Kurt Wenner, a former NASA employee, now uses his mathematical skills on things that people actually care about. Like Spiderman optical illusions! Speaking of Spiderman…

As if the nipples on the Batsuit weren’t bad enough.  To be fair, though, it was the 1950s (Detective Comics #241).

DISTINCTIVE:

TOO BLAND:

2. To stand out to prospective customers in a comic book store, it needs to be easily readable at 10-15 feet. If that sounds difficult, look at some of the following logos after walking to the other end of the room. Even at these shrunken sizes (50-75% smaller than they would appear on a real cover), the good ones are legible.  Be sparing with unusual font selection and text effects, because these can limit readability.

LEGIBLE (at a quarter of its actual size!)

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

3) Don’t use too many colors. I would recommend limiting the logo to two.  First, that will make it easier to color-coordinate the covers of subsequent issues with the logo.  Second, having too many colors may make it look garish.

SICK (AWESOME)

SICKLY (EWW)

4) Generally, I think it’s easier to read title text that is lighter text on a darker background (or outline). Note: this is virtually the ONLY time it is acceptable to use light text on a dark background!

HARD ON THE EYES (AND NOT JUST BECAUSE OF THE APES)

MORE LEGIBLE (AND APE-FREE)

6.  Don’t use objects to box in your text. If you let the text overrun the background object, it’ll create an impression of depth and will draw the reader’s eye to the title text, which should usually be the focal point.

AWKWARD/BOXED IN:

BETTER:

(Also, the color selection on the JLA logo is significantly better).

Thanks to Joe Acevado and Joe Klein for gathering these logos.

I also liked this one of Ironman.

I paid a name artist five months ago in advance for a pin-up for [series name].  In fact, I’ve had several artists, mostly old friends… all consummate professionals.

Just this one artist, who seems to be a bad actor. At the time he said contact him in two weeks and he’d give me an update on the status. Two weeks later I emailed him — nothing. I’ve been emailing him every few weeks very politely at first. Still no response at all. My last couple of emails were more strongly worded and in my last one I told him I’d be telling everyone I know on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and on our blog about it and name him by name. Hell, I’m thinking I’ll put out a press release, too.

What do you think? Does he get away with it, and I have a lesson learned, or do I go nuclear on his ass?

Don’t go public about backstage drama.  It can only make the situation worse.  First, verify what you can. Is he actually being delinquent? You would look like a damn idiot if you accused your artist of going AWOL and it turns out that he was actually in an emergency room after getting hit by a car. (It happens).  At the very least, do not stumble into a slander lawsuit until you actually know (rather than suspect) what is going on!

If you have an editor/publisher, address any concerns to them and discuss whether you need to replace your artist.  Unlike publically accusing your artist of fraud, replacing your artist does not open you up to a slander/libel lawsuit if it turns out his absence was totally innocuous.  If you don’t yet have an editor/publisher, make the determination on your own.  It will cost you time and money and you’ll probably have to scrap most of the work by the original artist.  It’s highly bothersome and usually unprofessional for an artist to go missing for several weeks, but switching to another artist may well be a cure worse than the disease.

Finally, besides getting back at your original artist, going public doesn’t actually help you in any way.  It certainly doesn’t make it any likelier that he’ll come up with the art for you.  It may raise questions about your professionalism and will probably make you look inept.  (Don’t give yourself a reputation for workplace drama).

Some other general ideas to minimize problems with your teammates:

• When you work with freelancers, pay no more than half upfront and the rest on completion. This increases the artist’s incentive to complete the job.  It also limits the amount of money you lose if everything goes to hell.
• Work out a schedule ahead of time. I’m not sure what the case was above, but making your expectations clear is usually helpful.
• Maybe exchange phone numbers. You may be uncomfortable asking for this if you’ve never actually met your freelancer.  However, when you’ve committed yourself to paying somebody thousands of dollars, I think your business relationship is strong enough to justify this request.  (At the very least, as a matter of customer service).
• Business etiquette: when should you call (rather than e-mail) your freelancer? Since a call is more intrusive than an e-mail, I would only call if your artist hasn’t responded to an urgent e-mail within 1-3 weeks.  For example: the artist misses a deadline by more than a week (without explaining why) and doesn’t respond to an e-mail requesting a status update.  If you call your artist, politely remind him about the schedule, ask if there’s anything you can do to help*, and ask about when he thinks he can have the art in to you.  *Unless he needs clarification, there probably won’t be, but offering is still friendly.

