Today, I’m doing a second installment about how comics for Moo-Cow (and comics in general) are made. This installment is Starring Eleanor Davis and the Bug Brigade.

Eleanor is a incredibly excellent artist living in Athens, GA with her also extremely talented comic artist boyfriend Drew Weing. Both Drew and Eleanor have done really fantastic illustrations for us in past issues (Scotland, Forests, Aztecs, Egypt) but Eleanor’s comic for our Insect issue’s Final Funnies page really raised the bar! She packed a ton of jokes, information and really appealing art into a 7”x 9” spot, which is really hard if you’ve ever tried it! Go ahead click on it and see for yourself.

Eleanor was nice enough to send us the gift of the original artwork for this comic. When I saw how clean and well crafted the original page looked I immediately wanted to put it on this blog as a peek at a comic that is perfectly done in a more traditional way of crafting comics (as opposed to my method of cobbling a comic together from parts using the computer). So Eleanor e-mailed me her sketches that led up to her final comic.

These are some of her preliminary character sketches for the Bug Brigade. Here you can see Eleanor working out the look of characters. Also you can see a couple of names and sketches for characters that didn’t make it into the final comic. When you are developing new characters this sketching part of the process is key to helping you understand them. I only learned that too recently, and therefore over the years I’ve introduced some clunky characters into the Moo-Cow world that then quietly disappeared (poor Bargain Bob). So remember to get to know your characters in your sketchpad before you go putting them in your comics.

These are the rough pencils for the comic. This is the stage at which you use pencils map out and draw the comic to extent you need to plan it. Some artist’s rough pages look almost as perfect and clean as their final inked pages and some just draw basic shapes to convey the images. Really it's just key to get all your major parts down so you can figure out your pace and spacing.

Here you can see the final inked page (isn’t it nice!) and how all the elements came together. Drew did the lettering on this comic and want to make sure he gets credit for it because he’s a real lettering pro! What you can really see from this picture is the use of white correction fluid (or white paint) on the page. This is common in hand inked comics because no mater how talented you are you will always make mistakes or want to make things look even better. Also, it can be used as a more controlled way to create white spaces after the inking is done.

I love when I see a comic fully realized on the page like this! To me it’s an awesome talent and one that is becoming more rare as more people (like me) start their comic careers in the computer age.

In all fairness this comic is not completely computer free though. We did ask Eleanor to color it with our 2 colors for that issue (we used a different 2 colors every issue), and the method in which we need that done requires the use of computer coloring. But normally Eleanor even does cool stuff with watercolors or inks that make her stuff completely done by hand. I’ll leave you with one of those images.