Please, do not follow my advice on creating a comic (part 4)
By: Ildefonso Montero
Tags: Comics, Fun, Diary, Cómic, Comic Books

Before start reading this post

TL;DR: This is the last part of a series of posts about how the creative process of a comic that I’m almost finishing has been done. If you wanted to known how did this all start, just go to Please, do not folllow my advice on creating a comic (part 1), (part 2) and (part 3) under your own risk :-) Disclaimer: as mentioned in the previous posts, this is just a chaotic diary/log about my creative process as an amateur having fun creating his first comic book. So, please, do not consider this as any guide to follow, just as an experiment about sharing my experience as a kind of not-to-follow advice list.

Hooray! The comic is finished!

Let’s celebrate together! as mentioned in the first post of this series, I failed too much to estimate the effort in terms of timing about making this comic a reality. Finally, it took me one year and a half to finish all the art and create a print-ready version.

Really a print-ready version? Of course not! c’mon I have no idea what I’m doing, so of course, I did it wrong. When I went to a professional printer to set up the physical comic-book version I directly faced some new unexpected issues.

The first one was about the generated PDF that did not contain printing marks and there are some edge-to-edge (full bleed) images to consider. BTW, I was requested to modify the entire design to keep the same desired quality/size/composition of the panels, images, pages, etc in order to make this full-bleed requirement happen. Finally, I was able to just modify a little bit the images affected (not too much), and I was lucky it was enough to satisfy my needs, but next time I will consider all these things before starting because it is not a good feeling to spend more than one year in something and at the last step reconsider to re-do almost everything for a printing requirement.

Twelveth bad advice: do not consider printing requirements before starting artline and composition of the pages, panels, images (and as additional bonus point: be creative and use full bleed as much as you can w/o considering printing marks!)

Once it gets fixed, the final version was ready to be printed, but I got a new issue. The weirdest issue I was never considering could happen to be honest. One day, I decided to include Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Return-like panel, final art contains a lot of effects from Gimp to set up a dark background and also some lightning storm details. The final result once printed: a huge entire black panel. WHAT!? Seems the printer has not enough memory to process the image (also rasterized via Photoshop) so, here I am waiting for a new printer to have the comic book finished :’(

So, in the meantime the printer is getting fixed, let’s review some scene composition techniques used and other topics as the final post of this braindump diary on making a comic book.

Scene composition techniques

One of the most interesting topics I wanted to explore (and to learn during the development of this comic) is how to set up the composition of all the scenes/panels in the entire comic considering not only aesthetic aspects, also timing and what I wanted to emphasize and how.

Rule of thirds example

I’m a total fanatic of cinema and design, and I wanted to explore how using different scene composition techniques a message/idea/feeling can be expressed. Here you can see a simple example of using the rule of thirds to set up the focus on different places

Expression of both characters, mainly eye contact and question from Lucia

The mobile phone used to search for something on Twitter

Thus, the main idea of this panel was not only to use it as a transition panel to another scene, so also it was trying to show to the reader some details about how each character would react to a specific situation.

Another recurrent technique used is zoom. I love to use that resource to put timing and emphasize mystery, suspense, surprise, or another relevant feeling.

Zoom on a surprised girl

I must say that I saw tons of time this very useful video from awesome Alejandro G. Calvo on the Sensacine Youtube channel named Guía básica del lenguaje cinematográfico and I used it as reference material for sketching most of the panels of the comic book. Kudos to Alex! You rock!

Discarded ideas

The last section of this crazy and outdated diary is about a brief summary as item lists of discarded ideas considered on the script and art

Finding Gael inside its toy garden house

One of the main topics of the comic books is that Guille must find Gael who is lost after some magic circumstances. At the very beginning, I decided that Guille will find Gael hidden inside its toy garden house, but finally, I discarded that idea because I preferred to destroy the entire house and I was not able to find a good reason to keep it there.

At a specific moment, Guille must go to Paris to meet a detective to help him. The first approach was to include Sherlock Holmes, but finally discarded given most of the fictional characters from the story come from characters of books he owns and used to read, and Sherlock was not there. BTW he loves the 80s animated series.

Related to that series, I loved too much how car and/or plane persecutions take place (are sooo funny), and also I have just seen with Guillermo great movie Porco Rosso and decided to include persecution. Three attempts, and it never happened. The first attempt: persecution of a motorbike and a pterodactyl, the second attempt: let’s replace motorbike by plane, the third attempt: replace the plane with a dragon. Final result: no persecution.

At a given moment, a lot of pirates appear. I wanted to do something like Peter Pan or Mot reference and explore/create a new collateral story with Gael playing as a pirate. But finally discarded.