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Showing posts from February, 2014

Planning Your Comics Career Like A Video Game

When my first full-length graphic novel, “The Spectacular Adventures of Zsazsa Zaturnnah” made waves for the most part of the 2000s, many people said that I was a success, that I could content myself with the fact that I’ve made a great contribution to Philippine pop culture, Philippine comics –Philippine literature even– in the New Millennium. While I was thankful for the unexpected accolades, it didn’t sink in so much. Maybe I was in denial. Maybe I believed the success was premature. Or maybe I didn’t really have an idea of what my success should look like. To me, the fact that I was able to finish the book and get it published was my true success. Everything else became a nice bonus. But maybe I should have looked at building my success differently, especially if I had really wanted to make comics my career. It’s important to define what your success will look like, especially if you plan to make comics over the long-term. If you’re starting out, your measure of s

Making Comics: Starting Out By Starting Small

When learning how to draw comics, it’s prudent to start small and work your way up. Many times have aspiring creators approached me to talk about their planned “epic series” but never got around to starting. They’re chasing the big dream without knowing what achieving that big dream entails. My first solo work back in 2001 was 56 pages long, and the story was simple–two people talking about their past romantic relationship. There were no physical fight scenes nor adventurous camera angles, and I had been drawing other people’s stories for a few years prior, so tackling 56 pages for a simple story wasn’t much of a stretch. For you, it’s advisable to spend a couple of years to create one 4- to 8-page story every month or two. Ideally, these works won’t be for public consumption. Instead, you can post your pages on forums like DigitalWebbing to get crits. As you work on shorter stories, you’ll be able to: 1) Learn how to draw different things. With each story, try a