Supplies to Create Comic Strip

Series Summary

Comic strips are popular cartoons found in newspapers and magazines around the world. They usually have a humorous, symbolic, or satirical meaning. The strip is comprised of a sequence of frames that tell a story, although some popular “strips” may run a single frame. Strips may create a single gag drawing upon the quirks and characteristics of recurring characters (“Peanuts,” “Blondie”) or tell a continuing or serialized story, as with early strips such as “Prince Valiant” and “Buck Rogers.” Various themes include animals, fables, fairytales, super heroes, and anime.

In this series of comic strip creation videos, our expert cartoonist and graphic illustrator Matt Cail demonstrates the basics of making your own comic strip. He tells you the supplies you need, then demonstrates how to create characters and panels. He also includes advice on tracing and inking the strip as well as adding word balloons with dialogue. Watch this informative video series and you’ll be creating your own comic universe before you know it!

Video Transcript

"The very first step for us to start creating our comic strip is making sure we have all of our various art supplies together. The first thing we're going to want to have on hand is a straight edge. This is going to help us draw boxes and also things like word balloons to give nice straight lines. You can go with one more of your fancy triangles from high school, or you can go with a good old ruler. Next, we're going to have a series of pens and a blue pencil. This is not a typical graphite pencil. It's actually going to have blue that you're going to be able to draw. That's very important. We don't want the traditional pencil. Half the times you can actually go out and get the mechanical pencils here to be able then to put your blue inside so you never run out. Then we're going to have a series of pens, which we're going to use for inking. There's going to be very fine felt tip pens. Also, for coloring you can various larger or smaller markers on hand to do our coloring for our comic strip. Lastly, but definitely one of the most important things we have to have, paper. I'm going to go through just normal drawing paper as well as tracing paper today. "