Asterion - iv. Finishes (Patreon)

“He carries on walking, it’s very dark. Footsteps echo back, different. He doesn’t notice. 

SFX, clop clop clop
kaclop kaclop kaclop kaclop ”

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Continuing a writing about Asterion, the short I contributed to Theater of Terror: Revenge of the Queers, a LGBTQ horror comics anthology, let’s talk about what goes into a comic’s aesthetic.

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Asterion - iv. Finishes

a. Inking Tools

Before I get into the inking process stuff, here are all of the tools I used to ink this story!

From top to bottom in this tray, I used:

Kuretake Disposable Pocket Brush Pen - I think they’re an Extra Fine and a Medium, but don’t quote me on that. I’ve had them so long that the foil stamping has worn off in a bunch of places and the felt nibs have worn down into unique, dull shapes that give a really nice thicker line. I’m going to go on the record saying that I don’t actually love using these, since I find the line control is really mediocre, but what they do well, they do really well, and what they do well is rounded edge lines. So I use them mostly for fingertips on hands and ears—shapes that require a nice c-shaped line with uniform thickness. They’re also great for speed if you’re in a time crunch and you’re happy to sacrifice some line character (and also don’t need your lines to be waterproof or eraser-tight. They claim to use waterproof ink, but I’ve never found that to be true. If you’re going to use wet media on top, use these last).

Uni-ball Signo Broad UM-153 - When inking, I find it’s really helpful to use negative drawing to get the right lines or finishes, so going over the positive blacks with negative whites is key. I’ve tried a lot of white gel pens for this in my day, and the Uni-ball Signo is easily my favorite. It flows nicely, is very opaque and rarely clogs. The only thing you have to watch out for is non-waterproof inks being reactivated and soaking back into the white, which will mix to an unsatisfying and uniform grey when it dries.

Copic Multiliner SP 0.7, 0.3 and 0.1 - Copic Multiliner SP pens are a line of modular, aluminum-bodied pigment-based multiliner pens. I took the plunge and invested in a partial set of these monstrously-priced multiliners a few years back because I got tired to throwing old microns away. CMSPs can be broken down into constituent parts so you can replace the nib or ink cartridge when they finally give in. The premium materials make the parts a lot more durable and feel excellent in the hand, plus since they’re intended to be paired with alcohol markers, the pigment is super resilient. I use the 0.7 for panel borders (or occasional smaller fingertips than the Kuretake is appropriate for), the 0.3 for a lot of general workhorse drawing (which included a lot of big lines that need a ruler), and the 0.1 largely for body hair, since the tip has frayed and fanned with age, which gives it a semi brush appearance.

Staedtler Mars Plastic and Paper Mate Tuff Stuff retractable erasers - Can’t beat a vinyl eraser. I actually use four different erasers most of the time (with a simple Staedtler Mars Plastic block and one even than the Tuff Stuff rounding out the family), but with inking generally requiring small, simple corrections at most, these two do fine. They last so long too that I didn’t even realize that Paper Mate stopped making the Tuff Stuff eraser years ago (apparently Factis makes a copy of this form factor these days).

Kuretake Comic Pen Nib Holder - My inking journey has taken me along a winding path through all of the major inking tools, with metal dip nibs being the final stop after fineliners, brush pens and brushes. After trying to make sense of calligraphy nibs as a newbie—an ocean as wide as it is deep—the standardization (if I can simplify here) of traditional Japanese comic inking around three specific nibs was a really appealing entry point, so I started there. The three nibs are the G-pen, spoon/saji nib, and mapping/maru nib. The first two fit a different-sized holder than the mapping nib, so I originally had a few different holders. The benefit of the Kuretake Comic Pen Nib Holder is that it holds multiple nib sizes, so you can switch the nibs between it pretty freely. I have to say that I have found G-pen and spoon inked lines a little too spidery, violent and unreliable in my hands, which generally means I need more practice, but the mapping nib slotted nicely into my arsenal with its thin, delicate line that is perfect (and in fact superior to most other tools) for drawing hair, and crucially, body hair. It is my favorite nib for laying down a cover of dense hair lines, even if it does generally leave most papers in a textured mess.

Rosemary & Co Kolinsky Sable Series 33 - I’ve been ordering Rosemary & Co brushes for years because the price-to-quality ratio is so good. They make exceptional lines with some nice India ink. In a perfect world, I’d ink every line with a brush, but it’s very difficult to make small, thin lines very quickly, so I mostly use mine to lay down the biggest, most important lines, then use another tool for tiny detailing.

