Bibliography

Barker, C, (1993), Razorline: The First Cut, Marvel Press, USA

Chiarello, M and Klien, T, (2004), The DC Comics guide to colouring and lettering comics, Watson -Guptill publications

Cooney, D, (2011), Writing and Illustrating the Graphic Novel: Everything you need to know to create great work and get it published, Barron's Educational Series, England

Caputo, T, (2002), Visual Storytelling: The Art and Technique, Watson - Guptill Publications, USA

Ennis, G, (2008), Ghost Rider: Trail Of Tears, Marvel Comics, USA

Gravett, P, (2005), Graphic Novels: everything you need to know, Collins Design

Harvey, R, (1996), The art of the comic book: an aesthetic history, University Press of Mississipi, USA

King, S, (2001), On writing: A memoir of the craft, New English Library, USA

Krensky, S, (2008), Comic book century: the history of American Comic books, Twenty first century books, Minneapolis

Marx, C, (2007), Writing for animation,comics and games, Elsevier

Millar, M and McNiven, S, (2011), Nemesis, Titan Books, London

Osgood, R, (2008), Cengage Advantage Books: Visual Storytelling: Videography and post production in the Digital Age, Wadsworth, USA

Pustz, M, (1999), Comic book culture: Fanboys and true believers, University Press of  Mississippi, Canada

Quietly, F, (2008), All Star Superman: Volume One, DC Comics, USA

Robinson, J,(2011), The Comics, An illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, Dark Horse Publishers, USA

Skinn, D and Millar, M, (2008), Comic Art: The Very Best in Contemporary Comic Art and Illustration, ILEX

Swain, D, (2008), Creating Characters: How to Build Story People, Oaklahoma Press, USA

Talon, P, (2005), Graphic Novels: everything you need to know, Collins Design

Weiner, S, (2006), One hundred and one best graphic novels, NBM

Wolk, D, (2007), Reading Comics: how graphic noves work and what they mean, De Capo Press, United Staes of America

The finish line

After a long time, I finally had the choose-your-own-adventure style graphic novel and IPhone versions of my comic.

The final stage was to complete the cover as I had left that until last to get a true feel of the comic before I started it.

Eventually I came up with a simple design for the cover which I did in pencil roughs first...

and then finished with inks and colors...

and the iPhone version...

Overall this project took a lot of work and things that I thought would be simple turned out to be a lot more complex than I thought such as the very creation of the comic. Although I appreciated comics beforehand I now had a lot more appreciation and respect for the artists and writers who create them. It's no where near as easy as it looks.

However I am very pleased with my finished results for both the versions and the lessons I had learned regarding their composition and structure I am sure will be used in my future projects.

Advertising

To go along with my iPhone and iPad version, I came up with some simple advertising posters and banners which could go on other websites. I tried to make them as 'Apple' like and professional looking as I could.

I created two poster versions as well as the benner...

Poster one...

Poster two...

The banner...

Animatics for iPhone version

As well as the normal frames, I intended to animate a few of the frames in the iPhone version. They would play on touch and link straight to the next panel once finished.

These were complicated as everything that moved, needed to be on separate layers in order to animate them. So with many of the animated frames I had to create and edit multiple layers for parts like limbs moving otherwise they would look far too static and would not move organically. The more layers there were, the better the animation would look, but of course the more layers there were, the more complicated the animation was to do in After Effects.

I created four of these for the graphic novel and I think they compliment it very well and are not just animation for animation sake which is always a risk so I had to choose the frames I was going to animate carefully.

iPhone comics

Since very early after the iPhone's release there has been various types of comics and graphic novels available for the iPhone. Comixology was one of the first to offer these and was able to offer a comic book reading platform which worked for several titles instead of being a company specific reader.

In the same way that companies release tie-in comics when a big film/game is being released, the same was being done with iPhone comics. Titles were being made sporadically but usually only when there was a movie to tie in with such as 'Watchmen' or 'Scott Pilgrim'.

Smaller companies started to bring out comics for the iPhone which were created for that purpose or for characters who's rights were in the public domain such as Sherlock Holmes..

Over the last two years the larger companies such as Marvel, DC and IDW have seen the possibilities and have released their own comics for the iPhone and iPad, normally with their own comic reader.

