📝This archived post is originally from my old comics focused Wordpress blog from 2011-2019. That site was a space to publicly commit to learning the art and craft of cartooning and self-publishing. These posts are full of a naive enthusiasm that though at times embarrassing, I'm proud of. I hope you find them useful in some way.❤️

It’s been a good day. Yesterday I finished pencilling out a solid storyboard for a comic that I’m making for my application for the Center for Cartoon Studies. It’s going to be a cute one with some sexy ink. Although it is autobiographical, I’m not going the Jeffrey Brown route and just using a ball point pen and going for a long series of comics. It’s a one-shot. Int his case, form is just as important in this work as the content. Additionally, I like sexy styled ink, so that’s what I’m going to give this comic. Obviously, it’s going to take a while longer to finish, but that’s what’s got to happen.

I like the form that I’ll be giving this little booklet. It’s going to be a handsewn booklet with handmade covers that will have 6 panels in a 3 x 2 formation in the spread.  Here’s a picture to go with the description.

A mock up of the comic

I’ve never done an autobiographical comic, so this feels a little indulgent. Oh well, ‘ve got to try everything at least once.

If you’re interested in some really interesting exploratory studies of structure in comics, Frank Santoro has been putting out a series of layout workbooks on the Comics Journal. Free classes on comics structure? Sign me up. Taught by Frank? Shit, get my ass over there.

They are especially interesting because of Frank’s background in the world of art outside of comics. What I like the most is how he touches on the inherent proportional relationships between paper sizes and traditional framing practices across multiple panels. From Frank:

"Maybe you knew all this, maybe you didn’t. Either way the sizes of paper easily available and the dominance of certain formats for comics is something worth looking into, I think, if you’re interested in comics. I think this is especially true for the maker. Understanding why certain formats “feel” right over others can guide one’s creative decisions in the planning stages. Far too many times I’ve come across comics that were obviously printed at the wrong size in relation to the artwork. Ever see a regular “digest size” minicomic with a really wide margin at the top or bottom? It’s usually because the artist drew the page on 8.5 x 11-inch paper and assumed that this proportion would shrink exactly down to the proportion of the digest size. Well, as many of you know, it doesn’t shrink down exactly to that size. Regular copy paper is a wider proportion than a comic book page. So if you use 8.5 x 11 paper to draw your originals for your standard digest size mini comic then you have to create a 7 x 11 inch area to draw within to make it line up. Right? Right. Let’s go to the workbook part. I promise it’ll make sense."

Click here for the most recent Layout Workbook (#8). To start at the beginning of Frank’s posts, click here.