I created now the first 10 pages of a manga and I never thought how much work is actually put into a good comic until I started making one myself. From writing the story, creating the storyboard, to layout the panels on the page, to sketching and drawing the artwork (what I am not even doing myself), reviewing the results and getting them corrected, editing the results to give them a final touch and then finally releasing and promoting the manga.
It’s much more work than one would expect. I now have much more understanding and respect for teams that push out 15 or more pages a week (like One Piece), than what I had before.
For the first small chapter, I had to get my artist to create two characters for me. One was Andreaz, and after one or some rounds of correction and giving lot’s of details, we had the character design ready.
Another character that had to be done was Alchera, here as well we got some good sketches and then got a nice design completed:
The first sketch of the manga didn’t turn out as I expected.
Here is the unpublished version which needed another design:
For me to show what is happening in a comic story, it is rather important to show the location where the story is happening. I provided some more instructions to the mangaka and this was the next page:
As this environment will be important for later in the story, I need certain amount of space to and such things. I put my ideas directly onto the sketch I have received, as it makes it easier to understand what I need:
Then the inking and shading was done, with the following result:
Here the main scenery was lacking a bit of contrast, so we changed the walls to be darker than the rest of the room, which helped a lot for the overall look and feel:
Here is where my artist finished his job and I started to take over. I made some smaller corrections, added some more texture to the rock walls, changed the sound effect text and added some additional explanation what is going on in this scene:
And that’s how the first page of Abylita Kreata evolved until it was ready to be published! In case you are curious, you can read the manga online:
https://abylitakreata.com/manga/chapter-001-hospitality/