Greg Pak - Make Comics Like the Pros: The Inside Scoop on How to Write, Draw, and Sell Your Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Copyright 2014 by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente

All rights reserved.

Action Philosophers is and 2014 Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente.

Archer & Armstrong is and 2014 Valiant Entertainment, Inc.

Atomic Robo is and 2011 Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener.

Bandette is and 2014 Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover.

Brain Boy is and 2014 Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

Chew is and 2014 John Layman.

Code Monkey Save World is and 2014 Pak Man Productions, Ltd., and 10 Print JoCo, Inc.

The Comic Book History of Comics is 2014 Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente.

Cow Boy is and 2014 Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos.

Dead Mans Run is Valhalla Entertainment and Aspen MLT, Inc. and 2011 Aspen MLT, Inc.

Jap-Smasher is and 2014 Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente.

Kinski is and 2014 Gabriel Hardman.

Los Robos is and 2012 Pak Man Productions, Ltd.

Nowhere Men is and 2014 Eric Stephenson and Nate Bellegarde.

Octane is and 2014 Fred Van Lente.

Power Play is and 2014 Reilly Brown and Kurt Christenson.

Pretty Deadly is and 2013 Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, Inc., & Emma Ris. All rights reserved.

Revival is and 2014 Tim Seeley and Mike Norton.

Rio Chino is and 2008 Pak Man Productions, Ltd.

Robot Stories is and 2004 Pak Film, Inc.

Saint George is and 2014 Reilly Brown and Fred Van Lente.

The Silencers is and 2014 Steve Ellis and Fred Van Lente.

The Sixth Gun is and 2014 Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt.

Swordmaids is and 2014 Colleen Coover, Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente.

Tranquility is and 2014 Steve Ellis and Fred Van Lente.

Undercover Chimp is and 2014 Colleen Coover and Fred Van Lente.

Vision Machine is and 2010 Pak Man Productions, Ltd.

All images used with permission of the copyright holders.

Published in the United States by Watson-Guptill Publications, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.crownpublishing.com

WATSON-GUPTILL and the WG and Horse designs are registered trademarks of Random House LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pak, Greg, author.
Make comics like the pros : the inside scoop on how to write, draw, and sell your own comic books and graphic novels / Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente.
pages cm
1. Comic books, strips, etc.Marketing. 2. Comic books, strips, etc.Authorship. 3. Comic books, strips, etc.Technique. I. Van Lente, Fred, author. II. Title.
PN6714.P35 2014
741.51dc23

2014001711

ISBN: 978-0-385-34463-0
eISBN: 978-0-385-34451-7

Cover design by MacFadden & Thorpe and Katy Brown
Interior design by MacFadden & Thorpe

v3.1

Welcome to Make Comics Like the Pros , a practical compendium of everything that weveteran comic book creators Greg Pak and Fred Van Lentehave learned while hammering out thousands of comic book script pages and working with hundreds of collaborators over the last decade. Here youll find step-by-step strategies for how to drag your comic out of your brain, with invaluable advice on writing, drawing, coloring, and lettering. And well help you build your strategy for getting your book out into the world with from-the-front-lines tips on pitching, publishing, and promotion.

Throughout, well make our pointers as practical and hands-on as possible with play-by-play commentary on the creation of a brand-new comic book story written by us and drawn by the brilliant Colleen Coover. Whether youre a total beginner or an experienced pro, youre about to dive into a giant pool of awesome directly relevant to whatever your interests in comics creation may be.

But were going to spill our biggest secret right up front: the big theme of this bookand the key to making comics like the prosis collaboration .

At the minimum, the production of a typical comic book requires a writer, an editor, an artist, a letterer, a printer, a publicist, and a distributor. In theory, all of those jobs can be filled by one person, especially in the digital age. But most comics are created by a team, and the vast majority of comic book creatorsand by creators, we mean everyone who works on the bookneed to learn how to talk to and work with everybody at every stage of the process.

And you guessed it: this book will help you do exactly those things.

The wrong way to frame all of this is that if youre making comics, you need to learn how to get all of your collaborators to see things the way you do and fricking do it already.

The reality is that great comics come from true collaboration, with genuine give-and-take through which smart creators learn from their colleagues and end up with a far better final product than they ever could have produced on their own.

Were going to explore every creative relationship in comicsunveiling how letterers, colorists, editors, writers, and artists all can work together for maximum impact. But to lay the groundwork for all of our conversations about collaboration, first well tell you a little bit about ourselves and how we started collaborating with each other, which should show you that while theres a way to make comics like the pros, there are as many paths to becoming a pro as there are pros themselves.