Clattertron

[dc]I[/dc] get asked how I write my comics from time to time. It usually starts with a joke or a concept, and I go from there. The dialogue comes to me as I go, and I tweak as needed. Here are a couple of photos of how I wrote this week’s comic (Rise Up).

Notes for this week’s comic, Rise Up.

These are my first notes about this week’s comic (it is difficult to see, but No Filter Fox‘s lines start in pencil near the top). The dialogue here is different from what’s in the next photo, where I tweaked the concept, and different from the finished comic. Yes, it’s a mess of sketches and text, but it makes sense to me.

Writing!

In the first notes, you see I had Tickles changing her Facebook profile picture at the start and the joke would be her changing her cover photo. Well, I decided Tickles changing her profile picture made for a better joke (and it could apply to other social media, not just Facebook).

Next, is the typed up script I paste into Manga Studio (and then trace for a hand-lettered look). I type all my scripts into OpenOffice using regular casing. After I spell check and edit, I make the text uppercase (an easy step: select the text, and right-click > Case/Characters > UPPERCASE).

I’M NOT YELLING

Even after this step, the final version of the dialogue changed. I decided No Filter Fox needed to use Tickles’ name to help set-up the last panel, which is just text reading: Tickles changed her profile picture.

I changed my profile picture on Facebook and screen captured the dialogue so I could match the font and color (as close as possible).