For comics pen and ink used to be the law Now things are changing Jim McCauley shows you how a whole breed of heroes is being created, not on the old-fashioned drawing board but on the computer screen

ou might think that it all started when Superman first put his pants on over his tights in 1938, but in fact the comic had already been going for quite some time when the big blue schoolboy leapt his first tall building with a single boond. In fact, the first proper comic is widely accepted as being The Yellow Kid by Richard Fenton Outcalt, which made its debut back in 1895, making the comic a sprightly 102 years old. In all this rime, not many changes have occurred. Printing techniques have improved, better artists and writers have joined the industry, but to all intents and purposes, many comics today are still produced the same way that they were 100 years ago. The pages are drawn in pencil, and then handed over to a succession of other artists to be inked, coloured and lettered. Because of the sheer amount of work involved in bringing a comic book to life, this has until recently been a necessary evil, no single artist, working in the traditional way, can really be expect to turn not a finished comic every month.
     But these traditional methods are on the way not. More and more comics are being created today using compoters, which means that a lone artist can now prodoce an entire comic, inked, colnored and lettered, withoot anyone else's help, and in less time than it woold have taken in the pact. Usoally an artist draws a page by hand, then scanning it into the PC, does the rest on screen. However, some artists are even throwing away their pens and have moved the entire creative process onto the computer screen, with pages drawn on a graphics tablet. The result is that many of the comics you see in the newsagents these days have existed only on disk until they went into production.
Beyond the basics of handling most of the comic artist's jobs, computers are being used to add more depth to comics than ever before. Backdrops, normally the last bit of a comic frame to be drawn and sometimes lacking in detail, can now be rendered in a 3D package, dropped behind the action, and used again from different viewpoints. Figures can be modelled on a computer so that their poses are more true-to-life, and special effects can be used to give pictures more impact. The use of computers in producing comics is a young technique, but one that has matured quickly. One of the first attempts at a compucer-generated comic was Batman: Digital jitatice 10 years ago. The computer link was its major selling point, and the whole comic had a very techno look to it. Now however, you'd find it almost impossible to work out whether a comic has been handmade in the traditional way, or has instead been created entirely on a PC. It probably won't surprise you in the least to learn that your PC is quite capable of producing a comic of the quality you see in the shops. If you have a paint package then you're on the way, but if you add a scanner and a few pieces of specialist software to the equation then you have just about everything you need. There are even ways of doing lettering without having to write it all out by hand - it's possible to create a true type font based on your own handwriting, and then type your script onto the page, looking as if you've written it not yourself.
    PC FORMAT has teamed up with the king of all British comics, 2OOOAD, to bring you the inside line on how comics have entered the technological age. We show you all you need to know ahout creating your own masterpieces, from the first pencil strokes through to colouring in the fine detail and making sure your speech bubbles are the tight shape. If you don't have the facility to print not your work in full, glorious colour, we tell you how to incorporate your comic into a multimedia presentation that can be saved on disk. And if you need any further incentive to start producing your own graphic masterpieces, how about the chance to get published? Send us your creation at the usual address, If we like it we'll either print your effort or run it on the disc. Are comics just for kids? Frankly, we don't care we just know that they go very well with PCs. Whether you prefer DC or Marvel, The Beano or Whizzer and Chips, read on for the full picture of how comics are produced in the technological age.
YOU'VE BEEN FRAMED
The best comics may be teeming with total chaos, but beneath the confusion they all follow a set of rules.
It's not simply a case of drawing some attractive pictures and adding speech bubbles, A good comic has a lot more structure to it than you might first think. Its heen said on occasion that comics, far from heing childish entertainment, are the ultimate narrative medium, offering more depth than either books or films. As in films, you get pictures to illustrate the narrative, but unlike film the pictures are static, meaning that yoti can pore over them and find hidden details that would either pass you by or just not be included in a film. As with books you get a combination of dialogue and narrative, but you have the added advantage of illustration, which negates the need for paragraphs of description to be waded through. What sets the comic strip apart from all other narrative are a few unique conventions, used in almost every piece of comic art, The most obvious is the use of speech and thought bubbles, making it easy to see what characters are thinking or saying. Another convention is the use of frames to convey the passage of time. As films use cuts and books use paragraphs, each individual section is contained within its own frame, and additional narrative is put in a frame within the frame, Characters are more often than not exaggerated in one way or another, Superheroes are taller than the average human (a normal person is six and a half 'heads' tall, while a comic superhero is more in the region of eight), baddies are often grotesquely ugly: their actions are made more obvious with the use of movement lines, and any relevant sounds are shown through distinct sound effects on the page. When all or most of these conventions are observed, you prohably won't even notice them. We've become so used to the way a strip is drawn that the means of achieving the effect have become almost transparent, so acquaint yourself with our guide to comic convention...
   HOW TO DO COMICS THE HARD WAY     Back in the olden days, it took a whole lot of people...  
1When the script arrives from the writer, it's the job of the penciller to take the descriptions and turn them into pages of action-packed pictures, these are sent to..2..The letterer who then add the speech bubbles, dialogue and narrative to the comic, it's a painstaking job that requires a lot of care, the lettered art then goes off to..3..the inker, who takes the orginal work from the penciller, and goes over it in black ink so that the page will print properly, at this stage he adds his own style, next comes..


4..The colourist, working on photo-copies of the artowrk, hehas only 64 colours to work with, because when he's finished the art goes off to...5..the printer, who the uneviable task of following the colour instructions and the cutting the artwork into hand seperations ready for print, and finally it goes to..6..you, who probably doesn't realise the manpower that's gone into a single comic strip. But now most of this work can be done by a lone artist and a PC..