Transcription
Five steps. That's all you need from having an idea for a manga to actually having a finished manga in your hands.
This year, I'm publishing my seventh manga volume, and I've published them all without a publisher, all by myself. And I will show you exactly how this process works. Hi, I heard you like road maps. So, I've made a whole road map just for making your own manga. We start at making your own story all the way to creating a PDF that you could print and publish. I will guide you through every single step. Just beware, this road map can take several months to fulfill. A manga is not something that you can do in a week or two if it's longer than a couple of pages. But now, let's grab every art supply that you have. Leave a like cuz god damn, this video was a ton of work. My name is Marcel and I'll teach you how to make manga like a ser.
So you have an idea. Let's make this idea into an actual story. First, before you create any manga pages, any story boards, you need to set your story. Now, here's what you do. You write down in basic terms what happens in your story. You make a kind of a timeline what happens when. So, flesh out your story bit by bit. You can already refer to characters or things in your story. But be careful. Beginner mistake incoming. Don't just write the timeline like you would write a manga. This happens at the beginning. This happens at chapter 2. This happens at chapter 3, etc. You should not only include what happens while the story is ongoing, but also what happened before. Think about One Piece for example. The timeline isn't starting where the main character begins his journey, but it starts much earlier. It needs to include what happens before. When was Roger executed? When did Shanks get the goonomi? When did he arrive at Fooia Village where Luffy lives? And so on. You need to really plan every important event that happens in your world, even before the main characters even existed. That's how stories like One Piece or Attack on Titan feel alive. Also, not sponsored, but when we were making my new manga, we had to plan a lot of the stuff. So, my story writer and I were using a tool for that where you can just drag and drop stuff in your story. I can highly recommend using a tool like this.
Okay, so you have the history of your world. Now, let's fill it. Like, obviously, you would need to focus on your characters as well. And I'm not talking about character design per se. I'm talking about personality and everything else. This here is something really valuable. It's a character sheet designed by the legend himself, Hihiko Araki of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Fame. This questionnaire is what he fills out before he designs a character visually. From their names all the way to their habits, favorite phrases, and so on. It's important to design a character's personality first, so you can base your character design around that. I've linked it down in the info box in case you want to download it and fill it out yourself. So, fill out a character sheet like this for every character in your story. And while writing your characters, you might already get some cool ideas how they could look like. So, what's also really important is to use references while making this. Go to Google images or Pinterest and collect some of them already. Now, this is a much better guideline for designing a character than that. But you are not done yet. What also always makes for really cool world building in fictional stories are items, tools, flora, and fauna. Maybe your world has special animals in it. Or maybe they use some special items or tools in your world. Maybe your world has some special plants that have special effects and so on. Write all of that down. All of these things get their own little mini character sheet. If you have a collection of characters and worldbuilding elements, you can now check your timeline if everything makes sense, if you need to include something or need to change names in case you have some placeholders left over. And also, I know some people like to make characters first and then write the story. That's also totally valid. You can also do it the other way around.
And now we come to the most crucial step. Now that you have all the characters and all the events in your timeline and every important item ready, this is where the magic happens. But before, make sure you're making this timeline in detail. Now, flesh everything out, make sure everything works out and the history of your world makes sense. What you're doing now, if your wealth building is ready and your story is finished, is you pick out where your manga actually starts. I call this the needle drop method because you're now pinpointing where exactly chapter one takes place. Again, think about stories like Jiu-Jitsu Kaisen. A lot of things happen in the story. Gojo and ghetto were friends, then they were not friends anymore. Gojo gets students. Yugji eats a finger. Yugji gets trained by Gojo. They fight in a tournament and so on. And now a Magaka's job is to pick where chapter one would start. And they decided this is a good place to start chapter 1. Everything else, what happened before we can explain later in flashbacks. And now it's up to you to decide this in your own story. Your timeline is finished and you should decide which event in your manga is the most interesting to hook your reader in chapter 1. My favorite example of this is Attack on Titan. Starting the story where Titans tear down the walls was the perfect needle drop and an insane thing to happen in chapter 1. And if you've read the series, you know that a lot of things happened before. lots of points where you could have started chapter one, but dropping the needle right here was the most genius thing you could have done. So now, if you have dropped your needle in your timeline, let's go. That's where you write the first chapters of your manga. You do not need to write the whole story from the get- go, but just enough so you can make the first manga pages out of this. Don't worry, this can take weeks, sometimes even months. You definitely have to take your time here. Especially if you're a beginner, you should start with a very short story for starters. So maybe just take your world and timeline and limit it to a short time span for your very first manga experiment. Congratulations, you're done with the first step of making your own manga.
