You Should Make a Comic by Phil Corbett

Kitty Quest is a new graphic novel for readers aged 7+. Creator Phil Corbett has written an inspirational piece for the FCBG about creating your own comic.

Everyone should make comics. Or at least give it a try. Don’t say you can’t draw. I know you can. I’ve seen those doodles you absentmindedly drew while on that Zoom meeting you didn’t really need to be on. That’s good enough. That can be your style. Embrace it. Don’t over think it. Let the pen hit the paper and let the creativity flow. You’re doing it! You’re making a comic!

You may be thinking that there’s so much going on when you’re making comics. You have to write it and illustrate it. That’s twice as hard. Surely, I hear you say, that’s double the work. But looking at it another way, maybe, it’s half the work. You don’t have to explain what the characters look like, where they live and what they’re feeling with hundreds of words. Just draw what they look like, draw where they live and draw their expressions when they’re saying or reacting to dialogue.

Again, don’t be afraid to draw. Draw what you’re happy with. A circle with dots for eyes and a slash of a mouth could be just the level of detail you need for your characters’ faces to portray enough personality. Or if you’re feeling it, get out the watercolours and create photo realistic figures to tell your story. Anything goes. Blaze your own trail. That’s the beauty of comics; the artistic styles are infinite and run the gamut from scribbles to highly finished multi media offerings. You could even use emojis if you want to pass on the drawing stage completely. Nothing is off the table.

Once you’ve nailed your style, a good tip is to never compare yourself to other comic artists. That path leads to disaster. As millions of life affirming memes will testify: You do you. By all means admire others, get inspired by them, perhaps worry about people thinking that you’ve nicked a joke from them, even though you came to it completely independently and you’ve never even read that comic anyway!

It may be something of a surprise for readers of this post to find out that I struggle with drawing backgrounds, but I do. I’ve always been able to draw the characters but the environments had always been a bit of a bother for me. For years I really had a problem with perspective. I just couldn’t make it work so I stopped doing it altogether, reducing my backgrounds to a straight line to represent the horizon. But I wanted to draw complicated scenes. What could the solution be? Expensive architectural software? Study the techniques of the masters? Nah. I just decided that I wouldn’t really worry about it. And for me that works. I mean I give it my best shot but have a close look – you’d never be able to walk around one of my city scenes or negotiate your way through the furniture in a room I’ve drawn. Now you know that secret though, you mustn’t tell anyone. If you notice someone scrutinising an illustration I’ve done, do me a favour and cleverly distract them and flip over the page.

The point is don’t get put off by what you can’t do. Focus on what you can. Start with a joke in a single panel or a short series of three, Snoopy-style frames. From there expand out and tell your story. You’ll be knocking out epic mangas as thick as telephone directories (forgive the ancient reference but I can’t think of a modern equivalent) in no time.

Kitty Quest is available now from all book retailers for £8.99. Published by Simon and Schuster.