I get asked a lot of questions by other artists, and I in turn ask a lot of questions of artists I like, about the process of creating a page. It's a huge weird mystery that I am always trying to crack, but it's also just a whole lot of fun to see inside someone else's brain for a minute and see through their eyes when they approached the page. It helps me to maybe see my own pages a little differently the next time, and to hopefully grow a bit as an artist and a storyteller.
So, in that spirit, I thought I'd kind of walk through a page of the current issue of Daredevil, from start to finish, and talk about every part of the process in detail. Feel free to chime in with comments about your own wonderfully funky ways of tackling the dreaded Blank Page.
I'm lucky that I get to work with one of the best comics writers in a generation that has seen some of the best writing to ever appear in comics. But that doesn't stop me from butting heads with Brubaker on a regular basis. :) This page, however, was an exception – he saw the pacing and movement and timing of the page exactly as I did. I would have loved to have picked a more complicated page, but this one is the only one in the issue that doesn't contain obvious spoilers.
This page had some challenges that were kinda sneaky. I had to introduce a new (old) character: The Ox. I had to make him instantly recognizable, but at the same time make him fit in stylistically with the book. He's a pretty cartoony character, so that was tough.
Secondly, we're reintroducing Turk, who hasn't been seen since Matt busted out of prison. He looks differently from the last time I drew him, since he's out of prison and back on the street. Different clothes, different hair.... No two artists have ever drawn him exactly the same way – shoot, I think he was even kind of Middle-Eastern in the Bendis run! - so I'm kind of having to establish a look for him now as if he's a brand new character.
And finally, I had to set a scene that is never really explained, and at the same time make it all look dramatic and interesting. This was actually the easiest part, since Ed's description of the place is so flawless, and we've all seen these warehouses in every movie and tv show and comic book. And it was easy to make it look cool because that kind of setting just lends itself to lots of dramatic lighting.and dark shadows.
STEP 1: SCRIPT AND LAYOUT 
My first task is to kind of start seeing this scene play out like a little movie in my head. I try to see it from a variety of angles, try to see and hear the characters acting, and then kind of pick out the angles for the various beats of dialogue. Like an editor saying "We'll use camera one for the first panel, then camera four for the second panel." And so on. At this point, the possibilities for the layout kind of start to appear in my head, and I choose angles that will fit well with certain panel shapes and sizes. I'll maybe decide at this point that there need to be some extra panels added by breaking up the dialogue into more beats. It's only when I've gotten this far along that I start putting pencil to paper, jotting down notes, mostly. I don't do much drawing, unless I have to work out some acrobatic or awkward pose or action. Mostly it's the stuff you see in the margins here - "C/U (close-up) T (Turk)" or "C/U O (Ox.)". Stuff like that.
Usually there's a lot more to this than you see here. Often there are various brackets over different parts of the script, with notes for alternate layouts and angles....breaking up the dialogue into different panels.... It can take a while, and sometimes I get stuck on just one possibility – usually a BAD one – and I can't get past it and it can be VERY frustrating. This page, however, was a joy....it was one of the rare times that I knew what I wanted to do in the first try.
So, after jotting down my minimal notes, the next step for me is to make thumbnail sketches of the layouts, with little coded notes in the boxes to tell me what's there. On the back of the script pages, I print out a page that I use just for layouts and breakdowns, so that it's right there, and I use those small boxes for the thumbnails.
I might notice, just by looking at these, that things are out of balance somehow, or might be a tight squeeze for space. I try to do as many possibible solutions as I can think of, just to look at all the choices and have them there in front of me. Sometimes there can be five or six choices that I can't decide between, sometimes only two or three. And on VERY rare occassions, the solution just jumps out at me right away.
NEXT: Breakdowns