Making a Poetry Comic

Ideas, Imagery, and Insight

What comes first in a poetry comic, the words or pictures?

Sometimes the words. Sometimes the pictures. Often both arrive at the same time.

In the case of “Alight,” the words arrived first. It was adapted from a poem I wrote months before. The poem was bouncing around in my head when I saw a flock of birds landing in a half-leafless tree.

Adding visuals deepened experience of the poem for me. I liked the visual contrast between the flutter of golden leaves and the flock of black birds. The rhythm of the panels gave the feeling of interrupting a walk down the street to pause and jot down an idea.

That’s my basic creative practice: walking around outdoors, pen and notebook in hand, hoping to stumble on a moment of insight. Luckily, autumn is full of inspiration: colorful leaves, assorted birds, days of blue skies and golden light.

I drew “Alight” for my first annual Poetry Comics Month. Now it’s in my new book, POETRY COMICS, published by Chronicle Books.

The second annual Poetry Comics month was last November. I asked some artists I admire (Kat Schneider, Austin Kleon, Summer Pierre, Travis Jonker , Jason McBride, Vikram Madan, Gavin Snider, and Madeleine Jubilee Saito) to contribute their work. Jason was kind enough to lend some Weirdo Poetry for the occasion—thanks, Jason!

Some days finding an idea for a poem is like waiting for a bird to land on my head. I walk. I wait. Nothing happens. But then—

Come winter in Kansas, these flocks are everywhere. I even found them on a rare Wichita snow day. On a wintry lunch break walk, I heard birdsong. I looked up and discovered a poem.

Poetic imagery is everywhere. So are poetic words. Recently I started a series called “Words of Wonder.” For the first installment of this treasury of language, I chose a handful of words inspired by my wanderings and illustrated their definitions:

I’ve found that once a word is in my mind, I’ll see examples of it everywhere. My brain is primed for noticing.

One day in February I returned home from a run. At the top of the hill going into my neighborhood, I saw a breathtaking sight: a flock of birds moving like a tiny tornado loosed from the clouds.

The moment I got home, I put it down in my sketchbook. Experience has taught me that if I don’t get an idea down right away, the jolt of inspiration may not return.

Later in the day, I flipped to the next page of sketchbook and tried to put my experience into panels.

This loose sketch stayed in my notebook for a week or two. The image stuck with me. On a work day at my drawing table, I got out a large sheet of paper to sketch the comic at a larger scale.

At this point in the process, the idea was set. I began to think about panel size and shape as well as the pacing of the text and images. Once it felt right, I took out my Strathmore tracing paper, Pitt artist pens, and Prismacolor markers and inked the final.

Making the final art is the most stressful part of my creative process. New ideas are exciting. Writing is an exploration that can be easily edited or erased. But putting pen to paper to render an image for publication feels permanent. I don’t want to mess it up and have to start over—even though that frequently happens. Drawing is a delicate balance of precision and looseness.

Finally the drawing was complete, with only minor touchups needed—a rare event in my studio! I scanned the art and clanked around in Photoshop.

I used digital media to clean up the drawing and drop in color. For the text, I used a custom font designed from my handwriting by my art director Jennifer Tolo Pierce for POETRY COMICS.

My goal for the final art is to achieve a clear, effective image with an economy of language. Color is vital to the feeling of my work; I went through half a dozen color permutations before the mood felt right.

The end result: a new poetry comic on a familiar theme—the beauty of birds in flight.

For more on how to make your own poetry comics, check out these six exercises in creating.

POETRY COMICS is out today from Chronicle Books and is available worldwide wherever books are sold. Signed, personalized copies are at my local indie bookstore, Watermark Books. Go out and make some poetry comics and share them with the world!