A Tale of Too Many Bananas 2

Ah, monkeys. There’s nothing quite like them. Particularly those with tails the same color as bananas.

But how does one go about building the better monkey? Well, it helps to start out with a good story. That comes care of Mark McKenna, creator and surrogate dad to Banana-Tail. Comic book art is a whole world of storytelling unto itself, where every panel needs to lead the eye to the next panel and come together to make a whole that is a thousand times stronger than the parts. Having never dabbled in this field before, I relied on the esteemed talents of Kevin West to guide me. You can see his layout for the first page to the right.

I divided each panel into separate illustrations, then worked out my drawings, trying to inject my own style while keeping faithful to Mark’s creation. I do most of my final sketches on tracing paper these days, just to speed up the process. Then I dive into my collection of papers and try and find colors and textures that come together and help tell the story. For me, the trick is to let the paper do as much work as possible and imply the detail. After that, it’s all cutting and glueing.

The final sketch is below, and the finished panel is above. Feel free to add your own words.

Part 1