How to Make a Comic Book: A Review of the Course

You do not need expensive materials to make a simple comic book

The beauty of online courses is that I can try out something well outside my comfort zone and sometimes it turns out surprisingly enjoyable. One such course is How to Make a Comic Book, available on Coursera.

Readers of my blog may already know that I have a part-time job with Class Central, writing occasional articles and answering emails. An emailed question led me to explore this course and I decided to enroll and audit the course for free.

You don’t just sit down and start drawing out your comic panels. First, you need to spend some time planning and preparing your comic book.

This six-week project-centered course goes through the complete process of making a 16-panel comic book with four panels on each of four pages. It covers all the steps from thinking of your story idea, writing a script, creating thumbnails, pencilling and lettering, inking, and assembling the finished comic book ready for printing multiple copies.

The weekly videos were short, but extra optional videos, readings, and podcasts made me realize the course is no walkover. Example comics, how-tos, and marking rubrics for the course assignments were all provided. Each week included an interview with a comic book creator about the week’s topic, then a discussion on “What did you particularly notice about what this creator said?”

A Project-Centered Course

As advertised by Coursera, this is a project-centered course. The object of the course is to design and produce your own print-ready short comic book. I found the course materials and resources admirably fulfilled this aim.

As I write this blog post, I have finished planning and thumbnails for my own comic book, but have yet to start work on the final copy. Scary and time-consuming, but I am determined to finish it within the next few weeks. The weekly assignments allow students to consistently work through each stage.

Although I have not yet completed the course, I browsed the remaining few weeks to discover what is coming up.

I also found the article The Story Behind the MOOC interesting.

The First Three Weeks: Planning

The introductory section of the course in week one discusses the materials needed. It recommends some professional-grade materials, but also mentions cheaper alternatives suitable for students who are unsure whether or not they want to pursue comic book creation beyond the course. It also introduces students to a helpful website at www.makingcomics.com which was created by several professional comic book creators including the course Lead Educator Patrick Yurick. A practice peer-reviewed drawing assignment instructs students to look for positive aspects and provide encouraging feedback to their peers. As a person who barely scraped through school art classes, I felt very nervous about this assignment but my peers were generous in their reviews.

Week one then goes on to the start of the actual process of making your own comic book. Start off with a story idea with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Week two focusses on writing scripts. You take your story idea and work out how to fit it into 16 panels. It’s emphasised not to start drawing yet, until you have it fully planned out first. This saves time in the long run because you’re not erasing panels and re-drawing them. No chance of starting to draw too soon for me! The actual drawing is my weakness and I feel far more confident about writing a script than actually drawing the panels.

Week three provides various resources on thumbnails. Planning out your entire comic book in thumbnail form allows you to really think about the positioning of all the elements of each panel. Drawing four pages worth of thumbnails (on one page) should only take about 30 minutes. This stage also helps beginners to discover just what will and will not fit in each panel.

Weeks Four to Six: Produce Your Comic Book Panels

In week four, we are provided with a panel template for our completed project. The template includes pale markings to help keep the lettering neat. In week four we create a faint pencil draft, then in week five we will ink over the letters and drawings.

Week four discusses pencilling and lettering. I had never considered the amount of work that goes into the speech bubbles of a comic book. Placement of speech bubbles and the words inside them are vitally important to how professional the finished product appears. I needed to plan the layout and practice my lettering on scrap paper before trying to fit the words into the bubbles. Discussion included whether to hand-letter or use software. Students were encouraged to at least try hand-lettering at first to acquire a better grasp of the process.

Week five explains the inking process. The assignment for the week asks for a final inked comic book, ready to clean away stray pencil marks and go on to the final production phase of your project.

Week six shows how to clean up your images and assemble your completed comic book. You can also design and add a cover if you wish. Instructions for the cover are limited to how to attach it to your comic book.

Photoshop is recommended to produce a clean copy of the right size and instructions are included on how to access free software for this step.

An Encouraging Attitude

I noticed early on that the course seemed to focus more on people keen to draw and reasonably skilled in drawing. There was very little information about actual drawing skills in the course. I spent plenty of time on Pinterest and other websites exploring how to draw eyes, faces and other elements. Then plenty more time on drawing practice.

An interesting aspect of this course is the included material about how to keep persevering when you’re feeling discouraged. It doesn’t turn out how you expected? Keep at it. Think it looks like rubbish? Keep at it! Make the work fun. Enjoy the creative process and look forward to the time when at your 100th or 1000th attempt, it finally looks beautiful.

The process is relevant for anyone in a creative field. Writers, artists, designers, advertisement creators, filmmakers, photographers … the list goes on. Take a look at the encouraging websites and resources and feel energized.

A Final Thought

Although the actual video lectures are generally short, links are provided to a range of useful resources including websites, books, podcasts and further projects.

Announcement

There will be no blog post next week. I’ll be back on October 16!

By Pat Bowden, published October 3, 2018.

2 thoughts on “How to Make a Comic Book: A Review of the Course

    1. patbowden Post author

      Hi Trudy, go to the course page ( https://www.coursera.org/learn/make-comic-books/ ). If you haven’t done any courses before, you will need to sign up with Coursera with your name, email address and a password. To enroll for free, look for a small Audit the course link when you select Enroll. All the best! I hope you enjoy the course.

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