Ah, the idea's the thing. You can't actively go looking for ideas, they're like the Spanish Inquisition; they strike when you least expect it. Unfortunately this usually means months of stomping around going 'what made me think I can write? I'll never have another idea ever again.' And then out of the blue, it hits me, so then I spend a feverish week or two coming up with the plots for each issue of the new series. After that creative burst is over I go and have a lie down, and refuse to come up with another idea for the next couple of years.As someone (possibly me) once said, an idea is just an idea, but two ideas combined equals a story. Or two ideas, I forget. I always favour stories that have more than one central idea, as in Angel Nebula where the main themes were cloning and the alien from Mars. Frontiers also has two seemingly unrelated aspects, the stuff with the planet and the Earth telepaths, which will obviously become intertwined by the end. I try to employ this technique in pretty much every story, for instance Departure at first seems to be a simple tale of an asteroid miner's discovery, but as we find out, is more about his obsession with a photo he carries.
I write scene by scene, sometimes in sequence, sometimes not, and then usually write down the scenes I have in order, together with the estimated page length of each. Then I can get an idea of the overall shape of the issue, whether it's well balanced, how long it's going to be, and if I've missed anything out or need to trim anything. Here's an example from Frontiers #2:
A much undervalued stage in the creative process. For thumbnails I like to divide an A4 page into quarters, giving you 4 pages. Then I just draw the script out, scene by scene. I sometimes write notes to myself, so I can remember what I was aiming for, for example if I need to reference a scene from a previous issue. Thumbnails are great for showing up problems with the script, i.e. sometimes you find one panel would work better split into two, or vice versa. After looking at the thumbnails of this Frontiers scene here, I decided to add a silent panel inbetween panels 2 and 3. I was also going for a theme of mundanity and repetition in this story, so I switched panel 1 to the same viewpoint as the next three. Panel 6 obviously belonged on the next page, so I sketched a grid to work out the new layout. I often do this, especially when it's a complex layout. The finished pages are shown in the next section.
After you've done all that, it's just a matter of transferring the essence of the thumbnails onto a sheet of A3 paper. Yeah right. This stage is the fun part when it's going well, or months of drudgery when it's not. My penciling tools of the trade are a propelling pencil, Mars eraser and a ruler. As I'm inking myself I do fairly rough pencils to save time, as I often fill in background detail at the inks stage. For inking these days I mainly use a Pentel Brush Pen, which gives you the varied line of a brush without all of the faffing around. For more technical lines I'll use any old cheap Fineliners, and a bingo pen for filling in blacks (not for detail ala John Byrne).
When that's all done it's a matter of cutting and pasting any repeat panels (usually with the aid of PhotoShop), then the lettering on Illustrator, and then correcting my numerous mistakes with a Tippex pen. A graphics tablet comes in very handy at this stage. By and large I still try to use traditional methods as much as possible, although the computer is starting to creep in to every aspect of production. Once I've got my A4 print copies ready, it's finally time to take them down the printers and erm, print em. Then I breathe a huge sigh of relief before getting stuck straight into the next issue.