Process

Work in progress!

I’ve been making comics (print and web) for a little over a decade, and if you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know how much I value sharing my creative process. Since late 2018, I’ve made it a point to document almost every part of the development of Alexander, for reasons regarding personal archival and public education. Hopefully this documentation proves useful for anyone out there interested in the process of storytelling in the comics medium!

Twitter Thread Documenting the Process (link)

The original thread in which I live-tweeted the process of writing, illustrating and researching the comic before the existence of this website, since 2019.

Creating the Title (link)

How I came up with the title and did the art for it.

Making a Handwritten Font (link)

The comic uses a font based on a variant of my handwriting. Here’s how I did it.

Designing Alexander (link)

The process behind Alexander's character design.

Illustrating the Original Prologue (link)

In September 2019 I published a proto version of the official prologue.

How Do They Drink From a Kylix? (link)

A case study of one part of my live research process, and a great example of how material culture research tortures visual artists in ways prose writers do not have to deal with. (Twitter version of this can be found here:

Art Directing Alexander (link)

An early behind-the-scenes on determining the comic’s art direction.

The Onion Method: A Story Outline Method (link)

A guide describing my homemade method of creating story outlines, based on the alternating interactions between two principles, Theme and Character. I initially wrote this for graphic novels (since that’s my primary medium), though apparently the Onion Method is transferable to other forms of fiction writing.

The Onion Method: Art Directing a Graphic Novel (link)

The second stage of the Onion Method, detailing how I decide on an art direction based on a story outline.

From The Blog (link)

I’ve been writing scattered essays about the comic in my artist blog for a while, mostly personal rambling over the hugeness of working on a story like this and my thoughts on craft. Despite their disparity, a lot of what I write, both here and on the blog, connect together and somehow end up as a single body of work (as you can tell even in this page, where I am linking to separate posts I’ve made online). If you are interested in the nitty gritty of process, and my process specifically, then check out my blog!

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