How to Write Comics

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Reese and I am the creator of the webcomic Vacant. I graduated from School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2012, and I've been working on comics off and on for the past ten years. I've definitely had my successes and failures. I would like to share with you what some of those successes and failures are. It's almost like if I went back in time and told the beginner or me what to do and what not to do in comics. What I will be teaching you is how to start a comic, how to finish a comic, and how to make comics easy for the artists to read. Since you're most likely going to be working with an artist, you could be drawing them yourself. But this is just to make it easier to collaborate. As for the assignment, I'm going to be asking you to thumbnail and write five pages of a complete comic. The comic must have a beginning, middle, and end, and there will be bonus points. If you managed to get an artist to draw the comic for you, I will be teaching you how to collaborate with other artists or how to hire different artists. And just some kind of tips and tricks on how to do that. You should join this course if you'd like to learn how to start in comics and learn from an old far, such as myself, of a few things on what to avoid and maybe things to help your success. 2. Lesson 01 - Mentality and Expectations: So this is lesson one of the lessons, and we're going to be talking about mentality versus expectations. So these are two things that you need in order to break into the industry. Is you need to have good expectations and you need to have good mentality. So let's go for expectations first. I think a lot of people are told that when they break into the industry, or when they try to get to the industry and they're not going to make a lot of money off of their comics. And that's true, especially when you're starting off, you just don't make a lot of money. And that's important to realize who you're coming in is that it's going to be a struggle for a while, but it is doable and so don't obsess about this fact that, that you're not going to make a lot of money because that kind of gets people and they don't even try. They're like, what's even the point of trying? And it's like don't obsess about it. Try try to get in about understanding the market, understanding yourself and understanding what type of publisher or what type of site would want you. Another thing that would happen often at the school I went to is that teachers would often just tell the students that they can't make it, they're not going to break into the industry, and that's just not realistic. Nowadays, you have a lot of options. You have lots of publishers and you have like Top Us a web tunes, so there is an option to get through. You just have to adapt and learn about yourself, really. If someone comes up to you and says you're not going to make it, don't just immediately listen to them and go, oh, okay, I'm going to make it, I'm not going to even try. That doesn't make any sense, like don't listen to them. The next thing is mentality, story time. Back in the day when I did vacant, the comic did very well. It got 10,000 views a month, if not more with advertising people around the world read the comic. It does well on Amylova, it's still on Amy Lova. But I was convinced, completely and utterly convinced that nobody liked it. And I was so convinced that nobody liked it that I tanked my career. I took the comic down, and I quit comics. And I look back going, was that really necessary? And that's because I didn't really take care of my mental state. What I suggest is if you suffer from things like depression or anxiety like me, is maybe go seek professional help and just ask, hey, I'm having negative thoughts about my comic. What do you suggest I do to get around that? And that helps a lot. Let's just push to do that sort of thing, just so that you can actually make the comic. Because if you sit there going, I suck, I'm terrible. And you just get really into the cycle of thinking that it gets very difficult to make anything and it gets very difficult to market yourself. You need to have confidence. You need to think like a professional. You can't sit there and go, I can't get anywhere or anything like that. That's just not going to help. You're going to have to think like I can do it and I am doing well. Just really say you're not going to make it big instantly. If you go on web tunes and you're, you're not getting like a ton of like people immediately, that's okay. It takes time. And I didn't realize that when I was starting off. I thought I need to be making money immediately. I need to like I need to have like a ton of followers immediately. I didn't really understand my place in the industry and I didn't really, I didn't understand my audience and I just didn't understand that this stuff takes time. And if I had kept going, it probably would have been a lot easier for me than what it is. Now there's a flip side to this. There's such a thing as being too confident thinking that you're going to be going in making the big bucks immediately on your comment movie made out of your stuff and all that. And for new beginners that's just not realistic. You need to think more in a grounded way if you think you're in that position. Just good critiques from other people, good critiques from professionals just to see where you're really at and take to heart what they say. It may be harsh, but what they say may be important. Again, if they just say you can't make it in the industry, you suck, Don't listen to advice like that. That's just helpful advice. Gauge whether or not this is helpful advice and use that to really see where you are in the industry. Let's just also be motivation just to get started and gets outside that mindset. If you're in the negative mindset of I can't do this baan get started. Let's just get started on the class. Let's get started on the 3. Lesson 02 - Scope: Lesson number two is about scope. I think a big thing that gets the new writers and new artists even down pretty immediately is scope. I think a lot of people read a lot of manga. They read these really big epic series with like 20 volumes, 30 volumes. And they think I need to do that well, the American history doesn't quite work like that. Like a lot of people excited, like one volume stories at the beginning. And