Write a Simple Comic Strip

While writing a comic strip can be fun, you might want to brush out the broad strokes with a simple comic before you commit to drafting out an entire series. Drawing simple comic strips in your free time can help your comic-writing skills stay sharp, and you can develop incubating ideas and side projects as you practice with simple comic strips, too! If you find yourself at a loss for what to do when drafting up your simple comics, all you need to do is develop a premise and put pencil to paper. Soon your simple comic will be done .

Steps

Developing Your Premise

1. Focus your attention on dialogue and story over presentation. The images you include while writing your simple comic need to be sketches that give the impression of action while taking as little time from the development of your story as possible. Your goal isn't to realize an artistic masterpieces, it's to write a simple comic. If you’re an artist, this may mean you’ll need to go against your natural inclinations and de-emphasize your attention from the image to the story.
   • Identify the relationship between characters in the scene. The feelings one character has for another will dictate how that character treats the other. These feelings will also motivate dialogue between your characters, and will set the tone in the narrative text. Narrative test is usually plaintext offset in a box at the top, bottom, and sides of a panel.
   • Prepare to spend time tweaking your dialogue and narrative text. If you decide to develop this simple comic into a fully-fledged one, you’ll need your text trimmed to the most direct, most significant expressions. Too much text in a comic can ruin the image-to-text balance or negatively impact a comic’s aesthetic.
   • Choose a focal point for you to write about. Your sketched images should centralize around some kind of action or interaction, otherwise known as the focal points of the scene. You'll write the text of the comic around these major events in the form of narration and dialogue. These focal points could be a comedic bit, like a gag or pun, could be a dramatic point of interest, like an archaeological find or scientific discovery, could be tragedy, like a story of star-crossed-lovers or a fall from grace tale, or many other varieties. You’ll want to express this idea compactly on a single page or two of panels.
2. Plan a one-off or a reoccurring comic. Some strips won't get any more mileage than a single strip. These "one-off" simple comics don't need to go anywhere or have a long involved plot. Simply achieve your goal of your comic, like delivering a punchline, and begin a new simple comic when you're through. For episodic simple comics, you'll have to consider the plot of the strip. This way you can do things like connect ending panels so they lead into the beginning panels of the next comic.
   • In some cases, you might find that a simple one-off comic is deeper or more interesting than you first imagined. In this case, you always develop your simple one-off into a more complicated story by adding preceding or following strips to it.
3. Determine your style. This will influence how you approach the drawing background and characters involved in your story. Whichever style you decide upon, you’ll need to be able to sketch in it. You’re not developing a detailed artistic vision with your simple comic, you’re writing it likely to flesh out an idea or sharpen your skills. This should be reflected in your artistry.
   • Do some rough practice sketches on a spare piece of paper to get in the flow of the style you have chosen. Some examples of comic styles you might employ are: Japanese manga, noir, cartoon, western, or basic. Basic style is where you use simple shapes, like squares, rectangles, and circles, to block out a scene.
   • Plot out the distribution of your panels. While you’re getting into the flow of your style, you should draw a miniature rectangle on a blank part of the page to represent the piece of paper you’ll be drawing your simple comic upon. Draw lines inside this rectangle to indicate where you’ll break the page into the panels that will make up the scenes of your simple comic. Apportion your page breaks wisely – your simple comic should only be a page or two long.