I intended to adapt my own graphic novel for the iPhone and this meant that I needed to think about the scale and how the interface would be.

I decided that the screen would normally show one frame at a time to allow for clearer views as the art and lettering would be lost if I left them at normal page size.

The reader would scroll through until they reached the choice screen and at that point would tap the screen on the animal form which would take them to the appropriate route/ending.

Interactivity

Early on I knew that I wanted two versions of my graphic novel. I wanted a regular comic page sized version and I wanted an iPhone version.

The iPhone version would be interactive, it would go frame by frame until the protagonist is cornered and there is a choice screen where the 'reader' would be given a choice of animal form, either bear, hawk, spider or panther...

Then the story would span off in one of those directions which with path being different. This choice screen would give the reader a chance to interact with the story, a chance to affect the outcome.

There are many interactive novels, such as the 'Choose-your-own-adventure' young adult books of the 90's, where the reader would be given a couple of options at the end of a chapter about how they could proceed and then the reader would have to 'Turn to page 64' or whatever their choice was. Though these types of novels have ebbed away in recent years and they seem to be few and far between, there are even fewer interactive comics. Certainly this was something that was not exploited in any great way by the major companies.

On the internet, there are a few examples of interactive digital comics such as 'Hotel' http://www.hoteloscartangoecholima.com/splash.html. But I don't think these are exploited as well as they could be.

The only trouble with my graphic novel would be that if I had four completely different paths, then that would be a lot of work and I had to bear in mind that I was already taking on a lot by producing two different types of graphic novels (comic/iPhone).

After speaking with my year tutor, I learned about culminative explosions. This technique would be very useful as it meant that although some of the paths would be very different, they could end the same way and therefore I could use the same frames.

Interviews

As soon as we received the brief, I contacted as many people in the sequential art and motion comic industry as I could. As expected I didn't get many replies at first, but I kept trying and resent emails until people got sick of me. Eventually I managed to get a few people to agree to a short email interview. I was very happy with the people who replied as one of them is the manager of a company that is at the leading edge if motion comics and the others are big names in the comic business.

My interviews will be in my misc folder.

Motion Comics

As I intended to animate at least a few frames in my graphic novel, I started to look at as many motion comics as I could.

Motion comics are still a fairly new medium, which seems to be getting better all the time. There are several excellent pieces out there such as Marvel's adaptation of Stephen King's 'N.'...

And the excellent prequels to the 'I am Legend' movie by Jason Chan, which was one of the first motion comics that showed just what can be done...

As soon as the larger corporations such as Marvel and DC saw these, they realised the potential of this new medium and quickly jumped on board. DC have since released several titles such as Superman: Red Son, Batman: Black and White and Watchmen. While Marvel have released Spider-Woman, Iron Man: Extremis, Astonishing X-men and most recently Thor and Loki: Blood Brothers. Marvel also released an entire series of Black Panther as a motion comics based on John Romita's 'Who is the Black Panther' run.

With After Effects improving with every version, so is the quality of the motion comics themselves and Jason Chan and Marvel's Thor and Loki: Blood Brothers leading the pack so far.

As After Effect's is widely available, there are several amateurs who are turning out excellent work as well. The following is a motion comic made for a music video. The art is from Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's 'Nemesis'...

The motion comic has a long way to go as a medium but at a fraction of the price of live action or digital or even traditional animation, we are bound to see lots more and improvements all the time.

Comic books: a brief history

Comic books are rich in history. Many superhero's are created  as a response to real world events. Captain America for instance was created as a response to the second world war and could be argued that his early existence was purely as a tool of propaganda. Many of Captain America's adventures involved defeating Nazi in various guises. Weiner (2009) agrees and writes "Captain America has often been proposed as an example of nationalist propaganda and given his wartime origins as a Nazi-smashing, flag-waving, drug-enhanced super-soldier, this is not a hard argument to make." (p17). However his adventures soon became more than simple propaganda and troops would take the comic books with them almost into the very trenches as an example of the true nature of comic-books and that is escapism.

The effectiveness of a comic books as escapism meant that many comic books were created and often depicted the darkest parts of human history. Several comics dealt with the atrocities of the holocaust. A great example of this is the Pulitzer Prize winning 'Maus' by Art Spiegelmen.

