By Jason Thibault

Expanding on our most popular blog, BUILD YOUR OWN COMIC EMPIRE , I decided to give you another billion links to follow broken down by category. All links are in BLUE.

COMIC BOOK WRITING

In my first extensive blog on writing, A FEW THOUGHTS ON COMICS WRITING, we covered a lot of books on comic scripting and an awesome discussion followed in the comments.

But there are a great many places online to go as well.

Mandatory Online columns for writing would include Dirk Manning's Write or Wrong column over at Newsarama.com, which has 20 essays archived on his adventures in the comic biz. He covers an incredible variety of topics that YOU want to know about. Check it out and visit his MySpace Page and add him. He's good people.

Steven Grant has 3 decades of knowledge on both the comic industry and the art of writing. He distills that into his weekly column. Permanent Damage is a mandatory visit every Wednesday at comicbookresources.com.

There are a variety of free comic scripts to be found on the internet written by your favs.

Brian M. Bendis script for POWERS VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 is HERE.  

There are Alan Moore Script excerpts for Big Numbers and Killing Joke.

Warren Ellis has three for download HERE.

And finally Dwayne McDuffie has a pile of them over HERE.

That's a lot of writing and different techniques to study.

ARTISTS

For all of you artists out there and anyone else interested in the creative process, there are several pros that have work blogs up and running. These are incredible for anyone wanting to peek behind the curtains of the masters. Artists who keep up regular blogs include Tim Bradstreet, brilliant cover artist James Jean, Sean Phillips and Dave Sim.

You should also head on over to Splash Page Art to eyeball hundreds of original pages. There is some incredibly beautiful work on display there minus the lettering and colors. It'll give you a look at some of your favorite comic book art in the raw.

COMIC BOOK COLORING

I don't know much about coloring but if you're seeking out more knowledge you can look over the tutorials that I found HERE and HERE. That's where I'd start.

This little story on Richard Isanove was also very informative.

COMIC BOOK LETTERING

Next we turn to the neglected art of comic book lettering. We do all of our lettering digitally at Op Wound after scanning in the artwork. Hand-lettering is an amazing (and ulcer-inducing) art form but ultimately 97% of comics are lettered digitally.

You need to go read this interview with one of the best letterers in the field, Todd Klein.

There are free comic book fonts online. You can  download Larry Young's free font. It's pretty sweet. Just make sure to give him credit for it if you use it. Or buy one of his books.

We buy and use pro lettering fonts created by Comicraft. I wait throughout the year for sales as I'm a subscriber of their Balloon Tales e-newsletter and get killer deals and useful tips that way.

BLAMBOT is the other one-stop lettering shop . They also have some free word balloons and fonts to get you started.

And there is A LOT more comic book lettering links HERE.

This book is the best 10 bucks you could spend and there are no others quite like it.
Comic Book Lettering: The Comicraft Way (Paperback) by Richard Starkings (Author), Patricia Ann Roshell.

GETTING THE WORD OUT

You might have already grabbed a membership at webcomicsnation.

You should definitely join up with the ComicSpace community for fans and creators. 11,000+ members and growing.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and going to any of these places will lead you to hundreds of other sites. We'll revisit this in a couple of months as Optimum Wound nears the publishing phase. Knowledge is power.

-Jay