OUAN601 - Development of a Graphic Novel Issue

I was aware from the beginning of the project that I wanted to create a first issue of a graphic novel to introduce the audience to the story world. There were several reasons for this, firstly I was attempting to emulate in some respects The Walking Dead's model in which the foundation was a graphic novel. Secondly, I had never created one before and I thought it would be an interesting and fun endeavor that had the potential to yield some good results in terms of what I was aiming for with the creation of a story world. Furthermore, it was relatively cheap to produce, the main costs were materials and printing as well as pens for inking. Despite this, I knew it would be a lot of work so I began the process by a thorough planning of the story from page 1 - 18 with two, two page double spreads in body of the issue, resulting in 22 pages of content - coinciding with the average story length in a US comic book of 22 pages.

The first part of the process was the writing and planning. I started before I did any drawing by creating a length synopsis of the first issues story. From here I took the best parts and revised it several times until I was happy with it. The difficult part came next and required some thought as I converted the story from a synopsis into a 22 page comic book. This meant that some small sections of the synopsis were expanded over several pages so that they stood up and were coherent in the comic book format, whereas other larger sections were contained within just a few panels. After the story was divided up across all of the pages, some consideration was made to shot framing and the way that the panel would be drawn - this gave me a clear idea going into the actual drawing process what was going to be in each panel specifically. Finally, I wrote detailed notes explaining what each panel contained, any dialogue in the panel and finally, some lesser notes on anything that came to my during the planning of the panel. Below is the plan I created of the 18 pages of story without the 2 double page spreads that will also be included. It was drawn using a black pen and gave me all the information I needed to start drawing.



I printed out onto a relatively thick card a template so my pages were consistent with one another. After this stage the process was simply to draw the entire graphic novel, which took longer than I expected. Some of even the smaller panels took me several hours to complete and a page could take me up to a day to a day and a half to complete in pencil depending on the contents of the page. Once the penciling was complete I scanned in every page so I had a back up copy and proceeded to start inking the lines on each page. This probably took around a quarter of the drawing time or less because I didn't really have to think about it and it was simply retracing the lines I had already drawn. Once the entire graphic novel was inked and the lines drawn in, I became adding the final elements. These included signs on shops, text on the side of the removal van, and sounds that were made through the use of text, and finally, the dialogue. Of all the different processes this was the one that I enjoyed the most because it was the first time I could see everything coming together. As I was adding the final touches I added some black in different places that I had intended it to be from the start, for example the very first panel of snow on page 1. Before I did this, I had intended to do a few colour pages to demonstrate the type of colouring that would be included in the comic book. However, after seeing how black and white looked on just a few panels I thought that it suited the mood and format I had chosen really well, so I decided against any colour pages as I thought this would destroy any of the atmosphere that the illustrations were creating at this point.

After organising all of the pages and dialogue, the last stage was too compile it into a readable format and I am pleased to say I think the graphic novel captures what my initial intention with it was, to introduce the world, the themes and the characters to the audience as an entry point into a transmedia universe.