Dear Colleen,

Gina Miller

Hi Gina,

One reason why you may be getting so many answers to your question about comic book page size, is simply that comic books (and manga) come in different sizes.

The right size of your original art – whether digital or or by hand – is not as important as the final printed dimensions of the work. Your drawings must be proportional to the printed work.

Pick up a comic book and a ruler. Now, find a page in which all the images of the comic page are contained within panel borders. That is, a page where none of the pictures breaks out off the page, or runs into the margins of the book. You want what we call the live area also known as the image area.

Just to keep the math easy, we’ll say that area measures 6″x9″.

Now, you don’t necessarily want to draw at that size. Art that is drawn larger than print size and then shrunk down looks cleaner and tighter than art that is drawn at print size or smaller. If you are working on computer, you can do anything on the art as long as it is proportional to the final print size.

So, if the final print size of your image area is 6″x9″, and you wanted to draw your comic page 1 1/2 times larger, then the size of your original art would be 9″x13.5″.

If you are doing all of your art – lettering and colors and tones – it is really up to you to draw your book as you choose, as long as you keep standard proportions in mind when you create your art.

The website ComiXpress has a great list of sizes and technical specs for different types of comic art. If, as you say, you are looking at “traditional” comic size, that would be the first page size listed. This website also explains what bleed, live area, and trim mean. Some other publishers may have different specs, especially manga publishers. Since ComiXpress is a POD (Print on Demand, as little as one copy at a time) printer, these tech specs are the sizes which they need to go directly to PRINT. Remember, your comic art does not need to be created at this size. It needs to be finished and PROPORTIONAL to this size.

There are some very good reasons for not going your own way and making huge variations in these standards. If you end up working with other artists, and your specifications vary wildly from industry norms, it can be hard for other creators to work with you. It may take a while for letterers and colorists to get used to your personal specs.

I do almost all of my art by hand, and even after years of being in the business, I make mistakes with sizing. Sometimes I work on projects where the printed size of the book is slightly different than what I am accustomed to. If I make a measuring error, I may draw an entire book at a slightly faulty proportion. I did this on the graphic novel Orbiter. No one noticed but me, but every single one of my splash pages is centered incorrectly because I drew the images slightly wider than the final book proportions.

I had a fit trying to figure out a good working proportion for my new book Gone to Amerikay (which won’t be out until next year.) Because the proportion is, once again different from standard, I found myself having trouble with the trim area and getting accustomed to the design of the wider-than-normal page proportion.

So, don’t feel badly if this is a little confusing! It happens to all of us! Which is why many artists buy pre-printed paper for their work.

BTW, I’ve also seen page layout programs on the web which you can download. I have absolutely no idea if they are any good, but I am providing the links for you.

Here is a set of layouts you can buy that appear to be at the standard comic page proportion.

I hope I’ve answered your questions, Gina! Thanks for writing!

c

I was delighted to clear out enough space in my studio to enable me to put my bottles of traditional media art supplies out where I can get easy access to them on the bookshelves near my drawing board.

I love painting in oil and other traditional media, but I get very little call for it anymore, except from private commissions. Since I have a major oil portrait to do sometime over the next year, I thought I would get the shelf organized and plan some time to work on it at least once a week.

When I went over to the shelf to poke about, I noticed a sticky substance nearly covered the entire top shelf. That’s never good, especially when valuable books are on the shelves below. I could not imagine what was on that shelf since I never put food anywhere near my supplies.

To my surprise, a bottle of linseed oil, package by the company Liquitex, had almost completely emptied itself all over the shelf. Worse, the leak had spilled over the shelf and had dripped onto a power strip below. Linseed oil is highly flammable. I also did not know that linseed oil can spontaneously combust, so I won’t be leaving any rags in the studio overnight anymore…

I had not made some kind of goofy mistake and knocked the bottle over: the linseed oil had eaten through the bottom of the plastic bottle in which the product was packaged. I do not know how old the bottle was, but I know it was some years old. It would never have occurred to me that the manufacturer would package a product in a bottle which could not safely contain its contents, but there you have it.

I’ve never had this happen before, and did not know linseed oil could eat through plastic like that. For those of you who have toxic or flammable traditional art media in your home, you might want to double check those bottles. I’ve always been very careful with my supply storage, and in this case, the manufacturer’s packaging is simply not suited to the job.

Kins and Co sells plastic bottles specifically for use with art supplies, and notes the dangers of turpentine and linseed oil leaks.

Solvents like turpentine and mineral spirits chemically attack plastic: This can cause the plastic to dissolve, weaken, discolor, or allow the solvent to permeate through the container (thus the bottle may feel greasy and over time you’ll lose the solvent you are trying to store). The plastic also may become brittle and crack…A regular plastic bottle kept at 50° C (122 ° F) for 28 days might lose 4-10 weight percent of its contents through the walls of the bottle. The Artist’s Bottle will lose less than 0.1%.

