Becoming a Comic Artist Part 1

Please enjoy this blog from the way way back days of Tumblr (2016)

I started drawing comics when I was 13 years old. I fell in love with Spider-man comics and the Dragon Ball Z anime at around this time and would be constantly drawing the characters and reading the Ultimate Spider-Man comic which came out every month.

It turned out I wasn’t alone when it came to loving Dragon Ball Z, Since a friend at school called John saw my DBZ drawings and asked me if I’d do a comic for him and he’d pay me £1 This ended up being my favourite part of Secondary School and helped me escape the monotony and gave me some sense of purpose.

Now, I’m going to post some of this ancient work, what little of it I could locate at least, and then I’m going to go into detail on how we never stop learning our craft.

First of all, I knew NOTHING about page layouts. I would simply grab a few sheets of A3, fold them into magazine form and start drawing. I never even had a script, just a vague story in mind so the comics generally had very poor pacing to them. You can see in the second page I uploaded that I tried my hand at digitally adding the word balloons and text…. in MS Paint. The less said about that the better. Also all the comics would be pencils only. I didn’t ink them because I didn’t know how. Did the inkers use ballpoint? Was it from Calligraphy pens? I just didn’t know and there wasn’t as much info on the internet back then. there certainly weren’t any YouTube tutorials I can tell you that much.

As time went on I did learn about inking however from a show that aired on the BBC about the Beano and Dandy comics where one of the artists was using a fineliner pen for his inks. I didn’t think of the different pen weights or any of that I just realised that I needed some fineliners.

When I was 15/16 I came up with my own story and even wrote a loose script for it. it was about a young schoolboy who was secretly in love with his best friend and was being bullied. He’d bottle it all up til eventually a violent split personality would come out. Typical teenage garbage basically.

As you can see, the layouts have improved but still aren’t perfect. I was still working on A4 paper, not realising how much i was limiting myself. I would eventually reboot this series a bit in 2008 though I admit I lost interest after a while. I was now working in a much larger format, A3 paper and my grasp of storytelling had improved greatly. I’d also discovered COPIC marker pens and tried to incorporate them into my comics before ditching them in favour of digital colour.

In complete honesty I HATE looking at old work. it really brings me down but I felt it necessary to show that talent is a non-factor in the comic making process. If you have the passion and the drive then you’ll get better as time goes on as cliche as that sounds.

Jay