barry kitson

http://www.barrykitson.com/



barry kitson did a talk at our college last year and said to me "keep in touch luke" well i've tried through his website and that but i guess he must be a busy man on the comic making/ convention going fronts because he's never got back to me. anyways he's a bit of a western comics super star and he gave some great advice when he turned up at our college to give a presentation. one piece in particular bears important relevance to my project, he told us all the industry way of making comics so i'm all clued up about the avarage working pace and turnaround and all that. cool.

he says that the pencils guy is given a 'treatment' which is like a script to make his pencil art with and he'll often start by making a rough guide of his layout panels action scenes and everything that he should get approved then everyone knows whats going on. then he makes the pencil art and sends it to the inker who using the pencil work as a guide to ink the piece and then send it to the colourist who colours it in si they work as a sort of 4 man team.

often times though one person does two jobs like pencils and inks or inks and colours and kitson even told us that what with inks being done a lot on computer now theres much less call for inkers as a job, so its most common for 2 to 3 people to be working on a comic.

he also says the gestation period for the comic varies wildly between different artists, projects and companies but most of the mainstream western comics come out very frequently and require a lot of hours of work to keep up with deadlines. there are other comics that take a long time to make and are very beautiful to flick through but theres less money in them obviously because there is less product to sell.

cool stuff, i know how its done 'the kitson way' so i'm going to mimic those professional working practices, only assuming all the roles so technically in real world practices a 20 page comic being made by 2 people might take 2 weeks from start to printed and distributed so technically i should be taking a similar length of time because theres half a comic to make and only me doing it. but to be honest i dont see it happening that quickly, i've never made a comic before, i'm not working with an existing story, i've got loads of reading to get through and learn so i can do a good job of it and i'm not connected to any printing companies that'll turn my product around at the snap of my fingers.

this'll be a slow and ponderous process because its about learning to do it as much as actually doing it and the deadlines not till ages away so i can plan out my time effectively to hopefully make something worth while.