Annotations Part 1: The Golden Age

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Stardust the Super-Wizard

Among my favorite things about my favorite comics is the level of detail the creators have gone to to create their comics. I love reading Comics Alliance’s dense annotations to G-Mo’s Batman. I love looking at the notes at back of Finder. With ‘Super Wizard’ I’ve tried to craft a comic with enough prewriting and world building built in to justify a similar thing.

And one more detail… This comic is based on public domain characters. Technically, the aspects that I’ve added to the Stardust mythos, Sirius the Stardog, Sunspot, the name Rosemary Redgrave, and everything else are owned by myself. But I’m a kopylefty. And these characters wouldn’t exist without the original public domain characters being viewed through the cracked lens of comic book history.

As such, I’m placing all my characters in the public domain. Bear in mind, I intend to retain copyright on ‘Attack for a while longer. (Not too long. I’m a kopylefty who is willing to put his money where his mouth is. I’ll release everything into the public domain in twenty years. I think that puts it at September 2030).

Notes

Page 1: Across the Gulf of Time

The framing story is my attempt to channel as much of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman as possible. Obviously, Stardust isn’t Superman. He’s darker. Grittier. More Conservative. And insane.

Right off the bat we meet Sunspot and Sirius the Star Dog. I’ll get to the origin of Sirius a little later, but at least in the text itself Sunspot’s origin remains a mystery. Not to say too much, but Sunspot was a member of Stardust’s Sixth Column, a child army he fielded in one of his last stories in Fantastic Comics. Sunspot is the last remaining member of this Sixth Column. But I don’t want to say too much. I think I’m going to do a follow up comic at some point about Sunspot.

Page 3:

Introducing Big Red McLane. He’s another one of Fletcher Hanks’ creations. Paul Karasik, the editor of the collections of Hanks’ work that Fantagraphics put out, seems to believe that the McLane stories were closer to Hanks’ heart than his other stories. He has a number of reasons for believing this, one of the more important ones is that they don’t rely on the same formula his Stardust, Space Smith, Fantomah and their ersatz brethren do. I picked up something completely different. In his original stories he’s a man of monolithic stature and ability. He’s some kind of Super Mary Sue. In the course of nine issues he goes from a crazy logging drifter to a billionaire industrialist boxing champion. And since he’s merely a mortal man, I felt like he’s a really good foil for Stardust himself.

Page 5:

Meet the rest of the cast. The two most important introductions here are Fantomah and Rosemary Redgrave.

Fantomah was the first female superhero (and also created by Fletcher Hanks). She was pretty much a female, jungle themed version of Stardust and that turned into a horrible skeleton monster whenever she used her powers. Once Fletcher Hanks disappeared from the comic book industry Fantomah degenerated into just another generic jungle girl. My original intention, meta-continuity wise, was to drop that and assume she continued uninterrupted. I’ve waffled on that and now if I ever show a version of Fantomah from the late Golden Age again I’ll portray her as the “Daughter of the Pharaohs” version.

Also note the other characters created by Hanks, Space Smith and Buzz Crandall (originally exactly the same guy with two different names) and Tabu the Jungle Wizard. Tabu continued long after Hanks ditched him. I feel like the character would ultimately have evolved into one of those ancillary JSA chumps that always gets killed off when they show up to show off how dangerous the villains are.

And as for Rosemary Redgrave; she showed up in the Stardust story in Fantastic Comics #12. She isn’t named there, but she’s a convenient reason to keep an insane alien space god on Earth–Earth girls are easy. More on her later.

Page 6:

Enter the villains. It was hard to come up with a villain that could justify Stardust assembling an army of himself from across continuity. The solution I chose was an army of beings roughly equivalent to him. Merlin is a mashup between a (non-Hanks) Golden Age superhero named Merlin and Alan Moore. Most of the annotations of Grant Morrison’s recent work have invented some avatar through which he could talk smack about Alan Moore’s affect on the comic book industry. This is sorta a meta-reference to that.

I feel like Lovecraft dovetails nicely with Stardust in that Stardust is pretty much an eldritch abomination from beyond imagination that’s become obsessed with Superman. That’s why you get an ersatz Nyarlathotep (Chaos Crawler) and a guy who looks like a classical Cthulhu (S’nn Gorr). The other guy is just a Hanks-infused lizard man. If I had it to do over again I’d replace S’nn Gorr with some kind of Kirby space god.

