Part Three: Layouts

While I had the plot, the “Marvel Method” I was imitating, puts the brunt of actually going from a story to a comic on the artist. The layouts are really just the next step in the writing. Here is where I figured out the what panels went in each page, and what went in each panel. Sometimes it was as little as stick figures, sometimes with more detail, their purpose was to work out pacing and composition. All of this was done on an iPad using Procreate. For some scenes I had ideas of key images. I started with those first and figured out the other panels on each page to fill in the necessary beats. I built out By and large everything is in there, story wise, just in a VERY rough form.

Since it had been long time since I had done something of this scope, I wasn’t very confident in my drawing abilities. For the first four pages, I wanted to use some reference. I had already decided that I would use an homage to Strange Tales 181 as my splash page. I bought some small cheap figure models and shot photos of them for figure reference. I mocked up the pages in Photoshop, and traced over them to do the initial layouts. This was very time consuming, and I would up changing my mind about the layout of page 4. Rather than shooting new images, I just drew them by hand, and ultimately found the process faster and the figures looser than the ones that were photo referenced. I did the rest of the book without doing photos first.I have also included those initial photo layout pages.

Comics of that era had dropped to only 17 story pages, out of a 32 page magazine. I decided to use a more traditional 22 pages, to give myself a little more room to tell the story. That still left 10 pages plus back & inside covers to fill. I decided to use one page for editorial content from a modern perspective, but the rest would be period accurate ads & editorial content. Those ads really were a key part of that experience, and had a story to tell all their own. Merchandise ads, classifieds, letters columns and bullpen bulletins crafted a world of growing comics fandom that would be as enticing as the worlds in the stories themselves. I would up sampling ads from all across the 70s that I think best capture that experience. I tried to match the placement of those pages as best I could (Bullpen Bulletins, Heroes World merchandise ads, Hostess ads classified pages and others, all tended to appear in the same spot month after month, year after year. I have included examples of some of the pages I used as inspiration. Some were followed very closely, others were more of a guide.

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