Make Your Own Comic Book

As a kid, did you ever try to make your own comic book?......


Many people remember reading comic books as children or young adults. They're fun and sometimes can be more interesting than reading long chunks of text in a novel.


The combination of pictures and text telling the story on the page is sometimes more like watching a movie by still-frame rather than reading a book and that can make comics more appealing for some people.


More recently, comics are used to convey messages to people who wouldn't ordinarily see or read that message in other mediums. Education, business, belief-systems, religion, and other forums often turn to spreading their messages through comic books as it helps them reach a wider audience.


It is possible to make your own comic book if you think you have a great idea, simply because some stories are best told in comic book format. You don't have a lot of space for explanation, so your illustrations need to tell your story, while your caption bubbles will convey any dialogue between your characters.


A homemade comic book looks deceptively simple. After all, it's just a few cartoons with a few caption bubbles over the character's head. Anyone can create a simple homemade comic book quickly and easily. The trick is making your comic story and your characters compelling enough to make your audience want to read more.


Let's get into some steps to make your own comic book



Step One: Find your Theme
All comics begin with an idea, but ideas are held together by a central theme. Decide what you want your comic to convey to your audience. Your comic's theme is not the same thing as a moral or an underlying message you want to pass on. Your theme is just the central premise around which the storyline revolves.



Step Two: Storyline
No matter how brilliant, exciting, entertaining, or amusing your artwork is, art alone isn't enough to keep people interesting in reading your comic book. When you make your own comic book you will need to develop a storyline that revolves around the characters and forms a plot.



Step Three: Story Board
A storyboard is a serious of connecting plot points that take your story from the beginning, through a series of conflicts to a nice climactic scene and finally to a satisfying ending.


You can create a simple storyboard by writing various plot points on cards or pieces of paper and then moving the cards around into different orders so you can see how the story will play out. This phase of making your own comic book is often great for giving you extra ideas for bits to add to scenes or might give you some hints about good artwork or illustrations that would highlight the plot.

 

Step Four: Characters
Comic book characters are often larger than life. The slightly exaggerated characteristics of many comic characters help to accentuate the drama or conflict in your storyline.



Step Five: Illustration
Your artwork needs to illustrate the storyline so that readers will know what's happening to your characters and what's going on in the plot. It makes no difference whether your artwork is realistically correct or whether you create two-dimensional cartoons. As long as your readers can see what's happening and enjoy the story you're telling, your comic book will be a hit.


Before you make your own comic book read plenty of other comics to see how the writers and artists put together various frames and scenes for effect and see how this impacts your own composition.



Step Six: Publication
You have a couple of options when it comes to publishing your comic book. You could decide to print out your own comics on your home printer and hand them out to friends, you can upload them to a website for people to view, or you can find a publisher to print a professional-quality comic book that looks like the commercial ones.


If you do choose the publishing option, then you will need to decide between finding a publisher who will do it all for you or opting for the self-publishing option where you're in control of everything.


While self-publishing offers you more creative freedom and control over your work, a traditional publisher - either large press or small press - can often mean a wider distribution network, even if the editorial demands might make you feel as though you're losing a little bit of control of your work at some stages.

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We hope you enjoyed this tutorial on making your own comic book. We'd love to hear your comments if you make your own comic book or if you're thinking of creating one soon. Please post about your homemade comic books and other projects here