Page 7:

At least I got to reimagine Azathoth merged with Galactus.

Page 9: Stardust VS Max Mustache

This story shares some similarities with the story from Fantastic Comics #2, at least in that it’s based obviously on World War 2. The difference here is that in the former story Stardust wants America to avoid war at all costs, but once the war actually kicked to life I can’t help but imagine him waffling and deciding war is good after all.

This is the introduction of Max Mustache. Various versions of him will show up from time to time. His ultimate fate informs his eventual transformation into a monstrous space god.

Page 13: Newspaper Gag Strip

Really big time comics nerds will instantly recognize this as a play on the Mickey Mouse suicide comics. They’re famous pretty much entirely because Disney wouldn’t have the balls to let a cartoonist do such a thing with their iconic mouse these days.

Page 15: Rosemary Redgrave

I wanted to do a story covering the horror and crime comics of the 50′s. Honestly, I’m not too happy with the results. Don’t expect this story to survive into the trade paperback I’ll eventually produce.

Page 19: Nebula the Hyper Engineer

This is an example of me planting seeds and watching them grow. Nebula the Hyper Engineer will eventually evolve into Black Hole, and be my ersatz Miracleman/Apollo of the Authority fame. As it stands, he’s just a Marvelman version of Stardust.

Page 20: The Big Three

One of Fox Publications other books during the golden age was The Big Three Comics. In my view, in the world of Fletcher Hanks our Big Three (Blue Beetle, Samson and The Flame) would be preempted by Stardust, Fantomah and Big Red McLane. This story is also meant to capture the essence of those early Justice Society stories at the dawn of continuity.

Page 24:

This page name drops the Evil Stardust from the Dark Side of the Universe. He’s going to show up very soon in the actual comic. The idea is that in the Golden Age continuity the universe was divided into two identical halves, one side good and the other side evil. Later on this idea was deemed stupid, so it was retconned that the Evil Stardust created a duplicate solar system and uses this evil Earth to occasionally mess with Stardust.

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Digital Comics Formats

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Stardust the Super-Wizard

I’ve got digital comics on the mind right now. They’re the future, etc. I’m just going to babble a bit about various digital comics formats and the paradigms they exist under.

Ones that exist now

1. Webcomics

Webcomics are a pretty full spectrum. You’ve got everything from gag strips, to this, to friggin’ MS Paint Adventures. But the thing is 99% of all webcomics use the same basic format. Most recent page on the frontpage (or start of the most recent update), arrows that go forward and back, often times accompanied by arrows that go to the first and most recent pages. Between this and being accessible through a web browser, that’s what defines them.

Of pros and cons, their main strength is that anybody can access them from just about any device; a computer, cell phone, iPad, netbooks, all the way down to the friggin’ Nintendo Wii. As far as inherent weaknesses, it’s very hard to get anybody to pay money for a webcomic. The successful ones generally grow a sense of community around themselves, or they cater to a community (often a fetishistic one) that already exists. If you erect a paywall nobody will read your comics… unless they’r porn. Then you might be able to get away with it. And in that case it’ll be easier if you appeal to some kind of fetish.

2. Single file based paradigm (CBR/CBZ and PDF)

The CBR and CBZ format is the closest thing to the mp3 format for comics. These are glorified zip or rar files containing raw images. They’re very simple and straight forward. As far as I can tell, they were created explicitly for piracy, but you can find a few small web stores that sell officially licensed CBR’s. Still, the vast majority of their users simply use them for piratical purposes. I’m folding PDF’s into this space because they have roughly the same technical possibilities. More control over the layout, but otherwise not terribly different.

You ostensibly need a reader program for these things (there’s a couple ways around that, but it’s just easier to download Cdisplay or whatever). That raises the bar of entry. If your IT guys are work are at all security conscious you can forget reading CBZ’s on your work computer on your lunch break. That said, there’s gotta be readers for the iPad and various android tablets, and I’m sure those things work excellently.

The most useful aspect of CBR’s is that the file format was designed around the limitations of the comic book format. But that’s also it’s greatest weakness. It’s much harder to have something elaborate like Kid Radd in this format. That actually gives me an idea for how a successor to the CBR/CBZ format could work.

