The current story I was talking about in a recent blog post is almost finished. I’m using the time off the day job as effectively as I can and getting some more pages done – one of which I’m really proud of, since I practically had to re-write it from scratch after I realised I had used a lot of the jokes in the 24 hour comic.

And then it occured to me that I could be overlooking the best way to make Plant-Man.

One extreme is to just make it all up as I go along, with no pre-planning. This makes it a lot of fun to write and draw since everything is pretty new, but it has the downside in that I tend to go all over the place with the story and it doesn’t make a lot of sense as a whole. The other extreme – which I’ve been doing on the story I’m currently working on – is to pre-write everything and then draw it a few weeks later after going over the script several times. It keeps the story tight and gives me a chance to hone the jokes but it makes drawing the comic really boring since I’m sick of it all by the time I put pen to paper.

So for the next story I do, I’m going to try and find a good middle ground. I’m going to start by plotting out the story with a series of quick notes – one sentence per page.

Page 1 – Plant-Man and Flowerin’ are going camping
Page 2 – General camp humour.
Page 3 – Commissioner Gorgon turns up and presents the latest mission

…etc etc. So when it comes time to put pen to paper, I can do whatever I want as long as it satisifies that plot point. It keeps the story focused and lets me play around a lot.

Now I just need to finish this gosh darned story and put it into practice! It’s like an elderly relative that just won’t die so you can steal her booze.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.