How to Make Your Own Manga Comic

Study the Manga style before you create your own book.

Creating a Manga comic is a work of art that requires time, persistence and patience. The Manga market in Japan is huge, with the industry worth $200 million in 2006. You can learn to create your own Manga comics from concept to final draft.

Instructions

Manga Comic: Create Your Own Book

1. Read a Manga comic such as “Alita: Battle Angel” or “The Guiver,” then compare the story and characters in it with something sillier, such as “The Dirty Pair.”

2. Decide what your Manga comic is going to be about; the key to a good Manga comic is “exaggeration.”

3. Write a paragraph about the story, from beginning to end, but leave out the details and characters.

4. Reduce the paragraph into one sentence that describes the comic to get a good idea of what to name your Manga comic.

5. Work on characters to develop your story. Determine their values, interests, loves, hates, friends, enemies, powers or talents and a background. Write a profile for each of your characters as if you were describing the character to a friend. This will help develop a voice as you write your own book.

6. Decide how much background or plot you want to expose to readers in your own book. Try teasing your readers with hints about the plot, but pack your Manga comic full of action.

7. Break your story into sections. Decide at which point you want to tell your readers something, or if you just want to introduce a new character, in what scene and what circumstances are necessary.

8. Create a storyboard to put your sections into a sequence of events and create points in your story for the drawings to be placed. Start with notes of “where” you want your characters to be and “what” they should be doing to help create the scenes.

9. Purchase books to learn how to draw the popular Manga style or hire someone to draw for you. Create a partnership with a colleague or friend for help.

10. Sketch out your characters in action.

11. Create a final draft that's a combination of writing and sketches ready for conversion.

12. Convert your final draft into line drawings.

Tips & Warnings

• If your Manga comic is going to be about a particular character who is the central role in everything (a first-person perspective), buy a diary and writing fake entries as your character. You’ll be surprised what your mind is capable of when you use the diary method; this will make your book more believable.

• Love is the easiest of plots, and people like to read about it. Betrayal is another key factor in a good Manga comic.

• With Manga, you can write anything as silly or as serious (or a combination of both) as you deem necessary or desirable.

• Drawings can be imported to software, where the images and text can be moved around and put into a sequence. You can then self-publish your comics by printing the file to a PDF format.

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish