66
Creating Comics
G
lenn Head was born 1958 in Morristown, New
Jersey, and grew up nearby. After graduating
high school, he attended the Cleveland Insti-
tute of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and the
School of Visual Arts, where he studied for three years
and was taught by, among others, Art Spiegelman, which
was an invaluable experience. Head studied the history of
comics and attended workshops in cartooning, which cov-
ered all the basics—writing, drawing, plotting, lettering,
and inking. He also learned about printing and distribu-
tion, and how to self-publish and get his work into stores.
Since leaving art school, Head’s comics and illustrations
have been published in various newspapers and
magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, the
New York Press, Screw magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine,
Walt Disney Magazine, the New Republic, and the
Village Voice. His work has also appeared in R. Crumb’s
Weirdo magazine.
In the 1990s, with fellow cartoonist Kaz, Head edited the
three issues of Fantagraphics’ comics anthology Snake
Eyes. Also with Fantagraphics, he put out three solo books:
Avenue D, and Guttersnipe 1 and 2.
Currently, Head edits and contributes to Fantagraphics’
Hotwire Comics, an anthology of new work by some of
today’s best cartoonists. Hotwire Vol. 1 was nominated for
the 2006 Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Anthology.
Glenn Head
67
Title: Booze/Drugs
Client: Hotwire Comics Vol. 2, 2008
Media: Brush and pen on paper, Photoshop
Creative Process
The art I make often requires various processes. For the two-
page spread “Booze/Drugs,” preliminary sketches of many
characters were done long before the piece was started. They
came wholesale from my imagination and personal life, rather
than any source material.
Once I’d completed many thumbnail studies, I chose several
characters that seemed to be interrelated. The characters
seemed to have a kind of high-energy, drugged-out craziness.
I knew these would work well together in a full-page piece.
Starting with a character in the lower right, I developed a
sweating, blinking, greasy-haired junkie character, a flying head
with a syringe in his tongue, swirling manically out of a garbage
can. (In drug lingo, someone like this is called a garbage head.)
Having developed this character and a background crack house
scene, the challenge was to develop an interesting composition.
With a drawing of this type, which is about a kind of visual
excitement and anarchy, there is still a need for control. In this
case, I achieved it by working out a cycle of energy. The motion
of the garbage-head character leads to the electrified female
lightning bolt character, which leads to the martini drinker,
whose whiskey bottle pours onto the tongue of the smashed,
swirling light bulb—whose trail leads to the man throwing it at
the garbage can lid.
What appears at first glance to be purely anarchic actu-
ally follows a pattern, a circular motion of psychotic behavior.
This approach was also used for the booze half of the piece.
In fact, the drawing here was intended as a counterpoint to
drugs. Here, in place of the garbage head is the boozehound
that comes flying out of the pages of the Alcoholics Anonymous
Big Book. Here again we see a cycle of bad behavior from the
swirling boozehound, to the other flying, peppy drunks, to the
cop smashing through a window—it’s a never-ending cycle of
drunken mayhem.
This picture shows a kind of duality, because the drinking
seems to be taking place not in a bar, but in an Alcoholics Anon-
ymous meeting. There seems to be a yin-yang involved here. On
the one hand the boozers are drunken, happy, crazy, and funny,
and yet the following morning seems to beckon. In this case it
seems that the cycle of bad behavior may be followed by an-
other cycle of slogan mongering, rule following, brainwashing,
and going-out-for-coffee fellowship. In fact, the bad behavior
and the recovery seem to be happening simultaneously, remind-
ing us that you can’t have one without the other.
Clenn Head
New York Press, Screw magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine,
Walt Disney Magazine, the New Republic, and the
Village Voice. His work has also appeared in R. Crumb’s
Weirdo magazine.
In the 1990s, with fellow cartoonist Kaz, Head edited the
three issues of Fantagraphics’ comics anthology Snake
Eyes. Also with Fantagraphics, he put out three solo books:
Avenue D, and Guttersnipe 1 and 2.
Currently, Head edits and contributes to Fantagraphics’
Hotwire Comics, an anthology of new work by some of
today’s best cartoonists. Hotwire Vol. 1 was nominated for
the 2006 Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Anthology.
Glenn Head
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(Text)
After building the narrative to the point where I find it has a
successful beginning, middle, and end (usually with some kind of
payoff ending, perhaps an O. Henry twist), I’ll have a page count,
and should have all the timing, pacing, and plotting of the strip
worked out. Everything should flow very clearly from panel to
panel, without glitches to slow it down. The next step is to make
preliminary sketches of the characters for the strip. I find that
doing this helps me know the characters better—how they move,
walk, talk, think, and react. This way, they become actors who
stay in character throughout the making of this “movie.”
Finally, I’m ready to draw the strip. Everything is blocked out.
