Yogyakarta, November 2nd 2020—Center for Digital Society held Digital Discussion #38 titled “Everything You Need to Know About Starting a Webcomic on Sunday night. In this event CfDS invited Desprofit Satriantomo, the author of “Baper” at Line Webtoon as the speaker. The event started at 7 pm and was moderated by Devia Putri Maharani, an event assistant at CfDS.
As usual, the moderator started by elaborating the group rules and introducing the speaker. Next, the moderator asked a question about why people choose webcomics over printed comics in this digital age. Most people said that webcomics are more simple, interesting, and eye catching. From the view of the creator, the main aim of webcomic is to make it easier for readers and to invite more consumers. According to Desprofit, from the creative process side, there are no fundamental differences between webcomic and conventional comics. There are several comic artists that draw digitally but distribute their comics through printed media, such as Rosalina Lintang (Instagram account: lintankleen) a comic artist of “Scrambled”. Rosalina Lintang feels that having a physical comic that we can hold gives more satisfaction and pride. “Here, all of us are comics aficionados, making and reading comics is supposed to be fun so we have to enjoy both,” Desprofit said.
Technically, the fundamental difference between web and conventional comics is the flow of reading of that comic. Japanese comics or Manga are read right to left, different from European comics that are read left to right. In Webtoon, though it is a Japanese product, many of the comics are Korean products. Meanwhile, Manhwa or Korean comics are usually read left to right, so Korean Comics in Naver Line Webtoon is more translatable to Bahasa Indonesia and hence easier to be embraced by the market.
When it comes to the process of making comics, like making conventional arts, the first thing that needs to be prepared is to find ideas and create a good plan. Ideas can come from anywhere and at any time. Desprofit advice comic artists to take note of any idea that comes to mind. “Don’t look down on your idea. Always take note of it even though it looks unpolished and rushed. Ideas could come from twitter, songs, stories of people venting to you, movies, and even personal experience,” he said.
After finding the idea, the next step is to note down the premise and to develop it to a written script. If we want to make a comic with a storyline, we need to pay attention to the plot tension. To put it simply, there needs to be introduction, conflict, climax, anti-climax, and the ending. However, before creating a comic out of it, we need to make the characters first. There are a couple of comic artists that sell their character. For example, Si Juki by Faza Meonk, have been a part of a lot of Faza Meonk’s comic titles “Si Juki Lika-liku Anak kos!”, “Kisah Usil Si Juki Kecil”, “Si Juki Kisah Kusut Dunia Dongeng”, and many more.
The last step in creating a comic is the storyboard. According to Desprofit, the creation of storyboards is important to give a foundation for the comic that wants to be made. In this process, the comic artist can see whether the flow of the comic is too fast, hard to understand, the place of the chat bubble, layout, and other things. To make it we can use any tools or application because there should be no limitation to creating. “There is no limitation to creating, especially in creating webcomics. There are a lot of ways and applications to be used in creating digital comics,” Desprofit said.
We can draw conventionally on paper and then scan or use applications like Paint Tool SAI, Paint Tool SAI 2, MediBang Paint, Clip Studio Paint, Manga Studio, Adobe Photoshop and many more applications that can be downloaded through smartphone. According to him, a good application is an application that we can be comfortable with.