then if it does really well, then you can add on when you start off. Try not to do the big epic. I'm not saying if you have a big epic that you really like and you're like, no, I believe in it, I think it's going to do really well. I'm going to put it on web tunes the. Sure. But do it on the side and have your main focus be completing a one graphic novel story at the beginning or even smaller than that. Maybe try to do anthologies, Ologies or a collection of comics put together in a book or online. You can look stem up, you can make a small comic hell, you can make our assignment. Our assignment is a five page comic with the beginning, middle, and end. You could take that comic and submit it to a Zen or an anthology. That'll be a good start off to getting into comics. But thinking small and thin, going big is the way to go just because honestly you may just not get it done. That's what happened to me. I thought I had a big epic. I thought I'm going to do all these issues and volumes and it's going to do really well and I'm going to get it done because I have all the will and I didn't get done. So it's like you just never know. At the beginning, it may feel like you have all this energy, you have this will, like you're going to do it. But a few months from now, like things happen, stress adds up, like life happens in general and you may just not get it done. Just keep in mind that publishers like, that's how publishers think, they think. Can we sell a first volume before we sell all these other volumes? Because you might come up with a series and the book one doesn't do well, in book one doesn't do well. They're not going to want to sell book two, just it's safer in the publisher's mind if you do a one volume thing first. That said, I hope that motivates you to complete a short comic. And let's continue on to the next lesson. 4. Lesson 03- Your Plan: This is lesson three of the lessons, and this one we're going to be learning about. Lucky. We've kind of got things going, We're kind of figuring out what we want to write and now we're going to figure out what our plan is with the future. This is important to do now that way when you write your story, you know what to include and what to exclude and have a general idea of what your audience is going to be and all that. The first thing you ask yourself is, what do you want to do with the comic? Do you want to do whatever you want? And don't care about the rules. Don't care about the audience. You want to do whatever you want, it doesn't matter. Do you want to do that or do you want to get published? Because one or the other. It's a specific set of steps towards that. If you want to get traditionally published mop, want to get the comics? They have read Marvel. They see. And they think, okay, I'm going to be a Marvel artist and you have to make a good evaluation of yourself and your art and compare it to moral, to see and think yourself, does it look like a male comic? Do you write like a Marvel or do you see a comook writer? If you are unsure, maybe give your writing to someone in the industry or a friend and say like a friend who knows about comics. Like who do you think this would most likely be published with? Do you feel like it's a DC Comic or not? Same thing goes for manga. An example of this is for example, like I have a comic called Granite Joe. It's about an old woman who fights war, wolves and mythical creatures. Now, it's not a bad story. It's a good story. But if I pitched that idea to Marvel DC, they probably wouldn't take it. You probably want to write more things like Superman or Spider Man or like that in general. And same thing goes for manga. You want to make it more manga. Esque Granite Joe might be a fine manga, but some things don't mix well with the genre. You just want to make sure that you fit it. So another big good thing is to get an agent to go to core tracker.com filter out agents for just graphic novels and pitch to the ones that seem like the most like you, that have the same sort of stories that you're looking to pitch. Don't if you're writing a thriller dump pitch or a romance agent, that doesn't make sense. It's just, don't waste your time with it because you might be sending out, you don't want to send out like 30 proposals you want to send out maybe like eight, so that's a good thing to do. Also, keep in mind that when you pitch to agents, you're going to have to come up with cup titles, titles, or books that you compare your book to. Let's say you're making a comic about aliens. A nice comp title would be Saga, or Black Science, or like. What are some I don't actually know about. Alien Schoolgirl You know there's plenty of schoolgirl comics out there. Manga, if you want to do comp titles of Maga, it's a good thing to think about. And it's a good thing to think about these things when you're writing your comic two, because they're going to try and market your book like that book, if you're making an alien comic, they're going to try to market your book like Saga. When you write your comment, keep that in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is that you have to look for what audience you want to make your comic for. Do you want it to be a young adult? Do you want it to be for children? Do you want it to be for new mature audience? You have to figure out what group you want to make your comic for. It's very rare for somebody to make a comic book for everybody. Just think of an audience and then think of what's allowed in that audience. Because YA books, well it depends on if you read the hunger YA comic books don't really have a lot of violence and they don't have a lot of not safe work material in their work. So if you want to do something with a whole bunch of not safe work scenes, then you may not want to do a YA book. Also, a lot of agents may not pick you up, and a lot of publishers may not pick you up. But it all depends because there's publishers like Dark Horse and Image that do publish mature content. You always have options. And then there's the idea of, you know, I don't want to even consider any of this like I just want to do what I want. I don't want to think about the audience. I don't want to think about what's allowed or what's allowed. I don't want to be like other comic books. I want to do whatever I want whenever I want to make my own rules. Okay, totally fine. You have options. First, your self publishing. I self