2.  It needs to stand out at a distance of 10+ feet.  The single most important audience segment for most comic book covers is prospective readers browsing through a comic book store.  Before they examine the product, you have to grab their attention.  Bold color combinations are one effective way to do so.  I find that scenes involving motion (particularly extraordinary motion, such as a Batman karate leap) tend to be more eye-catching.  Obviously, it helps if something interesting and/or unexpected is  happening.  More on that here.  Finally, the title/logo should be legible across the room (at least 10 feet). 

3.  Focus on what’s different or unusual about your series.  One recurring type of awfulness is a pointless closeup on something mundane.  For example, if you do a closeup on a character’s face, show something unusual about him.  For example, if you’re doing a G.I. Joe-style story about a macho soldier, instead of just zooming in on his face, maybe he’s facing the reader with a smile while an enemy in the background is taking aim at him.  Depending on the level of extraordinariness, maybe you’d have the soldier shooting at the target without even looking that way.  Also, even if the character looks deliberately generic like Peter Parker, use elements like emotion, pose, lighting, perspective and setting/scenery to make the shot memorable.   

4.  If possible, work in what’s at stake.  For example, place a character in danger.  Depending on the plot, that might be physical danger or the risk of losing something (s)he values.  For example, a romance might show the two characters breaking up and/or bitterly fighting, which would be more interesting than just seeing them enjoying 100% happy, conflict-free love.  Save “happily ever after” for when the story is over. 

5.  Assume that the typical prospective reader knows nothing about your work, especially early on.  (A lot of readers jump in a series at some point other than issue #1).  Is it an effective introduction?  Does the cover make sense to somebody that didn’t know the characters and story beforehand? Is it easy to discern the gist of the series from the cover?

Bonus #6: Put some thought into the perspective. Ground-level, head-on shots are rarely the most interesting way to show something happening.

Irregular selections have gotten vastly cleaner. The edges will usually be irregular around a person’s hair, an animal’s fur or whiskers, any object moving fast enough to blur (such as helicopter rotors, as seen in my header) and around glowing objects, among others.  If you’re working on a comic book with lasers, fireballs or other glow-heavy effects, you’ll probably have a lot of irregular edges.

Mixer Brush looks like it’s useful for turning photos into attractive paintings and possibly cartoons. That would be really useful for me: I like using photos for backgrounds, but it looks weird when cartoons are placed on photographs.  (See my header above–the cartoon characters clash with the photographic office and skyline). Alternately, if you’d like to use a photo for your background but want it to look more distinct or extraordinary than it would as a photograph, the mixer brush may make your life a lot easier.

Puppet Warp. You can assign anchors to your selection and rotate it in a natural-looking way.  For example, if you assign an anchor to to the joints of a human arm and wrist, you can take a picture of a guy raising his hand and rotate the arm so that it’s at his side.  I wouldn’t feel very comfortable using this professionally for a comic book (because your art is done to order and should not need to be rotated artificially), but it might help make minor adjustments quickly instead of contacting your artist and waiting 1-2 business days for a response. Also, I’d generally prefer not to bother an artist with something really bizarre and nitpicky like asking to straighten out an askew hat.

Content Aware Fill is so good at removing objects it’s scary.  This is more useful when you’re working with photographs rather than original digital artwork, but I could sort of see myself using this professionally.  (For example, to declutter a picture I’m using for a background).  Also, removing ex-lovers and political dissidents from photos has never been simpler.

Artist: “Umm, how about you commence our long-term professional relationship by paying me? Also, why would I want to work with a writer that writes worse than I do?”

Sorry, writers, but it’s unrealistic to hope that we can find talented artists that will work on-spec (for possible money down the road rather than money prior to publication). The obstacles to getting published are steep — ahem, over 99% of submissions get rejected.  It’d be crazy for an artist with options to put in tens of hours in the hopes that the book gets published some day.     And the artists without better options than betting on an unpublished author are probably not yet talented enough to get published, anyway.

The good news is that paying upfront won’t take you thousands of dollars.  You can get by at most comic book publishers with 5 inked pages, which can be done pretty well for $300-400. (If you want color, maybe $450-600).  I’m very familiar with the lifestyle of a starving writer, but $300-400 is less than a minimum wage paycheck.

If several hundred dollars is totally implausible, your best option is probably submitting to Dark Horse. They don’t require art as part of the submission.  That said, a script without art is at a significant handicap versus scripts with good art*.  If you submit to DH and get rejected, then I’d recommend waiting until you can come up with the money to have the art done well.   In the meantime, continue working on your script.

*”A script without art is at a significant handicap versus scripts with good art.”  Good art makes the proposal more credible and helps grab an editor’s attention.    Having no art raises questions, and questions are usually dangerous for unpublished authors.  Editors publish proposals because they think “this will work,” NOT “this could work.” Uncertainty terrifies editors.   Remember, 99% of what the editors see is not good enough to publish.  It’s very unlikely the editor will give you the benefit of the doubt that your prospective art will be good enough to make the cut.