All right, now that we have the story step completely finished, let's get visual with the most fun part. Okay. What makes character design good and what makes it bad? Well, the best character designs are unique, meaning you see the silhouette and you know what character you're looking at. Also, their outfits should definitely match their abilities, backgrounds, or powers. And also, their basic look, like hairstyles should match their personality, obviously. And that is why we've made those textonly character sheets before. If you struggle to make a character look unique, maybe use this as an inspiration. Maybe your character is into art and fashion and likes to draw, then maybe they should have stylish clothing and hairstyles, popping colors, and some sort of sketchbook with them in order to show this. If you want to have a stepbystep on how to make a good character design, I have made a tutorial about this topic showing how I've made my character designs. Definitely check that one out if you struggle in this step. TLDDR: If you look at a character and they look like they could be a protagonist of some random isekai anime, you failed.
Okay, this really is the same thing again just for everything else in your story. Make references and designs for the tools your character use, the animals, plants, everything. because you don't want to be in the middle of drawing your manga and being like, "Wait, how does this thing look like from the other side?" I've even made 3D models for my manga for certain weapons just so that I can check all the angles when drawing them. Same thing goes for places and environments. If you don't plan out everything ahead, it is going to bite you in your ass when you're drawing a manga and suddenly you forget how many walls there are in your fictional Attack on Titan City or where exactly the Titan forest is located. Make as much visual references so you can stay consistent. Also, make a world map so you can map out the journey your characters take and then you're good. I know it's a lot, but there's a reason why pro mangaka have folders upon folders of notes. Because if they work for years on these stories, they can't get anything wrong here. Believe me, I've been there. It's very important.
Okay, now one last thing before we can draw our manga. I promise. And again, it's something that can really help you out later on. So, um, how will your manga even look like? Like this or like that or like this or like that or manga pages can look completely different depending on their styles and you need to decide for the exact style that you're going for ideally before you start making your manga. So, here's what I did when I made my new manga. I collected some different manga pages first, and then I analyzed what they all had in common. They all had a lot of grayscale shading, aka screen tones. Don't worry if you don't know what that is. We're going to tackle that later on. They all had really detailed backgrounds. Check. I also need to watch that. Also, the backgrounds were realistic, but the characters still stayed very stylized and anime looking. Not like Vagabond, for example, where even the characters were drawn with more realistic proportions in their face. So, anyway, I tried to fuse all of these things that I like about other manga and tried making my own manga like this. Now, I like to think this worked out pretty well. What do you think? By the way, if you want to learn more about my manga, I explained the plot and I've even made a whole animated trailer for it. I've linked the video at the top. Just give it a watch. Anyway, that's what you should do before you make a manga. Pick some style references and then you're good to go.
Okay, steps one and two were a lot of preparation. This is where you start producing your manga. Here's one last challenge to test if you are really ready to start. Maybe just try drawing a manga page before you actually tackle this big project. A page with some characters from your story, different angles, maybe a location in your story just to check if you could really nail a finished manga page. If you struggle here, I've made videos about basically everything now, from how to draw a character in perspective, faces, how to invent your own art style, backgrounds, and so on. But if you really feel ready, then let's go.
Okay, I'll keep this part a bit shorter because I literally made videos about all of these steps. In case you didn't know, mangaka don't go directly from a story to a finished manga page. They make a story board before that. Always. You need to plan out which pages start out right and which pages start out left, how the panels in these pages are flowing, and so on. If you do not plan this out before, you will regret it a lot. So, yeah, go ahead and draw a storyboard of your manga pages first. Maybe sketch out your first chapter like this. If you have never made a storyboard before, I did make a tutorial on that where you can see how I turn a story into a story board. But if you already know how story boards work, then you know what to do. So, let's move on to the main part.