published my comic Vacant as a Kickstarter and it successfully kickstarted. Kickstarter is a website where you basically post up your comic, or not your comic, any project, it doesn't have to be a comic. And you pitch your idea and then if other people like your idea, they'll give you money to make that project happen. I put facing up. I asked for I think, $2,000 or so, and then people were willing to give me money to make the project happen. You have that option. You have Diggs, another one. That's another website where you can do these fund raising projects. You have self publishing and you have web tunes and Top. As there's other websites like web tunes and Top S that you can look into, but they're basically websites where you can post up your comment book and have people read your work for free. The only downside to going on web tunes to Top S is that if you have like very not safe work stories, they don't allow that on web tunes top S, what I would do is maybe just show the stuff that is within guidelines and then say hey if you'd like this, read more on my patrion and link to your patrion. I mean technically you can have not say for work stuff on there but it has to be like heavily censored. So sometimes it's so censored that you're like you want to bring them to a website or something so that they can read your work. But yeah, that's always an option. So there is a way you don't have to do traditional publishing. If you don't want to do traditional publishing, there's always a way, there is a way to get into the industry. I think a lot of professionals make it seem like if you can't do Marvel DC, you can't break into comics. And that's just not the reality of how it is nowadays, because you do have a lot of free options, and I hope that helps. 5. Lesson04 - Coming Up With The Idea: So now that we've got the basic idea of what we're going to be, who kind of audience we're going for, and the kind of thing we want to do. Time to come up with an idea for our story. There's more than one way that we can do this. One we can think about things that we like. Do we want to do Marvel? Do we like Spider Man? Do we like dogs? Do we like ballerinas? Swans do like like pizza. Like think of different things that you like reading about. Do you like science fiction? Do you like fantasy? Have that be your first step is to think of things that you want to write about. Then think about things that mean a lot to you. These could be things like the LGBT immunity may maybe it's treating animals well maybe it's veganism. Give anything. But just think about things that mean a lot to you that way. You could write about them in a way that feels good and works well for you that you can write like an entire volume based off of this thing. That means a lot to you. The thing you can think about is personal stories. And then think of ways you can tell those personal stories in a metaphorical or even in the literal sense. It could be an autobiography. Or you could do a story like, let's say I did a story off of my schizophrenia. I have schizophrenia. I made a story about a boy who gets ahold of a love potion because he's in love with the prince. He drinks a love potion. And love potion causes hallucinations. And hallucinations caused him to need to get help. And it goes to a good wizard, and a good wizard cures him of this sickness. So that's an example of taking something that came from me, came from my life. And then I was able to use it to create a story. Now we're going to go ahead and start, actually we're going to start writing the five page story. For this, I'm actually going to choose a fairy tale. I'm going to choose a red writing hood. So we're going to look at red writing hood. And break down red writing hood into a five page comic. 6. Lesson05- Outlining your story: Alright, so let's start from the beginning. Okay, so I have the story of Red Writing Hood, and I'm going to pitch it to comic publishers to think of an audience. And I kind of want mine to be kind of cheeky, kind of funny, have a lot of action in it, kind of spicy, you know. So I'm going to do it, I can do it as young adult because there are comics out there like the teenage Una turtles or other comic books in that genre that have violence that are fine. The just graphic violence. It's not like people getting their heads ripped off or something like that. So we could get away with young adult. I think I'm going to go ahead and do young adult, I'm going to think about the audience of young adult. I'm going to think about what young adult people like when I write this comic. Okay, so we have a young adult and I'm going to think of some publishers that I think this will be a part of. Let's see for second, it had some really good on press is really good comics that are not necessarily, they're not like super duper manga, but they're not Marvel or DC. They're just American comics with unique styles. And I want to do a comic with a unique style. I'm going to do something inspired by first, second, and on press. Those are the stories I do now. I don't think those publishers are actually open right now for submissions, but let's pretend that they are. We have those things checked off. Then what we think about is when we come up with the story, the things like themes are the backstory of a story. The five page story that we want to do is for the five page story, if you want to do your own fairy tale, except for just doing, just looking up the fairy tale and just writing the story straight. Look up the origins of the fairy tale. The origins of the red writing hood is that it's a story about a little girl who tells too much information to a stranger, a wolf, and that gets her essentially killed at the end. Now there's different versions. Sometimes she lives, sometimes she doesn't. Depends on which red writing hood you read, but that's what we're going to be thinking about. Those are the main thieves, don't talk to strangers and they'll wander off of your path. So we'll think about that when we come up with our interpretation. There's more interpretation, there's ones where she eats your grandmother, which you don't have to put in, but I'm just saying there's darker versions. So if you wouldn't like a darker story, you could do it or you'd have early childish just have her like one at the end. But those are a few things to think about when it comes to re writing hood. There's also a theory that