2. The Making of a Comic: 'Burn the Breeze' with Jen Hickman
Artist of LONELY RECEIVER fame regales tales of thumbnails and inks!
Howdy Brave Being,
Welcome to the first of hopefully many interviews with my comic-book industry collaborators and then some!
First up is Jen Hickman, artist of TEST and the futuristic tech dystopia LONELY RECEIVER! I found myself instantly enraptured with Jen’s art. From their depth and dynamism to their offbeat limited color palettes, Jen makes the world they help build all the more vivid.
Earlier this year, I asked Jen to join me on a pitch for the Western anthology OFF INTO THE SUNSET, curated by Brentt Harshman. Jen got really excited about the comic, entitled BURN THE BREEZE, especially the protagonist’s cybernetic, retractable gun arm. I mean, who wouldn’t?!
After our short comic (6 pages only!) was accepted, we got to work, promoting the heck out of OITS since it was headed to Kickstarter’s funding platform—famous for funding comics and indie projects. With the whole OITS team (~55 people) telling everyone they knew about the book, it was successfully funded on Kickstarter in May of this year. Yeehaw! Then Jen put pen to paper, or rather stylus to screen! They’ve sent me every part of the their process and throughout, added subtle and prominent details that have leveled up the emotional storytelling of our short story.
That brings us up to date, and now Jen has joined me to walk us through their artistic process from thumbnails to inks. Let’s giddy-up and go!
Brittany Matter: What's your go-to first step when drawing a new comic?
Jen Hickman: The Jen Process!
Breaking down the massive undertaking that is drawing a comic into smaller steps is the only way I could ever conceptualize getting it done. You don't eat a cake all at once—or at least, if you do, you might cut it into slices, then bites.
The first step is, always, to get a sense of the visual playground. Sometimes this means going through a writer's Pinterest board, finding my own reference images, or backreading and bookmarking existing work. This is also when I start to suss out what kind of vocabulary I will need—will there be lots of textures that will need to read? Fiddly tech stuff? More mood or more micro-expressions?
You don't eat a cake all at once—or at least, if you do, you might cut it into slices, then bites.
BM: How do you go about tackling character design?
JH: From there I'll do character design, which I love in theory but it's always mildly annoying in practice. I do a lot of the design work mentally while I'm gathering reference, and I tend to iterate as I go and discard what isn't working, so at the end of a long and involved process it's a little disappointing to just have a new character's turn-around. You don't eat a cake all at once—or at least, if you do, you might cut it into slices, then bites.
I think about a lot of very standard stuff. Silhouette. Shape language. Motifs. Here's the cast from BURN THE BREEZE:
For this story, I wanted to do a little symbolic/subconscious symbol stuff. I wanted circles for our protag (greyed out) and her sister Silks, crossing-shapes/Xs for James, and a sort of 'all-encompassing' vibe for Muldoon.
From there, my process looks pretty much the same as most artists working right now. Here's page one from BURN THE BREEZE, taken from thumbnail to inks (colors to come!)
When I thumbnail I'm doing all the broad strokes: page layout, shot calls, framing, black placement—flow. If I'm working with a writer who describes any of those things, I'll prioritize that until the minute when I don't think it's working for where the page has ended up, and I lose zero sleep over that. I've talked to artists who get really stressed over deviating from the script, and I've talked to writers who worry endlessly about providing too much or too little of these visual broad strokes. I don't know, maybe I'm oversimplifying, but for me all of those do or don't choices just come down to what will make the better comic. If a change from the script will clarify the action, do it! If describing the black placement will result in a cool pay-off later, do it!
At some point I'll probably throw my hands up and just ink from my thumbs.
Roughs are for construction: perspective grids, getting the anatomy articulated, adjusting whatever needs adjusting from the thumbs, and zapping tangents. Right now I think my roughs/pencils are obnoxiously tight and I can tell because sometimes I get to inks and find myself literally tracing, or preferring a line from the pencils over whatever I've inked. At some point I'll probably throw my hands up and just ink from my thumbs.
Inking is where it all comes together, so that's always exciting. It's when I go back to thinking about black placement and flow, and re-ink faces like three times each because digital work is dangerous for perfectionists.
BM: What about your process has changed/evolved over time?
JH: I haven't changed these steps since art school, but they have been more or less involved over the years. My thumbnails used to be much messier, and my pencils too. I used to flip, almost at random, which steps were done traditionally and which digitally. Now I only work digitally, more for time's sake than anything else. But I do flip between my stationary tablet and my travel-friendly iPad as needed, and so far I don't think anyone can tell which device was used to create.
BM: What else are you working on?
JH: Oh, but for the current book I'm drawing (Buzzing, written by Samuel Sattin, out from Little Brown...late 2022?) I am actually inking from my thumbnails when it seems doable. So my pencils look bizarre, with blown-up thumbnails and their fully executed black placement intermingled with careful outline-only pencils!
Honestly, what's awesome about making comics is that you can have such simple, rigid steps and still make five million fresh and interesting creative choices within them. It's one of the reasons, for me, that this shit never gets old!
BM: How does your artistic process change when writing your own comic vs. drawing a comic with collaborators?
JH: I mostly work with writers, and I love collaboration, but I do also write for myself and the steps are the same there as well. However, when I write for myself I have the bad habit of adding panels to a page with reckless abandon at any stage of the process. I have an adult comic wrapping up at Filthy Figments right now, called 'A Triangle Is the Strongest Shape' and the amount of times a 5-panel page has turned into 8 panels is staggering. That's partially, though, because I think a lot about pacing and the passage of time with my adult comics so I can very easily convince myself that another aspect-to-aspect panel is a great idea.
Honestly, what's awesome about making comics is that you can have such simple, rigid steps and still make five million fresh and interesting creative choices within them. It's one of the reasons, for me, that this shit never gets old!
BM: I have to agree with you, Jen! See more of Jen’s work here and on Patreon! Don’t forget to check out their next series with Samuel Sattin, the middle-grade graphic novel, BUZZING!
If you missed the OITS Kickstarter, never fear, there’ll be an online store set up in the near-ish future where you can pick it up and read our story with a boatload of talent and western-inspired root-tootin’ tales! Link coming soon!
Thanks for joining us for this inaugural The Making of a Comic series! Stay tuned for our next guest creator, Dailen Ogden, and don’t hesitate to comment on this post, I’d love to hear from ya!