ajandmagnus

Q&A: How Do You Decide on Dialogue and Images?

Added 2019-11-08 18:11:38 +0000 UTC

When you get the story/gag idea for a strip how do you decide on what dialogue and images get used? There's a limited amount of space to work with and you both do a great job utilising it, so are there some lines/images you just know will be there or does it need more experimenting with? Are there lots of sketches to get there or are things set in your mind first? I have no idea how anyone would go about creating each strip so I'm curious. As always, you're doing great work and I'm happy to support you.

- Steve

Hey Steve!

Our typical process is I'll do a first pass for dialogue and descriptions for character and scenes. From there I may do several passes or show it to Simon if I think it's ready. Once he gives his feedback, he starts on blocking out the text for spacing and sketching the characters. Once he's got his first pass of the characters, we both talk about the whole comic again, feedback on both the dialogue and art. Usually it amounts to reworking things, reducing text to allow for more art space, or changes to character poses/expressions. Actually, now that I write that, there's often a lot of reducing text! Sometimes he gives me some extra leeway like in the comic we're working on now, it's just text heavy for the subject matter, but most of the time it's my challenge to get the same idea across with less text without losing the meaning. Simple stuff!

It does seem like a big page of space to work on, but you're right, when it comes down to deciding what's the best way to use it, it can get challenging quickly. But that's part of the charm of the job, if it were easy, it would be boring and boring is never a good thing. ;)