the red writing the hood meant your period or the time of the month and you could incorporate that into your story as well. Maybe your red writing hoods about someone becoming an adult for the first time. Those are a few things to think about. Now we have all those and we have the themes and all that. I think I'm going to go ahead and get started on the right writing head. Now we have the story structure, story structure five. Structure, act one is the exposition. Act two is rising action, act three is climax. X four is falling action, and at five is a resolution. What does that mean is another way of saying setting up the story. Now there's a system of writing called Set up and payoff. Setting up something. Setting up information of something that's going to happen later on. A lot of the setups for the red writing hood are things like why she's going to the grandmother's house? What is her threat all the way to grandmother's house? How does she know to go to grandmother's house? How does she get lost? How does she get eaten? How does she get fooled? Like these are several setups that you can have for the red writing hood. And you just have to pick at different areas of the story to pay off those things. For our exposition, we're going to say, what does she bring to grandmother's house? Why is she going? We're setting up with she's bringing her food and wine. That's in the main story. That's what we're going to do. We're going to have the mom tell her to do this set up. Well, why does she go? We ask yourselves these questions and fill up the gaps. The mother tells her to go, and then she goes and that's what the set up of the rest of the story is going to be. Then you have rising action. Our rising action is her walking to the forest and encountering the wolf. This is what leads up to the climax. She walks into the forest, wolf sees in the original, he confronts her. But I'm going to do something a little bit interesting. I'm going to have it to where she has like a gun in her basket. She takes the gun out. She's like no wolf. Why? Well, she doesn't say anything in my story but like picture her be like, no, I won't be eaten today And then the wolf scurries off. And that's what it is in my version that he gets Fred because she has a gun. And just make it like, funny and really quirky. And then we have the climax, which is her entering the home and seeing, well, this is considered kind of so rising action. She goes into the home, she sees that the grandmother is a wolf. Climax. Finding out that the wolf is the grandmother moment set up to this is all of the sort beforehand going through the forest, meeting the wolf, talking about the grandmother at the beginning of the story and saying that the grandmother is at the cottage set up for when the wolf is found to be the grandmother, so that it's not out of the blue. The reason why we want to do set ups and payoffs is so that things aren't out of the blue. You don't want to go to grandma's house. And why did he dressed up like the grandma? Or why did she even go to the grandmother's house to begin with, you can ask questions like who is the red riding hood? Where her parents and stuff like that. People don't think you're too terribly random. It's good to set up and pay off so that it feels like a complete thought. Then there's the falling action which is depending on the sort version you have in mind. The wolf attacks that climax in the fall action is that she shoots the wolf in the back. Then the resolution is, is her taking grandmother out and then having the wolf dead behind them. That's going to be the resolution as number five. Those are going to be the five things that I put in my story. That's how you should think about your story. If you have a story, let's say we went with pizza. Dogs have to ask yourself like, who's the dog? How does pizza associated with this, the force that's pulling the story along? What is the point of the story? Um, what is the resolution? Ask yourself these questions so that when you come up with your five pages, it can be spread out in that way. Now you can make do it the easy way and half page one, be the exposition that be setting up your entire plot. Act two, be the rising action. That's just everything being set up and everything coming to a point. The climax. Everything having a payoff to it. Everything set up has a payoff in the scene. Then following action, we have the big payoff ever coming to a resolution. And then in page five, give you the resolution. You can split each one by each, each page like that, just to make it easier for yourself. I didn't do that. The following action and the resolution, I made them very short and short near the end. That's fine. You don't need to have it completely past out. Just depends on the pasting you wouldn't have with your story. Now that we have that figured out, we're going to actually start writing it down in a script format page by page, and I'll show you how to do that. 7. Lesson06- Writing Your Script part 1: Okay, now that we have everything set up, it's now time to thumbnail. Thumbnailing is probably the scariest part of doing comics. As a writer, you may feel like you don't need to do thumbnailing, and honestly maybe you don't. But I like doing thumbnailing for my scripts because it helps me plan out the story. It helps just make it easier to break it down and write out what happens in each panel. Re is an example of my thumb nailing. It's not pretty, you don't have to make pretty thumbnails to do thumbnails. As long as you understand what's happening in the page, it's fine. It kind of run to issues if you have to show somebody. I'm assuming that if you're watching this, you're not much of an artist because this was made for people who just write comics. You may not have thumbnails that are easy to look at anyway, but if you understand them, then I think you'll be okay for now. Thumbnailing is really, really, really complicated and very, very difficult to do. We're going to just try to get to where you are not overwhelmed by doing thumbnailing. Thumbnail. We'll go through each panel and we'll discuss why I chose to do each panel in written format. I'll discuss why I chose to angle, why the distance, I don't know how I want to say distance, like the distance from the camera that the character is. But like I know a lot of combookwriters and artists don't like to use the word camera when it comes to