I’ve given a decent amount of advice for writers during convention season—posts here on “Convention Season” and here on my own experiences at Comic-Con—so with Comic-Con 2016 barreling towards us, I figured I’d see what specific questions you lot wanted answered.

So I asked you. Here are some Qs harvested from my Twitter feed (I’m at @marcbernardin, if you’re interested in playing along). Hopefully they will add a little something to your convention experience this year.

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From Tyler Westhause‏ (@twesthause): “What are the essential ‘Must Do’s’ at a convention.”

That’s actually really hard to say, as that depends entirely on the kind of convention you want to have. As I’ve said before, success at a con as massive as San Diego is about defining your expectations. Are you there for comics themselves? Are you more of a TV fan or a movie fan? Do you know other people attending—does it become more of a social event that anything? Are you a cosplayer?

But without knowing the specifics, I’d say to set three goals: the dream, the longshot, and the sure thing. And then try to make those happen. Let’s say you’re a comic book writer. The dream should be landing some actual paying work from a publisher. Possible to achieve, but highly unlikely unless you’re already a working pro.

The longshot could be getting into an industry party. Definitely not impossible, if you know where to look. But not the easiest ticket in the world to score.

And the sure thing could be meeting a potential collaborator. Artists, editors, publishers— they’re all there. Most of them have established time at a booth somewhere. Track ‘em down. Shake their hands. Tell ‘em who you are and what you want to do. Some will be more receptive than others, but meeting them is on the table.

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From Tom Markham (‏@DarthBreesus): “As someone who has never gone, how are events set up? Do they overlap or can you see all there is to offer?”

There is no way to see everything. Absolutely not possible. As I told Tyler above, you have to decide for yourself what your priorities are. But there are four days of Comic-Con, and every half hour there are dozens of official events to choose from—panels, screenings, signings—all happening at the same time. Not counting whatever unofficial events are happening away from the convention center.

Choose wisely.

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From David Cava (‏@CavaDavid10): “Where do you go to learn how to write for comics? How do you get editors to read your stuff?”

I’ll answer the second part, first: Editors will not read your stuff. By and large, this is the great disadvantage of being a comics writer as opposed to being a comics artist. An editor can look at three pages of interior art and know if an artist is ready for the big leagues—or can be shaped into one without much hassle. You can’t look at three pages of a script and know if a writer can do much more than just type. Basically, you need to be published—in any fashion. Webcomics you print out, fanzines, ashcans, indie stuff … any of it will serve you better than approaching cold with a script for even a pitch. Having a finished version of your work will show that SOMEONE took a risk on you—the artist, a publisher, etc—and you have actually seen a piece through to completion. That goes a long way.

As for how to write comics, I’d look at books like Brian Michael Bendis’ Words for Pictures, Mark Salisbury’s Writers on Comics Scriptwriting, and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. (Editor’s note: Check the Comic-Con Programming Schedule for possible panels and workshops on writing comics. The schedule will appear online approximately 2 weeks before the event.)

And then put those books down and start writing. Those books will tell you how to format, will give you the basics of how comics themselves work, but they can’t tell you which stories to tell or how to tell them the most effectively. Only experience will do that. So start amassing experience.

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From Marry Banilow X (‏@BackAgainBen86): “What was your best/worst #SDCC experience?”

Best experience: Pitching AiT/Planetlar publisher Larry Young the idea for my first ever comics work, the original graphic novel Monster Attack Network, over lunch and having him buy it on the spot. It was a fantastic experience for obvious reasons. (Runner up: Crashing the Nerd Machine party in 2014 and dancing until 4:00 AM with, among others, half of the Whedonverse cast and the King in the North. And then that other time I told Battlestar Galactica’s Mary McDonell that it was okay with my wife if she moved in with us, because she is that awesome.)

Worst experience: I honestly don’t have one. You have to understand: Every time I’ve attended Comic Con, I’ve either gone as a member of the press or as a professional (most times as both.) As such, my convention experiences are, frankly, ridiculous. Statistically speaking, no one does Comic-Con the way I (and some of my contemporaries) do Comic-Con. So even when I am pissed about one thing or another at Comic-Con—a panel I couldn’t get into, a party I wasn’t invited to attend, a meeting that got canceled—I completely understand that me complaining would be like me saying that my diamond shoes are too tight. Champagne problems, to be sure.

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Marc Bernardin’s Devourer of Words appears the third Tuesday of every month here on Toucan, except next month, which is July, and we’re pretty sure something else is happening.

A few months back, I shared some notes for writers on writing for an artist. It’s about time I shared some suggestions for artists. Here are some thoughts on how to read a script.

First, all of these tips are AS TIME PERMITS. In a medium that’s generally deadline driven, it should be understood that everyone can only do their best with the project’s schedule. None of these are required to do a good job. Experienced artists may do a lot of them without thinking.

The first thing you’re going to do is read it, start to finish. Have a pencil in your hand and mark places where you have a question or an idea. Don’t bother with detailed notes yet. Just make a quick little checkmark. You’re looking to get an idea of the sweep of the story. When you get to the end, turn back and read it again, and now that you know where the story is going, you can make more detailed notes.

As I do this, I typically find myself asking some questions. Here are a few, with examples of how I might answer them.

When does the story take place? What time of year? What time of day? What’s the weather like?

“Spring 2011. I’ve got scenes at sundown, late at night, and lunchtime. The story is set in Portland so it will be grey and overcast with a continual maddening drizzle.“

Which elements will require preparation and research before you can draw them, and which can you improvise right on the page?

“I can draw the suburban home and the parking lot scenes, but I’ll need reference for the old Chevy they break into and I’ll need to learn what it looks like when you hotwire a car. Then again, the dialogue makes it clear what they’re doing, so if time is tight, I can frame the scene so the stuff I don’t know how to depict happens off camera.

Is there a tonal shift to the story? (By which I mean: Do things start out grim but turn happy? Do they go from calm to frantic?)

“The main character starts out crazy and confused but finds her center. The story starts at a kid’s birthday party. At the climax, there’s a car chase that turns deadly. Towards the end, there’s an animal dying in the desert, and two elderly women walking on the beach. Looks like we’re moving from exciting, to wild, to still. Unless scenes specifically require me to subvert that, I’m going to use background elements and unscripted character actions to push each scene I illustrate to be more or less raucous to fit into that emotional arc.

If I need the petting zoo scene on page 14 to communicate calm, I could show a little girl bottle -feeding a lamb. If I need to show chaos, that same girl could instead be freaking out and knocking over her little brother as she flees a herd of baby goats.

What are the important facts about the main characters, and how can I communicate them to the reader?

Bob is angry about growing up poor near a rich suburb, and he always has a chip on his shoulder about money. He has money now. Does he dress expensively to show the world he’s not poor anymore, or does he make a point of staying shabby and casual to express that he doesn’t think money is important?

How dense is each page going to have to be?

If most of the pages have 8 or 9 panels, I need to work in a style that’ll read clearly even if the panels are all tiny. 

Are there important visual details the writer has left unstated?

On page 5, Constance flirts with a handsome cashier, but I don’t know how old he is. Constance is 17. If I draw the cashier as a 20-yearold I’m telling the readers one thing. If I draw him as 44, I’m telling them something else.

Can I just tell the story as written or does it need fixing?

