When I set out to write the “Lair of the Plague Doctor” comic book, I broke it down into several stage. Mind you, this replicates the process I have generally heard from professionals who do this for a living, and it’s possible there is a more efficient way to do it. This is simply how I did it.

First is the script stage. Here you plan out what the characters do, what they say, and the overall plot of this particular story. If you are writing comics in a series, you have to plan how this one fits with the rest. However, since this will be a one-shot, that isn’t a concern.

Normally I would include a picture of the script, but it’s so hastily written that I doubt that it would be helpful to see it.

Second is the sketch stage. Based on the script that I made, I loosely draw what happens in each page, accounting for the pictures and the words. Everything is kept simple so that I can erase and change anything that doesn’t work, and believe me, there will be things that don’t work.

Next is the pencil stage. After carefully considering how it all looks, I put in the time to draw it all nicely. On average, It took 3-5 hours to pencil each page in this comic.

Before you move on to the next stage, carefully look over each page to ensure that there are no major issues. In particular, you will want to make sure that the characters are all drawn consistently. You won’t be able to fix this easily once you complete the next stage.

The fourth stage is inking, where you use pens to go over the pencil lines. You have two ways of doing this: erasing and tracing. With erasing, you draw with a pen right on top of the pencil lines, and after the ink dries, you rub an eraser over all of it to get rid of the pencil. However, it is possible that you won’t be able to get all of it, and some pencil marks will remain after being erased. This is called “ghosting”. For that reason, I prefer the second method. With tracing, you tape the first page on to a lightbox or something similar, then tape a second page over it so you can use your pen to trace over the art. I’ve been quite pleased with the results when doing this, and it results in artwork that is crisp, clear, and sharp.

Stage five is digitizing. I work the old-fashioned way, using physical media like paper, pens, and so on. That means there is an extra step where I have to upload the art to my laptop and prepare my comic for distribution.

I use my printer’s scanner to get a digital version of my artwork onto my computer, after which I use an image editing program (the ever-useful and totally free GIMP) to crop the image and correct any issues. Once that’s done, I export the image as a .png file and open it with Inkscape (also useful, also free), which specializes in vector graphic creation. In layman’s terms, that means it is mostly used for creating pictures, rather than changing them.

Something I wanted to try with this comic was to have all-digital text and speech bubbles, rather than the hand-drawn style I’ve used for Stick-y Humor. Inkscape is decidedly better at this than GIMP, even though there is some minor inconvenience switching between two different programs.

I add the dialogue, speech bubbles, sounds effects, etc. within Inkscape and export the image as a differently named file. That way, I can preserve the original just in case.

Normally the next stage is coloring, but this time, it’s a black-and-white comic.

That’s the five-stage process I used for making the HERO TIME comic book. Hopefully you will find it useful if you ever want to make comic books of your own.

–Neal