A Behind the Scenes Look at Making a Graphic Novel (my graphic novel!)
PLUS it's Girl Scout Cookie season!
It’s that time of year again, when entrepreneurial young women across the country start tempting us with delicious cookies.
This year our region switched bakeries, so you’ll see that the names of some of the cookies changed a little bit:
If you’d like to buy some cookies from Myca, you can order them here. We can deliver in the Portland, OR area, or you can have them shipped as well.
Myca’s selling cookies to raise money for a trip to Costa Rica, where she and the other girls on the trip will be learning about sustainability and environmental care from locals in Costa Rica. You can see more about the trip here.
Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things
There are so many things to worry about today and in the weeks to come, that I thought you might enjoy reflecting on this lovely poem by Wendell Berry.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
From his book, The Peace of Wild Things.
Making a graphic novel: the process of making GOD WITH US
FOUR YEARS AGO this week my beloved agent Wes sent my proposal for this graphic novel to my beloved editor, Sarah Rubio. And in two and a half months it will be out in the world, available for anyone to read!
I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the process of how a comic book comes about. It’s different for different projects and even differs depending on the preferences of writers and artists, but here’s a look at the process Dave and I used.
The first thing to come was, as you might expect, the words:
There’s a part of the script that is just me talking to the artist… and of course I got started writing before we even knew for sure who the artist would be. One of the things I wanted to make sure to do in GOD WITH US was to have different styles of art as different stories are told by different people, something that Dave pulled off in fun ways throughout the book. So I wanted this story (Mary being asked to be the mother of Jesus) to be sort of “slice of life.”
So yes, it’s notes to the artist but as you can see it’s also a complete breakdown with the action, the dialogue, even the number of panels (though obviously if the artist has ideas to do it with a different number of panels he was often right and did something better). Then we get our first art, the pencils!
As you can see the “pencils” (Dave actually did this digitally) are a sketch of how it’s all going to look. Dave does pretty tight pencils, so you get a really good idea what the art’s going to look like. I didn’t include the first draft of the pencils, but here you can see our team was working on putting in the lettering and making sure everything fit.
We did a good amount of trimming and cutting of dialogue throughout the book for three reasons: (1) I was learning how to get it right! (2) I, uh, might have originally thought we were printing this on bigger pages than we actually were hahaha. Smaller pages means smaller print which means fewer words for a comfortable reading experience, and (3) often Dave’s art already conveyed what the dialogue was meant to convey. If the art says it, no need to repeat it with words.
As you can see we cut the dialogue from panel 5. The art is so fun in this panel, why cover it up? And it seems clear that Mary is surprised and confused without having her repeat the angel’s message back to him. Then we get the inks:
Which, honestly, are really great. You can see that a lot of shading is already happening, and it’s pretty incredible to compare the pencils to the inked pages. You might even think, “wow, this looks great, no need to do anything more than this.” But hey, you haven’t seen the talented Whitney Cogar’s colors yet:
Amazing, right?!
And why did it take years for this comic to go from idea to reality? Well, there are HUNDREDS of pages and on most of them we did six or seven rounds of edits… the script, the pencils, the inserting of dialogue, the inks, the color. And every time we sent something back to the drawing board (literally) we’d need to double check that. So it’s a hugely involved piece of work that involves lots of people…. and all of that before we even get to the production piece of getting the book design, the layout, the printing, etc. done.
Anyway, I CANNOT WAIT for you to see the whole book, and I’m going to keep sharing little notes and thoughts about it until it comes out.
IF YOU WANT AN EARLY LOOK at the book, I still have a handful of spots available on the “galley tour.” You can sign up and learn more information about the galley tour here.
BRUCE!
Speaking of the peace of wild things, it’s hard not to enjoy watching Bruce when he feels completely relaxed and free from danger. The ears go down and he melts into a puddle of fur that is definitely not ready to run and hide. His nose stops twitching when he falls asleep and sometimes he even closes his eyes.
Peace to you!
Matt
P.S. As I’m writing this, I just had to stop what I was doing and go chase Bruce out of the house because instead of enjoying the peace of wild things he was introducing the annoyance of half-tamed rabbits into the living room.
I loved the inside peak at your new graphic novel. Thank you for sharing it!