Have you ever wondered how to improve your comic art? Or really wanted to draw a comic of your favorite character? I have wanted both of those things and wanted to tell you about a neat idea that my friend Keenan came up with.
That idea is to redraw a comic book page in your own style.
I had tried this idea YEARS ago but had pretty much forgotten about it. Then Keenan reached out online for artists to collaborate on redrawing an entire comic- specifically, Amazing Fantasy 15, known for being the first appearance of Spider-Man. His idea was for all the artists involved to do one page each (or contribute if they were specifically pencilers or inkers). the final product would be a diverse collection of people’s styles.
Keenan assigned pages from the script he reverse-engineered from the original comic to each artist based on their strengths. I got the wrestling match between Peter Parker and Crusher
So here are some process pics and the final page!
Benefits of this are: simply practicing making a comic page. As Jake Parker and others [art and fear?] have brought up, making things over and over and learning from them will help you improve more than trying to make a big perfect thing. So one page, already scripted, is a good practice piece.
Redrawing something that already exists allows you to point people to it as connected to that thing they are familiar with. It’s like fan art: people are more likely to find a picture of Spider-man by searching on the internet than a character that no one has heard of before.