The panels are ruled out, with some tiers bigger than others de-
pending on the amount of detail needed. Often, I’ll find that what
I’d thought had needed three panels can actually be presented in
one. In some instances, an entire page may be designed around
a single panel. Things tend to progress according to the written
breakdown, however, so that the pacing follows the breakdown
very closely. My comics tend to work within the principles of a
scripted film. I almost never make things up as I go along. That’s
what the sketchbook is for.
The next stage is the inking. First I do the lettering, then the
dialogue balloons, then the panels. Then I’ll often skip around,
fill in the blanks here, and do an outline there, until all the line
work is done. After this I do the gray tones. A great deal of the
ink work (mostly outlines) I do with brush. For the details, where
tightness and control are required, I use a Rapidograph pen. I
also use one for lettering.
The end stage (and this is always the hardest) is the last 2
percent of it: using white paint to correct anything that’s slightly
off. This is the most painstaking stage, but always necessary. The
worst thing is to look at a finished, printed work and think, “Why
didn’t I fix that?”
Title: Boneyard Blues
Client: Mindless Thrills Comics, 2008
Media: Brush and pen on paper, Photoshop
The process of completing a piece includes various stages,
many of which aren’t fully conscious. The comic strip Bone-
yard Blues is a good example of this. I started the strip as a
rumination on death and how it always seems to be lurking just
outside the reality we inhabit—waiting in the wings, if you will.
Originally, this strip used a completely different approach.
It was a kind of rant about self-destructive behavior. Then, I
decided to turn it into a narrative reflecting the idea that death
is just another dimension, one that exists outside the one we
live in as humans. I liked the idea that a couple of lowly death-
workers toil away at the margins of human life, invisible to the
naked eye.
Harry and Larry stumble into situations like vaudeville clowns,
trying to convince people (within their subconscious state) that
life isn’t worth living and that death is, in fact, preferable.
Harry and Larry have a boss who berates them for their
incompetence. Their jobs as well as their own existence are on
the line—should they fail to get their numbers up (i.e., bring in
more bodies), they’re doomed as well. I was inspired by C.S.
Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a novella about the correspon-
dence between two devils and their attempts to seduce humans
into self-destructive behavior.
This strip came about through the brainstorming of ideas
regarding death until the concept of death as characters, and
then minimum-wage laborers, gelled. With that came the no-
tion of death as a commodity, or even a marketing tool. This
related, in my mind, to “hipsterism”—which always flirts with
self-destruction.
Having developed the concept, I broke the strip down into a
narrative. Using mainly stick figures, or very rudimentary draw-
ings, I divided the story up into roughly nine-panel, three-tier
pages. This initial panel structure is very loose, and may change
during the course of drawing the strip. Three-panel repetition,
however, is very useful for setting up the rhythms of storytelling.
68
Creating Comics
Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics
#175 P DTP:204 Page:68
(RAY)
060-119_19413.indd 68 5/25/10 8:47:52 PM
Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics
#175 P DTP:204 Page:69
(RAY)
060-119_19413.indd 69
5/25/10 9:00:05 PM
(Text)
After building the narrative to the point where I find it has a
successful beginning, middle, and end (usually with some kind of
payoff ending, perhaps an O. Henry twist), I’ll have a page count,
and should have all the timing, pacing, and plotting of the strip
worked out. Everything should flow very clearly from panel to
panel, without glitches to slow it down. The next step is to make
preliminary sketches of the characters for the strip. I find that
doing this helps me know the characters better—how they move,
walk, talk, think, and react. This way, they become actors who
stay in character throughout the making of this “movie.”
Finally, I’m ready to draw the strip. Everything is blocked out.
The panels are ruled out, with some tiers bigger than others de-
pending on the amount of detail needed. Often, I’ll find that what
I’d thought had needed three panels can actually be presented in
one. In some instances, an entire page may be designed around
a single panel. Things tend to progress according to the written
breakdown, however, so that the pacing follows the breakdown
very closely. My comics tend to work within the principles of a
scripted film. I almost never make things up as I go along. That’s
what the sketchbook is for.
The next stage is the inking. First I do the lettering, then the
dialogue balloons, then the panels. Then I’ll often skip around,
fill in the blanks here, and do an outline there, until all the line
work is done. After this I do the gray tones. A great deal of the
ink work (mostly outlines) I do with brush. For the details, where
tightness and control are required, I use a Rapidograph pen. I
also use one for lettering.
The end stage (and this is always the hardest) is the last 2
percent of it: using white paint to correct anything that’s slightly
off. This is the most painstaking stage, but always necessary. The
worst thing is to look at a finished, printed work and think, “Why
didn’t I fix that?”
Title: Boneyard Blues
Client: Mindless Thrills Comics, 2008
Media: Brush and pen on paper, Photoshop
Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics
#175 P DTP:204 Page:69
(RAY)
060-119_19413.indd 69 5/25/10 8:47:52 PM
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