Comic books boomed in the early 90's and then crashed with many large companies such as Marvel skirting close to bankruptcy, it seemed they had hit their maximun gross load and most comics had 7 optional covers or holo-covers.  This comic book crash of the 90's along with a lot of disillusionment led to a lot of comic-book artists and writers setting up independant studios. People like Todd MacFarlane who went on to produce 'Spawn' and 'Haunt'.

Although there had been a small number of comic book adaptations to film before 2000 such as Tim Burton's 'Batman' and Richard Donner's 'Superman', it wasn't until 2000's 'X-men' and 2002's 'Spider-man' that hollywood had began to see comic books as the true untapped resource that they are. And in recent times' it's hard to think of a prime comic book character that hasn't been adapted to the big or small screen.

Primary research

Once I had my script laid out I knew what elements I would need in the story so I started to look at books on drawing the animals I would need in my story.

Animals Real and Imagined (2010) by Terry Whitlatch was an excellent resource as it described how to draw animal musculature and locomotion.

The Artists Guide to drawing real animals (2006) was another good resource as it broke down the techniques for drawing differeing animals. I decided to try and get some first had photos of birds of prey so I joined a few forums and managed to get in contact with falconer who lived quite close by to me. He was nice enough to let me come and take some photos of his amazing birds which I could use for reference....

I also asked and visited a friend of mine who I knew kept jumping spiders in order to get the following photos for reference...

I also had to practice drawing people such as S.W.A.T team members...

Beginning my graphic novel

Armed with the previous knowledge I had learned I began on my own graphic novel, I wanted to draw as much as I could of the graphic novel and hopefully finish it before I started to animate it and make it interactive.

So I began on the script. The script was easy enough to write as I already knew my characters and the short story I wanted to tell.  At it's core my story needed a protagonist who people could relate to and emphasize with, I adhered to Swain's (2008) advice who wrote "A story must revolve around a character who is wholly believable even if they are in unbelievable situations" (p151). This was important to me as my character would be in a science-fiction/action story with quite fantastical elements so if the character was not strong enough the story would fall apart.

With the above in mind, I decided to start the story with the main character being as 'in-the-dark' and as unaware as what had happened as the reader. The reader would find things out as he would.

Below is the first page of the script...

The process

After doing as much research as I could on the creation of comic books, I had a better understanding of the processes.

A comic book begins with the script by the writer, which details what will happen in the panels and the dialogue. The scripting is the first and many would argue most important part of comic books. The writer of the script must understand that his words need to be translated perfectly to panels in order to work and must think visually. Marx (2007) agrees and states "As a comic book story-teller, you must have mastery over telling your story ith the images as much as with the words. The alchemy is in how you combine them to create a whole that is greater than the sum of it's parts" (p99).

Below is an example of part of the script for Marvel's 'Captain America Reborn'...

The next stage is where the penciller will draw out the layouts or 'roughs' which show the basics of how the page will look, panel sizes/angles etc. Below are the roughs for the comic book 'Conan: Kiss of the undead'.

Next are the finished pencils, which are again done by the penciller and are the final detailed versions of the layouts, with shading indicated for the inker. Below is an excellent example of the pencils for the comic book 'The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born' by artist Jae Lee...

Then the inker, fills in the black, this can determine a lot of mood and tone in the scene and a good inker must determine what is needed and show not only the pencillers intentions but augment them. Talon (2007) agrees with this and writes that "Pencils would never maintain their imapct without an inker to complete the job" (p70). Below is an inked piece by Danny Miki for Marvel's 'Siege' cover series...

Finally the colorist obviously adds the colour, the colour added needs to work perfectly with the lighting and tone of the panel. Although it may seem like a simple job, it's more technical than it sounds.  Klein and Chiarello write "A comics' coloring is a lot like the soundtrack of a movie. It's something that is subtle yet always present and if done well can greatly add teh the experience" (p7). Colorists such as Richard Isanove have redefined how well a page can be coloured and how much colour can add to a scene. Following is one of Isanoves coloured pages for 'Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born'. It's evident how much Isanove's colour has benefited the page...

More Research

Before I began drawing my comic book, interactive or otherwise, I wanted to understand more about the world of comic books and graphic novels. Although I had read them since I could walk and was raised on Spider-man, Hulk and X-men I felt that I needed to learn a lot more about how they are put together and more about them as a medium. As Stephen King (2002) writes "Just because I listen to the radio everyday, doesn't mean I know anything about the music industry" (p114).

