How to contribute with a Comic

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How to contribute with a comic

To make things easier for aspiring writers and illustrators who would like to see their creations published in SWEDISH SUPER-COMICS we have compiled a list of the different criteria and guidelines that we follow. These guidelines are here to provide all of us, readers and creators alike, with a pleasant comic-book experience.

These guidelines are divided into: common guidelines, guidelines for illustrators and guidelines for writers.

COMMON GUIDELINES:
Swedish Super-Comics happily review the comics that you write or draw. We primarily deal in  superhero comics, but also action, horror, science fiction and similar adventure-filled genres. Rougher comic-book plots can also be of interest to us. If you want to collaborate with someone, you are free to look for people on our forum or Deviant-art page. You can also contact us in the bullpen, and maybe we can help you out with hooking up with a collaborator.

Here’s how you do it:
1. E-mail a (very) short text-piece that describes your comic-book story to Viktor Matiesen. This short piece is called a synopsis. It is preferably half a page, describing your comics series of events and a short run-down of the general concept. Remember to fill us in on how many pages you see the finished story consist of.

2. Once we’ve agreed with you that your synopsis is solid and up to par, we will ask you for two things: A finished script for the first part of the comic, as well as a finished and drawn first page of said script.

3. The bullpen will then review how well your comic would fit into the magazine, and will contact you with our final decision.
If you already have begun, or completed a comic-book story, then you can of course send that in for review as well.

Each part of a comic-book story can be at the most 20 pages long (give or take). If the comic is  part of a longer ongoing storyline, we recommend you to limit it to at the most three parts of 20 pages each, wherein the last part will contain a clear ending to the storyline. You can of course make another story with the same characters later on, should you wish to do so. If a comic consists of more parts that one, the second part has to be finished and drawn before we publish the first part.

Lettering is something that we at the bullpen can help you with, should you need it.

Only send good copies, unless we ask for originals. Or send high-resolution scanned images. The resolution should be at a minimum of 300 dpi (the depth which we print), or preferably even higher.

We won’t publish any material with characters or other content which other publishers or individuals, than you, are the sole owners of. So there’s no point in sending us endless pages worth of Wolverine, Superman, Witchblade or other known characters. In other words, nothing but original characters, please!

GUIDELINES FOR ILLUSTRATORS:
The fanzine is in black and white. Only the cover is in colour. Contact Viktor Matiesen if you wish to contribute with coloured images. We have very high standards for the front-cover!

Contributing with pin-ups is cool, but we’re a lot more interested in full pages of sequential art. Usually our comics are drawn in the international ISO A series standard, A3 size. Which is 11.7 × 16.5 inches. The closest paper-size equivalent being 11 × 17 aka ”Ledger” or ”Tabloid” size. But that’s not all-important, as long as the pages are drawn in a standing orientation, and not wide-screen.

Currently the most sure-fire way to get a good result in print, is to print in nothing but black and white. This is because of our current status of printing-quality, which could potentially mean that pages with gray-scale rendering added to them could turn out looking far worse in print than intended. Our biggest problem is with very light gray tones, which run the risk of printing as nothing but white. The same problem can be said to exist with darker shades of gray, which can turn out as nothing but black. Make sure your images are clear, you can achieve this by inking your material. The black-points can also be edited in a computer-program of your choice, such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or GIMP (the last option is completely free). Black should preferably be black. Don’t clutter your pages with unnecessary details. If you do, you run the risk of everything printing as nothing but incoherent blobs.

Lettering should be clear. A good tip is to first letter with graphite pens in thin lines, which can then be erased once the final inked letters have dried out. You can also do your lettering digitally in Adobe Illustrator or similar programs. Just make sure you don’t chose any stale regular typeset.      

GUIDELINES FOR WRITERS:
A script should be well structured. Already in the first pages we should get to know the main character(s) and what kind of problems they are facing. Because it’s almost always about some kind of problem or hardships. The bigger strokes of the situation at hand, is established.

Don’t just cram in any character you can think, just for the sake of it. For you, the writer, the situation could be very clear, but for everyone else, things can get messy, boring, and hard to follow when there are too many characters running around in your story.

A script which is to be read by others should be very clear and easy to follow. It can be a full script or in the form of simpler sketches. Just remember, that drawing longer stories is a lot of hard work. So a good tip is to divide the story up into shorter individual done-in-one chapters or episodes. At the moment we seem to have a gamut of writers and a shortage of illustrators, but don’t get discourage just because we can’t find an illustrator for your story at the moment.

If you submit a full script for review, it’s preferred that you also include a short plot-description of at the most one half a page, a so-called synopsis. A synopsis will make things a lot easier for us, when we read and interpret your script.    

And remember, if you want to use characters other than your own, make sure you have the permission from all the rights-holders of said characters.

Contact info: You can contact ViktorMatiesen via note, or on his email: viktor.matiesen@svenskasuperserier.se
© 2010 - 2024 Swedish-Super-Comics
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