illustrating a comics page

Here’s a one-page comic I recently illustrated called the ‘The Origin of The Amazing Spider-Foo’. It’s a Spider-Man parody written by Crhymes; a writer, comedian, and musician based out of San Diego.

From Script to Rough Layout

Originally conceived of as a one-page 12 inch by 12 inch record insert, Crhyme’s script was a brillliant parody of Stan Lee’s verbose Marvel Comics stories.

Here’s the script:

My first task was to break the text up in to individual panels. I was originally thinking a 9 panel grid, but couldn’t squeeze all of the text in, so I added a tenth introduction panel on top. I even started thinking about color at this stage. Here’s an early rough that was meant just for me.

I refined my roughs and sent them over to Crhymes. (I sent them without color, since I wasn’t sure yet what my color plan was.)

At this point, Crhymes had some much-needed suggestions to help make my drawings more convincing, including the addition of palm trees, making Spidey-Foo’s sandals more accurate, and adding tattoos to Pedro Parker’s arms and neck. Crhymes also wanted Spider-Foo to break the panel borders in the last panel.

Changes are welcome at this rough stage because they’re easy to make before inks and color are added.

Pushing and Refining the Poses

At this time I also decided to push the poses in the piece, especially in panels 1 and 2. (The poses of those two panels in the roughs just looked too similar to me.) Pedro Parker also looked too relaxed in panel 3, so I changed up that pose as well.

Here’s a few rough drawings I made while working on the piece.

Digitally Inking the Comics Page

Inking went slowly for me, though you wouldn’t know it from the timelapse below.

If only I could work that fast.

I originally estimated the page would take me about 6 – 8 hours, but each panel took about 3 hours including rough drawing, inks, lettering, and colors.

A lot of that time was spent trying things that didn’t work out, like those early rough colors, or some of the unused poses, for instance. And a lot of undos. Undo. Undo. Undo. Making comics is hard.

Here’s the final inks.

Coloring the Comics Page

I finished the colors, (done on a separate layer from the inks and pencils, as you can see above), choosing not to show Spider-Foo in full-color until the final couple of panels.

I sent the final artwork to Crhymes. He had a few edits to the text, which was no problem since the lettering was a well-crafted font I purchased from PixelSagas.

Leading up to San Diego ComicCon, Crhymes started posting a panel a day to his Instagram. Crhymes is wild, ambitious, and smart. It’s my guess that he has a lot of stories in him, and not just Spider-Man parodies.

I’m grateful he took a chance on this fairly untested comics-maker.

Go buy a shirt from him, or a print of the comic, while he works on his next project.