If this is a well-constructed story, with a plot that makes sense, recognizable motivations and conflicts, clearly expressed themes, and a beginning, middle, and end, my job is to be a window on the story and tell it simply and directly as possible. If the story doesn’t make sense or there is no story, I need to look for ways to find something in the script that feels like a narrative, and communicate that with my pictures. If a character’s spoken motivations don’t make any sense, maybe I can subvert that with pictures that contradict what he or she says? Can I evoke emotions that seem appropriate for where the scene is in the story, even if those emotions aren’t earned in the plot? And if the story is completely unsalvagable, is it too late to turn it down and find another project, or do I have to just suck it up and just try to give my readers some amusing moments or nifty pictures?

A good script will put lots of interesting questions in your head. Some writers enjoy working directly with artists and love to discuss these things. Others prefer a more hands-off approach and will trust you to make the right decisions on your own. Either way, take pride in your contribution and remember that you don’t work for the writer or the editor. You, the writer, and the editor are all working for the reader.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month on Toucan!

Toucan: So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about collaborators. Your new steady collaborator seems to be Chris Samnee on both Daredevil and Rocketeer, and you continue to work with artist Peter Kraus on Insufferable after a long run on Irredeemable. What makes a great writer-artist collaboration?

Mark: Communication and total trust; realizing that it’s a collaborative medium; nobody bringing any ego to the table, is what makes it work. Everybody has a bit of a healthy ego if they’re working in the arts, but with Peter and I from the very first days of Irredeemable it was always a give and take, it was always a “Hey, have you thought about this?” or “Hey, you know maybe there’s another way of doing this,” and that’s fine. The scripts begin with me, but it’s not my story. It is my story until such time as I turn the pages over to an editor or turn them over to a collaborator; at that point it becomes our story, and you have to accept that. You have to accept the fact that there’s going to be stuff sometimes that gets drawn that isn’t quite what you had in mind, and maybe that’s a disappointment on rare occasion, but most of the time instead it’s “Holy crap! I never thought about that before,” or that’s a new wrinkle, or that’s a new way of telling the story that I hadn’t seen before. Chris in particular is very good about breaking stories down in a slightly different pacing then I’m used to, and he’s very good at that. Pete is phenomenal when it comes to the stuff that I tend to gravitate towards anyway, which is facial expressions, which is emotion, which is the human moments. I really think that if you’re a writer in comics and you’re not starting every script with “dear artist, here’s my phone number and email, please contact me,” you’re making a horrible mistake.

Toucan: A couple months ago there was kind of a little Twitter controversy about working full script or working “Marvel style.” Which do you do?

Mark: I tend to work full script, at least until such time as I get enough momentum going with an artist where I start to feel like we know each other’s rhythms and at which point I have no objection to shifting to that sort of Marvel style, because mine is a more modified Marvel style anyway. I don’t just turn in a two-page outline of a plot and expect the artist to do all the heavy lifting; that’s not fair to him. Instead, I put tons and tons and tons of dialogue into my plots, even if it’s just rough suggested dialogue, for two reasons. One is that you want the artist to really sort of understand what the character is saying and feeling and also because I want cues for myself a month from now when I’m fighting a deadline and the letterer is waiting for the pages and I’ve got to turn in those script pages overnight and it gives me something to work with. There’s pluses and minuses to each, but I think that the thing I like about full script—if pressed, if I could only choose one for the rest of my life, it would be full script, with the caveat of getting it to an artist and asking him to treat it like a plot. Asking him to treat it like something that it is his job then to adapt as he sees fit and then I will go back and make alterations and tweaks and repacing and so forth and so on to fit the art. So again, a collaborative medium. And even with Insufferable, which is full script, when the pages come in before they go off to lettering, I’m constantly moving balloons to different panels or changing the pacing of this line or eliminating dialogue in places because I’m working off of Pete’s storytelling.

Toucan: So is that part of the beauty of digital for you?

Mark: Yeah, because you can make changes like that in a snap, you make edits in a snap. I no longer have to feel that awful about asking an artist to make a tiny change because it’s not like they have to redraw the entire page—just make a quick fix in Photoshop and you’re off to the races.

Toucan: When we first started talking, you mentioned having to sit down at 11:30 PM and get a script ready for Peter Kraus and you said for a “book.” Do you look at digital comics as books? I mean, is your long-term plan to publish this later on, or is it only going to exist in the digital world?

Mark: I think there’s room to have it published down the road. I think that my original concept for digital comics was trying to hedge my bets and make it friendly to both digital and print. In other words, when we originally picked the Thrillbent format, we deliberately picked that 4 x 3 ratio of a horizontal screen, specifically following the DC Zuda imprint and Ron Perazza and those guys who came up with that sort of stuff. If you stack one 4 x 3 page on top of another, you’ve got something that’s roughly proportionate to what an American comic page is. So the idea is, “Oh we can always just stack our screens one on top of the other and we’ve got printed pages” and we’re off to go. Now as I got into it and we started developing new digital storytelling tools that involve things like repetition and screen swiping to get a different image in or balloons popping in and out and so forth, it becomes obvious that to go to print from that is going to take some interesting production tricks, so we will get there eventually. If there’s a demand for it, I’m fine with publishing these fetish objects that people call books, of which I’m a big fan obviously. I think there’s plenty of room for that. I just want to go digital first, do it that way, play with those tools and then retrofit into print.

Toucan: In a recent interview with Pace Magazine you stated “the future is all about digital for me.” Why do you feel that way, and what made you start your own digital comics portal in Thrillbent?

Mark: I’ll take the second question first. What made me start was looking at the cost of print. This is back when I was doing the BOOM! editor-in-chief stuff and BOOM! creative chief officer a few years ago and looking at print costs across the board for all publishers and how insane they were unless you’re one of the top two or three publishers and you’ve got 50% of the market share and your per unit cost is feasible. But if you’re anybody else and you’re doing a comic and it’s got a print run of 5,000 or 6,000 copies and you’re doing a color comic, you’re paying more in printing then you are in everything else put together including editorial and overhead—that’s ridiculous. I’m selling my $4 comic to Diamond for about $1.60 and I’m having to pay a dollar in print costs; that is not a feasible business model. The idea was okay, well we still want to do comics, we still want to do print, but how about we go digital first, try to monetize that enough to make our production costs back, and once we made our production costs back then we can afford to go and print, because we’ll have created a product for which there is now a demand and then issue it that way. So that’s still sort of the long-term business model. Let’s just make our money back in digital. I mean, it would be great to be filthy rich in digital, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. All I really want to do is break even with Thrillbent material so that I’ve made my money back in production costs, and then if I go to print, that becomes straight profit.

Toucan: But right now Thrillbent is free.

Mark: Yeah, I know. So you’ve sussed out the flaw in my plan.

Toucan: So what if you take those comics and turn them into a digital book and in turn you sell that on comiXology or any of the other platforms, as an interim step before going to print?