Here are some of the issues I noticed: Alaska and Hawaii aren’t colored blue on the map, AO’s coat blurs away on the last page, and the poster on Agent Orange’s door changes from white to blue on the final page.

2.  The more specific, the better. “John has adventures” says much less about the art you want than “Haxley is a barbarian that has to mangle his way to the throne.”   If you have a two-sentence synopsis, use it.  For more advice on doing two-sentence synopses, please see this.

3.  What exactly do you need from the artist? If you’re doing a color comic with just one illustrator, you need pencils, inks, colors and letters.   How many pages do you need?  If you’re looking to put together a sample for publishers, you’ll probably want around 5 pages and possibly a cover.  Check the submissions guidelines for each publisher, of course.  If you’re self-publishing, you’ll need the entire issue, which will probably be 32+ pages per issue.

4.  Describe the sorts of characters and creatures you’ll need illustrated. Just regular humans?  A superhero whose power sets him on fire?  Supersoldiers in powersuits?  Fantastical creatures like griffins and dragons?  Werewolves and vampires?  Angels and demons?  Hydras and Zeus? Eldritch horrors?  Eldritch horrors tanning on the beach? Before you hire an artist, make sure he’s comfortable with every major character and the mood of the work.

5.  Will you need unusual props? For example, if you’re writing military sci-fi set in the 23th century, your artist will do a lot of exotic vehicles and weaponry.  If you’re writing a romantic comedy starring me, probably not so much.   Except for the Pimpmobile.

6.  Describe the visual style you’re going for. Are there any books that look like what you have in mind?

7.  Who’s your target audience? This ties into style–a comic for kids will probably be illustrated differently than one for adults.

8.  How mature is your comic?  I’d recommend mentioning if your comic will entail major gore, sexual content, on-panel drug use or notable creepiness.  Otherwise the artist might get skittish when you ask him to decapitate someone during LSD-fueled sex.

9. Payment information. Do you have a set amount of money you’d like to offer?  Or would you like artists to submit bids?  If you announce how much you’re paying, you limit your negotiating position and will probably end up paying more but you’ll probably attract more serious applicants.  How much are you willing to pay upfront?

10. What sort of commitment will you need from your artist? If your plan is to get the comic professionally published, make sure that your artist will be available for a suitably long period.  ”If we get published, you’ll be available to do each issue, right?”  I’d recommend making sure that they’re available for at least one month per issue.

Please see all five pages here.

1. Check for continuity. Are the dimensions of the room consistent? Are the characters consistently portrayed? Are the characters as tall and wide as they’re supposed to be? Also, in the toning and coloring stages, please make sure that the lighting sources are consistent.

2. Character placement. Does the placement of the characters make sense? For example, if two characters are walking somewhere but only one of them knows the way, he should probably be in front. Does each character have enough space to perform his later actions? For example, we once had to redo a page because we were boxed in by the walls–it was impossible to have a superhero drop behind a character that was leaning against a wall.

3. Are the character expressions consistent with their lines of dialogue? One particularly tricky area here is when the character’s emotions change dramatically mid-panel. If your script goes something like this, you’re screwed.

Panel 1.
WIFE, annoyed: Your boss kept you late tonight. What gives?
HUSBAND: I got a promotion!
WIFE, excited: Hooray!

Since it’d be very difficult to show the wife being annoyed and excited at the same time, this panel is pretty much doomed.  This is a problem that you need to solve before the page goes to your artist.  For example, you could break this into two panels so that she can emote her annoyance and excitement separately.

4.  Is the amount of dialogue consistent with the panel’s pacing?  For example, if you’re doing an action panel of someone leaping at an enemy, giving them 25+ words of dialogue will damage the pace.  No one can plausibly say that many words in the span of a jump. Too many words will make the action feel slower and less exciting than it should be.   As a rule of thumb, the more intense and involved the action, the fewer words you should use.

5. If something changes, like a character drawing out a prop or something, is it clear where the change came from? For example, if John is unarmed in panel 1 and wielding a gun in the next, readers might wonder where the gun came from.   You could solve that by adding an intermediate panel of him reaching for the gun, or by using motion lines to show that his hand is moving from where his gun used to be.  Alternately, just show time passing or the scene changing.  For example, if panel 1 shows us a police officer driving with his gun holstered, it’ll make sense if his gun is drawn when he gets out to storm a building in panel 2.  We didn’t see him draw the gun, but the situation has changed–now he’s in a much more dangerous situation.

6. If a character has a prop or accessory, does it appear consistently? It’s really easy to lose track of what each character is holding.  Be careful.

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