3. Streaming individual file though an App

Most of the comics apps for mobile devices have their own separate applications and if I understand them correctly, you pay for access to certain files and, once you’ve paid for access, you can stream them from that app (or for some of them, any version of that app). This is what Comixology and it’s various competitors do. This gives convenience (assuming you have internet access). And since payments are build into these apps on their own users are conditioned to pay money for content. This is a big change up from the first two options and that could be the game changer.

But ultimately you’re paying the same money you would for a book for access to a file that you could lose at any time thanks to rights issues or if a meteor hit Comixology’s servers. I can’t help but remain skeptical about such a thing. I’m okay with streaming, but don’t make me pay for every damn file I stream, you know?

4. The Kindle/ebook formats

These formats were designed specifically with prose in mind. All these ebook formats are basically glorified and encrypted html files, which is all well and good, but with all the interesting and unique features removed. But the hardware limitations are well known, and if you’re clever you can work around them.

The main benefit you get is direct access to the biggest storefronts on the internet. I suspect merely showing up in searches of Amazon will do wonders for anybody’s sales. I certainly hope so.

But you’re struggling with formats not designed for this use. If you’re doing anything but high contrast black and white comics you’re probably out of luck. It’s not too hard to tear up a file into something readable on a Kindle. But the thing sure as hell isn’t designed for the job. Perhaps the next generation of eReaders will have color e-ink or LCD screens. Or they’ll be superseded by tablets. But at any rate, I suspect this issue will be rendered moot at some point.

Possible Future Paradigms

I feel like none of these formats is entirely mature. I’ve got a couple ideas in regard to directions things could go in the future. I suspect the basic Comixology paradigm will eventually win out, but I hold out hope that somebody will beat them to the punch. We’ll see.

1. Netflix Streaming

Marvel’s subscription service is sort of what I’m getting at here. You download a mobile app or buy an account on some website and then you can read comics to your heart’s content. The difference between this and the existing Marvel subscription app would be that they would license content from other authors, not just from one publisher. The other issue is that I’ve heard that Marvel’s been dragging it’s feet releasing new content onto it because they think they’ll make more money licensing out individual files.

The monetary basis for this would be that a subscriber pays a small fee to access a huge database of comics. The publisher collects this fee. And they come to terms with various content creators, I’m not sure if Netflix pays content creators based on number of views or just a flat fee for the option of streaming it. I’ll bet they negotiate whatever terms they can get away with.

2. Enhanced CBR/CBZ

The only real problem I have with the CBR/CBZ format is that it lacks bells and whistles. It’s hard to add value. Depending on what reader you’re using you can add text files, but this functionality is really basic at best. What I’d like to see is something somewhere between an ebook and the CBR format. In essence it would be a CBR, except instead of just raw image files it would contain a full featured html file to control how to view them. So long as your reader has good JavaScript support it would be trivial to add different versions of the same page (no lettering, just pencils, inks, breakdowns or whatever). You could add text commentary to different pages (either alongside the page or with elaborate mouseover trickery). Embed audio or director’s commentary on specific panels. Video. So long as you’re basing the format off html (and not intentionally gimping it’s abilities) the sky is the limit.

Or you could skip all that and sell a basic file for $.99, with the option to get the ultra deluxe Criterion Edition for $2.99 or whatever.

That’s all that’s dribbled out of my head for right now. Let’s see if I can get some sleep.

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Production Blog

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Stardust the Super-Wizard

Attack of the Super Wizards is hurtling toward is startling conclusion, so I think it would be fun and interesting to explain where the project came from, show off some of my early art, and just generally make with the director’s commentary.

The idea began bubbling in my head years ago. It had to be around 2004 or so that the Stardust story from Fantastic Comics #16 (the De Structo one) started circulating around the internet. I found it on Something Awful and I very quickly fell in love. At the time only a few other Fletcher Hanks stories were available online, one more Stardust story, a couple Fantomah tales and a Space Smith yarn. After they blew over I forgot about that strange Superman knockoff and went back to photoshopping baby’s heads onto celebrities.

I suppose it must have been around this time Paul Karasik rediscovered Stardust himself and started on the work that eventually evolved into “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets” and “You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation”.

Over the years a few more Stardust stories were unearthed and posted in various places online. And that’s when a brilliant idea struck me. I felt like somebody needed to do something with this character. Why shouldn’t it be me?

I wanted to create something sprawling, something insanely huge and complicated, something with a million moving parts all working in unison. My initial idea was to create a hybrid prose/comic telling the fictional history of Stardust continuity.