Mark: That’s one of several options we have available to us. Obviously, the reason we were free going out is because we wanted to make noise, we wanted to get hits, we wanted to draw eyes to what we were doing, and it’s been very, very successful, and believe me if I had one-tenth the number of people looking at every issue of Daredevil as I do every installment of the Thrillbent stuff, I would be happy as can be. What’s exciting is by the time we get to late fall, the plan is to have something new every day on Thrillbent. Right now it’s just my strip with Pete, Insufferable, but ideally John Rogers, my partner in this, will be doing his series in the new few weeks. We’ll be launching Gail Simone’s thing or something by James Tynion IV or whatever; we’ve got a bunch of things that are in various stages of development with an idea towards getting to a point where there’s something new up everyday. And once that happens, we can experiment with revenue streams. I’m not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution to how you monetize all things Thrillbent. I think it’s more exciting and more interesting to say, “Okay, Gail . . . why don’t you try something where it’s free, but if someone wants next month’s installments ahead of time every month for 99 cents, we’ll email them next month’s installment.” And John, what if you try the model by which it’s barebones free to read on the site but if someone wants additional material like pencils or layouts or colors or script pages or behind-the-scenes stuff then for 99 cents they can download it, that sort of thing; or for me just a plain vanilla tip jar. If you like what we’re doing with Insufferable and you want to see more of it, please pay me what you think it’s worth and see what that gets us, because we can afford to do that at this point. Doing comics is not insanely expensive. It ain’t cheap. I’m certainly paying more for a month’s worth of Irredeemable material than I do on my mortgage, but I sold all my comics to do this. I can carry this for a few more months.

So like I said what excites me about that is it’s not that expensive. So I think we’re smart to play with different types of revenue streams and see what works for us. In the meantime, continue to network as we have with the Blind Ferret guys, the Penny Arcade guys, the PVP crew, and talk to the webcomics guys out there who are also creating revenue streams themselves so they can keep doing what they’re doing and mix and match ideas. One of the greatest things about working in digital is the sheer disconnect between comic book professionals and webcomic professionals—this gargantuan gulf I had no idea existed. Because the myth among us comic book folk is that webcomics guys, ah, yeah there’s a couple of them making a little bit of money, but by and large they’re all losing their shirts. You know: little kids doing their little thing on the side, that’s the myth. And the reality of it is, no, actually a lot of guys are making a decent living doing this, a lot of guys. And it doesn’t mean everybody can, but it means that there’s a lot more to that, there’s a lot more money in that ecosphere than you dreamed, and some guys are making really good money doing that stuff. And while making really good money is for me not the goal, it’s just to make enough money to keep doing it, the idea that it can be done is great. And what’s also great about the webcomic community is that I have yet to encounter any sense of selfishness, any sense of proprietary ownership, any sense of trade secrets and people being very hush hush with what they’re doing, because that’s stupid. Comic books tend to do that because we’re selling to an audience of 90,000 people, but among the webcomics guys they seem to get the fact that the potential audience is 6 billion people. There’s room for all of us out there. We’re not worried about competition yet among each other. So that’s the long answer to the question about monetization. So we’ll play with stuff. We’re going to roll out some more stuff in the next couple of months, some more material and play with some different sort of revenue streams, some different ways of monetizing, and just see what works. Pay attention to the feedback from the fans, pay attention to the social networking of it, and see where the needles start to hit the red zone and follow through on that.

Toucan: Let’s go back to the first part of that question, which was the quote from another interview you did that said the future is all about digital for me.

Mark: Yeah it is.

Toucan: Do you see a point in time when you’re not going to do print comics, not be working for the big publishers?

Mark: I can’t imagine not being involved in print comics as long as they exist, if for no other reason that it’s the only job I’ve ever had in my life that’s meant anything. If I had a choice, if it was put down to me that I could only do the Thrillbent stuff or only do print comics, I’d have to go with Thrillbent, because I think that really is the future. I think that there’s your audience. With the spiraling, escalating costs of print and selling 32-page comics or 28-page comics (I guess self-covered 32 pages now) for $4 and you get five minutes of entertainment out of that, I don’t know if that’s a working model, whereas digital is because we can reach everybody who’s got Internet access.

Toucan: You were a special guest at both Comic-Con and WonderCon this past year. What do you enjoy about doing conventions?

Mark: It’s changed. It’s funny—if you’d asked me 15 years ago, my secret answer would have been I just love getting in the dealers room and diving through the comic books like a porpoise, like Uncle Scrooge and his money bin. I find now that I don’t buy as much at conventions, if anything. So I’ve had to adapt, and what I really enjoy is—it’s a typical answer but it’s true—I like meeting the fans. I like talking to people. I like hearing what they’ve got to say. I like hearing what they’re interested in. And I also like connecting with other professionals. I like being able to talk shop late at night over at the bar. I like being able to grab breakfast with a guy and talk about story and talk about craft. Those are things I really enjoy and it’s great. Again, I can’t thank you guys enough for bringing me out to both shows this year, and I also love the sound of my own voice, so I’m happy to do any panels, any moderation anytime, and actually that’s a big part of it, too. I enjoy doing it. It’s not just because I enjoy the performing aspect of it, it’s that I really enjoy not only talking craft with the creators but doing it in front of an audience. I have many shortcomings as a human being, trust me. I could spend the rest of the morning listing them, but I am a decent interviewer, and this is where my knowledge of comics history, I think, comes in handy in ways that it oddly doesn’t seem to when I go out in the real world. I enjoy having those conversations and being able to ask the Stan Lees and the John Romitas of the world questions that they have not necessarily been asked before.

Toucan: Since you are a comics trivia expert, one of the panels you’ve done for us in the past is “Stump Mark Waid.” So has anyone ever asked a question that stumped you?

Mark: A couple of times. It happens. Generally, it happens when they ask me about my own work, which is the last thing I remember. But you know what, if you stump me, the best thing you can do is not tell me the answer, because then I will be like a junkyard dog. Some guy asked me the other day what was the first time Superman used heat vision in comics? Now, diehard Superman aficionados and of course everybody reading this interview already knows the answer to this, so I apologize for being repetitious. But for the longest time Superman just had X-ray vision, up until the 1960s. His heat vision power was just X-ray vision, because we didn’t know anything about radiation in 1945; we just thought, oh, if he uses his X-rays more, he’ll set things on fire. So at some point science comes into play in the ’60s and they realize well, maybe we should split that off into its own separate power. So the question from a fan was, what was the first time he used heat vision, and I popped off an answer: Lois Lane #10, everybody knows this, come on. Thank you, by the way, for not interrupting my story . . .

Toucan: I didn’t want to give it away.

Mark: Exactly. So I say this and he comes back, he sends me an email a couple of days later going actually I don’t think that’s right, and I went and looked and I was completely wrong. And most ordinary men would be able to say, “Oh well, that’s a shame, I think I’ll go play ball with my kids or I think I’ll go out and buy the groceries, or I think I’ll go out and work at a soup kitchen, I think I’ll go out and do something to make the world a better place.” But me, no, no, no, no, I spent the next afternoon going through every Superman comic of that era in chronological order until I found the first time Superman uses heat vision. So that’s the best thing . . . if you stump me, just watch me dig and dig and dig until I find the answer. It’ll be entertaining for you.

Toucan: So what’s the answer? You can’t leave people hanging here.

Mark: Action Comics #275 would be the first time heat vision was its own separate discrete superpower. See—you read the Toucan Interview and you learn.

Toucan: So here’s a trivia question for you.

Mark: Hit me.

Toucan: What was Stan Lee’s nickname in high school?

Mark: I don’t know. You have stumped the man, but since you can’t leave people hanging . . .

Toucan: It was Gabby. And I know this because Sean Howe’s book, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, is out and he has a great Tumblr thing that he does, which he updates every day, and there was a photo of Stan from his high school yearbook.

