Bones' Comics Tips
Bones' UO Comics

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OK, a few pointers... in terms of content, it's a good idea not to be overly abusive or offensive. While being irreverent can be halarious, you should always have a line that you don't cross. For instance, someone wanted me to put up a link to his comics, and all they were was a depiction of some warrior raping Blackthorne. It simply wasn't funny, and went a bit too far for me to "endorse" it.

The text should be clear, and easy to read, and it should always be easy to tell who's talking. Some of the comics that are in the "submitted" section on my site don't always do this perfectly, since some of them use the same text color for all the characters and the text is often not centered or overlaps their body, making it hard to tell who is speaking. This is a minor detail, but it shouldn't be ignored. Usually if I can't get my characters to say their lines without the text overlapping, then I rewrite the text so that their lines are short enough that they no longer overlap, even if it means adding another cell to the strip. :-)

Having characters that are easy to like (or to hate) is important. If the reader simply has no opinion of a character, the character will have little impact or importance to the audience. This is of great importance to the success of the strip.

In terms of lay-out, whether you want all the cells in the strip to be the same size or not is up to you, but it generally looks best if the height of the cells are all the same (the width is not as important). If you make the cell sizes too small, you may find that you run into problems fitting the text inside with proper alignment to the characters, and that the "camera" will thus have to jump around relative to the terrain from one cell to the next. So I would suggest cell sizes that are not terribly small, but small enough that extraneous unimportant info doesn't invade the scene and so that the load-times on the web pages are kept low. Personally I've been using 300x240 as a cell size for quite some time, since I can comfortably have as many as 3 people speaking if their lines are simple enough.

For a very good description of how to make comics, check out Lost in UO's FAQ.

If you feel you're ready to start thinking about submitting some comics to this site, or you'd like some more minor guidelines in general, please read my "comics submission page".


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(Bones' UO Comics (C) Copyright 1998, Ed T. Toton III, All Rights Reserved)

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