As it stands, the only aspect of that concept that’s survived all the way through is the emphasis on small story nuggets set in every era of comic book history. My original outline sketches out about seventy pages worth of comics, in much lower detail than the eventual version, with much more text, written in a matter of fact non-fiction style. It was to be a grand non-fiction book about the history of American comic books, with little snippets of comic peppered throughout for flavor.

Show Don’t Tell

The text grew to be a stumbling block and my ideas for little stories to parody other eras of comic book history exploded. The text withered away with my prewriting. I came to the conclusion that I should be illustrating my points. That’s a hell of a lot more interesting than just explaining them to death. And that’s when the book finally began taking shape.

The first version of the framing story I wrote back in 2008 was completely different than the version that I’ve eventually gone along with. It begins with Stardust, his kid sidekick Sunspot (yes, he was one of my earliest semi-original creations), Big Red McLane and Fantomah together on Stardust’s private star. His televisual crime detecting unit has picked up a new and incredible threat. Yew Bee, Slant-Eye (here called The Eye, because naturally any modern publisher would try to disguise any possible racism) and Max Mustache have escaped their various prisons and developed their own cargo-cult control belts. Each of them now has the power of Stardust himself. But Stardust has discovered something that just might help them… if it doesn’t drive them out of their minds, first. He pulls out a bunch of comics. And that’s where everything splits off.

Ultimately I felt like the conceit was too on the nose. Too close to home. Too metafictional. And as much as I love meta-fiction, Grant Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut are really the only guys who’ve ever worked something like that out all that well. And besides, it seemed a little too lighthearted for the framing device for a great Stardust yarn.

So it went back on the back burner for a while. It took another year before I had time to work on what was finally becoming Attack of the Super-Wizards.

I took another shot at the framing story. Here’s where I feel I finally struck gold. I crafted new villains that could threaten Stardust, Fantomah and Big Red McLane (even while portraying them as an ersatz Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman respectively), but I set up a method that would allow me to jump from story to story in a logical sense, and all without beating the metafiction stick too hard. And that was something like a year and a half ago.

The Legend Begins

My intention at this point was to publish it as a four issue mini series. The first issue would cover the Golden Age, the second the Silver Age, the third the Bronze Age, and the fourth issue would contain the horror of the Shit Age, but by the second issue this wasn’t coming together perfectly. I jumbled things around to make them fit into discrete chunks better, so that not every story would be a repetitive superhero story. Thus the newspaper gag strip parodying the Mickey Mouse suicide comics, the Archie parody, Stardust the Barbarian, and all the other weird outliers. And the scope of my work seemed to increase with every story I finished.

I added an alternate take on the framing story (the What If that ended up in Issue 3). I doubled the size of the final issue. I also dropped a couple stories that I felt stretched the premise a little too far (a manga magical girl version of Stardust and a children’s euro-comics/Tin-Tin take on Stardust). Finally with that I’ve hit what I feel like covers enough of the history of American comics without too much extraneous fluff.

Of the stories as they exist now, the earliest ones that have survived mostly intact are Stardust VS Max Mustache (that one I wrote long before even the original framing story), Newspaper Strip (ditto), Underground Comix Stardust (which I wrote immediately after the original framing story, because I was so enamored with the sexist, deviant Stardust who showed up for like two panels), DC Vertigo Stardust (which was inspired by one of my early doodles combining Morpheus from Sandman and the Super Wizard), the Dark Knight Returns/Miracle Man mashup, and the Goddamned sprite comic. Even thought it’s like the third to last story, the sprite comic was one of the first ideas I had, this repulsive and cruel parody of webcomics. Because, well…

I’ve always been a webcomics person (visit Tacolicious.net for more comics, plug plug plug). I always figured that I’d eventually publish at least some of this on the web. As I finished the second issue I finally opted to start dropping things online. This was at the end of convention season 2010. I had no more shows until Boston Comicon, where I debuted Super Wizard #3, and that was like six months away. So it became a webcomic.

Now I’m hurtling toward the end like a freight train. I’ve got something like 110 out of 125 pages in the can. And I’m gearing up for my next project (WHO IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST LUMBERJACK???). I hope this little blog post was illuminating or at least somewhat interesting. If not, well, you won’t be reading this part anyway.

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Continuity Guide Part 1

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Stardust the Super-Wizard

I’m hurtling to the stunning conclusion of Attack of the Super Wizards, so I guess it’s time to start posting director’s commentary and what not.