Mark: Oh, I’ve got that on my RSS feed, exactly. I missed that one though. That’s great. I love Stan. One of the great experiences I’ve had in the last five years and one of the biggest, the most lasting things to come out of my relationship with BOOM! was not Irredeemable or Incorruptible, it was the fact that because we did a bunch of superhero comics with Stan I was able to genuinely become friends with Stan. And I mean not convention friends, and not oh look, he vaguely remembers my name. No it’s kind of cool. I mean he seeks me out at conventions. We’ll sit down and we’ll have a drink, we’ll talk about stuff that’s not I’m a big “True Believer” conversation. We’ll have real conversations about craft and about editorial and about the world at large and it’s just, man it’s great, but oh, my God can he talk.

Toucan: How do you top this year? You won three Eisner Awards, you got the Comic-Con Inkpot, you just came back from the Harveys in Baltimore and you won three or four awards there.

Mark: Yes, four counting the Inking Award for Joe Rivera, yeah.

Toucan: At the Eisners you won Best Writer, Best Continuing Series for Daredevil, and Best Single Issue, also for Daredevil (#7), and you started Thrillbent this year, you’re doing a ton of projects, how do you top this year?

Mark: Apparently, I have to go after the Oscar now. I don’t know. I have resigned myself to the notion that I can’t top this year in terms of the accolades, in terms of all that stuff, because if you start thinking that way then you will just . . . I’ve got enough on my plate without having to worry about how I’m going to top it, because then I really will burn out. I’m just going to put my nose down to the grindstone and just put my head down and just do the work and hope for the best. I don’t know how to top it. I’m sure there’s some glib flip funny answer to that question, but I don’t have it.

Toucan: After 25 years as a comics pro and a lifelong love of comics, what still excites you about the medium?

Mark: Finding new ways to tell stories. That’s the thing, the simplest little thing. When you come up with a way of doing stuff that nobody has done before, the simplest little stuff. I hate doing this, but I don’t know any other way to do it except by example. I believe I can take credit for being the guy who changed whisper balloons from being dotted lines around standard balloons to sort of gray tone faded back—you know, fainter stuff. I suggested that like 15 years ago with something, and just that moment of discovering that idea of here’s a way of doing something in comics that we’ve not done before, I lived off that for six months, that excitement for six months. And now with digital we do it all the time. You know, how do you do a rack focus in comics, a static medium that you can now do with digital? That sort of thing just keeps me pumped up and keeps me excited. It’s not so much what I buy at the comic store that gets me excited, it’s watching how I and others are learning new storytelling things.

There was a kid at Baltimore. Kid, he’s probably 35. He comes up to me with this app. He’s done his own comic and he’s going to sell it as an app, a digital comic and it looks pretty good, but he’s done this thing with it that is phenomenal, which is if you’re scrolling left to right that’s how you change pages. But if you scroll up and down that’s when you start to see different levels of the work. In other words, if you scroll down, you peel the lettering away and then you peel the coloring away to see the pencils and then you peel the pencils away to see the layout, for a process junkie or for anybody who wants additional information about how it’s done. It’s a simple little thing, but I didn’t think of that, and that is brilliant and honestly that’s got me chopped all week long. I’m talking to this guy about oh my God get a patent on that and I will license it because that’s great. It’s just that sort of stuff, whether I come across it or whether you come across it, or some random guy at some convention comes up and says look what I did, that’s great, and that’s where digital gives me the chance to find all new stuff to do.

Toucan: But in a sense it’s almost like it’s 1935 again, when people started doing comics for the first time that weren’t reprints from comic strips and they didn’t know how to do it and they just made it up as they went along, it’s the same thing with digital.

Mark: That’s a good point, and I think you’re absolutely right and that’s what makes it exciting and that’s how you break ground, man. You just get in there and you don’t know how it works, so you’re just going to figure out on the fly.

A well-worn truism among comics freelancers that the best part of any project is getting the green light to get started, which leads to the worst part of any project: getting started. There’s often a lot of work that precedes “page one, panel one,” and I thought I’d discuss some of it here.

When you’re working with one or more collaborators, there are a lot of extra elements to take into account. Let’s break them down into two categories: Business and Creative. We’ll talk about Business first because no one likes it, so it’s more likely to be neglected.

You might think that the only thing you need to discuss with your collaborators is who does what. “You write! I’ll draw! That’s it!” This would be a terrible mistake. A creative partnership can go a lot of different ways, and it’s important to clearly communicate your needs and intentions from the very beginning. If you’re creating something new that you’ll own, you’re essentially starting a business with your collaborators as partners. Katie Lane, author of the Work Made For Hire blog says: “Not talking about business before entering into a business relationship is a great way of saying, ‘I don’t really care if this arrangement screws me over.’ ”

I won’t launch into all the specifics of what needs to go into a contract in order to protect you, your collaborators, and the work you’re creating—that’s what lawyers and agents are for. But notice how I said lawyerS and agentS? That’s because each individual collaborator should have their own representative in a negotiation.

Once you’re ready to write a contract, you need to prepare for success as well as failure. Failure is often easier—there’s nothing to divvy up! It’s deciding who reaps the various rewards of success that can really cause trouble. It’s one thing to split the profit from sales. What about licensing? Does the artist get half the money from a script book? Does the writer get half the money from a coffee mug that reprints one of the artists’ drawings? Can a movie studio option the property and hire one of the collaborators as a creative consultant without hiring the other as well? And what happens if one of the collaborators dies? Are decisions about the future of the work made only by the surviving collaborator, or by the survivor and a representative of the dead collaborator’s estate? Again, there are a million considerations, and you want your lawyers to have worked that stuff out long before a producer shows up with an offer and a ticking clock.

If you take one thing away from this essay, it should be this: Don’t enter into a business relationship without a contract.

Back on the creative side of things, you should also discuss how you prefer to collaborate. Some comics makers don’t have the time or inclination for a lot of back and forth. “The writer writes the script, the artist draws it, the publisher publishes it, and we’ll all say hi to each other at the signing at WonderCon next year.” Others prefer a much more organic collaboration, with sketches and suggestions flying back and forth via email throughout the process. Some writers produce elaborately detailed scripts with clearly specified camera angles, gestures, and incidental detail in every panel. Others prefer to leave most of the visual choices to the artist. Some artists like to run every choice by their collaborator or editor, sending thumbnail layouts before pencils, pencils before finishes. Others go straight to the finish. There’s no right or wrong here, but if you have preferences either way, it’s important let your collaborators know in advance.

Let them know your hard limits, too. If you have religious, political, ethical, or aesthetic objections to certain types of content, make them clear in advance. Don’t wait until you receive a script set entirely in a strip club to tell your writer that you refuse to draw nudes. If you object to depictions of smoking, tell your artist before she choreographs an important plot point around sharing a pack of cigarettes.

Now for the fun part: the creative steps a comics maker can take in preparation for a new project, before they start writing or drawing. I like to assemble reference as early as possible. Sometimes, if I’ve seen a script or a plot outline, I can look for something specific. “The next issue has a series of murders that take place in a automobile factory in 1930, so I’ll look for photos of an assembly line just to start getting ideas of how they work, and how the spaces are arranged.” Sometimes you’ll only have general information about a project or a storyline. If you’re going to be drawing a competition between two Olympic ice skaters, try to immerse yourself in that world. Learn as much as you can about skating and training and coaching and the culture that surrounds them in preparation for the first script’s arrival.

