After waiting, waiting and then waiting a little bit more, writer Ryan Garcia is finally able to see his comic book script come to life. But what’s the next step in the process and how will he feel about what his artist has produced?! We find out in The Garcia Method: Page Sketches and Rethinking Your Script.

The next step after character designs is for your artist to produce rough sketches of the page layouts.  Here is where your comic book will truly start to take shape and where the transition from your printed page to artwork begins.  It can also be a shocking experience.

The editor on my project, Fallen, is a very wise man named Rob Levin.  When I first received the rough sketches for the Fallen pages he said I would probably have one of three reactions:

1. Wow, that’s exactly what I imagined!

2. Oh my god, what did he draw?  That’s not what I wrote!  Wait, is that what I wrote?  What the heck did I write there?

3. That’s not what was in my head.  Because it’s way better.

With those reactions pre-wired I opened the sketches and had exactly the three reactions described.  Either Rob has impressive Inception-like mental implant abilities or those are the standard three reactions any writer will have upon seeing sketches.

My biggest surprise was that the least interesting reaction was the first one.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to see a drawing of something you’ve written–especially if you can’t draw in the first place.  It’s one thing to meet your characters during the design phase after they’ve lived in your head for so long; it’s quite another thing to see those characters in action on the page.  But the pages that were as I imagined were just that–as I imagined.  The other reactions were far more challenging and interesting.

My artist, Jose Holder, has more experience drawing comic books than I do writing them.  So Jose was given free reign to make changes to have the story flow better visually.  Sometimes this meant combining multiple panels into one.  Sometimes it meant chopping a panel into two or three.  Perspectives on a panel may have hidden a detail called out in the script or revealed something I hadn’t written.

Ultimately I realized that reactions two and three were really the same thing: an opportunity to revisit the script and see if the art needed to change or if the art was now making the story better.  Nine times out of ten the art was making it better and I had a chance to revise the script to accommodate the new direction.  The other time ended up being a note back that the panels or page probably needed to be closer to the script for an important reason.

And then there was a new reaction, a heretofore undiscovered fourth reaction that even The Amazing Rob could not predict (or he totally did and just didn’t tell me, leading me into a false sense of learning something just so I try a totally lame crane technique and he sweeps my leg at the comic writing tournament).  That new reaction: oh, this page doesn’t work at all.  Because it had been drawn as written but it stuck out like a bad Karate Kid parenthetical analogy.  That page was completely rewritten, but we’ll talk about re-writes later.

If you’re taking this journey without an editor, here are a few things to look out for on those page sketches.

• Panel transitions.  Think about the action between each panel.  This can be hard to do when you know where the action came from and where it’s heading, but do take the time to look at the characters and objects.  How did that arm go from back there to up here?  Where did that door go?  Some of these questions may be a product of the rough sketch, but it’s worth thinking about now before inking begins.

• Visual flow of the text.  Some panels have more text than others but you won’t see the text in a rough sketch at this time.  So you’ll have to think about where the text may go and will it interfere with the visual flow of the page.  Can the final box/bubble be put in a place so your reader’s eyes will head to the next panel or will they jump a few panels ahead?

• Try to visualize more than one panel.  It’s easy for you as a writer to focus on a single panel at a time.  But be aware when something in one panel might blend with another.  A leg in one panel may match the angle of a steel beam in another so that it looks like the same line.  Those kind of awkward transitions are easy to fix at this stage.

After you’ve reviewed the rough sketches of your project’s pages, it’s time for the artist to get to inking.  Which also means you’ll get to do a bit more waiting.  And then a lot more re-writing.

Ryan Garcia (@SoMeDellLawyer) is a social media lawyer, professor, and podcaster (GabbingGeek.com).  He thinks you’re the best around and nothing’s ever gonna keep you down.