AotSW is pretty much continuity porn for a continuity that only exists in and of itself. It’s designed pretty closely after the two “main” comic book universes, namely Marvel and DC. And the crux of the story is a massive team up of Stardusts from different universes and continuities.

I dunno. Somebody might find this enlightening.

Across the Gulf of Time. . ., The Super-Wizards of Many Worlds, The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Lumberjacks

The entire framing story is set in the “main” continuity. It’s a jumbled, mixed up version of all the most iconic aspects of Stardust. He lives in a shared universe that’s pretty much an echo of our own world, except for a few superhero tweaks.

Stardust VS Max Mustache, Stardust’s Gal Pal: Rosemary Redgrave; The Big Three

These stories are pulled from the Golden Age of the universe. Let’s just assume that the specific Stardust’s pulled from these universes are just separated by like ten minutes in time. But anyway, similar events to these stories have occurred to the modern Stardust. It’s just that his Max Mustache isn’t as obvious an ersatz Hitler, the Big Red McLane he met wasn’t as dumb a bruiser, etc.

Newspaper Gag Strip

Somewhere along the line in the Stardust: The Super-Wizard newspaper strip funny animal versions of the characters were introduced and eventually usurped their non-funny animal counterparts. Later on, in the Silver Age the events of the newspaper strip were relegated to Earth-C, the Cartoon Universe.

Nebula the Hyper-Engineer

Other publishers, in an attempt to milk the Stardust hysteria created various transparent knockoffs, the most obvious of these was Nebula the Hyper Engineer. He’s only remembered and well regarded because of his grim and gritty 80′s revamp, but it’s important to introduce the character early on, so that will make sense later. Obviously, this isn’t even Stardust so it’s not anywhere near in continuity.

The Super Wizards of Two Worlds

This is a story from the birth of the Silver Age. It’s hard to tell if the Stardust depicted in here really counts as the Golden Age original; by this point most of his hard edges have been sanded down. Likewise, this intersects with the Earth-C of Sirius the Star Dog and gives Stardust’s pet an origin story. But other aspects of his Silver Age self, the identification of him as a human, and such, haven’t happened yet.

But regardless, the events of this story were nullified in the Cosmic Calamity. The events happened, but the history attaching them to the main Stardust was cut off at that point. The main Sirius the Star Dog has a completely different, less stupid and insane origin. No I won’t tell it. Yet.

Double Date Disaster

During the late Golden Age Fantastic Comics began flipping from genre to genre in an attempt to redefine itself and find a new audience. Most of the stories contained therein were one offs. This particular story faded into the background and was completely forgotten. Technically this is supposed to be a story of Stardust, McLane, Fantomah and Rosemary Redgrave when they were teenagers, but it doesn’t fit cleaning anywhere into the continuity scheme. It must be another universe.

The Origin of the Super-Wizard

This is during the overt Silver Age period of Stardust. He’s reconfigured as an American scientist, no longer a cold, distant and insane alien. Eventually these events were established to have occurred on Earth-B, but it was a long time after this story was published before that was decided. After Stardust returned to a more baseline, iconic version of himself he’s had several team ups with the heroes of Earth-B, who now have aged up significantly.

Underground Comix Stardust

Thanks to the well known rights issues in regard to Stardust, a disgruntled former illustrator created a brief series in various Underground Comix anthologies depicting Stardust going off, hunting down sex and drugs and little else. These stories are clearly way out of continuity and nobody can really argue otherwise.

What May Be…?
This story is tightly linked with the framing story, but it’s also clearly and evidently set in another universe where things are ever so slightly different. Still, the Attack of the Super-Wizards hasn’t yet come to pass so perhaps events will unfold as this..

Tea-Heads Don’t Drink

This story originally happened to the Silver Age Stardust, however it was later deemed such an important story that the events thereof were folded into the “main” Stardust’s history after the Cosmic Calamity.

Stardust the Barbarian

This actually isn’t entirely out of continuity. It’s a potential future, set after a U.S./U.S.S.R. nuclear war that decimated the planet, but Stardust sacrificed himself to prevent it from destroying all life. This all happened in the far off year of 1999, so it’s ship has kinda sailed, but writers still hint at some of the changes, like that summer event a couple years back that ended with Detroit changing its name to Qarnak.