The reference can take a lot of different forms. You might find some of these steps helpful:

Bookmark useful links.

The last thing you want at 3:00 AM is a struggle to find the right combination of Google search terms to re-locate that article about 14th century beekeepers.

Subscribe to relevant blogs, Tumblrs, Pinterest boards, and Instagram accounts.

I don’t know why, but my artist friends are continually surprised at how often the exact picture they need shows up in their feed the day they need it.

Visit the library and bookstores to find books that deal with your subject.

The more general reading you do about your subject and setting, the easier it’ll be to make that world feel lived in and real.

Locate useful props.

Drawing a contemporary war story? You’ll be very glad to have full size Airsoft replicas of a some of the more common rifles like an AR-15 and an AK-47. Drawing a Western? See if you can find a Breyer horse or two to draw from.

Be on the lookout for chances to observe relevant material from life.

If you’re drawing “Love on the Mats: A Jiu Jitsu Romance” get to a gym so you can watch the students roll. See how they interact with each other and their instructor. You’ll bring so much more life and verisimilitude to the story than you would if you only relied on your imagination or what you found online.

And because I like to practice what I preach, I’m going to wrap this up here. I’ve recently taken on the position as artist on Valiant’s Quantum and Woody series, and I need to find someone in Portland who will let me sketch their goat.

Artists and writers: what steps do you take to prepare for a new project? Let me know on Twitter @steve_lieber.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!

The culture of comics sometimes seems to be built on complaints. We spend so much time griping about our problems that it can be easy to lose sight of the many, many things that are going well or at least progressing. As Thanksgiving approaches, I thought I’d take a moment to look at the world of comics—the business, the artform, and the cultures surrounding them—and talk about things that we can be thankful for.

Archival Reprints of Strips and Older Comics

When I was a comics-obsessed pre-teen, there were very, very few opportunities to read older comics. Most of what I knew about comics from before the 1970s, I knew from short, tantalizing glimpses in a scattering of hard-to-find (and impossible-to-afford) books and zines, and from tedious sessions tearing through my local library’s microfilmed newspaper archives, looking for the daily strips. It was tough. You had to be an amateur scholar or know someone with a huge personal collection to get a look at what comics had already accomplished, and this meant that just about every generation of new cartoonists had to become junkyard archeologists if they didn’t want to spend years reinventing the wheel. That’s no longer the case. There are handsome, affordable, and comprehensive reprints of dozens and dozens of classic strips and older comics, and more good writing about them than I’ll ever have time to read. And for a fan who can’t buy his or her own books, they’re all available at almost any library in the US or Canada through inter-library loan.

Ease of Digital Availability

Old comic books and strips were entirely out of my reach as a kid, but even new ones were tough to find. I had access to a couple magazine stores, a junk shop, and the local Carnegie Library to find comics, and if something sold out? Tough. I don’t think I ever saw both parts of a two-part story. Now with comiXology and other digital platforms, it’s easy to get that great comic you heard about from a friend. And that’s not even mentioning the unbelievable cornucopia of free-to-read webcomics out there. As a reader, I’m immensely grateful that I could spend the rest of my life digging through the comics that artists have put on the web and never run out of things to read.

A Wide Variety of Styles and Subject Matter

I’ll try to spare you any more “when I was young” talk and just say this: There has never, ever been such variety available in comics. We as readers have access to more stories in more styles and genres and approaches than we’ve ever had before. And as cartoonists, there are audiences out there for a much, much wider range of material. I know cartoonists who have supported themselves with comics about food, about tall-ship sailing, about sex education, about politics, about business, about science, about history, about family, about 17th century university life, about 21st century university life, and on, and on, and on. My tastes have changed as I’ve gotten older, and my ambitions as a cartoonist have too. I’m glad we have so many new stories and new readers. 

New Ways to Reach Supportive Fans

The days of being dependent on a few narrow venues to reach your fans are gone, and I am glad to see them go. Publish through a traditional bookseller, or a comics publisher. Publish it yourself. Put it on the web. Sell downloads via Gumroad. Sell books, prints, or original art via eBay or Etsy or a Big Cartel shop. If you’ve built an audience, you can run a Kickstarter campaign or start a Patreon. I love watching cartoonists mix and match and experiment until they find what works.

Ease of Communication and Transfer

I am thankful every day that I don’t have to Fed-Ex boxes of art to my publishers or collaborators and hope they arrive safely. I don’t have to watch faxes crawl creaking through a feeder and hope they’re legible on the other end. I don’t have to run up huge long distance bills to talk with other cartoonists. I can communicate privately or wade into my Twitter feed and share art and ideas at a convention that’s 24/7/365.

Comic Conventions Everywhere

And sometimes it seems that the conventions are 24/7/365! I love that every week of the year, there are multiple comics conventions, and I love the different audiences that they’re developing to serve. We have big pop culture festivals, and comics-centric extravaganzas, independent shows that focus on comics as an expressive art, and events that celebrate comics by and for people from marginalized communities. I love walking through shows as a fan and I love exhibiting at them, and there are more worthy shows than I or any cartoonist could ever possibly attend.

Translated Comics

I’m so glad to have easy access to so many great comics from outside the English-speaking world. It used to be hard to find the work of even the most famous and well-regarded cartoonists from Europe, Asia, and South America. Now we can read and be inspired by the work of hundreds and hundreds of established masters and new innovators.

Access to Educational Resources

Any artist in North America with a library card or the ability to get online has access to an endless firehose of first-rate instruction and advice from accomplished professionals. Libraries can get you great books on every aspect of the craft. And online there are thousands of how-to pages, hours upon hours of tutorial videos, even entire textbooks scanned and downloadable. I remember how hard it was to find helpful resources when I was young. I’m so glad to see that now if a young artist wants to learn about how to make comics, everything they need to know is easy to find.

A Vibrant Critical Culture

Comics can be too easy on itself, and can fall into the trap of self-congratulation. I’m grateful we have engaged and passionate critics and fans who are willing to speak out when we get things wrong. Whether it’s bad work on the page or bad actions in the office, we need those voices if we want things to improve.

A Community That I Love and Respect

And finally, I’m grateful that I’m privileged to work every day on projects I love, and that I get to do so in the company of so many bright, dedicated, and talented people at Periscope Studio in Portland, Oregon. It’s a gift I never take for granted.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Comics convention season is almost upon us, and my friends and I are doing what we always do, panicking. There’s so much to do! (If you have a comic you need to finish in time for the con, this column isn’t going to help you.)

But you’re going to be multitasking in the weeks before the con and at the con itself, so the more you have things organized, the better the con is going to go. Here are some steps to set yourself up for success in the weeks and days before the con.

First, make a folder in the cloud called “Conventions.” Make it in Dropbox, Google drive, wherever. The point is to have all your info in one place online.

• Make a new document that’s a list of the names and dates of all the cons you plan to attend this year. List them in order.
• Now make a folder for each convention. Here’s what’s going to go in those folders:
• PDFs of your travel info for that convention: Your flight or train ticket, hotel or other lodging details
• Sales tax documents and permits
• A document with contact info for:
• The person meeting you if you’re getting picked up
• The convention guest liaison, if any
• Any local contacts you might need.
• Tracking info for packages you shipped
• A list of what you need to do to attend that con, what you need to ship, and what you need to bring with you

Make another folder with your headshot, bio, and the cover of your latest book. Have the images in both web and print resolution.

