Even more lessons learned from editor Shelly Bond

More filth, more grammar...and more red editor's marks!

Hey all, I hope you’re having a happy holiday season and that all of your creative endeavors are taking shape no matter what phase of the process you are in! Today I want to share three more key lessons learned from the great Shelly Bond.

A couple of months ago, I had the great fortune of workshopping my original graphic novel, Major Thomás, with Bond. It was a wonderful, holistic experience that broke down every aspect of my project, from concept, to assets and branding, to script, to finished page review. Before our review session, she had e-mailed me high-level notes and a marked-up PDF. Bond also snail-mailed me something I’ll treasure forever: a fully printed out black-and-white ashcan copy of my book with all of her editor’s marks in glorious red ink. As a former journalist, I was back in familiar and nostalgic territory with this old-school approach. I carried that ashcan around with me for a couple of weeks as I made detailed notes for my creative team on almost every single page—art, colors, and lettering, sometimes only one tiny thing, sometimes a combo of all three things.

Line art by Serg Acuña , Colors by Raúl Angulo, red ink by Shelly Bond

Luckily, I’d had a primer to this approach by taking Bond’s 4-week, online course Filth & Grammar, which is opening up again in February 2023 and you can sign up for it here at the Off Register Press web site.

Now it’s time to drill into three super specific areas that really stood out to me in the one-to-one I had with Bond. These were some of the finer details of making a comic book that may seem obvious from a 30,000-foot view, but hard to spot when you are in the weeds of writing a script. For example, I felt I’d come a long way by asking artists to leave enough room for balloons and/or captions for any given panel that has more than one or two balloons, or that is a smaller panel on a page where space is tight, like a close-up or a two-shot of talking heads. So here are some gems that came into sharper focus under the critical microscope of a brilliant editing mind.

1. Readability of things like whisper balloons, quiet balloons, and words and names with accent marks and tildes.

   1. My book is littered with Spanish-language words with accent marks and tildes, including the titular character Major Thomás Muñoz. The key learning here is that the leading, the space between lines, needs to be ample enough where an accent mark or a tilde doesn’t get lost in the line above. With a project like mine, I would lose so much cultural flavor without enough headroom to make the intended impact of using Spanish-language words.

   2. This one may seem obvious, but the font size on a whisper balloon or quiet balloon still needs to be big enough to read for people of all ages. The whisper is easier to accomplish with the effect of a dotted line around the balloon, but a quiet balloon is a little trickier. Suffice it to say, I came to a good compromise with my talented lettering partner, Taylor Esposito.

      

      Logo by Tim Daniel (The Vault Comics)

2. Use of color to subdue and highlight. Admittedly, I hadn’t thought of incorporating this into my script, but I will going forward. Simply put, this is when you have a group of people in a panel, and you need your speaking characters (usually the main characters) to pop out. What the color artist can do is subtly dull out the colors of the background characters just a touch so that the speaking characters catch the eye. This can even be done in a two shot, where the speaking character is at risk of getting drowned out by an over-the-shoulder or an obstructed view. There was one page in particular where this made all the difference in the world and I’m glad to have partnered with the fabulous Fabi Marques on this particular color edit. Here’s a before image, and you’ll have to buy my book in 2023 to see the after version (cha-ching)! Line art by the great Mau Mora:

   

   Line art by Mau Mora, Colors by Fabi Marques

3. Adjacencies from a neighboring panel, creating weird optical illusions. This one is harder to explain, but sometimes a drawing in one panel just looks weird with the drawing in an adjacent panel. Imagine one panel where a character is sticking out their arm, and we can only see up to the elbow before the arm disappears into the panel border. Then in the next panel over we have an extreme close-up of a character’s ear. The result is what looks like an arm going into a giant ear. I found this topic the hardest challenge to overcome by far. As a writer, I’m struggling with how to express watch out for adjacencies in the script phase. It’s a toughie, but as a many-hats project manager, you can pay attention to detail in the thumbnail phase, and even that can be hard due to the very rough nature of thumbnails. Better yet, I’d encourage writers to hire an editor with a keen eye for all aspects of production!

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   I know I don’t post a lot due to a crazy busy schedule, and I hope you were able to take a nugget or two from this post. If nothing else, do check out Bond’s how-to books like, Filth & Grammar, or Hey Amateur! Better yet, sign up for her second interactive session of Filth via 4 Zoom classes, it is money well-spent for anyone craving that secret knowledge to level-up their comics skills no matter what artistic discipline they are bringing to the creative table. It is a phenomenal investment…and I hope to see you there! Or, you can always catch me online at my web site, or on any social media channel with the handle @omorales81. I use that handle for gaming, Substack, Discord, and just about anything else you can think of.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to share! Next time, I’ll reveal what I’ve learned from Scott Snyder’s Comics 101, available via his Best Jackett Press Substack.

Hail to the Victors! #GoBlue