4. Design your characters on a separate sheet of paper. This is going to the be most detailed work you do in your simple comic. By developing the images of your characters here, you’ll have a more definite idea of how these characters will occupy and move through space when you’re sketching their motion in the panels of your simple comic. This sheet will also serve as a reference for your sketch work when you start writing your simple comic.
   • Give your character a specific style or costume. You might not want to devote too much time to facial features and expressions, these can be developed later. A costume, however, will influence how the figures move through the scene, tools that the figures have, the dimensions of the figures, and how the costume interacts with the environment.
   • Develop the narrative of the character. In plaintext below each character, write names, jobs, physical details, and notes on personal history. You might want to adopt the tone your scene will take while writing these details. For example, if you are trying to write a dark, noir style, you might describe a character as, “Jack Smith, detective to the rich. The only clean man in a dirty world, though at five-foot six inches, he doesn’t exactly cut striking figure. His trench coat is known in many seedy venues, but his reputation remains untarnished."
5. Come up with your setting. On your practice sheet, alongside your style practice, you should begin sketching the setting of your comic. You’ll need to decide on where the events of your simple are taking place. This could be a warehouse, a school classroom, a library, a jungle, a spaceship or numerous other places. Remember, the goal here is not developing the artistry of the setting. In writing your simple comic, your setting is simply a vehicle to help you develop the idea, plot, or situation motivating your simple comic.
   • Use shading to loosely define the depth and perspective of your setting. For example, if your setting is in a building, you’ll likely need shadows in the foreground and on the walls to either side of the panel to give the illusion of depth to the room. Simple shapes, like ovals, squares, circles, and rectangles, can simulate boxes, control panels, barrels, buckets, refrigerators, mountains and more.
   • Use organic, connected strokes to create the illusion of vegetation in the background. You should use the same approach to large organic creatures like aliens, giant animals, monsters, and so on. Organic shapes are usually more fluid, so smooth strokes can effectively give this impression. Adding basic shapes, like a triangle on a square to simulate a head with a snout, can be added to smooth lines to further define the shape.
6. Decide on your plot. You’ll need to capture your plot in one to two pages. It should be compelling and central to the simple action you sketch in the panels of your simple comic. To help you focus your plot, you should identify the key points of your simple comic. Some examples of these would include: conflict (physical), conflict (emotional), man vs. nature, good vs. evil, a pun, a euphemism, a fall from grace, and so on.
   • Choose the major plot points for your simple comic. Do you want references to these plot points throughout the comic? Or would your comic benefit from the surprise reveal of a plot point at the end? Your comic might work best if you start with your plot point in the beginning and use it to motivate the events of your panels.
   • Judge the effect your plot will have on your characters. Since you’ve already developed your characters a little bit and have a working understanding of who they are and how they work, you should be able to judge how your characters will react with regard to the plot. Your characters might support the driving force of your story, or they might resist it. This is where your story begins taking shape.
   • Write down key words and phrases that you find central to the idea of your simple comic. You could pull these ideas from phrases you’ve heard throughout the day. If that doesn’t work, try opening the dictionary and pointing at the page at random. Use the word you selected as a central word for your simple comic. You should also begin jotting down central tidbits of dialogue you want to use. A simple comic about a warrior might have a hero yell, “Cur, have at ye!” These will help you develop your simple comic.