Make another folder with any files you might need to print at a convention:

• PDFs of your art prints
• PDFs of your price lists and other table signs
• PDF of your business card
• PDFs of promotional items like postcards or bookmarks
• A sale-sheet: this is a checklist of everything you’re selling, with space for hashmarks to track sales

And here are your to-do lists for the months, weeks and days ahead of a con.

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Months Ahead:

• Apply to convention.
• Arrange for booth or table space.
• Send the con a link to the folder with headshot, bio, and the cover of your latest book.
• Arrange travel. If the con is making the arrangements, have a document ready with all the travel info they’ll need: frequent flier numbers, TSA Pre code (if you’re a frequent traveler, the time and expense required to enroll in the program is absolutely worth it), passport number for non-US conventions, etc. Assemble this document once and you’ll never have to hunt down all that info again.
• Arrange housing. Book a hotel, line up any roomies, find out if a local friend has a couch?
• Sign up for whatever permits are needed to exhibit at the show.
• Make arrangements for any panels or talks.
• Find out who the retailers are near the con. If timing works, maybe arrange a signing?
• Check inventory. Do you have enough copies of the books, prints, etc. you plan to sell?
• Re-order or reprint anything you’re short of.
• If you have to reorder, first check with the publisher.
• If the publisher doesn’t have enough copies left, see if you can get copies (at a price that’s near-wholesale) from any local or internet-based retailers.
• Announce your appearance at the con on social media. Make sure to tag the con so they can share the announcement.
• If you’ll be taking pre-con commissions, let people know the terms.

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A Few Weeks Ahead:

• Decide what to ship to the con.
• Find out if the hotel accepts shipments. Most do, though some charge storage fees, and one or two charge by the day, which can cost a fortune. If so, look for other options. Maybe a pack and ship near the convention, or a friend who lives near the con? Maybe a local retailer who’ll be exhibiting at the show?
• Make a note in your document for that convention exactly what you’ve shipped, and in what quantities, and the tracking number of the shipment.
• Reach out to anyone you want to meet with. Don’t put this off! Schedules fill up quickly.
• Decide what original art to bring, and make sure it’s priced in pencil on the back.
• Announce appearance at the con on social media, again. Make sure to tag the con so they can share the announcement.

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A Week Before:

Notify collaborators and clients that you’ll be away, and that you might not be reachable or free to do any last minute fixes.

Announce your appearance at the con on social media, again. Make sure to tag the con so they can share the announcement.

Gather all the stuff you’re going to bring:

• Whatever books you didn’t ship.
• Art prints. (If you have a lot of different prints, organize them, and have a way to find the one you’re looking for quickly at the con.)
• Any other merchandise.
• Business cards.
• Promotional items like bookmarks, postcards, or preview booklets.
• Sale-sheet listing of everything you’ll have for sale.
• A sign-up sheet for convention sketches.
• Ones and fives so you don’t run out of change.
• Foreign currency, if the con is outside of the US.
• Convention Kit

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What Should You Keep in Your Convention Kit?

• Your booth or table display equipment. If it’s elaborate, you’ll probably ship it ahead, but for many exhibitors, it’s just a tablecloth and a few bookstands or wire-mesh cubes.
• Your table signs and price lists.
• A portable travel scale. Most airlines charge a huge fee if your bag is even one pound over their limit.
• Anything you might need to repair your display. Packing tape and a spring-clamp or two can come in very handy.
• A flash drive with a bunch of images of your work. If you get called onto a panel, the AV tech can quickly add your images to a slideshow
• The art supplies you might need: pens, pencils, brushes, markers and marker refills, good quality paper, scrap paper. Don’t raid your daily supplies. Have a separate set.
• Post-it notes.
• Phone charging cables
• A spare battery for your phone
• A Square reader (now called Point of Sale) or PayPal Here reader, so you can take credit cards. (If you haven’t signed up for Square or PayPal Here, do that right now. Taking credit cards at conventions used to be a novelty. Now it’s expected.)
• A few extra business cards, because everyone runs out.

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The Day Before Departure:

• Print out a document with complete convention schedule: meetings, panels, signings, dinners.
• Print out all your travel info.
• Print out proof of the permits or sales tax registrations you signed up for.
• Print out any notes or visual aids for panels or presentations.
• Charge all your devices.
• Google to see if there’s a grocery store anywhere near the con. Some cons feed their guests, some don’t. If they don’t, and you don’t want to wait in a 20-minute line for a $9.00 convention center hotdog, you’ll either need to pick up lunches and snacks somewhere before the con, or bring them from home.
• Gather clothes and personal items.
• Get everything into one or two suitcases, and weigh it all to make sure each bag is under the airline’s limit.

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Does this sound like a lot of work? It is! But exhibiting at conventions is an increasingly important part of every comic creator’s schedule, and the better organized you are, the more you’ll be able to enjoy them.

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What’s on your convention checklist? Let me know! You can reach me on Twitter @steve_lieber or on Facebook.

Ah, January! Named for Janus, the two-faced Roman god of transition who looks simultaneously to the past and future … It’s a traditional time for rebooting our lives: analyzing what was great about the past and what the projects are that we’d like to do better … As we consign 2013 to history and analyze our new calendar of 2014, it’s a good time to consider …

2013

With the demise of Comics Buyer’s Guide, I ended up woefully out of touch with much in the current comics world, and my pull list at the comics shop became more and more limited, just because it wasn’t in my routine any longer. I increased the scope of my Twitter feed, so I could respond more quickly to what was going on from the creators whose work I’ve found to be so much fun, but I saw many good things there and then didn’t get around to following up.

On the other hand, we’re now in a world in which we don’t have to lose sight of the old while we’re following the new. So I began to dole out for myself such treasures as Fantagraphics’ first Barnaby collection: the work of Crockett Johnson, probably best known for creating Harold and the Purple Crayon. (Although his name seems bewilderingly lost in most of the acknowledgements from the animating company that built on his foundation.)

2014

So I’m determined to pay more attention to Diamond’s Previews in order to fill my shelves with more of the volumes we never thought we’d see when Don and I were first collecting. We live in a Golden Age of reprints—and I don’t want to miss the treats that are being restored to the world.

And, of course, I want to renew my attention to new projects. Darwyn Cooke, for example, has just released his latest graphic version of Donald E. Westlake’s “Parker” novels (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark), Parker: Slayground. That’s a must-buy. But technically it’s from 2013, even though I won’t be able to get to it till 2014, so I renew my vow to be on the lookout for more gems, as they ship to the shops.

And you?

Are you using Previews (or your local comic shop’s staffers) to plan your purchases for 2014?

2013

Among the many magic moments of last year was daughter Valerie’s telling me that, after years of trying, she’d managed to get her son, Devon, to sit down with her for a regular story time after she got home from work every day. Ten-year-old Devon is on the autistic spectrum and finds reading difficult—which means that reading for entertainment is a challenge. But she located a series that has captivated him (and her): Jeff Smith’s Bone.

They developed a routine of doling out a “chapter” (issue) per night, complete with reading characters in funny voices, sounding out complex words, rereading choice passages, and so on. I got into reading because Mom helped me do the same sort of thing in the 1940s; comics can be a compelling learning tool. (I’m now rereading Bone for myself at the same pace so I know where they are, but it’s been hard to restrain myself from looking ahead. By the way, what happened to Kingdok in “Earth & Sky” in Book Four: The Dragonslayer really shocked Devon; Smith created a compelling world in his epic.)

