Styling Megalomania

Settling on a style for the comic book was an interesting challenge. It was originally written to be a TV series, so I had a whole different stylistic playbook in mind. For one, I was planning on a very heavily sound designed and music driven show. Losing that audio component was not something I really wanted, and I did still keep a love of music in Tucker’s character. At the end of the day, I ended up ripping the bandaid and trying to lean really heavily into something that was inspired by old-school comics, but with a look that invokes the feeling of drawing in the margins of your textbook. I know that a strong stylistic stance is still right for this story as it unfolds and, with each new page I draw, I’m confident that this was the right choice.

I did end up having to make a change, though, and I’m glad I did. The first iteration of the comic was made at a lower resolution of 300 dpi. Not terrible, but not great either. Most comics are published at 400. At the lower resolution, my linework had to be thicker, and much of the detail in the sketch was lost in the process. The other issue I ran into was, at that scale, my dots for shading were too big. They didn’t feel like shading but instead felt like they were supposed to be actual detail in the scene. Not ideal, and very distracting. To set them apart, I tried making them a lighter gray rather than the same black of the rest of the linework. That did a good job of setting the two apart, but it didn’t solve the strange screen door effect that the dots were causing.

With the resolution boosted, I was able to have much finer linework and smaller dots, but to improve the screen door effect and bring it all together, I hand-stipled the dots into a full sheet I can mask to do my shading. I filled a quarter of the page at each shading level, then copied and flipped and reversed to fill out the rest of the page. There are some points where the lines between the sections of dots can show, but I think it looks like a printing artifact and matches the style so I am happy with it.

I am also doing something fun with color. Old school comics used to be monochromic or two-toned, or at least they were very conservative with their use of color. I am paying homage to that by using my colors sparingly, as a way to indicate light sources and thematic significance. So far I think it’s working very well.

There is a strong possibility that the stylization of Megalomania will change as I progress through the issues, but I think we have started in a very well-anchored place. I will be streaming some artwork for this and my other projects on youtube, keep an eye on the discord for updates about that.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.