Last week, I went to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT for a week-long summer comics workshop. It was a very intense experience conducted by professionals that I admire and respect, and the other students were all really cool too. I had a blast, and I learned a lot about where my process usually breaks down and how I can get past that in the future. Thanks to all the staff at CCS for being totally awesome, to Gendo at the Upper Valley Zen Center for helping to open my mind to this experience, my fellow workshop students for being very good company and excellent hand models, and mostly to my wife Kim who endured a week of single motherhood, stormy sleepless nights, and the first week back at school teaching so that I could run of to New England and draw cartoons for a week.

I’ll show you the finished piece first, then I’ll go in and break down the process a bit, mainly for my own benefit so I can remember what it looked like, but also so you can see how much work can go into making comics…

After looking at it for as long as I have, I can see a million problems with it, but I think it turned out pretty well all things considered. Here’s how the process worked:

I started off Monday morning by going to the Zen Center, which I was fortunate to have discovered the night before while I was exploring White River Junction. I had this short conversation with one of the monks there, and I was struck by the image of Gendo framed by the window. After the morning comics lecture, we were asked to come up with a goal for the week. I had a short story that my best friend Todd had written, but I thought that might be too big in scope to get done in a week. So while I was waiting for the amazing Jason Lutes to come around and discuss my goal with me, I drew this sketch just so I could remember the image for later. After talking to Jason and discussing my options, I decided to expand on the sketch and draw a 4 page story about the morning’s conversation.

I had a really hard time trying to break down the conversation into a workable 4 page story, and I spent much of my studio time Monday procrastinating and idly doodling while trying to figure out how to lay this thing out. I did my portfolio review with Jason on Monday night hoping to get some tips on how to proceed, and he suggested I write out all of the dialogue, and draw one thumbnail panel for each bit of dialogue. Then I could go from there and decide how to lay it out and edit it.

This was by far the hardest part for me. I never realized it before, but I really don’t plan out what I’m doing enough. I usually do some rough layouts, but I don’t do much editing at that stage. I guess that explains why I’ve been doing pretty well at small strips that don’t require much layout, but I really struggle at longer comics. You can’t build a house without a frame!

So I muscled through it and worked late Monday night to wrangle all of these frames and dialogue into a decent 4 page layout. If you look closely at the above preliminary sketches, you can see there’s a whole scene with a cat that didn’t make it into the final layout because of space concerns.

On Tuesday I started doing rough pencils, and I went back to the Zen Center in the evening for zazen and to get some visual reference for details in the monk’s clothing and the Zen Center building layout.  I got all 4 pages roughed in on Tuesday and then spent Wednesday refining them into what you see below. As you can see, I starting using very heavy pencils for the final drawings on the first two panels, but a couple of teachers wisely pointed out that I would have issues inking on top of solid black graphite, so I backed off after that. Also, Many thanks to Steve Bissette for giving me some valuable tips on how to use black placement to draw the eye.

So, after getting this done around midnight on Wednesday I went straight to bed knowing that I would have my hands full getting it inked by Friday. Fortunately Alec Longstreth gave a really inspiring talk on Thursday about time management and how to stay focused, and I used that info to make a schedule and stick to it. Because of the heavy pencils on panels one and two, I decided to just ink it using a portable light table and keep the original pencils intact. That helped a lot with the inking, and it also gave me the option of going back and finishing the whole thing in pencil if I really screwed up the inks. I worked on inking from 2:30pm on Thursday until 6:30am Friday, not sleeping at all and getting done just in time to make it to the 7am Friday zen session at the Zen Center. After sitting hunched over inking for 16 hours, sitting with correct posture for a half hour was excruciating, but when it was over I felt much better.

After Friday morning’s lecture, I scanned in the inked copies and printed out a few copies for the final critique and for trade. When I got back home, I fixed some more errors in Photoshop, and came up with the copy you read at the beginning. Voila!