Kieron Gillen

The comic expert reveals his tips for devising your own title

What does an indie comic offer that a mainstream one doesn’t?

Control. You have a vision. You can actualise your vision, as you intend. The joy of working in comics is that the playing field is relatively equal compared to fields like animation or film, where money is a huge thing. Here’s 22 pages. Fill them. Paper, ink, ideas and the inside of your head. It’s the most democratic visual storytelling form on Earth.

What are the benefits of creating comics collaboratively?

Collaborating is an interesting one. As a writer, I’d certainly like to encourage all artists to collaborate with writers – ideally me. But in reality that’s a question you have to ask yourself: do you want to just tell your own stories? If so, you may still want a writer along if you’re not sure of your abilities in various areas; not least the organisation side. In most writer-artist teams I know, the writer takes on a lot of the admin work because, in terms of pure hours, the artist normally puts in much more.

What’s the most challenging thing about creating comics?

Artists with enormous experience in creating single images can have a tendency to underestimate the difficulties in creating comics. There’s a different language there, and there are things that make you perfect for creating a single image which can actively work against you when creating an effective comic. Luckily, there are a lot of resources on comic creating now – plenty of tutorial or theory-lead things, which I’d encourage you to devour – as well as reverse analysing comics you like, to see exactly how they create those magical effects that leave you all a-quiver.