Creative Process
This is from a comic I did called BodyWorld. The comics I’d done
prior to BodyWorld, such as The Mother’s Mouth and Bottomless
Belly Button, were very involved with page properties—things like
facing pages, or page turns—formal properties of printed books.
It started to feel like all of these formal properties were weighing
me down. I just wanted to tell a story in a stream of little boxes.
So I started BodyWorld as a webcomic, where there is no book
or pages.
All of the drawings are done in a grid of panels that continue
as a long scroll down a website. It helped me focus entirely on
the story, which is about a rogue botanist named Paulie Panther
who travels to an experimental city to research a plant. This plant,
when smoked, grants the smoker telepathic powers. He becomes
involved with other residents of this town when they smoke the
plant and he “reads” their bodyminds.
Unlike how telepathy is displayed in most fiction, BodyWorld
is about bodymind telepathy, so your body would read what it’s
like to be inside another person’s body—not just reading their
thoughts in the form of words. It’s like physical thought balloons.
Since I made it for the Internet, the story branched out to become
about what the Internet is to me: a society composed of all of
these individual cultures’ minds, like a superorganism, and the
conflict that occurs during that transition from a single organism
to a superorganism. But mostly it’s a sex/relationship comedy,
sort of like Molière.
Tools: Mixed media, Bristol board, crow quill pens,
gouache paint, Photoshop, photocopies, acetate
Dash Shaw illustrates Bottomless Belly Button, the short
story collection The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century
A.D. (both from Fantagraphics Books), and BodyWorld,
originally serialized online and later published in book
form from Pantheon Books.
A prolific cartoonist and animator, he also regularly
contributes to Mome, the Fantagraphics quarterly
anthology, and is the director of The Unclothed Man
series of animated shorts on IFC.com. He lives in
Brooklyn, New York.
Dash Shaw
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Creating Comics
Dash Shaw
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(Text)
Dash Shaw
STEP-BY-STEP
Step One: I started working on acetate sheets while
I was a student at the School of Visual Arts. If you look at
pre-Photoshop comics coloring or magazine sheets, they
primarily used acetate or clear celluloid, with black line art
printed on it. For instance, for Batman: Year One David Maz-
zucchelli would do his line art and it’d be photocopied onto
the celluloid, and Richmond Lewis would paint on a board
that would be laid under the acetate. I took that process and
combined it with animation-style use of celluloid, where the
backs of
the acetate are painted with gouache and laid over a
painted background, plus color separations where black line
art is used to mark the different colors, plus painting over
photocopies and collage and Photoshop techniques.
Step two: BodyWorld is a mash-up of pre-Photo-
shop coloring processes and Photoshop coloring. I’ll do the
color separations by hand, paint-bucket the shapes in Pho-
toshop, and then print it out and paint over the photocopy,
then scan it back in and tweak the colors in Photoshop to
make it look like the original art, or a variety of other things.
Step three: The key, for me, is to combine what
I like about hand drawing with the processes available in
Photoshop. So I don’t do any drawing in Photoshop. I don’t
have a Wacom tablet, and my actual knowledge of the
program is limited compared to most “mainstream” colorists
who work exclusively in Photoshop—that coloring leaves me
cold, but obviously that’s not the software’s fault.
Step four: Another technical thing about my color
comics is that because I’m working over photocopies or
painting on one page, I don’t have a separate line art layer.
Most comics are printed with the black on one layer and
the colors on a separate layer. This makes sense for a lot of
comics, but I don’t want to make color comics that have that
distinction. I want black to be just another color, not sepa-
rate or more important. If you looked at the digital files for
my color comics, they’re all in one color layer.
This is from a short comic I did called My Entire High
School … Sinking Into the Sea! It’s about my high school
drowning. Everyone in the school dies. I save a girl and leap
off the top of the building. Then we’re in the water and it’s
a scene exactly like the ending of the movie Titanic except
instead of dying I am preserved in ice, frozen forever. This
is sort of my ode to the autobio comic genre. All autobi-
ography is about mythologizing your past. Titanic came
out when I was in high school and it was a big deal. All
of the girls liked Leonardo DiCaprio, and I told people the
movie sucked even though I actually loved it. Memories
are preserved in ice. It’s drawn in a pseudo-mainstream
house style that never really existed. House styles are often
generic, nonspecific, like memories, too. The panel borders
are wide and it’s meant to emulate when you see original
art for full-bleed pages, as opposed to seeing them in print
where the drawings run to the end of the page.
Most autobio comics are drawn differently than main-
stream comics, but it’s just a different house style often
meant to emulate holding an original diary/sketchbook in
your hands. The backgrounds are sort of Rothko cloudy
shapes except done with markers that bleed through paper
and get fuzzy if you scan them at a low resolution. It’s all
about drama.
Tools: Crow quill pens, colored pencil,
gouache paint, acetate, markers
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(Text)
Dash Shaw
STEP-BY-STEP
Step One: I started working on acetate sheets while
I was a student at the School of Visual Arts. If you look at
pre-Photoshop comics coloring or magazine sheets, they
primarily used acetate or clear celluloid, with black line art
printed on it. For instance, for Batman: Year One David Maz-
zucchelli would do his line art and it’d be photocopied onto
the celluloid, and Richmond Lewis would paint on a board
that would be laid under the acetate. I took that process and
combined it with animation-style use of celluloid, where the
backs of
the acetate are painted with gouache and laid over a
painted background, plus color separations where black line
art is used to mark the different colors, plus painting over
photocopies and collage and Photoshop techniques.
Step two: BodyWorld is a mash-up of pre-Photo-
shop coloring processes and Photoshop coloring. I’ll do the
color separations by hand, paint-bucket the shapes in Pho-
toshop, and then print it out and paint over the photocopy,
then scan it back in and tweak the colors in Photoshop to
make it look like the original art, or a variety of other things.
Step three: The key, for me, is to combine what
I like about hand drawing with the processes available in
Photoshop. So I don’t do any drawing in Photoshop. I don’t
have a Wacom tablet, and my actual knowledge of the
program is limited compared to most “mainstream” colorists
who work exclusively in Photoshop—that coloring leaves me
cold, but obviously that’s not the software’s fault.
Step four: Another technical thing about my color
comics is that because I’m working over photocopies or
painting on one page, I don’t have a separate line art layer.
Most comics are printed with the black on one layer and
the colors on a separate layer. This makes sense for a lot of
comics, but I don’t want to make color comics that have that
distinction. I want black to be just another color, not sepa-
rate or more important. If you looked at the digital files for
my color comics, they’re all
in one color layer.
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