The Process of Writing (and Drawing) a Spidey Book! (Patreon)

Hi, my friends! Today is a big day. The book I finished drawing almost a year ago is finally out in the world. Yay!

Hopefully, a lot of you have already had Spider-Man: Animals Assemble! on order and it has successfully shipped to your houses or pull lists. If not, you can pretty much get it wherever books and comics are sold. And if you DO have it, please take a few minutes to write a quick review. It REALLY helps me out.

Also feel free to share a photo of the book with your pets! I'm going to try my best to share any sent my way. Here's one with my cat Vanellope von Schweetz. :)

NOW, to make the day a little more special for y'all here though (and not just my cat), I thought I'd give a little insight into my writing/drawing process for Animals Assemble. I've written a bit of what it was like creating the cover (and even a few BG/SG comics), but this'll be fairly new territory. Gonna be a lot of word docs in this post so I'll try to keep things quick and attention span friendly.

OK, let's get started. :)

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PART ONE: The Story Pitch

Before I even began writing, I had a video chat with various folks over at Marvel and Abrams Books over what my thoughts were for the book. I pitched the idea of having a small responsibility that turns out to be a BIG responsibility as well as a pet pigeon that can fly around with Spidey so he's not talking to himself on every single page. I knew going in that Abrams wanted Spidey teaming up with the Avengers somehow so, with the pigeon idea a big win, the plot of him pet sitting for various Avengers was collectively landed upon.

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PART TWO: The Synopsis

It was now up to me to flesh out the story, gearing it toward young readers but also something older readers would enjoy as well. Above is the first of a short two page synopsis I sent my editor. Nothing here was necessarily going to be what would show up in the book; more me throwing out an idea and seeing what worked for everyone. One thing I remember is doing my dangest to get Kate, Kamala and She-Hulk in the book (because they're my faves).

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PART THREE: The Notes

Above is a sample of what I got back from Marvel and Abrams. All of those boxes and highlights are notes from various people letting me know their thoughts and suggestions. This is where I learned that nothing in the book can be linked to the cinematic universe and to keep characters strictly to their comic book sources. For example: Carol's cat "Goose" in the movies needed to be changed to "Chewie" like in the comics. Simple stuff like that.

Notes could range from, "We love this!" to "Can we have a more familiar Avenger show up before Kamala?" and everywhere in between. From there, it's a bit of chatting with my editor on the phone to hammer out all this stuff and then moving on to...

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PART FOUR: The Script

I'm including two pages here just so you can get a good idea of how I write my comic scripts. Because I know I'm going to be the one drawing the comic, I can get away without having to separate sequences into each individual page and panel. I can figure all that out when I start drawing (and sometimes--a LOT of times--things change during that stage).

So mostly I write out stuff in dialog with little cues to help me remember what I was visualizing while writing. Sorta like a script for a film or play, but...not really. All the information conveyed clearly enough so that my editor knows what to expect when I get to drawing it.

I wrote the nine page script for Animals Assemble in just two days, which I will likely never ever do again my lifetime (by contrast, my script for the third Spidey book took me two weeks). I think I was just excited to be working in the Marvel Universe for the first time. I then crossed my fingers that the book would end up being around eighty pages of comic, which was the rough final page count the publisher wanted.

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PART FIVE: Additional Notes

I do usually get another round of notes after handing in a script, but they're often very minor. My editor and I have gone over the story enough that at this point, rarely does anything major need to get changed. Mostly little tweaks to dialog and me forgetting things like "Stark Tower" is actually "Avengers Tower" in the comics.

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PART SIX: Panels and Lettering

After an approved script, I can start laying out my comic. This is the first book I did everything from panel layouts, lettering, all the way to final color in Clip Studio Paint. I've gone into how I use this program in other posts so I won't go into more detail about it here, other than it's great, I love it, and I have no clue how there's still some folks out there scribbling around in Photoshop.

This is pages six and seven. Here I'm using CSP's comic feature to easily make guides for my panels and then laying down my chosen dialogue for each one. I always lay down my dialogue first because I like to know how much space it's going to take up. Again, the advantages of drawing your own comic! Although to be honest, I would probably even want to letter a comic someone else wrote for me to draw. It's just easier for me to lead the readers eyes where I want them to go (more on that later).

For those curious, the font I'm using here is Comicraft's Dave Gibbons Lowercase, but condensed 75% horizontally (so I could keep it large enough for young readers but would still fit inside word balloons comfortably). It took about two weeks for my art director and I to decide on this particular one. Haha.

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PART SEVEN: (Digital) Penciled Layouts

I will roughly "pencil" out the entire book before moving onto final art. In a way, this is just one more draft of the script, as I'm continually making tweaks to the story, pacing and dialogue. For these two pages, not a whole lot changed, but OH BOY wait till I get around to sharing some Quantum Quest process. I ended up deviating from the written script and writing most of the book during this penciled stage.

But that's a future post! For now I'll just share how the masking around the panels works (what you see in purple). It allows me to freely draw without having to worry what's beyond the panel borders. I can also toggle it off, like I have in page 6, when I need to.

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PART EIGHT: (Digital) Inking

Once the entire penciled stage of the book is approved, I then move on to "inking" and coloring the whole thing. My digital drawing process has evolved where I don't really tighten my rough pencils anymore, as it just seems pointless since I'm not actually inking them traditionally. So my digital inks become my tight pencils. It's just one of the ways I prefer working digitally since it's one less step in the process and therefor saves me that much more time.

The panel guides I created during my layouts work as digital rulers allowing me to draw nice, straight panel borders. For this comic I used one of the pencil brushes to give them bit of a natural, rough texture.

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SIDE THING: Balloon Placement

I mentioned earlier how I like lettering my own comics. Here's a quick visual of how I'm using the ballon placement in conjunction with the art in order to lead the reader's eye in the direction I want. This is especially important for early readers still developing their sequential reading instincts.

Even though I don't in my roughs, I do draw my word balloon on a separate layer during my inking stage juuuust in case I have to resize or nudge them around a bit.

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PART NINE: Coloring

Finally, a few weeks of frantic coloring work and we have a finished book! There might be some additional very minor copyedits after this stage, but for the most part it's done. I send some files off to my art director and let them do whatever they need to do to make this:

All in all this book took me a touch over four months to complete, which will definitely be the fastest I'll ever make a book of this length in my lifetime. The art and story simply spilled out easily; likely due to how much fun I had playing in the Marvel Universe for the first time and how receptive everyone involved was to my wacky ideas. The other Spidey books, so far the same length at about 80 pages, have taken me much longer.

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BONUS!

And since you made it this far, here's a few process pics of the next two pages in which I swapped out Ms Marvel in favor of Iron Man. For this spread I actually did start off with some really rough pencils.

Don't worry though. Kamala still shows up a few pages later, as does Kate. She-Hulk got switched to the second book and once you see her part in it, I think you'll be happy she did.

And that's it! Hope you enjoyed a bit of a look into how I make my graphic novels. Or at least this one. 🙂