The Devil and Mr. Gandhi

The 12-panel comic I promised.  In a previous post, "Indie Comics: Which Way to Go --> The Devil and Mr. Gandhi (the second direction)", I mentioned how indie comics seem to fall into 2 major categories: "real life" (think the trials and tribulations of a geek) and "archetype and foil" (think the odd couple).  This is definitely the latter.  The whole idea is to come up with crazy situations in which to place these two characters, one bent on causing havoc and hijinks (The Devil, a.k.a. Satan), the other determined to be nice and keep things in order (Mohandas Gandhi).

With regards to the coloring: I decided to go with something a little different than the standard black and white.  You will see this type of monochromatic printing style in indie comics.  It's not actually monochromatic in the strictest sense of the word.  There are the black letters, a yellowish orange color around the speech balloons, as well as at least two tones of orange used for shadow and the background.  Playing with the transparency of a layer painted in one color can get you an interesting effect.  Then you can decide what you want to stand out (in black or white, etc.) or fade into the background.  I added some halftones as well.  It is kind of a cheat in terms of coloring.  If I tried to stick with a cartoon palate of primary colors (which is basic) but then colored in every inch of the comic, it would take a very long time. Then do you do a shadow and highlight of each primary color used?  More time.  This is a quick way of adding color in a short period of time.

With regards to speech balloons: Doing 4 panels across on a standard 11x17 comic page makes the panels taller and skinnier.  For me, this makes it easier to devote a full third (or more) of each panel for a speech balloon.  Sometimes I just draw a drawing in a box and add the text below like a caption, other times I try to squeeze in a speech balloon and sometimes hide some of the original drawing.  Here, I hand drew the speech balloons into the drawing and then inked them over.  It gives it a more "hand-drawn" look, and for me, I see it as a matter of practice makes perfect.  I think having the balloons bust out of the panel boxes, and overlap with some of the character elements (like Satan's horns in panel 11), it adds more simple foreground-background depth.

You might also notice some swerving in the panel lines of this piece.  I usually decide on one of two ways to do this: either use a French curve stencil to do curves, and a ruler to draw the lines, or do it all freehand.  this was done freehand, which kind of makes the Photoshopped vector text a cop-out, but I don't care.  Freehand lettering so that it fits and looks good is hard as hell.  As you can see with both coloring and lettering I look for shortcuts.