Halo 3 comic update

After several posts about Gerry, I figure its time to go back to my usual incoherent rambling! Anyway, you may recall that I am writing a comic. Although I haven't finished yet, I thought that I would give you an update on my progress.

First off, I want to say that writing a comic is a lot harder than it looks!!

Before I even started, one of the first issues I encountered was that I had no idea about how to even start creating a comic. To get around this, I dug up some old comics to read so that I could get an idea on how to storyboard the comic itself. In particular, how to decide the frames, use speech, thought bubbles etc etc. During this process, I also managed to discover that Marvel actually allow you to read some of their old comics online. Very nice!

I also went to a couple of bookstores in my spare time to see if there were any books for prospective graphic artists. To my surprise, there is actually quite a large section of different books giving different advice. Anyway, I spent a short time just browsing some of these books - again to get an idea on how to structure my comic.

The second step in the process was for me to actually start storyboarding my comic. This is actually quite a difficult step. Although I had some ideas for how certain frames would look, I soon realised that I was very constricted by the fact that all the graphics had to come from screenshots. In the end, I went back into Halo 3 and replayed the video of my game several times while playing around with the camera so that I had an idea of the kind of pictures that I would be able to get for the comic.

After I had a rough storyboard of what I wanted, I came across another hurdle. I didn't have any good software to create the comic with! The problem is that I don't have Photoshop or an equivalently powerful photo editing software. The photo editor I use is just a free one which I downloaded off the internet. It was good enough for simple photo editing - but it was nowhere near good enough to create a comic with!

Now Photoshop is incredibly expensive and there was no way I was going to spring the money to buy it. So what were my options? Back to the old internet search!

Actually, I managed to find some really interesting tools used by professional artists. The most impressive one is probably the Wacom tablet - this is basically a giant screen which artists draw directly on and which then results in your drawing appearing on screen. Its a great idea as it means that artists can draw using a pen equivalent rather than trying to draw using a mouse (the tablet is also touch sensitive). Of course, these things are also expensive so not really suitable for me either.

The most realistic option I found was actually a little piece of software called Comic Book Creator. This looked to be perfect to my needs actually. It was a normal priced piece of software which was specially designed to help you create comics from photos! Its like they read my mind! I very eagerly downloaded the demo - or rather tried to. The problem is that I guess the company is a very small company and only has limited bandwidth. It took me 20 hours to download the demo and after all that, when I tried to install, I got an error message saying that the file was corrupted.
:(

Suffice to say, this didn't give me a whole lot of confidence in their product. Also, upon further reflection, I wasn't really sure whether I was going to continue making comics on an ongoing basis so decided that it probably wasn't that good an idea to buy a software solution.

Which dumped me back to square one - how was I going to actually create my comic?

In the end, I put all the screenshots I had onto a flash drive and took them into work so that I could use Powerpoint on my work PC. Thats right! I'm creating a comic using Powerpoint using my work PC during my spare time (lunchtime and evenings before I go home). Now you know why progress is so slow!

Of course, another problem showed up as soon as I started creating the actual comic. The problem was that some of my screenshots didn't fit within the storyboard that I initially created. This resulted in me either amending the storyboard or going back into Halo 3 to retake some of the pictures.

Wow - long post! Don't worry - almost done now!

Anyway, I have now finally finished the storyboard portion of the comic and will move onto text (which incidentally brings up another issue of which font to use!). At this point, I thought I would share a couple of pages from my upcoming comic with you. Enjoy the preview!