Ah, yes. Drawing the actual manga page. Just a quick heads up, I don't care if you draw this digitally or traditionally with pen and paper. The same things apply for both, namely the different zones. Here's a quick explanation what this means. The outer zones of the manga page will be cut off. That's like 3 to 5 mm. If you want to see exactly how that looks like, here's a PDF from my manga that has these marks. That's where it gets cut off while printing. Then you have these borders. That's depending on if you're drawing a left or right manga page. For example, if you're drawing a left manga page, then don't put anything important here because in your finished manga, this part of the page probably won't be visible anymore. So, yeah, while drawing, don't put any speech bubbles or important things here. But that's why you've made a storyboard, so you won't have to worry about where to place things anymore. You've already planned that ahead. And oh yeah, the part in the middle is the safe zone. It doesn't matter what page you're drawing, this part is always safe. Usually, manga cars have this special manuscript paper that includes all of these markings. And that's also what I've used for my traditional manga pages. I can only recommend it. And if you want to know where I got my paper, my ink, my pens, and so on, they are all linked on my art supply list, by the way. That's what I have a website for, so you can check it out. There's also lots of other important stuff like paneling, timing, especially when you're drawing fight scenes, effects, like sound effects. But all of this depends on which kind of manga you're drawing. But if you need any help, like I said, I have a whole playlist with all of this stuff in detail, from paneling to sound effects. This manga paper is also really important for the next step because if you want to ink traditionally with a pen and nib like pros do, regular printer paper will probably bleed. Manuscript paper won't.
Now, speaking of inking, again, you probably know the drill. You sketch out a manga page and then you ink it. You can totally ink with liners, but the problem here is that liners fade when you erase over them. That's why you see pro manga always use special pen nib and ink for manga pages. Now, I will warn you, handling these is not easy. The learning curve is steep. It is expensive and tedious, but it's also an incredible amount of fun. There are different nibs with special abilities, and I use them for basically all of my artworks. Now, again, if you are new and you want to learn about every detail when it comes to inking, especially with pen nibs, again, I've made a video on how to handle them and how to ink in general.
Okay, in case you did not know, manga isn't just shaded gray like it looks at first glance. These are actually not just flat gray areas, but they are tiny dots. And this effect is called screen tone or toning for short. To me, that's kind of what makes the difference between a black and white comic and an actual manga. At least when it comes to the finishing touches. However, if you're a traditional artist, don't do it. Traditionally, you're doing it with screen tone foil that you need to stick onto your paper and then cut into place. And don't get me wrong, manga pages like this can look incredible, like the ones in My Hero Academia. These are drawn traditionally and also toned traditionally, but these things are way too expensive. Instead, just scan in your manga pages using a scanner and some free software like MS Paint. If you need my settings, I showed them on screen. Then crank up the contrast and then just shade it digitally. Don't worry, you can also convert it into screen tones. Believe me, this way it's much less of a headache. And I could also scanner. What app is that? Which software are you using? Oh. Oh, yeah. Right.
So, yeah, you're done producing your manga pages. Congratulations. This is taking months to get done, but it's worth it. Okay, after all this time, let's make a manga out of these manga pages. Okay, so obviously you don't add the text by hand. You add the text digitally after scanning your manga pages. And here is a quick crash course on that. You want to download a font called Anime Ace. A download link is down in the info box. You can literally use any free software to add text, but there are a couple of things to look out for. First, leave some space in your speech bubble. Ideally, your text should have equally as much space to breathe on each side. Now, next, I personally like it when your text has a similar shape to the bubble itself. So, instead of this look right here, try formatting it more like that. It has a nicer shape to it. Again, that's how pros do it. And I think it's overall a lot more pleasing to look at. And now, these are your finished manga pages with text and all. You could actually print them like this, but most printing companies actually want a full-on PDF. In that case, you need one more step. There are special layouting softwares for making an actual PDF. I'm using Adobe Inesign for this. It's pretty self-explanatory. Opening a new document in your desired size, placing the pages, and boom, you're done. I actually prefer placing my text in this layouting software rather than on the pages themselves. But this is just a matter of preference. Placing it in in design is the more professional workflow though. And then from here on out, you can export it as a PDF. And boom, you're done. Here's your finished PDF ready to be printed. Oh, and what's still missing is your cover. And it's as simple as that. You make your illustration either digitally or traditionally. You scan it, you add some font as your title, and that's it. Your printing files are ready.
Okay. Now, what's next? Ready for the final step? Let's publish your manga. Now that you have a finished PDF, you could either go to a publisher because they could print it and sell your manga in bookstores and online. But the problem is that they might change your story or let you redo it from scratch. Or instead, you could print it on your own, sell it in your own online shop, and maybe publish it that way. There are a lot of things to know about this. Lots of downsides, lots of upsides. And if you want to know everything in detail, again, I've made a video on how to publish your own book. I would just copy and paste everything from that video here. So again, just watch that video if you want to know the details. Before you leave and watch that though, this video absolutely broke me and it would be nice if you subscribe to the channel. I'm making a lot more videos like these very soon. All right, it was a pleasure helping you guys out. I had lots of fun animating this video and I will see you guys next.