Someone Asked (a while ago) How I Draw My Comics

I found a disc that had "family photos pets etc" written on it. Being in a morbid mood I thought I'd see if there was anything that needed transferring to a flash USB stick.

I got a surprise.  Well, for me. Photographs taken while I was working on two comics in May, 2005 -I could have sword it was much later but the photos are dated for that time! The first is the end products -Words Within Worlds, that became the first part of the Dr Morg Trilogy and had a limited run as a small press comic. This one has a white cover and others had a yellow card cover. Worth a few £s now.  The other is the original A6 (A6 measures 105 × 148 millimeters or 4.13 × 5.83 inches) GoBo zine that I was handing out at the Bristol Spike Island event BUT thanks to a certain person sitting there saying "It's s***. Bin it, it really is s***!" a good few ended up in a waste bin by the doors -and I 'recycled' them!

 I am one of those people who prefers not to be tied down to a straight forward 5-6 panels page. I like to use a few different techniques in my work.  I will draw on an A4 (A4 paper size is 210mm x 297mm, or 8.267 inches x 11.692 inches) sheet. Maybe a single illo. Maybe 2-3 illoes and I will then cut and paste these onto an A3 (A3 paper size is 297mm x 420mm, or 11.7 inches x 16.5 inches) sheet.

This means that you can move the panels around until they look okay on the page and then glue 'em down! The good thing about this method is that you can take an A4 sheet and make it a panel to them work on and alter before pasting down. For instance, below, that page to the bottom right features the character Jack Flash -a major character in theReturn of The Gods and a key character in Green Skies. Originally there was a strange creature to the background, heavily shaded and an outreached claw coming over his shoulder. But I then realised that the page worked better with a solid black background which left a lot up to the reader's imagination.

Below shows the A4 "blacked out" page and the actual print-proof copy of WWW where the creature and claw are seen. I looked once and thought "redo".  I do not waste paper and if a page is wrong and can be corrected with white India ink, Tippex or a patch (a piece of paper cut out to fit over something that needs redrawing) I do that.

Below I'm busy at work cutting and pasting.  Why take a very long time to draw a figure broken up into puzzle pieces when it's more fun to draw the figure and then cut it up into puzzle pieces to then paste into a panel?

I have absolutely no idea what happens from panel- to- panel in my comics let alone page-to-page. I do not use a script -I only write scripts for other people.  This means that, quite literally, a character in panel 1 is talking to someone and in panel 2 a chunk of rock falls on him and I never actually (consciously) thought about that.

Also, I'll be drawing and think "right, I know" and will look around and perhaps grab a template or something else to go around a panel or become a central object on the page. As with the floral pattern on that page my hand is over.  I only use brushes for large solid black areas so all size brushes come in handy and in 2007 (?) I purchased a 600 ml bottle on India drawing ink and it is still quarter full. Ink needs time to dry and if the ideas are coming fast and furious you cannot mess around.

For quick solid blacks I use Berol Broad and even Fine fibre tips and have done since the 1980s -people used to argue that I was using brushes to draw when I just used Berols to draw!  Sharpies...no. I was given one but the ink seems to last far less than a Berol -someone want to send me Sharpies to try out and review? I've recommended Berols to artists for decades.

There's an article here but I'm guessing some of the photos are missing by now so I may re-write it soon:
hoopercomicart.blogspot.co.uk/…

Below: I washed and posed for this photo with GoBo for a photo for an interview in The Imagineers (I think it was for that) but it was never used.

And below some of the last "Small Press" Adventures (volume 1) -the yellow covered bumper issue is VERY rare but some idiot on ebay paid £20 for it?????

The End