Ok kiddie kats, as I’ve mentioned, I’m going to be running y’all through my general process for making a chapter of Spoilers. This is how I put together the recent Chapter 21. Ok, here we go:

I do most if not all my Spoilers planning in this sketchbook. Not only is the book pretty attractive, but the vertical orientation is a good fit for the long and tall nature of the strip. To be perfectly honest, I actually used this same book to work on the new pushups. It’s interesting to go through and trace the development of that book. The development for Spoilers took place in a number of different sketchbooks back in 2006 when I started it originally. Anyway, when I finished the new pushups, I had become committed to this sketchbook and the idea of devoting one book to a project. Anyway, moving on…

This is what it says at the beginning of my sketchbook. I really needed this encouragement when I started the new pushups.

So here’s a basic layout sketch of the chapter. I’ve got a really simple outline of what happens in each chapter of the comic. I don’t put together a detailed script or plan for how it’s going to play out until I get to that particular chapter, or usually the one before. My mind kind of does a frog leap ahead for a bit before I settle back and get down to the matter at hand.

How I write a chapter is I sort of trick my mind into becoming really focused on the scene, and then it runs through my head like a film. The boundaries to this are essentially what’s supposed to happen, the kinds of things I want to be communicated and whether it can create a smooth transition into the next chapter. Once it all becomes clear to me, I try to come up with ideas on how to present it as comics. That’s about the point I make the kind of sketches as you see above.

This chapter was a little different, because I had been planning it (and dreading it in a way) for about two or three years. I was really nervous because I was basically writing a song, which I’d never done before, and I didn’t want the lyrics to be terrible. So I wrote the words a long time in advance, to give me the space to revisit them and edit it. I’m not sure how I did in the end, but it doesn’t make me feel too gross and people have said it seems like real song lyrics, so I’ll accept that and move on.

I also knew this was going to be a pretty big moment in the comic, kind of the climax, so I felt a lot of pressure to get it right. Most importantly, for me at least, was I wanted to test out an idea I had been having about depicting space. I’ve been really fascinated with enclosed spaces, specifically how human beings are basically really small things walking around in these boxes that we stack up on top of each other. Sort of like looking into a dollhouse. I don’t think I quite captured what I was going for, but I wanted the concert to be really packed in, so it didn’t feel like there was an unlimited space all around them. This is also one of my favorite conditions for a punk rock show, so that was more incentive to depict it.

So, with all this internal pressure, I went out in search of reference. Luckily Liz Suburbia‘s husband Corky Berlin is an amazing concert photographer, and he had recently recorded a show for hardcore band the Deathrats. I am absolutely in love with the shots of this show, and they were a huge inspiration for the feeling I attempted to get across.

So you might recognize some of the poses and set ups from these pictures in Chapter 21. I also thought it was important to have as many individual people represented as possible, including all the band members and the audience. I didn’t want it to feel like a music video, with a camera trained on the band, mostly the singer, the whole time. To feel less like a stage than an actual space.

So I did a ton of sketches, copying poses from the Deathrats photos, figuring out how instruments are put together (drums are hard!) and figuring out what the band was going to play, look like and wear (the organist is wearing an outfit from a JCrew catalog, the bassist is wearing the Um Jammer Lammy tshirt and the singer’s displaying an emblem that’s a combination of the DC flag and the King City logo). The singer is partly inspired by Butterscotch and Truth Is… On her wrist is a Yoruba pattern that kind of gets lost.

When I’m done figuring out the whole thing (or sometimes a little before), I cut out a series of 7 x 17 inch panels of Bristol board. Most of the time I work on the back as well to save paper, but I try to go in cycles, so that I can continue a drawing from one to another (so like 1, 2, 3, turn over, 4, 5, 6). Then I quickly lay out rough sketches to see how my layouts work when actual size. I usually work out my trickier transitions and compositions at this stage.

Then I fill in the pencils.

Then I ink it if everything looks ok.

That opening line, “Hey everybody… thanks for sticking around,” is taken from a live recording of the Mr. T Experience. It’s also a little inside joke for you dear readers.

I’m not going to tell you what the song is about, but think about who the second person is that she’s referring to.

That hazy line you see about a third of the way down is because my scanner is not big enough to take in the whole page, so I scan the top, flip it around and then do the bottom. I then stick the pieces together in Photoshop to remake the page. The computer aspect of making the comic is my least favorite part of the whole thing, which is part of the reason why my comic for PUPPYTEETH was entirely analog (well, ok… I did the titles and credits in Illustrator, but that was a pre-production thing, which I then printed out and pasted onto the actual drawings). Anyway, as you can see, I fill in the majority of the blacks on the computer, both to save on ink and also so the paper doesn’t get really wavy. Also, my scanner is kind of crapping out (it’s older than Spoilers), doing the spot blacks afterward requires less touching up, since the inked blacks leave a lot of white speckles that I would need to cover over anyway.

So touching up is the most tedious part of the process, but it’s gotten a bit better since I started using a tablet. I go through the whole strip really close up and erase bad marks or fill in places that are missing. Since I do the whole strip on separate sheets of paper, I need to stitch them all together again in Photoshop, so sometimes I need to connect lines, or move things around to make it look seamless.

Here’s a before and after shot of a particular example that needed quite a bit of digital retouching. The white-out was not saving the drawing, so computer magic fixed it up again, as well as adding a compositional element to anchor it a bit.

So then when everything’s all cleaned up and it looks ok, I chop it up into 200px high chunks and save those as individual fragments. Then I stitch it all together again with HTML and PHP. I update all the various pieces of the website so that the new content is accounted for. Then I post it up and tell you guys all about it on here, on Twitter and on Facebook. I used to used Tumblr but it would link to itself, which would then link outward, which seems kind of silly to me.

So there you go, that’s how a chapter of Spoilers is born. Hope you enjoyed that, Liz. Thanks again to everyone who reads it. It means the world.