I’ve spent the better part of the morning trying to remove all the traces of dried linseed oil from the shelf and floor: obviously the power strip had to be discarded. The bottle wasn’t even directly over the power strip. The oil had oozed along the shelf and then dripped off the edge several feet away.

Anyway, just a head’s up for those of you who have art supplies packaged in plastic in your house. I think we may have avoided a disaster here, and goodness only knows when this leak occurred. It may even have happened while I was out of town. I’m just relieved no serious harm was done.

None of the other bottles show any signs of wear or damage, but I will be replacing them all the same.

c

Another tutorial from Digital Art.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have never ever been able to get the hang of computer graphics by reading text books. I have to see the process. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Lynda.com, but they have few tutorials specifically for comics-type graphics.

The Digital Art tutorials allow you to follow along with the pros as they create their work.

Some of them may be too advanced for beginners, but this feature is easy material for newbies. If you are just starting out, get one of those short term subscriptions to Lynda.com ($25 a month for UNLIMITEd access) and back it up with a selection of Digital Art Tutorials. You could check out any terms or techniques you didn’t quite understand on the Digital discs over at Lynda. For example, when I was starting out I could not seem to get a hang of the whole idea of layers. Many art tutorials assume knowledge of this, and I’d just sit there in a mist wondering “How the hell did they do that?” So after checking terms I did not know at Lynda.com, and then reviewing the Digital Art Tutorials, I was able to get the hang of things I had spent more than a year trying to suss out without success.

BTW, I was talking with Brian Haberlin when I was at NYCC, and he swears up and down that the new CS4 Photoshop is utterly beyond utterly. OK, “utterly beyond utterly” is my term, but he swears CS4 is worth the price of the upgrade.

For my own part, I am so happy with the ease of making layers on comic art in CS3 (up from Photoshop 7), that I can hardly believe how simple the new system is. I never quite got the hang of the old system. I can only imagine how much better CS4 must be.

I’m not going to upgrade right now because I simply don’t need to: not doing a whole lot of digital art at the moment. I’m doing a bit of painting and practice for my portfolio.

Plunking down a few bucks to get Digital Art Tutorials is worth every penny. After a few hours of watching these tutorials, I walk away with knowledge and tools that save me countless hours of scrambling around on my own. I nabbed some very nice computer painting jobs with my very first samples!

This is not a paid endorsement. I was given several samples of the tutorials, and also purchased others on my own.

I know sometimes these tutorials and classes can seem expensive, but they are not nearly as expensive as the time you sink into trying to figure out things by yourself. They really are a great investment.

c

I was a big fan of shows like Battlestar Galactica (the first one), and obviously, that costume sensibility is all over my old stuff. I guess it’s a bit masochistic to post old art like this! This piece was drawn as preliminary design art prior to the publication of the comics.

I met the original costume designer for Galactica some years ago, and he was very nice. I don’t remember much about the encounter (we were both convention guests), but I do remember him making a comment about costume design in comics, and how simple the designs were. I replied that the costumes are kept simple in comics so people can draw them repeatedly. This was during a panel, and a gasp went through the audience. I don’t think most people had really given the matter much thought! But consider trying to draw these outfits over about 200 pages or more, and you see the challenge…or the problem. A single character in one graphic novel who appears in just half the panels on that page will be drawn and redrawn at least 300 times per book.

It won’t be too long before most cartoonists just use 3-D modeling programs for all their art. I know a couple of people who do that already, but one told me that the set up costs for his comic ran into about $100,000. Too rich for my blood!

Because my acquaintance designed his 3-D figures on computer, he can just crank out a huge amount of finished work every day, and produces three full color pages a whack. I’m not sure I’d want to go that route. To me, it’s more like computer animation, and the reason I like to do comics is because I enjoy drawing. But I am not sure how well old school cartoonists will be able to compete in a web comics world where people expect full color comics. Many fans really don’t care how the comic was made.

I’m drawing a graphic novel right now – Gone to Amerikay – with minor computer assist. I created a couple of computer models of ships to help me to draw them in correct perspective, but the models are too crude to publish. Basically, they are just outlines for me to follow. I’m not sure I saved any time making the model, because it took me so long to construct the model I probably could have drawn it just as quickly. However, I doubt my drawing would have been as accurate from various angles. Arcs in perspective drawing are hard to pull off…for me anyway.