The rules Devon has set up, by the way, are excellent: no reading ahead, no sneaking a peek (though reading cover copy is fair game), they share it for the first time together, and they won’t start another reading project till this one is done. But he posed one question in the meantime that was a challenge: “What can we read next that’s like Bone?”

2014

That’s a fair question. The best answer I could come up with is the rich series of Donald Duck adventures created by Carl Barks. For starters, I found a beat-up copy of one of the Dynobrite issues to kick off the project. For a follow-up, I bought him the two-volume Christmas set from Fantagraphics. But no peeking till Bone’s nine volumes are cherished properly.

And you?

Are you finding other ways to enjoy comics besides entertaining yourself with what’s out there? Have you shared your comics love with others who might benefit?

2013

Conventions were wonderful. I met new friends and reconnected with old ones. I had the opportunity to introduce Glen Weldon (comics spokesperson of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” podcast) to the wonder world of Comic-Con International and he blogged about it memorably. I ended up at a number of other comics events in a variety of locales, appeared on a few panels, enjoyed Free Comic Book Day in Madison, WI, and ended the year at the kickoff for the “Milestones” exhibit at the magnificent Geppi’s Entertainment Museum. (Note: At that debut, son Stephen and I were able to hang out with many folks I get to see only now and then. Do grab the opportunity to take a look, if you’re in Baltimore. There’s nothing else quite like it. It makes clear—as little else does—how events affect popular culture and vice versa. “Milestones” focuses on African American contributions to pop culture, including comics, and runs at least through March.)

2014

So, yes, it’s time to get past coincidence and start to plan event-connected adventures for 2014. I’ll be at Comic-Con, as ever—and have begun a “to do” list I’m putting together for that.

And you?

See you at comics events this year? Have you begun to plan?

2013

It took years for me to decide to do it, but I made a major change in my comics collecting in 2013. Steve Borock (whom I told ages ago, when I first met him, that I thought encapsulating comic books was silly and pointless) addressed my growing concern over the damage that might occur to my pretty-doggoned-good-condition comics. What damage has been done in the past has largely occurred when I pulled comics out for research purposes. (When I told Valerie once about hearing a comic-book cover tear slightly at the staples when I was scanning a splash page, she responded, “Why don’t you just tear up $100 bills?”) So Steve and Lon Allen of Heritage Auctions plowed through thousands of comics to pull the ones that were in good enough shape and of sufficient interest to bring bucks at auction—enough bucks to enable me to replace them with copies in crummy shape and still have cash left over so’s to fund my declining years and grandkids’ needs and such.

2014

Auctions will continue through the year—and re-creation of my collection will begin. Money goes directly into the account set up by My Money Guy, with capital gains tax subtractions and collection replacements kept in mind.

And you?

How’s your collection doing? Can you get at what you want? How well are you taking care of it? (Comics are fragile: damaged by heat, light, moisture, and other exposure to the environment when you’re not actually reading them. High prices for old comics are a testament to the dwindling number that survive in good condition.) Have you set goals?

2013

House cleaning. My incredible kids helped to clear Stuff out of my house. Sample: Valerie and I piled up costume jewelry accumulated over several decades. For what I’m keeping, she installed a vast number of cup hooks on the back of my closet door and sorted a bunch of smaller items into drawers, and we turned the rest over to Granddaughter Grace and to two daughters of a friend of Stephen’s. Reports to me are that all three distributions were successes, and not the least of the bonuses is that I can locate at a glance the remaining decorations for which I hunt in frequent pre-con packing frenzies.

But that’s only the slightest indication of the processes of 2013. My dining-room table is now in the study for better sorting. (I don’t hold many banquets in my house—and, often as not, meals in the house are consumed while watching TV anyway.) More than 1,000 Beta tapes are in boxes. (Yes, they should go out; but some are not replaceable at this point; sigh.) On the other hand, the comics collection is in a state of wild disorder. Point is …

2014

… House cleaning. Yep. Still much to do, and that includes continuing to complete my Excel files of what I have on hand and consolidating and interfiling contents of boxes of left-behind comics as I build a new want list.

And you?

Do you have a list of what you have? Is there a backup of that list somewhere? Does the list include an indication of where you have what you have? (Valerie turned up items for which I’d been looking for a couple of decades.) What are you still looking for? How will you find it?

In short, 2013 was memorable, and my goals for 2014 are designed to make the new year even more memorable. In a good way. What are your goals?

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Maggie’s World by Maggie Thompson appears on the first Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!

Suppose you’re nearing the end of a day drawing comics. You’ve only got one panel left to draw: a panel featuring a llama. You’ve never drawn a llama before, but you might be able to wing it. Or not. Do you have time to look up a photo, for reference? You check the clock and the bus schedule. If you pause to search for reference, you may miss the next bus, and be here for an extra hour. If you forgo reference and fake the llama, you will catch the next bus…but your llama might end up looking like a furry horse. What do you do?

When pondering dilemmas like this, it’s useful to identify your two most extreme options. These will define the opposite ends of your option spectrum; perceiving that entire spectrum will help you make an informed choice.

First, we identify the easiest option: work without reference! This is a choice favored by such art luminaries as Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, and John F. Carlson. Their reason was that photographs tend to lock us into seeing objects a certain way, which inhibits us from pursuing our innate creative vision. Obviously, we have to see everything at least once before drawing it, but by this method we would study objects long before drawing them for print, then put the photos away and rely thereafter on our memories to guide us.

The trouble with this approach is that it only pushes our initial problem back a step: instead of referencing my llama now, when drawing this panel, I should have drawn studies of llamas earlier, when I first received the script. So, either way, the llama must be photo-sourced at some point, placing demands on my time. What’s more: even very familiar objects can grow vague in the memory. I recall Peter David lampooning a Captain America comic in which a telephone was drawn with only nine buttons. (Hopefully, Cap never needed to call any numbers that have zeroes!) The artist had drawn too few buttons, despite having seen phones probably every week of his life. Gaffs like that seem to make photo reference necessary.

So we arrive at the opposite option: use reference for everything! If drawings based on reference look more authentic, why not reference every object on every page?

Here we run into the time constraints I alluded to earlier. Cartoonists must draw a thousand things from a thousand angles; finding (or snapping) photos of everything we draw would take forever. I once spent an hour finding a photo of the right Lamborghini, shot from the right angle, for a panel in which the car ended up appearing smaller than my thumb, and mostly in shadow. Never again! It would have looked the same had I drawn it from my head.

Further, if accuracy is paramount, then it isn’t enough to find a photo of the object; you must also understand the object’s backstory. I once heard an editor criticize an artist for including flowers in a medieval scene that weren’t bred until centuries later. The flowers were drawn correctly … but they were anachronistic! (And don’t get me started on the complaints you’ll hear from doctors or soldiers over inaccuracies in comics about those fields.) So, chalk up another hour or more studying the history of all your photo reference.

A final problem with referencing everything is that it gives the timid creator a place to hide from creating. “I’ll just do a BIT more research …,” say the artists who draw five pages for every five hundred pages of research.

Clearly the solution lies somewhere between these two extremes. But where? How will you decide whether or not to photo-source that llama?