comic books, because you're not filming a movie. It doesn't make sense to say the word camera. I'll say how you crop the image. I'll explain each one of those as we move along. And hopefully after, by the time that you're done, you'll have a much better idea of how to thumbnail your comic. But I do recommend thumbnailing. Just make it easier because it's hard to visualize or play on each panel one at a time through a script. Now, the way that you write scripts can be really different from one another. There's not one way of sure way of doing it. I'm going to show three examples. Well I'm going to show two examples because I don't know if I could show the third one. But for the first one I did a script where I made the descriptions vague. And then I provided references for the objects in the script. For example, in this page I'm doing page two of Bullet Rose not page one because page one is spicy and I don't know if that's a lo, skill share. In page number two, I have a character named Artemis. And except for describing artimists, I just have a reference of artimis for the artist to click on. I did that for the force as well. I didn't describe the force, I just did like an image of the force. That's how I did this one. Here is the script. I'll have it to where you can download it. And then here is the final art. This is how this one turned out. The next one I had a little bit more detailed description. I actually describe it takes place in the office. I actually describe the office. To describe you character, I used a couple of references, but I didn't rely so much on references for this one. That's how this turned out. This is the scripts. You could download it and then here's the artwork. Then the last one I did because there's a certain format to doing scripts. Well, you don't have to do the format, but usually how they have it is where there is the title of the comic. For our old, or I don't know, our Red Riding Hood comic going to be called Red Riding Hood, and you would say by Res Nunnelly, which is my name. And then you would say page one. And in each page of the document, the word document is a page of the comic. Page one here is just just page one. I don't put 0.1 and page two. On page one, I just put page one. I put page one and then I put one and then I describe the panel. And then if I have dialogue, I number the dialogue and I have the name of the characters. Caps In all caps, I have them indented on the script. I do each panel this way. I have a description, then I have the dialogue, and it differs. If you have like sound effects, like some people will actually put sound effect and then write the side effect out. There's different ways of doing it. But this is what I've learned of how to do common books, strip writing. But I do have one common books strip where the artist wanted to do all the thumbnailing, she wanted to do most of the work. So I just had a general idea of what happened on each page so that she could take over from there. So just make sure to talk to the artist and make sure that you have an agreement of how you want to do this. Because you don't want to take all the creative ability away from the artist if they want creative power. There are four things you'd like to ask yourself for every single page of the comic. That's right, I said every single page, not the book in general, is you need to ask yourself, what, when, where, and how. What is happening? When is this play taking place? Where is it taking place? And how are they going to complete the task at hand? Let's take a look at our script page number one. Panel number one. We have a medium shot of Red's mother. She has blond hair with a low point of til she is speaking to Red with a big smile. It is something outside with some clouds. Now I chose a medium shot because later on there's going to be an establishing shot. And it's always good to have a variety of different angles and shots in your script. Some close up, some medium shots, and some far away shots. I said a medium shot of the mother talking. I said medium shot versus close shot because far away shots, medium shots and close up shots each have their own meaning. Close up shots typically mean close up shots typically emphasize something very important or big is happening. It's also to get the reaction of the different characters in the scene. And since we don't really want her reaction, and it's like a pivotal portant moment right now, we don't need to have a close up, especially since this is at the beginning of the story. We want a shot that's able to establish things about the surroundings. So we're going to do a medium shot of Red Riding Hood's mother with a sunny background. And I said blue sky, sunny background so you know where they are and what time of day it is. I said partly cloudy because clouds have meaning in stories. Usually when there's a lot of clouds or just a storms, storms coming. But clear skies means like things are good right now, we don't have a lot to worry about. I said some clouds to show establish something might be coming up soon but it's not immediate. You don't have to make this so literal to make like a storm over the forest. You don't need to do that, but like some clouds is a good indicator that something alright might go on. I made sure to put a description of Red Riding Hood's mother. A very brief one though. Um, this is just so that because I don't like dictating everything that the artist does, do keep certain things vague for this. I kept how the blonde woman's looks kind of vague. As you can see here, I put a reference. You don't have to put a reference here. In a lot of scripts, there's nothing here and you don't put the reference here. I think they just send references between, between the artist and the writer. But I like them to be in the script that way. They just have a reference like on hand. There's a reference right here. They can click on the reference and look at it. But for the most part, it's that way. It's up to the artist, how the mother looks. I like doing it that way because it gives the artist artistic freedom. It's really difficult to draw comics. It's very stressful, and it's even worse when you feel like you don't really have a lot of say in the project that you're doing. So that's why I did that. In this panel, it says Red, will you run along and give your grandmother some cake and wine? She's not feeling well This is what sets