How are comic books made?

So... another post. What do I know about the process of creating comic books?

Oh, and what is a "comic book" anyway? A lot of people seemed to have asked this question, and "comic books" along with the longer "graphic novels" are distinct from both "comics" and "comic strips". They all seem to belong under the umbrella term "sequential art" which is a term people who make these things seem to like. I think with good reason. They all have many examples which use the standard semantics and semiotics of western comics - the sequence being right-to-left and down the page, speech bubbles for dialogue, onomatopoeic words for sound effects and so on,

A comic strip is usually a short sequence of pictures, somewhere from four to twelve usually, and usually not a full page, often with a set cast of characters and a consistent-ish "world", but either telling very short stories, or a serialisation, and the most common occurrence of them is within newspapers or magazines. They are often designed to be funny, and often not the main focus of the publication.

A comic strip is Peanuts

A comic, on the other hand is a whole publication, usually aimed at children under the age of 12, often with several stories, but once again using stable (and therefore recognisable) characters. Stories range from 1/2 page to several pages long. There may be thoughtful moments, but comedy is often the focus.

A comic is The Beano

And a comic book is really quite similar to a comic, except it is aimed at an older audience, sometimes aimed squarely at adults. Some are collections of small stories, some are a single story, some form a serialised episode of a larger story and some have several episodes of serialised stories in them, or any sort of mixture of the above. Traditionally a large volume of comic books is taken up with superhero stories, and the two largest publishers of these are DC and Marvel.

A Comic Book is Batman, and so is 2000AD.

I could spend longer theorising about these distinctions but the truth is it is far from important for my purposes, other people have done a much better job of this deconstruction, and I cannot be bothered. I'm sounding quite academic and although that's true to character, it's not really what I want to do. At least not all the time. The point? Lost it.

Ah there it is.

So how are comic books made?

Well it all depends. Sometimes a single talented person does everything. More commonly it's a team effort, involving first a writer who creates a "script" - a list of instructions to the people coming after. This seems to include a panel-by-panel breakdown with descriptions and dialogues, and looks a little like a movie script in some ways. Apparently there is no standardised format, but there are commonly-used conventions, which I'm sure I can pick up easily enough.

After the script writer, there is behind the scenes an editor, whose job it is to get the script into a good shape if it is not already. I suspect they also act somewhat as a project manager or producer.

Next, the penciller comes in, and draws out the scenes described in the script.

Next an inker takes some black ink and makes the pictures all inky.

Next a colorist (or in my world maybe a colourist) adds colour to the pictures, unless it is a black and white comic book, which still happens quite a lot. In which case we don't need a colourist, obviously.

Finally a letterer comes and adds all the words, mostly in speech and thought bubbles.

Of course, it's not as straightforward as this, Sometimes one person does several of these jobs, sometimes there is no need for a letterer, sometimes one artist does all the non-scripty bits... as with anything creative, it all depends on the people, the project and the publisher.

So I want to make it absolutely clear, the part that I am proposing to attempt is the first bit, writing the script, I am not an artist, and I don't really want to be. I want to write the scripty bit. There is a kicker with this ambition though: it's the hardest to get into.

The problem is this - it's quite easy to know if you are any good at art, but there are many, many fools who think they can write. For example me.

I have seen this in the game development world, where there are three main disciplines - programmer, artist and designer. Programmers and artist have obvious skill sets, so everyone who has an obsession with games but no obvious skills fancies themselves as a budding game designers. And they think it should be easy and obvious because they are really excited by the ideas they have for games.

There is a sort of saying in the games development world: "everybody has an idea". It's true, and certainly it seems to be true that ideas are easy to come by. Good ideas are harder to find, but the rarest of all is someone who has the skills to turn an idea into a crafted, well-rounded, detailed game design which in turn delivers a memorable and worthwhile player experience.

Coming up - what principles can I apply to comic script writing that might help me to be good at it.