Six: Text

For your comic, pick a font that's easy to read, preferably either sans-serif or comic-specific. Don't use Times New Roman. Of the fonts preinstalled on most (Windows, at least) computers, Verdana, Lucida Sans, and Comic Sans are good choices. I recommend looking at free font sites for good fonts to use. However... pick one font and stick to it. Don't change fonts every comic, or use a different font for every character. The first case looks like you can't decide what your comic should look like. The second is just annoying, although some people can pull this off effectively.

Make sure that the font size is large enough for people to read. If you have to squint, most other people won’t be able to read it at all.

Textboxes are easy to make, but aren't easy for some beginners to figure out on their own, so I'll explain them here. For an alternate explanation, take a look at Shard's guides at the Bob and George site. I'll explain how to do it in MS Paint; the techniques can be applied in more powerful programs, with knowledge of the capabilities of those programs.

Here's a panel (Panel C from the previous page, shamelessly reused here), with some extra white space below. Miarin's line has already been typed in the white space. Typing out the text first makes more sense to me; that way, you can draw the box around the text instead of trying to fit your text into a box.

Next, draw a box around the text. The shape doesn't really matter, as long as it looks neat. In this example, I've used a rectangle with rounded corners. Next, we need to move the textbox onto the panel.

This was done with transparency enabled. Not exactly what we were looking for, huh? Let's try it with transparency off.

Better, but still not right. Though for a simple background, you can just fill the white corners back in, this won't work for a complex background. So how do we get around this? Easy.

First, fill in the white space with a different color that doesn't occur anywhere in the sprites or backgrounds used in the comic, then right-click on that color with the color picker tool. That will set the background color to the color you replaced the white with, in this case a dark red.

Then select the textbox with transparency enabled, and move it onto the panel. This should make it so only the textbox is opaque.

All right, so we have a textbox, but we're still missing a way to show who's speaking. All you have to do now is draw a pointer of some sort that points at the speaking character. It doesn't really matter what the pointer looks like, as long as it's neat and leaves little chance for confusion.

The finished panel, with the pointer drawn directly onto the image and Miarin's mouth opened.

Layers (a method of image organization found in most advanced image editors) make textboxes (and comics in general) a lot easier, since transparency is not assigned to a specific color and you can play with how the boxes are arranged as much as you like.

Textboxes don't have to be black on white, but they do have to be easy to read. Keep this in mind as you make your comics.

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