up the entire story, which is that she's going to be going on an adventure to go and find her grandmother. That's the set up this panel and sets up the entire story from the get go. That's going to be at the beginning of the comic. Page one is just different information that will be come up later on in the panel to an establishing shot of a little girl of blond hair and pigtails and a red riding hood. Walking out of her mother's cottage. She has a yellow basket on her arm with a red bow. Her mother is behind her standing at the door. There's a path outside of her mother's home. To the right, there is a hint of a forest, says your mother. As you can tell, you don't have to write like this, but you can write your scripts to be very formal and much more like a novel. I choose not to do that because clarity is more important than it's sounding good. I made point blank sentences that are very clear to read and very obvious. Because this matters more as a comic than it is as a script. People aren't going to be reading the script, so it doesn't make sense not to do that with heavily secrets. I did write that more as a novel, but you don't have to do that if you don't want to. That's why I did what I did. There's an establishing shot now of the little girl. I did a vague description of her and applied a reference that the artist can look at that. And for all based off of that, I said an establishing shot. An establishing shot is a shot that basically shows the entirety of a scene. We're going to want to establish Red and we want to establish Red standing in front of the mother and going on a path. They want to establish these things. So it's going to show those items completely and not leave anything out. So we're going to have a complete shot of the two figures and the house, and then we're going to have a little bit of the force, that's what an establishing shot means, it just establishes something that we're going to be using. Later on, I made sure to put the yellow basket on her arm because that's where the cake in the wine is. We set up the wine in the cake in panel one. So it needs to be like paid off in panel two with the basket so that you know that she's carrying this basket with her throughout the entire journey. She's not leaving it behind because you don't want the audience wondering, well, where is the food? Where does she keep the food? You have the basket to help you out with that. She says, sure, Mother, to establish she's talking to her mother, establishes a relationship from Red to her mom so that you can establish that as well. We know who we know the mother. Red is the little girl. So that answers who? We know that they're exiting the house to go out to the forest. When we know this happens at daylight and how they are they going, they're that's established. And panel two says she walks outside and there's a path. The path is signaling there's going to be a journey taking place. Panel three is establishing shot of red walking down the path towards the forest. In the distance, she's shrined by green hills. The forest looks dark and scary. As you may notice, there's two establishing shots back to back. There's not a lot of establishing shots at the beginning of a story. Because you need to set things up for later on and you need to establish things for later on. Because once you establish, let's say, a big crowd scene, you can show the crowd scene once and then you don't have to show it as much throughout the rest of the comic. So that's why there's another establishing shot of Red walking down the path towards the forest. I put green hills to show that, like green hills around the house, the cottage house. So that she lives in a peaceful area where she doesn't deal with a lot of the danger. That's usually what green hills means. Like there's not a lot, it's very clear to look at. It's easy to look over hills. So it's like there's not a lot of danger going on in the forest Is dark and scary because typically forests mean danger. And stories typically, sometimes they're not. But there's the unknown things in the forest. That's always how it's been, fairy tales. I'm going to talk about the rest of the script in part two because this is kind of long. 8. Lesson07- Writing Your Script part 2: Okay, we're on to the next lesson or the next part of this lesson. We're on page two, panel one. An establishing shot of red walking in the forest. The forest is shaded with dark cues. Plants and flowers grow from the ground around her with the shadows of the, within the shadows of the forest, you see the eyes of the wolf shining menacingly. Again, it's an establishing shot. So it's going to be a really good shot of her in the fort. She's walking and she's walking in the forest. You don't want to close up shot of her in the forest because you don't get a good look of where she is. Again, this is near the beginning of the comic, which is going to be a thing. When it comes to the five page comics, you're going to get a lot of establishing shots within your five page comic because it's only five pages. Yeah, it's going to be an establishing shot. The force is going to be shaded with dark cues. Just to show that it's dangerous, I put flowers growing on the ground. As an homage to a version of the story where she goes around picking flowers and that's how she gets like straight off her path. Then I have the eyes shining menacingly in the shadows like a lone tune you Luna tunes. You can see the eyes of the moss or whatever in the shadows. You can see eyes in the dark was just homage to that panel two, a close shot of red and the wool side of the background. This is just to emphasize the eyes just in case you didn't see the eyes in the first panel. And it's just to amplify it. Also we want to zoom up of red face. I like having zoom characters faces so you can register face and keep the face in mind. Otherwise it's hard to relate or identify with the character. Panel three, an explosive shot of a massive jumping, jumping out at the red, snarling with teeth and nails red, see surprise. She has her head and her hand in the yellow basket, an explosive shot because I wanted it to be maybe exceeding the panel borders. I wanted it to be really big. I wanted it to just be like a big moment, a big action packed moment of when the massive wolf jumps out at red. And I wanted to make sure, se, snarling teeth and nails so that the artist wants to draw that