With the potential to utilize panels, characters, word balloons, captions and an unlimited special effects budget, the comic feature is a unique vehicle for humor and self-expression.
The lead horse that guides and helps to pull your comic strip vehicle along is the concept. Be careful how you select and treat your lead horse, because if it comes up lame, your vehicle will almost certainly slip off the narrow mountain road and crash onto the craggy rocks below.
There are two types of boundaries: Those that exist in the form, and those you create in the cartoon universe of your own design.
It is important to understand the boundaries that exist, to keep abreast of how the boundaries change and, in order to effectively test them, to know where the walls are thick and strong or thin and penetrable.
Boundaries may be viewed as restrictions on creative freedom or the outermost extremities of a sandbox. While I prefer the latter, take your choice. Either way, you'll have lots of company.
There are two ways to get a syndicate editor's attention.
First, jump up and down, wave your arms, drop your pants and do anything else you can think of to offend him. This won't get you anywhere - except possibly out the door - but it will get his attention.
Second, you can show him a commercially viable comic feature that is unlike any comic feature he's seen before. Not only will this get an editor's attention, but it will also sustain his attention, and this should be your goal.
Like book manuscripts, film scripts, and TV scripts, your presentation needs to be as plain vanilla as possible. This allows the syndicate editor the opportunity to look through submission after submission and concentrate on the material without being distracted.
If you want to waste your time and money on an expensive presentation, you are welcome to do so, but it will not help you syndicate your strip. In fact, if your presentation is more elaborate and well executed than your feature - and I've seen this more times that I can count - you may want to consider a career in promotion or advertising, since that's the area in which you seem to be more inspired.
Draw your comic feature so that it will cleanly reproduce at the size and proportion of a comic feature. I've seen comic strips drawn in pencil, stacked two on two on an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch sheet of paper and colored with crayon.
Your writing needs to stay on the course of communicating the story or the point you're attempting to make. If you step off this particular road you will most certainly be standing in quicksand. Since this is your story or gag, and since it's a road of your own design, you wouldn't think it would be so hard to stay the course, but it is.
Your drawing needs to be executed from a single vision. For example, unless you've got a reason, don't put a two-dimensional face on a three-dimensional body in a two-dimensional room with three-dimensional furniture. If your characters and world are two-dimensional, they should stay two-dimensional.
If you've created two-dimensional characters but need to execute them in a three-dimensional manner to show actions, then you need to seriously reconsider your character design.
The visual filter a cartoon world is viewed through is what gives the cartoon world life. If the filter is flawed, the world is flawed and lifeless.
Your lettering should be uncluttered, easy to read and consistent in its interpretation of the alphabet. Lettering, letter spacing and word spacing should be practiced over and over and over.
Your balloon placement should be clean and unobtrusive. If you need to have two separate balloon pointers crossing one another, you should have a better reason than "that was the easiest way to do it."
return to KWFSB mainpage