There are a million ways into the comic book industry. You can spend countless hours sending in samples and working on spec scripts. You can attend comic conventions, totting around your portfolio and hitting up every one in site (this particular avenue has become a time honored tradition, but that is another article all together), or you can take the path of least resistance and self publish. Of course all of this work will do you no good if you haven’t mastered a few very important skills. If you can become proficient at these four artistic skills then you have a good shot at not only breaking into the comic biz, but also making a career out of it.
#1. You must be able to draw the human anatomy.
Allow me to reiterate this one. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO DRAW THE HUMAN ANATOMY, both accurately and stylishly; over-exaggeration gets ugly when taken to extremes. As most stories feature a lead character of some sort, you must be able to make that character look good and, believable. When the graphics are the only description given of a character, ugly means readers don’t like the character, so no second series of the story.
#2. You must be able to tell a story sequentially.
A series of loosely connected single images just doesn’t cut it. Think of a comic strip as a movie and you’re getting somewhere. A panel that looks fantastic is utterly useless if it does not tell the reader what is going on. If you can look at a page and understand what is going on without ever having written a word then you have done your job correctly.
#3. You must make room for the text.
When you’re drawing a panel, think of how much text needs to go on that panel, where it can go, and then compose the shot. There is little more irritating to reader and artist alike than a beautifully rendered, expressive face with a great big, dirty, speech bubble hiding the nose. You might think this would be the easiest skill to master but surprisingly it isn’t.
#4. You must be consistent.
Consistency is essential – practice drawing a figure dozens of times, from every conceivable angle. It’s consistent enough only when it is instantly recognizable every single time. Face it, if you make it into the comic book business, you will be drawing the same characters hundreds, if not thousands of times, and the reader must be able to immediately recognize these characters.
I know that if you are an artist already, these four skills probably seem obvious to you. I’m sure someone has read this article and said to themselves “DUH”. But here is something I would like you to think about. Jim Lee, who by the way, is one of the artists that helped form Image comics, once said that before he broke into comics, he would spend hours drawing and re-drawing comic pages. He drew until his fingers bled, he drew trying to find his style and more important, he drew to hone his skill. If you are going to make it as a comic book artist, you have to be really good and you have to be really fast. So for those out there who think this is remedial reading, I want to remind you that the message here is practice, practice, practice and more practice, because you can never be too good.
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