sort of thing. I wrote red, see surprise. So that you get reds reaction. It's important to get reds reaction so that the artist knows what to draw for that. And then I have her hand in the yellow basket as it set up for her pulling out the gun. It's in the panel before and then it's going to be the panel after. Red holds out a magnum at the wolf. The gun looks big and frame she a red. That's just but of the joke is that she puts her hand in the basket, she takes out a gun. So she had a gun on her the whole time. The gun looks really big, just to be comical and really emphasize the gun. Red keeps holding out to the gun as the wolf whimpers off frame, his head hangs low. Make sure to put that she's holding the gun in that frame just to show what he's whimpering away from. To show the relationship between the show the relationship between the gun and the wolf. He's whimpering away. You know he's whimpering away from his hand, head hangs low just to show that he's been defeated. Now we're onto page three. Page the three Sabine shot of grandma's house. The force surrounds them. The front door is open. Again, this will have reference of the grandma's house attached to this document, which you can get when you download the document so they don't have to draw grandma's house. It'll be the establishing shot. So show entirety of grandma's house and will be a zoom up of grandma's house because and you won't be able to see her in relationship to Red. You need to see the relationship between Red and Grandma. And then the forest surrounding them just shows that they're still in the forest. That she came from the forest and she's going to the house within the forest. I said that the door is open to set up, that the wolf has snuck in. This is also another homage to the book, because in some versions, the door is open when she walks up to the house. Red stands in the doorway of grandma's house. Her shadow extends across the panel, over the wolf that lays in grandma's bed. He is wearing grandma's clothes. The inside of grandma's house is dark, being very shadowy inside grandma's house just to show because in the story is too dark to see Grandma and the wolf very well. This is how they're able to disguise it. They are they are the grandmother able to fool Red into thinking that it's because it's dark. So I made sure to make it dark. I had her shadow extend over the wolf to show the relationship between red and the wolf, to show that distance and that they are related to the story, of being important to the story. It just gives an ominous feel to the story. If you just see a long shadow, then there's an establishing shot of the wolf's face in the Gard's clothing. I said establishing shot, but you could also say close up shot, either one. I just said an establishing shot of the wolf's face to show that you want to have the entirety of the wolf's face. But you could say close up shot and that would work as well. We want to close up shot site where you could register that it's the wolf in the wolf and grandma's clothing and that it is indeed the wolf. Just to make sure that if you didn't see that it was the wolf in the previous panel, you will now page four. This grid, I have a picture of it here. A grid like page we're on, the left is going to be all the reactions of red, and on the right is all the reactions of the wolf in each panel. On the left, Red asks a question, and the wolf answers in the panel to the right, what big ears you have. Then the wolf says, all the better to hear you with the red goes, what big eyes you have. It goes all the better to see you with. The last one is what big mouth you have. And it says, the best to eat you with. I put in my description that the wolf attacks red in the last panel. I said it exceeds outside the panel, just to show that it's ruined the rhythm of the paneling. He's doing something very different now, and it's like breaking the fourth wall a little bit. He breaks the panel to attack red. Then we have page five. A big panel of cart wolf through the chest. I said the chest to stomach. I said the stomach originally but if they shoot the stomach, they grandma dies. We can't do that shot in a cartoon way. That way we can sound like a young adult. So cartoonishly basically means like cartoonish bullet holes, not a lot of blood. Just not like graphic shots. Just, you know, kind of silly. There are no guts and there's some blood. So we're just specifying that so that the R just doesn't go in and just straw like tons of guts and stuff because then we can't sell it as young adult. And then in the very last panel, grandma and the little girl are hugging. Behind them lays the dead wolf with a pair of scissors. In his stomach, a choice of blood leaves from the wolf to the grandmother. Now this is just established that one they were able to cut grandma out with the scissors, that's why his the scissors are embedded in the stomach. The blood trail is to show that grandma was once in the belly. You can also have her covered in blood, but I'm not sure if that would be a young adult or not. To be completely honest. We'd have to talk with the publisher to see if we could get grandma covered in blood to kind of show like she was inside the stomach of this wolf. It really depends. I don't really know, but then that's the big resolution. So these are the five pages of the red riding hood story broken down. And I explained why each one is thumbnailed the way that it's thumbnailed when you do yours. Just think about that. Think about do I want to close up shot? Do want a far away shot? Do want to medium shot? What do I want to establish? What do I not want to establish? What are the meaning of things in my story that I can put in there to set up something later on. You could do your own story, you could do what I did, Just do a fairy tale that makes things easier. You're able to write up how to do the script pretty easily based off what's already been written. Just keep in mind like the origins and all that. But yeah, that's about it for the five. 9. Lesson08 -Your Assignment: All right, so I'm going to go for your assignment one more time. Again, it is a five page comic with the beginning, middle, and end. Please do it as I guess you could do as a Word document or PDF. Format it the same way that I formatted the red writing hood. Have the page panel and then quotes. You can make them into PDFs by, you can either do that through