A teeny preview of what I’m working on at the moment, a 1250cm long comic strip! I’m knocking it down into a workable and digestible shape now…

Portable Comics, an online platform for reviewed and curated underground comics, has hosted the next installment in the Chinatown Comics collection. It’s a story by Teik Chew, a local clothing retailer and his encounter with some clientele a little out of his usual demographic.

Listen to Teik Chew retell his tale on ABC Radio National.

I speak to Matt Levinson from ABC Radio National about the Chinatown Comics project and its progress. More interestingly, however, you can hear Teik Chew retell the story he contributed to Chinatown Comics in this recording! Listen here. Sydney siders might be interested to visit Teik’s street wear clothes store, Half Sleeve.

From the script I’ve knocked into shape, I need to layout the ‘script’ into thumbnails. Here I’m thinking first about page layout, including how the information and rhythm in the pages lay in relationship to the other pages. For example, if there’s a ‘reveal’ or vital piece of information, I might want to keep it up my sleeves and away from the reader’s peripheral vision, so when they’re reading one panel in one page, they might not spoil further information by glimpsing something further down in ‘time’. I might otherwise want to consider how the rhythm of one page’s sequences affects with pages flowing on to the next, whether I might want them to harmonise or whether I want them read at a dissonance.

Once I have a sense of the scale of the story and its length, I can do deeper to look at the panel rhythms in each page – should there only be one splash panel? Should there be 9 neurotic panels? Should they be equal sized and paced like a metronome? Should they be different every time and surprising? Once that is settled, I can look at the compositions within each panel – ‘staging’ the actors and sets and props so that the audience’s focus knows what’s important to read and perhaps sprinkling a richer layer of detail in between. I’m also thinking about the synergy with the text that corresponds with each image on the page – do I ever want to just repeat the narration? What can I do with my visual vocabulary and the recurring symbols and metaphors in each story to expand the understanding and emotion behind single line? What devices from the rich history of comics and art’s visual techniques might I reference as a shortcut to a lend a wider empathy to the narrator and his or her story?

In comics, the text, captions and dialogue or word balloons occupy the same space as ‘real’ things, people and environments. A word bubble might take up the size of a student’s cramped bedroom. Thought bubbles might compete with character’s head space to squeeze out with all their thoughts.

At the thumbnail stage, it’s less about pretty pictures and more about figuring out these mechanics. Staging all these elements requires thought into both their functionality (eg. readibility and flow), but they are also means of expression and to heighten the telling of the story itself.

Here are some pencils for the comic. It’s a little hard to tell in these photos but if you look closely, my first page in the thumbnails (on the left of the previous photo) changed completely and I moved up what was previously my final page up front to open Juno’s story (far left in the above photo of my pencils). Anyone whose worked in comics knows these pencils are more than rough, they’re worse than most people’s thumbnails! As this is the first time this comic’s appeared on a scale comparable to the pages that I’m working on for my final pages, I’m just getting a sense of the space on my final page – the finished size of panels, how much space I have for text and characters and comics devices like balloons.

Since I am the sole creator – writing, penciling, inking editing – I’m able to speak to myself in my own shorthand. Luckily my own language of bad abbreviations, handwriting and rough sketches is clear for instructions as I’m just speaking in my own head, but if I passed this onto a team where we divided the roles, each step would have to be significantly tightened.

Inking is the sexiest part of making a comic, it’s easily the most enjoyable part. Everything comes alive, it’s the lightning bolt into the dead pulp that wakens this Frankenstein’s monster of pictures, design, word, art and reproduction into its own artistic being. Even if you aren’t familiar with the process, I think it must be really clear even with a glance through these process photos and this guide to comics making – all the mess and anxiety and neurosis in the mass of words, messy thumbnails and fog of pencils opens up and takes a big breath at the inking stage where the artwork and words embolden and reveal themselves.

And then I email the comic back and sit on the end of nails until I hear some feedback!

You’d think that given all the space in comics – with the few, deliberate lines, the select words, the gutters between the panels and the leaps in time over a sequence of images – that gaps wouldn’t threaten the making of a comic, but knowing everything comprehensively empowers the creator to showcase selectively without losing authenticity. Whilst the lines and words included on the page leave a lot of room for the audience to project and fill in the gaps, everything that is chosen to be included plays an important role in holding the reader’s hand and leading them the right way. It is vital that the reader projects, but it’s not a free-for-all, the spaces don’t represent anything and everything and the creator has an influence over the architecture of this intangible imagination space in this early editing and composition process.

From here, I’ll spend some time marrying all the raw emails and conversations and getting to know all the material together. With it all before me, I can start making a few passes at structuring the story and dialogue. This is a balance of maintaining and celebrating the idiosyncratic and expressive nuance in how my contributor communicates – the way they speak for example, or their energy or personality – and also the naturalistic way that we remember past events, with the tight structures, arcs and rules of formal writing that allow the communication to reach readers clearly.

Above are a few passes at the writing – from left to right, the story gets tighter and slimmer, and I start breaking down the prose into something resembling instructions for a script – page breakdowns, panel layouts, dialogue, captions and descriptions of visuals and transitions.

OK, enough with all the words already, next time let’s take a look at where the visuals come from and how all these elements coalesce into art’s favourite layer cake, comics!

It’s important to have these stories shared in the most comfortable format for the contributor so that I can have a real sense of their personality and their voice isn’t lost behind structure or too much overthinking. The intimacy of the comics medium – where one’s attention is pulled into a book; and further into a page; and further into a panel; and even further into a bubble – works well with the the casual quality of a friend recounting a personal experience.

Here is an excerpt from one of these stories – a recording of my meeting with Jun-Woo Do, a Korean international student who recounted his experiences how Chinatown represented a larger cultural clash for him upon arrival in Australia.

♪ LISTEN TO JUNO ♪

Check in over the next several days, when we’ll see Juno’s story written up, broken down, laid out, sketched, inked and composited together.

Visited Dixon St markets yesterday night to watch lion dancers squeeze their gear into the smallest gap between the vendors to perform before a stunned Friday night crowd, but was slightly distracted by the many pampered pooches, both manning the stalls and cradled by shoppers! Yes, it’s turning into that kind of blog.

The lion dancers are off to perform in Dubbo today, good luck team!

There is a double page spread about the Chinatown Comics project in XKB, a Chinese newspaper here in Sydney.  It is completely in Chinese! I hope it translates well. It would be amazing to include a short comic in the Chinatown collection entirely in Chinese or another non-English language, and it would really test my visual storytelling skills to make it universally appealing. Thank you Molly & XKB for your support!