The best use I am getting out of the computer just now is filing my reference. Having my jpgs at my fingertips and being able to automatically create model sheets is completely new for me. My old computer could not handle this job. I’m figuring out new ways to file and index my images to make them easy to find in my system, and since I have more than 500 reference images on file for the new book – many taken from books and magazines more than 100 years old – I have to have an efficient system.

It’s so easily to misfile a piece of paper, and when you need THAT ship and THAT shot, which accidentally got filed under SHOES…you are in for a day’s headache.

Now, I use my contact sheets to tag the reference that I need for each shot. I write the file name for the image directly on the original art. I no longer have to worry about losing the paper copy of the reference: it is on the computer. I can print it out again if I need to, and can easily find anything filed away by category. If a piece gets misfiled, no worry. I have the file number written on the art. When I am finished with this book, I am going to start moving all the category files onto discs.

Old Photoshop didn’t automate contact sheets, and of course my old computer could not handle programs like Bridge. The new system has made everything so easy, and with all this memory, I can store tons of images.

I know those of you out there in cyberland who have had all these computer bells and whistles goodies for years are laughing at my newbie thrill. But it is a revelation to me how much easier the computer makes my work, even when I don’t use it to draw. I don’t know if I will scan all my clippings files, but it is highly unlikely that I will print out tons of reference photos in future. it’s just too easy to put them directly on a disc, download them, and file the images by category. Takes minutes.

I have 10,000 reference photograph originals sitting in files, and I don’t think they have ever been in order, while the files on my computer are in meticulous order.

I’m also trying something new: inserting art pages and reference into the manuscript document. Never really tried working this way before, but having my thumbnails and reference right there on the script page is pretty neat. Don’t have a clue why I didn’t do this before, but with so much reference, and art pages going through multiple evolutions, this is a handy way to stay on top of each one.

And because I love recycling, me mum and dad figured out a perfect function for old floppy disc file boxes: they are the perfect size for storing seed packets. Now even my seeds are properly stored and alphabetized!

Our culture celebrates young, brash geniuses, and can’t get enough of innovators who create something spectacular before age 30, even if they never do another thing their entire lives.

When I first published A Distant Soil, I remember having a very revealing conversation with Dave Sim who urged me to make absolutely certain that I finished up my series before I turned 30 because creativity dies by then and my work wouldn’t be any good after I hit middle age. I don’t know that he still holds this view, but many people seem to think innovation dies as we mature, even when there are creators like Will Eisner as our examples. He was vital and interesting and working in comics until the day he died at a ripe old age.

A late-blooming economist named David Galenson has spent years studying the nature of creativity and genius, and has determined that the creative life isn’t limited to teen wonders. He postulates that there are two types of innovators – of a tortoise and hare duality – and that the continuum of creativity peaks early for conceptualists who usually do their most important work by age 30, and experimentalists, who often peak quite late into middle age, such as Frank Lloyd Wright (who created his architectual masterpiece Fallingwater when he was 70) or Mark Twain (who didn’t find his unique writer’s voice until well into adulthood).

There’s a lot of interesting food for thought in this article from Wired magazine.

I have spoken with a number of aspiring creators about how hard it is to become a comics pro after a certain age. It’s possible this doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the artist, but with the realities of the economics of starting a difficult art career without a steady paycheck, health benefits, or disability benefits. To many young people, these are not major considerations. After a certain age they are necessities.

When you are a kid, you live at home with your folks and can tolerate a period of economic disadvantage while you endure years of career apprenticeship. You do not have to support yourself or a family. Adults do not have this advantage, nor do they usually have the advantage to take time to conceptualize and take personal risks.

I credit most of my career success to the advantage of this early start (I began sending out samples when I was 12 and nailed my first paying job at 15). It took me about three years of slogging about before I made any decent money. Then early publishers walked off with about $250,000 of my royalties. It was a good decade before I began to get some sound financial footing, and that was after a couple of lawsuits, too!

How many 30 year-olds are going to have the ability to lose a couple hundred thousand dollars in income and recover? Especially if they have acquired families and mortgages along the way. How do you find the time to draw and paint when you have a day job and family obligations?

Anyway, when I was a kid, I admired a lot of folks like Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Jeff Jones, etc, and kept their book The Studio close at hand. I wanted to be just like these guys, and when I was still sleeping on a couch in my parent’s house at the ripe old age of 19, I thought I was a loser. Didn’t all the cool artists have great work under their belts by then and studios in New York?

I later realized that The Studio and the works in it were created by men who were in their 30’s and 40’s, they had each spent nearly two decades in the trenches, slogging away until they developed their own visual sense. Jeff Jones’ earliest drawings and paintings were full of swipes and Frazetta riffs, and he did a lot of fanzine work before he was ever taken seriously.

So, delays are not denials. If you’re not a conceptualist, maybe you’re an experimenter, and your best work is in your future.

c