Speedball Super Black India Ink - I think I picked this up a decade ago because Becky Cloonan mentioned it in passing as her ink of choice. I can confirm that it definitely gets the job done, but I can’t say that inks are the easiest thing to compare since a single bottle lasts for aaaages. That said, mine’s gotten thick over time from evaporation, so I think it’s time for me to buy a new bottle. Maybe I’ll try a new brand! Still, Speedball hasn’t steered me wrong. Dries super fast, very black, doesn’t bleed or smudge. Very few complaints beyond the fact that that bottle always, always, always explodes if you take it on the plane (keep it inside a ziploc inside a ziploc, my friends).

b. Inking

In the previous post I showed how printed out large sheets to lightbox on top of paper, so I threw them onto my A3 light pad and went to work.

Here’s an example of how the pages looked when inked. I tried to go for a more simple background style to save myself some time, but I think I lost it all again when hand inking that crazy border around the first row of panels.

I also started inking clothing on people on the fly, so I made a few mistakes here and there that I had to correct over.

c. SFX

After inking all of the pages, I drew up some simple SFX using whatever fat or flexible markers I had on hand. At this step, you’re looking for something interesting rather than something perfect, so any tool you have works. I had a whole box of pens that I couldn’t find a precision inking task for that I love to pull out to draw weird letters, and so I grabbed a few and started the process of drawing out all of the onomatopoeia I needed, over and over and over. That got me these:

You can see where I switched pens and started circling different marks and shapes. Ultimately, though, I’m too much of a neat freak to draw these directly onto the pages. Same with speech bubbles—all of my experiments there have led to me manipulating all of the letters in post. Not very time-wise. Here’s an example of a finished sound effect that I took from those scans and tweaked and collaged into something I thought fit the art:

It has a nice spontaneous feeling… that I spent half an hour nudging and resizing into place. Doing it this way instead of using a font really helps make it blend in to the art better, instead of matching the speech bubbles. Where you want to align your SFX—either with the dialog or with the images—really should dictate how you approach adding them to your comics, if you’re going with digital lettering.

d. Colors

Luckily for me, while I was inking, my friend and her boyfriend offered to flat the pages for me. She absolutely saved me at a critical crunch moment during this project so I could jump straight into turning flats into finished colors right when I’d finished the inks.

I had a day to color 9 pages before the anthology’s print deadline, so it was really do or die the day I woke up to color. 18 hours later, I had (somehow) managed to color it all.

Where the fresco elements had all of the bright colors, I let the torchlight and shadow mute them into really subtle forms to create that sort of mystery you get when you can kind of but not really see something. I felt it would be a fitting vibe to emanate from the work, considering the story.

I also worked to simplify the coloring I used, keeping the cel shading down to a simple two tone on most elements with spot gradients here and there to add some visual detail.

The thread being a bold red bleeding off the page/back into the labyrinth was a strong visual that I had from the conception of the project, so it was nice to finally get to be able to put it on the page. It made balancing all of the other background colors against it both super important, and a bit of a challenge.

Also, I used strong color holds on the metal to give it a sort of otherworldly presence, since most of the metal objects in this bronze age story are visually or culturally important to the characters.

The big door is really where all of the visual ideas I had rolling around clicked into place, and I’m going to go ahead and attribute like 75% of that to luck. Either way, I’m glad it did. Thanks luck!

e. Lettering

And here’s how the pages look all finished and put together: 

With lettering, it’s important to use your bubble/effect placement to control the reader’s eye, pulling it along the page to help guide where they look, and for how long they linger at each part. Here I used the bright white walking sound effects to build a bridge from the discus maze, past our character looking off screen into the new room, down through his narration, down further to his sandal (the source of the noise), and then on through to the second panel, where the string guides us back left in an unconventional way to the text. Hopefully, ending up on the left hand side makes the reader linger for a fraction of a second as they move back in the natural rightward reading direction.

And on this page, the lettering is a lot more traditional. The lettering on the first row is simple narration on top of the finished frescoes, carrying the idea along in a very conventional way. Then for the only line I dialog in the story, I made a really scratchy pencil brush in photoshop and drew what looks like a traditionally-inked balloon and threw in a new font to make the character’s drug-fueled delusion seem that much more delusional and ancient. The typeface I chose had really odd, and specific ascenders and descenders, so I spent a couple extra minutes adjusting the height and kerning of every letter to make an interesting shape with the words—letting them bounce around and nestle within each other in a way that the other text doesn’t. I would’ve liked to have pushed it a little further so it seemed more visually intentional, but time was short.

f. In Conclusion

And that’s as much as I’m able to share of Asterion for now. I’ll be posting more about it in a year when the rights come back my way. They’re selling preorders for the entire anthology The Theater of Terror: Revenge of the Queers over here if you’d like to preorder a copy, and I’ll have a small stack of them coming in that I’ll be personalizing and selling at the MSRP when they ship them my way—likely September, they said.

Until then, thanks for reading! I hope this was a helpful insight into how I make a short comic!