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Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that simple. At the time we did the sample pages (which did get us straight to contract talks) I was working on a book for the European publisher Humanoids, Les armee des anges (Translation: Army of Angels) volume 3, and as such it was a European art style I was working in. But when Paul asked me to do the pages I realized I would have to switch gears and retool my art for the project. For me at least, that is a difficult proposition. I actually learned to draw manga while I was in school in Japan and Paul knew that. That was probably why he came to me to work on this. Japanese comics are very different from their American cousins for a number of reasons, the least of which is the most obvious, the art. I am talking about storytelling and the use of black. When I moved back to America to pursue a career in comics I had to relearn everything I had picked up in Japan to make myself appealing to editors at American comic companies. So going back to work on a book that was intended to be as authentically manga as possible meant that I would have to once again relearn what I was doing and retool my art process for the book. Which brings me to point one: Know your subject matter and your intended audience. Here the subject was manga and the audience was a publisher who specifically dealt in it exclusively. Just as you wouldn’t take a set of sample manga style pages to Marvel or DC and expect to get hired on a superhero book; if you are pitching something to a company like Tokyopop try and keep the capes and the bulging biceps down to a bare minimum. Or get rid or them altogether if you can. The world of Manga may have action-based comics in it, but it doesn’t really have all that many books about mild-mannered copy editors who have a secret identity as that of a masked superhero.
Once I had managed to successfully switch modes to a manga art style, I had the difficulty of adjusting to working on the right materials for the project. Manga is made in Japan on a different, smaller-sized paper. The actual paper they work on is known as B4 size, which, for those of you without an oversized scanner with paper sizes marked on the glass scanning surface is 10 5/32" by 14 3/8". Compare that with the larger DC comic paper, which is 11.5" by 17". The actual safe zone within the paper where all your art is supposed to go is also smaller, at 7 1/8" by 10 21/32”. Once again, for comparison, the DC paper is 8 7/8" by 13 15/16". That is a huge difference and making the adjustment to drawing smaller took some time and a lot of sketching before it began to feel right (although for what it is worth, Tokyopop doesn’t work at exactly the same size as Japanese companies do. They wanted my work to be slightly larger at 7 7/8" by 11 15/16" which made the job of adjusting to the new size that much easier).
There is another reason to work on the smaller, Japanese-sized paper. My wife and I tone the books by hand. Tone is expensive but it gives the book a nice worked on feel that toning on the computer can’t give (for what it’s worth, toning on the computer isn’t really toning. It’s just coloring in grayscale) and in order to keep cost down we wanted to use the smaller Japanese paper which would result in us using less tone. That and if we were to tone at a larger American comic size, when the pages were shrunk down for publication it would result in a moray, where the dots of the tone don’t line up the way they are supposed to and form annoying patterns inside the art that can distract from the art itself. Thus we have arrived at point two: Make sure you are preparing your pitch samples to the company’s publication specs. This will really impress whomever you are dealing with. It shows you have your act together and are willing to work within the company’s specifications. I can’t tell you how many portfolio review lines I have stood in with other hopefuls where the guys in front of me had sample art work drawn on loose-leaf notebook paper or their own special size of comic board. Suffice to say, the editors whose attention they were trying to get weren’t impressed and those guys didn’t get any more advice than to be told to draw on the correct size of paper.
This process of adjusting to the new book took some time for me and wasn’t a fast or easy job. However, working with Paul made it a little easier. When we were talking through the basic idea behind the story it was clear to me that what Paul was thinking of and what we had developed together would be easy to translate to paper once I got started. And this, for me at least, is point three: Work with someone at least as competent as you are. If you can, try to find a partner who is in fact not only competent but also creative, driven, and who has a great work ethic. It makes all that you do on your end of a project easier. But as I know from personal experience if you don’t find someone to work with who aims high, you might as well stop right then and there. Any work you happen to do will end up being wasted when the other person flakes out and you are left with a dead project with nothing to show for it but the sinking feeling that the time you sunk into it on your end is something you can’t recoup. : : |
7 May 2008 30 April 2008 23 April 2008 16 April 2008
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