If you have been reading webcomics for a while, I am pretty sure you have stumbled across PVP. PVP is created by Scott R. Kurtz and it is one of the poster-boys of webcomics. It has a huge following, spawned a website dedicated to criticizing it, and due to its success, Scott works full time making a new strip everyday, and sells all kinds of PVP related merchandize.

PVP is partly webcomics and partly blog (just like my site). On 2008/01/19, he posted his video podcast about his wish to turn his “Adobe Photoshop + Wacom tablet” comic workflow to “Adobe Illustrator + Wacom tablet”. Illustrator outputs vector graphics, which allows the user to stretch or shrink the art to any size you want without any loss of quality. Photoshop images, which are bitmap graphics, on the other hand, lose their quality when you enlarge them.

See his podcast here for his dilemma:

Now guess what? My comics are all created in Illustrator. I have been using it for years (my full time job is a casino game designer), so it has become natural to me. Ironically, I wish to draw freehand professionally in Photoshop like Scott and other proficient webcomics artists. Illustrator webcomics takes a long time to create, and simple strips like mine can easily take me 3 to 5 hours to create and polish and still I cannot achieve what you can do with Photoshop.

I am learning how to make a comic the new traditional way, but first I have learn how to draw with pen and paper as I have zero patience with them.

Comics is more than just pretty drawings (or may be it has nothing to do with prettiness), it involves writing, planning, pacing, placement of graphic element to show action, flow of time, locations, moods and many other things. I was actually a little hesitant to create my own comics, because I knew the most I could offer were a few cute vegetable characters.

So I went to my local bookstores and searched for books on comics. There are many, to my surprise, dedicated to a huge variety of related topics, from drawing big eyes Japanese-style cute girls to American-style super heroes and fantasy monsters. To me, the book that really stood out was Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics”.

“Making Comics” doesn’t particularly teach how to draw, but it offers you very valuable insights. For example, some book might teach you how to draw a super hero standing up straight, but “Making Comics” shows you how you position your eye level on a subject to suggest to your reader the possibility of authority or weakness. How you combine different basic emotions to create subtler and more believable emotions - for example, how do you draw a “pity” looking face? The book shows you by combining a face that shows mild joy and a face that shows mild sadness could get you that non-black-and-white emotion.

The book is a joy to read, because it is created in a comic book format. If the book is purely text, it will make no dents in my head after finish reading it - I would remember nothing. Because it’s in comics format, when I suddenly feel like I could reuse some advice from the book, I can quickly flip through the pages and find the right topic. The book has offered so many insights, now that I am eager to try them all. I am more confident, and your comics would definitely improve if you follow Scott McCloud’s advice.

In case you don’t know, this website is a WordPress blog with ComicPress plugin installed. To have a custom look, you will need to modify some of the “.css” (cascading style sheet documents) and “.php” file within the ComicPress plugin.

Here’s a brief summary of steps you need to do to run a Wordpress comic site

1. Register your own web domain name and subscribe to a web hosting package that includes PHP and MySQL features.
2. Download your Wordpress kit from Wordpress.org/download. It will be a very small zip file and after it has been expanded, use your FTP program to upload all the contents to your website. Follow the instructions given by the WordPress readme. Make sure your basic WordPress blog runs properly before installing the next thing…
3. Download the ComicPress plugin for Wordpress from www.MindFaucet.com and follow the instructions. You will be putting the “plugin” folder inside one of your Wordpress subfolders and subsequently activating it in Wordpress. ComicPress requires you to follow its instruction very specifically, so please spend a minute understanding how it works.
4. Basically your webcomic site is all ready for comic and blog entry posting, but depending on your ambition, you will want to modify the look of your site. If you are not a programmer, but have built yourself a simple website, then you might consider modifying the css files and php files step-by-step and carefully within the Comic Press folder. For example, if you want to have your own special navigation bar, then you might want to program it in Dreamweaver, then copy and paste the code inside the header.php file. Header.php generates, as the filename suggests, the header part of the blog page.

   If you are lost, you will need your some help from your geek friends. To be honest, most people care about your comics more than the look of the site.

The idea of having my own comic site surfaced in 2006 (or 2007?) when I got so bored doing my day job. By that time I already had a blog site and I felt that it was not going anywhere. To be honest, which blogger doesn’t want high traffic to his/her site? And my writing, as you can already tell, isn’t that interesting and I am not the one who likes to write very biased blog entries just to instigate people to post comments. So I thought I should go back to the area that I am more comfortable with - graphics and illustrations.

Making comics allows me to get something out of my head more easily than making a very detailed illustrations (that’s not to say comics are easy to draw - I need to practice more and work hard at it) and let me doing something that I feel belongs to me. The graphics that I work on in my day time job don’t belong to me, it belongs to the hiring company, and also, most of them I don’t have an attachment to.I will strive to update this site every week, but all depends on how much energy is left after finishing my day of work.

Cheers,

Victor