The solution most artists favor is, “I use reference when I have the time.” But this is really a non-solution, because “when I have time” tends to play to one’s weaknesses. If we’re lazy, “when I have time” turns into “hardly ever.” But if we’re inclined to hide from our work behind photo-searches, “when I have time” turns into “all the time.” And in either case, the time we spend on reference—whether a lot or a little—might be ill-considered, and be spent on things that need it least (such as my tiny Lamborghini).

Foggy questions like these lead back to art’s Big Question: what is my art for in the first place? I find it easiest to ponder that question by removing art’s parts, and asking whether it still works. If I removed my drawings, and replaced them entirely with photo reference, would my comics still work? They’d still be understandable … but they would lack a human touch that I deem crucial. How about if my drawings bore no resemblance to any objects: would my comics still work? No; then there would be no common ground by which readers could understand my meaning. For my comics to work, then, they must include recognizable objects, rendered with a human touch. I think most comics work along similar lines. Cartoonists are like birds feeding other birds: We take parts of the visual world into ourselves, make them their own—with our own scent and our own temperature—and regurgitate those self-scented images into the minds of readers.

Just as birds return to the nest with the foods they favor, so we share with readers the images we favor. In any comic story, there will be a gamut of such images, from our very favorites to the most trivial. Our favorites, the primary images, are the main reason we draw the story; the rest are included to support the primary images.

This offers a clue as to how to budget the time we spend sourcing reference photos. If my main reason for drawing a story is to celebrate Captain America, for example, then I should prioritize the accuracy of my drawings of Cap himself. Should there be a phone in the background that has too few buttons, so be it—phone buttons are not the star! The background probably only needs a phone-shaped object there, to help set the scene. If, however, Cap makes a call on that phone, thereby drawing attention to it, its inaccuracy could hamper the story’s realism, and undermine the celebration of Cap himself.

We arrive, then, at a priority list:

• 1. Primary: Cap, and his friends and enemies (MOST ACCURACY NEEDED)
• 2. Secondary: objects that characters use, or that otherwise attract attention (SECOND MOST ACCURACY NEEDED)
• 3. Trivial: objects or people in the environment that attract no special attention (LEAST ACCURACY NEEDED)

Armed with this list, we can judge where best to spend our time sourcing reference photos.

Tiny Lamborghini? Category 3; wing it.

Cap’s personal telephone? Category 2; you should probably find reference, and draw it right.

The llama? Well, that depends on which category it occupies. If it appears in the background of a petting zoo: skip the photos and wing it. Your time is precious. But if you’re drawing an issue of Louie the Llama … prepare to miss your bus!

We’ll be back in August!

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Jesse Hamm’s Carousel appears the second Tuesday of each month here on Toucan!

In earlier entries for this blog, I’ve written appreciations of artists like Will Eisner and Al Wiseman, who did some of their most notable work before I was born. With this installment I’d like to talk about the work of an artist who only started his professional career a few years ago, but has already produced an admirable body of work that rewards close reading: Benjamin Dewey, creator of The Tragedy Series.

The Tragedy Series was initially a webcomic appearing on Tumblr. It’s mostly single panel gags with a short narrative caption. It’s sort of like Gary Larson’s The Far Side, but illustrated with lush, painterly sepia-toned ink and wash drawings instead of Larson’s simple, cartooned line art. The gags are set anytime from the Paleolithic era through the Gilded Age, and in an immense variety of settings, including but not limited to mountains, beaches, jungles, opera houses, barber shops, universities, and orphanages. The body of the work consists of 500 “Tragedies” and 26 “Sadness Reprieves.” Each of the former presents some sort of tragic scenario, and these range from surreal to absurd to genuinely poignant. The latter are heartwarming and happy, and offer the reader a fresh eye on some odd but genuinely wonderful moments.

And as a group, they offer remarkable lessons for visual storytellers.

1. Deliver satisfying portions.

In our current environment, it’s crucial both to grasp a reader immediately, and send them away feeling like they got their money’s worth. (And in the free entertainment environment of Tumblr, readers believe that their attention and their recommendations are forms of currency.) Every Tragedy Series installment is self-contained. The reader gets a handsome illustration, a weird, unexpected idea, and a pay-off, even in the single illustrations. There’s no set-up to slog through, no “putting the pieces on the chess board.” In a comics environment cluttered with “to-be-continued” and stories that have gone on hiatus, readers are drawn to projects that deliver a satisfying serving of entertainment every time.

2. Sometimes it’s better to whisper the punchline.

Dewey knows when to go big and when to keep things subtle. Comics are not typically a subtle art, but subtle compositions are often more effective, particularly when the timing of a gag is helped by making the reader take a moment to search for something. Still, artists should note how effectively Dewey staged the crowd at the old well, and used the placement of solid black on the Oatmeal guy’s coat to make sure that readers could find his wooden spoon and pick him out of the crowd.

3. Let your cast reflect a broad audience.

When Dewey casts his scientists, tradesmen and landed gentry, he looks beyond the usual group of Downton Abbey extras. These are fables and allegories and gags, and he trusts that if his readers can wrap their brains around sword-bearing slow lorises and yoghurt-stealing blobfish, or a woman in Victorian finery riding a tortoise side-saddle through a blizzard of butterflies, they’ll probably be okay with that woman having dark skin.

4. Vary your staging.

Even though the individual Tragedy Series images are designed to be read as self-contained units, Dewey takes care to vary his compositions from one panel to the next. Look at these four, each of which involves one subject’s relationship with another. Despite all four frames being the same rectangular shape, each of the compositions has weights and directional thrusts that move the eye in different directions. It’s important to keep your readers’ attention by not feeding them imagery that feels the same over and over. Despite the many similarities from one Tragedy to the next—same shape, same rough size and placement of type, same graphic language of brush marks—Dewey is able to keep his pictures varied and his reader surprised.

5. Let them fill things in.

If the audience has to fill in something that’s not in the picture, the picture’s impact increases. Half the fun of the crashed whale (#231) is imagining it happily floating over the city. And there’s a lot of pleasure in visualizing the intrusive llama (#300) continuing to invade the personal space of its poor victim.

6. Keep your tools simple.

As you’ve seen, these are lush illustrations, with plenty of intricate and lovingly delineated detail. But they’re also drawn with remarkable graphic simplicity. Dewey allows himself a palette of black, white, light grey and dark grey. This is the same four-tone palette the master illustrator Howard Pyle advised his students to use in designing their illustrations. (You can see Pyle’s own work analyzed with this suggestion in mind by Andrew Loomis in Loomis’ book Creative Illustration.)

7. Graphic devices can be effectively incorporated with otherwise unstylized illustrations.

Despite the convincing realism of Dewey’s proportions and rendering, he’s able to incorporate well-designed graphic devices into his pictures without losing his audience. The key, I think, is “well designed.” The disparaging butterfly’s pictorial balloon in Tragedy #105, and the puppy’s plans for glorious adventure in #196, are integral parts of each Tragedy‘s composition.

8. Don’t get hung up on formula.

After dozens of horizontal Tragedies, Dewey drew a vertical one. After scores of single panel gags, he introduced some traditional multi-panel comics. Keeping things fresh while keeping things consistent is the circle that every cartoonist needs to square.

You can still read The Tragedy Series on Tumblr, but if you buy the hardcover edition from St. Martin’s Press, you’ll also get “Lady Excelsior & Friends in the Curious Case of Judgment’s Unblinking Eye,” a sequential story that incorporates several Tragedy characters.

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Steve Lieber’s Dilettante appears the second Tuesday of every month here on Toucan!