I would say that most of the revision happens near the beginning. So in the thumbnails, I am working out the dialogue. I’m working out the pacing. I’m working out if I need another page in there somewhere to sort of stretch a scene out, or make it clearer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of making the action clearer, and then you know, the characters were like, facing the wrong directions, and the word balloons were not flowing well. So I don’t know. I think this something you just get better at the more you do it, which is why I encourage kids especially, don’t wait, like start now. Start making bad comics now so that eventually your comics get better.
But the goal for me is to do as much revising as I can before I start the final art, because, at that point, I’m really committing to, you know, making it look the way that I want to. And then I can kind of go into auto pilot. By the time I get to inks, I wanna be like, barely even paying attention to what’s in front of me. It’s just shapes now, It’s just kind of like a technical process where I’m filling it all in. And then I can listen to, you know, audio books and podcasts while I’m doing that.
Whereas up to that point, I need either silence or very, like, chill music. So there’s just different stages, and each stage takes about six months. The pencils and inks — depending on how long the book is — can take a little longer. And sometimes the script comes together very quickly, and sometimes, you know, the thumbnails — I think the fastest I thumbnailed a book was one month, but I had been thinking about what the story was before I started. It wasn’t like I just dove in and made a story up from scratch.
But the longest it’s taken me to thumbnail a book is more like six or seven months, because I was pulling myself out of it and thinking, “No this story’s not really working. I need to kind of go back to the thinking stage.”
