Comic Book Career

I wanted one before, but it’s only now that I made a couple of comic strips featuring my own characters. To be really fair, the division of labour isn’t so evenly divided among all cartoonists as there are those who do all the pencils, inks and writing on their own. Others leaving just the writing to one person, which’s the case for some comic strips like Baldo. In the case with American comic books, there are instances where the cartoonists do almost all things on their own. Most notably Carl Barks whenever he did Disney comics, as well as those involved in alternative comics.

There are those who are part of an assembly line, as first formulated by Will Eisner. This involves somebody who does the pencils, somebody who does the inks, somebody who colours and somebody who writes. This is the standard for many superhero comics and the like in America, though I’m always of the opinion that cartoonists should ink their own cartoons. However, if they can’t write that well they can always rely on a good writer. Well, the latter two are commonly found in Japanese manga though they also have assistants.

Gerry Alanguilan has inked other people’s comics before, he has inked his own comics before as well. If I’m not mistaken, I started inking in May-June 2021. It wasn’t easy at first, but I got used to it the more I inked my own comics. Not to mention, I have to have a regular schedule if I were to get employed to do comics for a living. So I have to brush up on my own work ethic to get there, if it were to happen to me at all. Even then, this would earn me a lot to support myself and others if it were to happen at all.

I considered working for DC before, but lately I feel tempted to work on my own characters and stories. Whereas much of DC’s owned by a corporate owner in its totality, working on my own comic strip makes me own my own comics well at least here in the Philippines where there’s no comics syndicate overlooking cartoons. At least that’s one of the upshots of working in the Philippines, these days cartoonists own their own cartoons and creations not others.

Inking

I think I tried inking my pencil drawings before, but I’m getting better at this. I tried doing this last year, I wasn’t that good at it yet and I didn’t have whiteout markers then. But I’m getting better at this, so practice really does make perfect. When it comes to the kinds of ink that make a very dark black, there’s one in the form of Blink but I think gel pens like the ones from Panda tend to be darker because the material holds more pigment so you get a dark black this way. The sign pens from Artskills are dark enough to be legible, but look pretty grey compared to the Panda pens.

To be fair there are Philippine pen brands that have ink just as grey as these, if only I made somebody buy those it would be fun to check which ink is darker. But a really black ink would be fun as it contrasts with white better and it still looks pretty black compared to the black inks of other pens, which looks rather grey and I could get that’s how people feel around Blink. It’s really dark, so dark it makes all other black inks look grey. Looks like the efforts to make a black ink have really paid off, that’s something that I like.

For a regular (read greyish) black ink, almost any pen would do but for a darker black go for gel pens like those from Panda for instance if you can’t afford Blink. It’s not the same thing, but it’s as close as one gets within one’s budget and logistics.