Google, I think Google Docs. You can do that. You can just put all the words on there and then you can save as PDF or you could do that through Word documents. I think Word allows you to save as PDF. You can also do Canva if you want to do Canva. It's a free website where you can put together word documents and pretty little things. You could do those things. Bonus points, if you can get an artist to draw your comic is just a bonus for you. Obviously, I can't give you anything extra for doing this, but just a bonus for yourself. That way you can go send it to anthologies, bonus points. If you figure out what publisher you want to send it to or what anthology do you want to send it to, then what audience your comic is for. When you're done submitted to the website, it's on this page right here. You just click on this button and you just upload the file that's about it. 10. Lesson09- Hiring an artist: Hooray. You have everything done for your comic. You thumbnailed it, hopefully by this point you wrote it. You have a plan of where you wanted to submit it. You have it all done. So now here comes the scary and important part of writing comics. Finding an artist. There's several ways of finding an artist. You can go to conventions right away and just connect and say, hey, how are you to the artists there? If you find someone you'd like, ask them what their schedule is and see if maybe they'll work with. You have DV and Art. You have Twitter, you have Tumbler. You can explore those for artists that you like. There's also a website called Comics Cab. I'll make a link on it, on the Skillshare website. But you can go on there and you can just say, hey, I'm willing to pay for a artist who is open for being able to be worked with and asked for a portfolio. Now that gets to the part where people don't like, which is that you need to pay your artists. I know seems really scary. It seems like not everybody pays artists. It seems like some writers are able to get artists for free. The problem is, is that you are not going to be able to get an artist unless you have a reputation. If you don't have a reputation writing other comics, I know that the writer of sex criminals, he tried to get someone to collaborate with him. And he was able to say that he worked for Candy X Men. What did he work on? He worked on a whole bunch of stuff. I'm blanking on it right now, but he worked for a whole bunch of stuff that makes people go, oh, okay, I can have faith in this person. I know that our comment may get somewhere. But if you don't have a reputation and you don't have a relationship with the artist, then the chances are unlikely you will want to pay your artist. Now, you should be paying your artist $20 an hour. It takes about a day to complete a comment page, so that's 20 times. Let's say you work 10 hours, you should be paying them around 200 bucks. Nobody does that. Book artists don't ask for that much. For some reason. I think they just think they won't get any work. If they ask for that much, they should be asking for that much because that's how you live, that's the only way you live off of comics is if they pay the appropriate amount, but they go as low as $30 a page, which is nuts. Some people will draw for $30 a page, Some will draw for $50 a page. I normally pay at least 100, which I think is still too cheap. To be honest. I think it should be like 160. But some combers will take that. But you need to be able to pay artists to live. There was one guy who paid only 100 bucks for an entire issue. If you do the math, that's 24 pages in a month. If you spend 10 hours a day on a comic and it takes you a day to do the comic, that's $0.25 an hour. That's maybe even less. I think it's like $0.02 I don't know, I can't do math, but it's very little I try and if you go on the comic book clab, make sure to put your information about the comic say like the comic summary, what kind of art you're looking for, and give your contact information. There is scammers and people might think you're scammer, so just make sure to have your information readily available so people don't think you're a scammer. Also, beware of messages where they don't send a portfolio right away in your post asking for artists, you may want to say, please provide your portfolio. I won't look at your work unless you provide me a portfolio. Because I find that a lot of people were just wanting you to waste your time by chatting it up. That's a good way of figuring out if you're being scammed or not. See if they have a website. If they have a website, that means they're not a scammer. Just like look into the person that you're wanting to hire except for just going for it. Make sure, do reverse search just to make sure that they're not stealing art from another website. You just really, because there are people who will do that. And then once you have an artist draw your stuff, make sure to ask them to do a quick rough sketch of the page before they do the final. Don't have them do the final immediately because you may find things that you don't like about it. And if you're paying, you're not collaborating. If you're paying them, you could tell them, hey, I would like these adjustments and they'll make adjustments for you before they do the final. Once they have the final, then you'll have your coma book page. If you have a five, decide to do your assignment. You decided to hire an artist to draw your assignment, then you're welcome to submit that, the Anthology. You're welcome to print it out and go to cons. And hand it out at cons. That's always an option. That's what you could do with the short. If you choose to do a longer comic, then you can make a pitch, which I might do in another class on just a comic. Make sure, just see who publishers are open and look at their submission guidelines. And then follow other submission guidelines. This is if you don't get an agent again, you want to get an agent to go to Tracker.com and filter out, filter out agents for graphic novels. And you should be able to do it. From this point on, there's not much more to do. I'm glad that you managed to finish the assignment. I hope you post it on Skillshare so I can take a look and critique it. I will be answering questions on my Tiktok as well. Just make sure you check everything out. And make sure to download all the things you need to download. And I'll see you later. Thank you so much for taking this class.