I’m a novelist—most of you guys know that. I’ve studied and practiced that particular mode of storytelling for around 15 years now. That creates a lot of habits and expectations when I sit down to work on a story.
But I’ve been thinking about branching out into comics for a long time. And it was while I was working on thinking up an idea for a newsletter freebie that I decided to finally commit to finishing a project. That project was “A Reason to Run: the comic.”
The idea was, I wanted to give my readers a view of my story they couldn’t get just from reading my books. I set my sights on the first chapter of the first book of the Dronefall Series. I wanted to adapt it to the comic medium. But I really had no idea how I was going to do that.
How Do You Adapt Novel Text To Comics?
Of course, this is what I asked Google—actually, I asked Pinterest first, because I typically do, but when I didn’t find what I needed there, I took it to Google. And guess what? I also didn’t find a lot there.
So, is this not something people do? Clearly, they do it—novels do occasionally get graphic novel adaptations, after all. But I was able to find very little guidance on how to do it online. And so, I realized I was going to have to log off and use my own brain.
That’s a good thing to do sometimes. Kids, you don’t need people on the internet to do all your thinking for you. God created you with a brain that can think on its own. Sometimes you have to step away from other voices and remember you can figure things out for yourself. It’s actually one of the best things you can do for your creativity.
But, having said all that, I thought it was too bad there were hardly any tips for how to do this on the internet. So, I’m going to share my insights with you. Read on.
My Process
Being an extremely visual writer who for some reason always knows exactly what compass-point everything in a given scene is facing, I had a lot of very strong imagery in my head already. This process would probably be a lot longer if you needed to make a lot of character and setting design decisions before you started. I dived straight in without writing out a script or anything. I just started story-boarding the whole thing shot-by-shot like a movie.
Don’t do it this way.
It was getting really long and tedious. I was many pages into my thumbnailing when it occurred to me that comics are not films. So, that’s my first tip.
Tip #1 Comics are NOT Film Storyboards
Comics are their own medium. It’s possible to use way too many panels to show an action. It can actually make the action more confusing. I also didn’t want to make this a 30-page project. This was my first time trying to complete a comic for public consumption. I wanted it to be manageable.
So, I scrapped the thumbnails and started rethinking things. I needed to think about what parts on this first chapter of Dronefall One actually needed to be communicated. What could I make clear? What could I get a casual reader interested in without a lot of exposition?
I ended up selecting two passages of text that would end up appearing on the pages. One was that iconic intro about the Blindworm and train-jumping. The other was the conversation my MC Halcyon and her friend Reveille have as Halcyon is making a run for it. Off of that, I could build my pages.
Tip #2 Draw your thumbnails—worry about page layout later
Now that I had the text to use as a framework, I started drawing new thumbnails. At first, they were just a string of rectangle panels. I didn’t bother thinking about layouts and different panel shapes or sizes until I knew what panels I actually needed to tell my story.
By rethinking my thumbnails in a much less play-by-play progression, I flew through the thumbnailing process and was ready to move on to page layouts.
Tip #3 Decide how many pages you want to draw
I managed to condense the whole of chapter one into eight pages. I was able to guesstimate the number by knowing about how many panels I would probably be able to fit on a page, and then starting to mark out potential page-breaks in the thumbnail sketches.
Staying flexible at this stage is helpful. None of the panels were set in stone yet. A lot would shift around and evolve as I got into sketching my tentative layouts. I ended up dropping and combining a lot of panels. I wanted to stay sensitive to readability and composition in the sketching phase.
Tip #4 Stay noncommittal in the early stages
Comic art is more than just a string of pretty pictures. It’s about telling a story.
Once I was satisfied with the layouts, the scary part began. This was also the point where I realized I was going to do the whole comic in traditional media—also a scary decision. I went out and bought the biggest pad of Bristol board I could find. I don’t know a lot about comics, but I do know you’re supposed to work much larger than your print-size. And with all the pictures within pictures in the medium, I knew I would still be getting into some pretty small details if I wasn’t careful.
Tip #5 Work LARGE
The original pages of this comic are 17inx14in (43.18cm x 35.56cm) and I almost wished they were bigger. Still, working even on that scale has its challenges. If you’re not an artist, you might not realize how distorted a large page is when you’re sitting at a desk. I had to stand up and look straight down at it to keep it from getting too skewed. An easel or drawing-board might have been helpful.
Tip #6 Use a medium you’re comfortable with for your first comic
Kind of a bonus tip. Also, I didn’t do this.
I opted to use alcohol markers for this project. For the most part, I like how it turned out, but I felt a little panicky the whole time I was using them. They interacted strangely with graphite. (Which I used to sketch the pages out before inking with alcohol-based fine-liners.) They each blended a little differently. And boy, I sure used some of them up. We took a couple of emergency trips to Hobby Lobby to replenish them over the two weeks I was working on this.
I was using the store-brand ones, luckily. But you know they still weren’t cheap. That’s the thing about alcohol markers.
Anyway. Once I had inked and colored all eight pages and a cover, I photographed them with my phone, cropped and adjusted them, and popped them into Canva where I added the text. I could have hand-lettered the text on the physical pages, but I didn’t. Because I kinda forgot. I got in the zone.
Tip #7 Leave room for your text boxes/speech bubbles
Mine got a little crowded. This probably takes some practice to get right. But in the end, I think I ended up with a totally readable, and even kind of cool-looking comic that gives my readers an exciting taste of the world of Dronefall. That was my goal.
I hope you got something out of this behind-the-scenes look at my comic-making process. I’m obviously a complete newbie, but I wanted to share my experience with other complete newbies out there who might be just as lost as I was at the beginning of the process. If you have any questions for me, please drop them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to answer them as best I can.
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