Stardust the Super-Egregore

This was the result of the very first Post-Calamity Stardust revamp. While popular, it grew in a strange, divergent fashion from the editorial office’s plans for Stardust. Eventually the events of this (and the McLane and Fantomah revamps that followed) have been folded into a Dark Fantasy universe aimed at mature readers.

Cosmic Calamity

This is the event that shook the universe. It was originally intended to tidy up the various histories and parallel continuities, but in the end it didn’t serve that purpose. It simply created a new jumping on point for Stardust and his related heroes. In the middle of this story the dimensional space that the Golden Age universe occupied is destroyed and a new universe created from the wreckage. There are numerous changes from the original continuity that eventually lead to the universe we know and love today. These divergences began with Stardust pre-incarnating the soul of Max Mustache into the inventor of shaving and became really obvious with the new origin of Fantomah.

The Hyper-Engineer Returns

The 80′s were a hell of a creative time for comics. Riding on the success of the Dark Fantasy Stardust a small press got the rights to Nebula the Hyper-Engineer, but rights issues forced them to change the name. That’s the origin of Black Hole. Eventually the stories tied in (sort of) with the original Golden Age stories, but for continuity’s sake they didn’t happen in the same universe.

That’s it for now. I’ll post another entry explaining how the future stories fit together into the over-arching meta-continuity.

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Open Source Comics: Lettering in Inkscape

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Stardust the Super-Wizard

I’m a kopylefty. Also, I can’t always afford the latest version of Photoshop or Illustrator. And, regardless of my mastery of the torrenting arts, I still don’t like to pirate things if there’s some kind of other option. And as far as vector graphics programs you don’t have to pirate Illustrator, because Inkscape is there for you.

Illustrator’s the go to solution for mainstream comic book lettering. Often independent artists hand letter their work, but if you want to emulate the look of those garish men in spandex punching each other you at least need some sort of vector art program. I’m going to teach you the basics of the free solution: Inkscape.

When I first started using the program I had to teach myself how to use it. The program itself is very useful, even if it does have a lot of rough edges. There are a few comics lettering tutorials people have posted, but all of them have left out a bunch of information I consider vital.

First things first, I’m going to warn you about a couple things. Inkscape assumes all raster images it imports are 90 dpi (or dots per inch). And the other problem is that Inkscape only exports PNG files. Both of these can create issues if you want to print your files. But there are solutions. I’ll get to them in a little bit.

Here’s the layout of Inkscape. The first thing you want to do is load up your comic page. Here’s an example from Big Red Christmas, the holiday comic I did with my wife last year.

Caption Blocks

Next up select the Text Tool and figure out where you’re going to put your text. With the text tool selected, one of the top toolbars will transform into a text widget. From here you can control the font, letter size, alignment and a couple other things.

This isn’t a design tutorial, so I won’t tell you what fonts to use (other than don’t use Comic Sans, for the love of Eris) and I won’t tell you what font size to use either. For me, I figure out what I’m trying to do. Is this character a superhero? From what era? Or is he a barbarian warrior? Then I trawl Blambot for an appropriate font. I might need to go off into the wilds of the free font websites, but thar be dragons. If I had some extra money I’d spring for some Comicraft fonts. But I’m using Inkscape, so I’m doing my best to avoid pay options.

And as for sizing? Figure out what your final size is going to be and make sure whatever size you select will be readable at that size.

Now, it’s time to use that text tool. With it selected you will draw a cursor wherever inside your image you click. From there you can add any text you like, complete with line breaks wherever you want.

One feature that comes in extra handy at times is the Text Tool Box. It’s available through the Text->Text and Font menu, or as a button on the top bar.

This gives you a few more options than the top bar. Mainly, it gives you access to line spacing, which can be vitally important if you’re using a font not originally created for comics.

Let’s turn these into caption blocks. First, click the rectangle tool from the toolbar. This will create a bare bones rectangle wherever you click->drag it.

Whoops. It looks like I accidentally covered over my original lettering!

Luckily, there’s a solution. You can raise or lower all the objects in an Inkscape file two ways. You can hit the dropdown menu with Object->Raise/Lower. I use the Page Up/Page Down, which use the same function. Lower the selected box until it lowers itself below the text like this:

Now the text is readable, but it doesn’t quite look complete. Hit Object->Fill & Stroke to bring up a menu to alter your box’s properties. The “Stroke” in this case is the outline around your object. The “Fill” is everything inside the stroke. Play with the options however you like. I’m here to teach you the basics, not elaborate theory.

