The comic. Not the sex — the details of which will remain a secret between me, my darling wife, the rented lawn furniture, the Tupperware chip & dip filled with peanut butter, and the well-worn VHS copy of “Dark Star”.

Anyway, this is all that goes into a strip of Arkham Polytech — well, everything after the heavy drinking and half-naked, midnight rambling around the neighborhood.

It all starts here… with the Written Word.

Yup, it’s Word 2003. Been using Word since the 90s. It pretty much sucks but I’m used to it. Ideally, I try to keep at least six scripts (two weeks worth) ahead but it usually ends up I’m only three ahead, and those three tend to get rewritten completely by the time I’m lettering the strips. (The whole writing process is a tale and a half itself that is best not to dwell on.)

(Yeah, don’t expect fancy, in-focus screen shots here. I do those all day at work. A pox on screenshots. I’m using a camera, damn it. Snapshots, in all their wonderful handheld, often blurry glory.)

The actual drawing starts off innocently enough — with the pulling out of the bristol. Yep, I draw everything in pencil and ink first. I just like it better.

For three-panel I use 9×12 inch. For four panel… well, I haven’t done four panel in a while, but I like to think I’d use 11×14 inch.

Disregarding the bristol pad’s feelings and the screams of pain, I rip out a sheet and arrange it artfully on the slab of pressurized sideboard that serves as my desk.

Since I’m old, they’re in metric, and I really can’t be bothered to memorize them, I’ve written the dimensions I use for panel borders on an index card and posted them below a die-cast Eagle from Space 1999 (a gift from DeMorte, which he says he got at a yard sale, and which I’m am certain he inserted a tiny explosive device into before giving it to me — but it’s okay, D’argo’s got my back.)

For three-panels, I t-square borders in .5 mm pencil at 1/10.3/10.6/19.9/20.2/29.5 cm across and 3/6/13 cm down.

The line at 6 cm is the dialog line — a visual guide to remind me where the word balloons will go, so I don’t waste time drawing anything complex there, ’cause it’s just gonna get covered up.

Names are a powerful thing, so I always title the strip before leaping into the drawing. I use a Penstix .5 mm for this — not because I like Penstix, but because I bought a bunch of them before I discovered Microns were like a million times better and I feel bad not using them for something. So they get title duty. I also use them to write out checks.

Non-photo blue pencil time! (The barcode you see is my own inventory tracking system. I know where all my pencils are at all times. Can you say the same?)

I do a ham-fisted rough outline sketch in blue pencil, getting the character positions and scene worked out. Often, between the blue pencil and loose pencil steps, a panel will change drastically — either because it just doesn’t work for me, or it’s just to darn complex for me to actually pull off. Honestly, once something gets into eleven-dimensional hyper-perspective territory, I’m lost.

Once the blue pencil rough is done, I hand pencil work off to my robot assistant Sandow, who uses a .5mm mechanical and a blaster ray.

The pencils are usually fairly tight after two passes. The ruler comes in handy drawing straight lines, which are the hardest thing in the world. Next to circles. And curved lines. And most everything else.

The pencils done, it’s time to break out the Microns. As you can see, they love this part and practically jump into my hand. (No, they’re not really jumping. They’re pens. They don’t have legs. I’m actually using the Force.)

I use a 05 micron for characters and props, a 03 for scene setting and backgrounds, and a 01 for scenery details. When I do shading, it’s usually with a 01 or a 005. I use a 1 to fill in blacks. I sign my initials and trace the panel borders with a 02. Then to make the characters pop, I outline them using a 1.

Then it’s a waiting game. Either a few hours, or seventeen days… I never can remember how long the ink needs to dry. Let’s just say after an indeterminate period of time and drinking, it’s time to take the knead eraser to the bristol to clean off the pencils.

Once Erasy’s had her fun, I end up with a bristol board with a bunch of ink squiggles on it, which if you squint and if you’ve had enough Scotch, sorta looks decent.

At about this point, the scanner starts to get hungry. So, time to feed it. The strip’s panel borders are sized exactly to the scanner’s “hot” zone — a technical term I just made up now for the actual scanning surface or a scanner, in this case about a centimeter in from the edge of the glass all around — which means I can scan an entire three-panel strip at one time. No need for multiple scans.

I import the strip through Photoshop CS3.

Import settings are straightforward black and white, six hundred dpi.

Inside Photoshop, I rotate, clean up any stray lines with the eraser, crop it down to the borders, then export it into a GIF. That’s it for Photoshop.

Illustrator CS3 is next. I’ve got a template for Arkham Polytech strips, so it’s a simple matter of asking Illustrator to open a new doc from the template, something which it rarely complains about. The template’s all set up for a strip 920 by 350, with pre-drawn borders on the next to top layer, and a copyright slug on the top-most level.

With the template open, I “place” the gif of the strip. Placing keeps the gif at its original size, which is important for capturing details when I turn it into a vector.

Now here’s where the magic happens. I do a Live Trace of the gif — transforming the gif into a vector.

This does a whole bunch of neat things for me: Once it’s a vector, it’s easily scalable, and ready for any future DPI I want; Using custom Live Trace settings, the lines are smoothed out just a tad, somewhat compensating for minor (okay, some might argue major) defects in my art; and last, it makes it dead easy to color (when using the Live Trace “Ignore White” setting to turn white transparent, and Live Paint).

More Live stuff. This time, Live Paint, which essentially lets me paint fill any bounded area in the vector just by clicking. (Unlike Photoshop’s Fill, it doesn’t leave white alias lines when filling — which I’m sure there’s a way around, but Live Paint is just plain easier.)

I use a custom saved palette that has the skin colors and clothes colors for the guys, and live paint away. For the stuff Live Paint can’t color easily — or quickly — I just create vectors and slap them on a layer under the strip.

Once the color’s all set, I scale the strip down to the output template size, putting the strip behind the pre-drawn panel borders (which are the same proportion as the hand-drawn borders).

Then it’s time for words. The words I copy-and-paste from Word, using 11 pt CCBlahBlahBlah for the font in their own layer. I chunk the sentences into shape, place them, then put the word balloons in, using the vector tools. I vacillate between no balloons, rounded-corner balloons, and oval balloons. Don’t know why. Will continue to do so.

The strip’s pretty much complete at this point. I, Erasy, Sandow, and D’argo do a quick read through and visual check for errors, then I change the copyright date to reflect the day I’ll be publishing it, and export to a final GIF. I save the Illustrator file for archiving, and since I usually do the digital portion of the process on Sunday mornings, down only a half liter of Scotch in celebration.

The final step is showing it to the wife, and her chuckling politely at it and patronizingly at me.

Anyway, that’s how I make a webcomic. Your mileage may vary. And probably turn out a lot better.

- JIGreco