Following on from our previous post, we’ve now gotten our paragraph which breaks down the entire story into a few key sentences. So for example Star Wars could be quickly broken down into:

1. In a galaxy far far away, there Intergalactic War between the empire and the rebels.

2. We follow the path of Luke Skywalker who goes from galactic farmer to Jedi.

3. He looses his mentor along the way, but gains a series of friends.

4. He continues his training and proves himself in battle as the rebels try to thwart the evilness that is the empire.

Or something along those lines. So what’s the next step? Well the way I’ve currently been going about it (in this series dedicated just to documenting the creating of my own graphic novel) is expanding those few paragraphs into Acts. These Acts are basically very brief descriptions of the above sentences broken down into pages. It’s all meant to provide a skeleton of roughly what is going to happen within each page and roughly how many pages are going to be required in each Act.

This is useful for many reasons. It gives us a very loose frame from which we can either choose to expand or reduce, depending on which direction we choose to take it. In addition to this we also get a general feel for the number of pages that we’re going to need.

Currently as it stands ‘Aitus Moralis’ has a total of 9 Acts and requires around 65 pages for the first volume. The final page count might go up or down, but by and large it will hover around that number. This might not seem like a large number, but it’s actually a little bit larger than an European graphic novel or a 3 issue American mini series.

Now the last part that’s pretty important for me to disclose is that I’ve actually done all of the above by hand. I’ve not typed any of this up, it’s all hand doodles. I’ve found that this is a much more productive manner of creating than typing it on a screen. It feels more organic to me, which is weird since I’m not a technophobe and yet my most personal project I’m going COMPLETELY analogue (even planning to hand letter it as well).