Here’s what I came up with.

That looks okay, but I’ll use this opportunity to teach you something else that might become useful.

Create another box in the empty space of the caption block. Select both blocks at the same time. You do this the same way you would in any program. Use the select tool and hold down the shift key, then click both objects.

Now click on Path Menu at the top. This gives you a bunch of exciting options, the most useful are Union and Difference. Use Path->Difference (or the Ctrl - keyboard shortcut). What this does is it takes the two objects and carves out a space from the older object using the shape of the newer object. The result looks like this:

What ever am I going to do with that other text, though? Let me put another box under it.

I’m not covering the entirety of the text because I’m gonna show you a few things.

Pay special attention to the handles at the edges of the box. Let me show you something else that’s useful. Drag the circle downward.

Now I’m going to Edit->Duplicate or Ctrl D the box and move it around so that covers under the rest of the text.

Be careful when reshaping objects with a stroke. The stroke will get refigured each time relative to how you’re altering the shape. I’ve nudged it so little it’s not obvious. But anyway, I’ve now shaped the block around the rest of the text. Next I’m going to Path->Union AKA Ctrl +. This takes the two boxes and merges them together and you get this:

Using these techniques you can create all the basic effects that you’ll see in caption blocks in comics.

Word Balloons

Now let’s move onto something a little bit more complicated and hands on. Let’s start off by laying down
some more text and putting an oval underneath it. The Oval Tool is a couple clicks below the Rectangle Tool. You should be able to figure this out for yourself.

The first thing you will want to do is hit Path->Object to Path. What this does is take the oval object you just created and it transforms it into a primitive object. The next thing you’ll want to do is select the Paths and Nodes tool.

This will show you a bit more of how Inkscape (and any vector art program) runs under the hood. All the objects you’ve created, all the boxes and even the text, are created from points in your page. These points have mathematical functions that tell Inkscape how to connect them. This shows how the oval object works. Click on the handles and play with them a little to get a feel for how this stuff works.

Once you’re done playing undo all your changes and go back to the original state.

Edit->Select All (or Ctrl A) to select all the points in the current object, then click the Insert New Nodes button on the top menu.

This creates a new point in exact middle of all the other points. Play with these points until they look less goofy.

Now you’ve got to add the balloon tail. Select the Pen Tool.

Once you click, the Pen Tool will create raw points with lines connecting them. Once you’ve created the points you want then you double click to create an open shape, or you can create a closed shape by double clicking on the handle that shows up where you first clicked.

I’m going to create an angle pointing out from the balloon roughly at Stardust, so I can create the most basic balloon tail.

Next I select one of the lines and click the Curve button up top.

Play with the handles until you get a shape you like.

With that done you can Path->Union (or Ctrl +) the balloon and tail together, resulting in this:

By now you should have a good grasp on the basics. Let me apply a bit more theory. Here’s a new word balloon.

Note how the balloon overlaps the panel border and Fantomah’s wrist. I select the pen tool and create closed shapes around where I want to clip the word balloon.

I Path->Difference these shapes and voila. Now the balloon fits the panel borders better and appears to slide under Fantomah’s wrist.

I’ve shown you pretty much everything you’re going to need to utilize most of the functions in Inkscape for lettering comics. There’s one last thing I have to show you; how to export your finished image.

When you’re done hit File->Export Bitmap. That will bring up this dialog.

Now here come the two issues I warned you about at the beginning. Inkscape treats all images as if they’re 90 dpi and it can only export PNG images. If you’re exporting for the internet you’re fine. You might want to convert the image to another format or play with the color space, but the PNG format can hold as much information as any other web format, so it’s a good place to start.

If you’re getting ready for print, though, this can be an issue. Fortunately you don’t have to export a bitmap image and Inkscape can natively save itself to about fifty million formats.

See?

I haven’t actually used this method and I suspect it will still save the image at 90 dpi, but that can be surmounted by importing it into another program, the obvious choice for me would be Open Office Draw because it’s also Open Source, and alter the print resolution before sending it on.

Or you could export everything but the base image and overlay it onto the original image at the appropriate resolution if you really wanted to.

With that in mind, Inkscape is still an incredibly useful tool, and it’s free. You can’t beat that price.

Now go read Super Wizard and Garry: The Legend Continues, two comics I extensively use Inkscape on.

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