In general, my goal with this newsletter is to entertain you, not to (shudder) educate you. But sometimes, it can be fun to learn how the sausage gets made. So for my last post of 2024, I thought I’d share some doodles and sketches and how they lead to a finished comic!

This comic seems like a good candidate. It’s one of my favorites, and it took an interesting path from initial concept to final comic.

Step 1: Concept

The first thing to do is come up with an idea.

How does that happen?

Here’s my method. When you start looking for comic ideas, gradually your brain starts to see them more and more often. Eventually, you get to the point where you start thinking of funny things as you go about your day. It’s important to write them down or draw them right away before you forget. I keep a list of comic ideas in the notes app of my phone.

Some real entries from my notes app:

“Yolka Cola: Legally allowed to be called a beverage since 1948”

“Armpits: the crotch of the upper body”

“Helpless Man: the super hero who makes you feel useful by giving YOU the opportunity to save HIM”

No idea when I thought of these or why. They could still wind up becoming comics, by the way. So hands off!

Step 2: Sketch

This is the initial sketch of the bedtime comic. I usually sketch on a Post-it note with a BIC pen or whatever happens to be nearby. Then I use the Microsoft Lens app on my phone to scan it and send it to my computer via OneDrive folder lickety-split.

I try to keep comic creation as frictionless as possible. If any part of the job is hard or slow, it becomes a bottleneck and I don’t finish the comic. So putting in some work to figure out the pipeline ahead of time is essential.

Step 3: Template

Once the sketch is on my computer, I put it into the Photoshop comic template I made for myself, which ends up looking like this:

The template is another crucial ingredient in my frictionless comics creation process. I hate drawing the little boxes, so I use the same ones every time. It’s never made a comic less funny, as far as I know.

But you can see a problem with this comic. It’s only 3 panels, and my template, designed with Instagram’s square format in mind, has 4.

I could’ve eliminated a panel and just had the bottom panel float in the middle all alone, but that feels a little awkward to me.

Instead, I used the limitation to push the idea a little further. I removed the “30 Years Later” panel, which was uninteresting visually anyway, and replaced it with captions that said “Bedtime, age 5” and “Bedtime, age 35.” This still communicated the time gap and maybe made the comparison a little clearer.

Best of all, it left more room for the drawing, which meant I could fill the panels with details that added a richness beyond the core joke. I could include references to toys from my childhood as well as the real sleep impediments to my adulthood, dialed up to 11.

(Fun fact: I was only 31 when I made this comic, so the ages are fudged. Somebody on Reddit analyzed the pop culture references and called my bluff, deducing that I couldn’t be 35 yet. Nothing gets by Reddit!)

Step 4: Tiedown

The tiedown phase is a digital sketch I draw over my scanned doodle. It ties down the details of the drawing so that the composition, poses, and specifics are all figured out before inking. (All the drawing from here on is done digitally with a stylus on my Surface Pro.)

In this tiedown, you can see blue lines where I made a perspective grid. I’ll do this for more complicated drawings, but a lot of times I’ll skip this step.

In order to change the format to 2 panels, I simply erased the vertical gutters from my template.

Step 5: Inking

With a good tiedown, inking can be a breeze; it’s one of my favorite parts of the process.

I ink with Photoshop’s built-in American Comics Inker from Kyle’s Inkbox. Creating a hierarchy of line thicknesses to communicate form and guide the reader’s eye is an incredibly fun and rewarding challenge.

This is when the comic starts to feel “real.”

Step 5: Color

This final phase can be deceptively time consuming. First I block out the colors on separate layers (this comic had about 200 color layers) and then I fine-tune them, referencing a color palette to keep things feeling cohesive. I have about 4 or 5 go-to palettes that I choose from depending on the mood of the comic.

Then, I use a digital gouache brush to add shading and texture. This comic had a lot of shading since the glowing lights are part of the joke.

While I’m coloring, I’m careful not to let the colors distract from the focal point of the comic. In this case, I wanted to keep the eye focused mainly on the yellow guy (whose name is Berk, though I don’t think I’ve ever said it in a comic).

It helps that he’s bright yellow, but I use a few other tricks too. Often I’ll give him a white rim light that makes him pop out from the background. I’ll avoid using his yellow color anywhere else; all the other yellows in the first panel are more orangey and muted. The exception is the caption, but since that’s part of the joke, I want it to stand out too.

I usually keep the speech balloons white since that helps with readability and makes the eye snap to them. I avoid using white in the background, opting for a cream color instead.

Hilarity Complete!

And that’s it! Now the comic is ready to be shared on social media, in books, and in person at shows, now and for years to come. There’s no better feeling than sharing a comic and hearing someone laugh. And when you have a good process, it’s fun and easy to do it again and again. I love making comics!

That’s it for 2024! Thank you, thank you for being a reader in my inaugural year on Substack. There is much more to come. If you have a suggestion for how to improve the newsletter in the new year, please leave a comment. I love to hear reader feedback!

Happy holidays, and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your year. See you in 2025!

News

• Central Texas Teen & Kids Comic Con (Feb 22, 2025): Free attendee tickets are now available to reserve. I’ll be a vendor!

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Why not try your hand at making a comic over the holidays? If you do, I want to hear about it.

-Joe