The Nightly News creator Jonathan Hickman talks about the creation of his visually stunning book:
I’ve quickly found out in comics, even though this is my first one, that it’s all problem solving. It’s all trying to figure out how to tell the story. Like I kind of touched on in the last question, most people think that’s by panel-to-panel storytelling, traditional comic storytelling, but I’m trying to solve it in a different manner. I think it was, in the end, a different solution to the same problems every comic creator faces… The process that I go through is that I work on each individual piece of art independently on an 11-inch-by-17-inch piece of paper. I then take these different elements and I scan them in.
The way that I’m able to pull off doing it this way is because I make them all vector data. So, it’s completely scalable and I don’t have to worry about whether or not it was the right size or how the page goes together. I just move it around until I feel like I’ve successfully pulled it off. As far as story flow is concerned, that’s a layout, color, word balloon thing… Saying all that, I’m not anywhere remotely close to where I want to be on the design side of marrying comics and graphic design. I’m mostly using things that were cutting edge 4-5 years ago that have seeped into, and become easily recognizable as ‘designy,’ in popular culture. My hope is that as I gain credibility, and hopefully a following, I can really start to push it as far as I can.