I started with the books by Will Eisner and read forward from there, it was very interesting to learn that the angles used in panels are not arbitrary at all, but that each panel is the same as a camera angle in a film, each panel needs to justify itself. If a low angle is uses as apposed to an overhead shot, then why? As the angle can completely change the mood and pace of a image. A low angles shot can signify domination and imposition by the character, a close up shot of the face augments the emotion. All these things are carefully taken into consideration by the artist. The artist has to work like a film director, establishing shots which would show what the writer intended. Putting the focus where it needs to be.

Campiti (2011) writes "Each frame should act like a stand-alone piece of art" (p51), this is something I agree with strongly as each frame should take into consideration the tenants of any art such as appropriate lighting, good composition and should make the purpose of the frame clear.

More research

"Any successful construction must begin with a deconstruction" Anon

In order for me to create a good graphic novel, interactive or otherwise I had to know how one worked. I had to know what made a good one and what flaws made it a bad one. So I read as much as I could on the subject and the basic tenement that was apparent in all the books was that a successful graphic needed to tell a good story.  Talon (2004) agrees with this and states "A story must be worth telling in order to make it a good comic book" (p7).

Because we had a lot to do in this assignment, the website, showreel, essay and the graphic novel I decided it would be more economical with time if I used my existing 'Wylde' game idea. I also decided that Wylde's content and characters would suit the graphic novel medium as it was dynamic, emotional and it was a good story to tell.

I decided to start with the part of my story that I created the pods for in my last project, as the setting and timing of that sequence would make it a good opening for the story. As the sequence I would write and draw would be short, it would be difficult to make the reader emphasise with the character ands create a solid enough emotional response but  in accordance with Wolk (2007) who explains that emotional content is needed in all areas of the comic from the concept to the composition in the panels, I wanted it to have one that was apparent in the writing and the panels themselves (p152).

An excellent example of this is 2008's 'All Star Superman' by Frank Quietly and Grant Morrison.

This title pulled the character of superman to pieces and asked why he does what he does and who he was. It was a story with real emotional content and stands as one of the best takes on the character in it's long history, which is a substantial amount of time since the first Superman comic was published in 1938.

First thoughts

"If ever there was a medium made for over-achievers, it's comics. Where else can a creator make mischief on a cosmic scale; tell tales in which worlds rise and fall in the space of a few panels, where battles may shake the stars, and every emotion -- grief, joy, rage, hope -- is felt and expressed on a mythic scale?" (Barker:1993:3)

 Now we have been given the title of our projects, I was both looking forward to and nervous of the work to come.

I felt I had a good knowledge base for the work concerning graphic novels but I had no idea how to make one interactive. I also had very little knowledge of website and showreel making so they would be good skills to learn.

As with all briefs the first thing I did was to start my research.

I immediately joined some comic book art forums such as the following...

http://www.comicartfans.com/
http://www.comicartistsdirect.com/
http://www.millarworld.com/

These websites would come in extremely useful later on for critique on my works in progress.

I also went straight to the library and looked for the best books on sequential art. Although I  wanted to look at the best examples of graphic novels and comic book art, I also wanted to research the actual process behind them so I withdrew the following books...

For examples of the best...

Watchmen by
Sandman
Death: The high cost of living
Old man Logan
Ultimate Wolverine Versus Hulk
The Ultimates Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch
Ghost Rider: Trail of Tears

For research on the process...

The DC Comics guide to digitally drawing comics -- Freddie E. Williams
Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics -- Stan Lee
Comics and Sequential Art -- Will Eisner
Graphic Storytelling -- Will Eisner
Bryan Hitch's Ultimate Comic Studio -- Bryan Hitch
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art -- Scott McCloud
Panel Discussions: Design in Sequential Art Storytelling -- Durwin S. Talon

Unfortunately a lot of the entry-level books on comic art, particularly the 'how-to' guides tended to repeat themselves and would have the obligatory sections on anatomy, perspective and dynamics but very few about the diversity of styles or the history and depth of comic books. It seemed to be the case that most books on comic art were primarily concerning themselves with how to draw muscular characters but spent very little time on 'why'.  One of the few books that was concerned with the question was the Eisner and Scott McCloud books.