December Sun – A Web Comic

I wanted to share this page from one of my old notebooks. I have two systems that I use to creating notebooks of December Sun ideas. Some are just straight written text, with few random illustrations. I’ve got quite a few notebooks stacked around that describe characters, story ideas and concepts, locations, etc. Then some notebooks are all built around visuals and sequential narrative. The page included here is an example: with battles and fight scenes, I draw most all of these out with minimal dialog in notebooks, to get an idea of pacing and breakdown of how the scenes will unfold.

In it’s most elemental form, these visual notebooks are the kind of thing that I used to draw when I was young, but the creation process was a lot different: back then, I drew first and just let the story unfold from the artwork. It was a much more interesting process, but the stories often left something to be desired.

These days though, time is so limited that I often just resort to keeping notebooks of written ideas, and I’ll just down themes and ideas that I want to pursue. I’ve also noticed that, even if I write out an elaborate path in some of these notebooks, whether or not I use the ideas if a completely different matter. I was taking the train home from Chicago once, about 5 years ago, and I had written out a detailed tapestry of story ideas that would take place. But looking back now, I skipped most of the ideas, or bypassed them for a future run (I had an arc of stories set to a tight 12-issue run, but I gave that idea up.)

Anyhow, just rambling about some of the creation process.