Drawing Your Simple Comic

1. Break your page(s) into panels. Your simple comic should be no more than two pages long for the purposes of practice or idea development, though you may want to use a long-draft simple comic for roughing out more complete comic ideas. Refer to your practice page and the panel distribution you drew there. Using this as your template and a pencil, break your pages into panels that depict the action of your scene.
   • You might use size your panels according to the importance of the events contained in the panel. For example, the punchline of a comedic comic might take the bottom half of a page, while the top half, where the set-up of the joke occurs, could be split into three panels. For beginners, you might want to start with the classic four panel approach. Simply divide your paper into four quarters, creating four scenes for each page.
   • Many comics utilize a simple "strip" format where the panels tell a linear story from the start on the left to the finish on the right. This style is still popular in print media, like newspapers and magazines.
   • Use thick lines when sectioning off the panels of your pages. You don’t want these lines to be confused for the sketch work you add when you put character-shapes and background images in your panels. You can also use different shapes or outlines to convey emotion or sensation in your panel. For example, a character getting shocked might have his panel bordered with a zig-zag line.
2. Sketch out the background. You’ll want the setting firmly in place before you start adding characters to the scene. The background will influence how the characters move through your panel, so you should start with this as the first building block for the art in your simple comic. If you need more space for characters later in your comic writing, you can always erase some of the background to free up space. After all, this is only sketch work.
   • Remember to incorporate important tools or features that are part of the setting. It would be strange if one of your characters was suddenly holding a sword with a dialogue bubble coming from his mouth with the words, “I’m king Arthur!” Instead, if you show the sword in stone in the background followed by a picture of a man holding it with the same speech bubble, the image is much more coherent. Some setting features you might want to keep in mind: switches, weapons, doors, large furniture, character props, humor props, and so on.
   • Include local features to set the tone. If your comic is taking place on a foreign planet, you might draw three moons in the night sky to immediately give the reader of your simple comic that impression. Similarly, a city could be indicated by a few rectangles for buildings and a circle on a cylinder for a fire hydrant.
   • Use layers to give the impression of distance. Your simple comic won’t have the depth of a fully developed artistic vision. You can still add triangles in the far background for mountains, some long arcs below the mountains to give the impression of foothills, and a flat foreground for the characters to stand upon to add depth to your setting.
3. Draw your characters. Since you already know your plot, you should know roughly how your characters are going to play out the scene. Your characters will either be confronting each other or some other plot point, and around this interaction you’ll write the substance of your comic. This substance is conveyed through character dialogue bubbles and narrative text, which is usually plaintext offset in a regular square box at the top, bottom, or sides of a panel.
   • Your characters might interact with each other directly, or they might set off a chain of events that influence each other. The distribution of the characters in your panels will depend upon the plot you have decided and how the characters taking part in the action.
   • Use your character sheet to help you sketch each characters’ movement throughout the setting of your simple comic. If your characters are in a swamp, you’ll likely need to show their clothing trailing behind them in swamp muck. If your characters are in the snow, their costumes might drag a vague pattern behind them. Remember, your goal here is broad strokes. The scene and the characters of your simple comic are a prop to help you write the comic.
4. Write dialogue and narrative text. Now that you have your background and characters in your panels, your stage is set and your players are ready for the story. You need to write the text of your comic in the remaining space on the page. This will describe the action and convey the emotions in your simple comic. Take a look at your list of key words, phrases, and dialogue that you came up with while working on the plot of your simple comic. Use these as the foundation upon which you build the rest of the scene.
   • Narrative text should convey all the important information left out of dialogue. For example, you might start a scene with the narrative text, “Jack Smith had a chip on his shoulder all his life. And now it was time to settle that score.” Below the box surrounding that narrative text could possibly be a scene with a character saying, “I’ll show them all!” In this way, you can use a mix of narrative text and dialogue to tell the story of your simple comic.
   • Take into account characters’ distribution in the scene when coordinating dialogue. A character standing in the foreground will appear closer than one situated in the background. You might express this in your text by making the dialogue text of the near character larger than that of the far character.
   • Trim your text down to the bare necessities. You only have so much space on the page, and overloading it with text will make your comic less comic-like and more like a novel. To prevent text overload, you might want to limit the space allowed for the text of each panel to a third.
5. Complete your final panel. Your final panel may be a cliffhanger, or it could be the end of the scene, but you’ll need the panel to convey a sense of finality. You might put the words, “The End” somewhere in the lower right hand corner of the page as a visual cue to readers that your simple comic is finished. You could also use a thicker than normal borderline for the panel to give the sense of a hard stop to the scene.
   • You could also turn your simple comic into a series of simple comics. If you really like the idea you’ve been developing, you could write “To be continued” or “Stay tuned” to indicate you intend to issue another simple comic of the same series.
6. Polish up worthwhile simple comics. You never know when you're going to find a diamond in the rough among your simple comics. A strip that you intended to use as practice might turn into a popular strip in its own right! If you think a particular simple comic, or series of simple comics, has merit, you should:
   • Clean up your linework
   • Ink your drawings
   • Colorize your panels
   • Add it to your portfolio or get it published

Sample Comics

Doc:Political Comic,Comic Book,Comic Strip

Tips

• While sketching your simple comic, you should prioritize using a pencil. This way, if you decide to develop your comic into a more polished comic strip, you can do so without having to draw everything from scratch.
• You might borrow from the seven basic plots come up with ideas for your story. These seven archetypes include: overcoming the monster, the quest, comedy, tragedy, rebirth, voyage and return, and rags to riches.

Things You’ll Need

• Eraser
• Paper
• Pencils
• Ruler (optional)

Related Articles

• Write a Manga Comic
• Write a Comic Book
• Make a Comic
• Draw
• Sketch

Sources and Citations

See also

• Enjoy Comic Books
• Make a Comic Strip
• Make a Comic
• Make a Political Cartoon
• Write a Funny Comic Strip
• Write a Good Joke
• Write Anime
• Store Comic Books
• Make a Webcomic
• Size Your Comic Books for Proper Storage

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