Oh Brother thumbnails finished!

SO

I realised that I never posted about finishing the Oh Brother thumbnails, and it was such a big step towards getting the book done that I wanted to share how I got there. Last year I spent most of my studio time working on re-drawing my Oh Brother thumbnails for my publisher. When my book got picked up by the publisher, I had written the whole book in script form (although the last 100 pages were a hot mess), drawn the first 250 pages in rough pencils, and inked and coloured the first 40 pages or so. Originally the book was written from the point of view of me as a 25-year-old (which was how old I was when I started writing the book) with non-chronological flashbacks to my childhood growing up with my brother. But just from talking to various publishers who were interested – this is before I signed my contract with Penguin Random House – it became very clear that whichever publisher I worked with would need me to re-write the book to be from my point of view as a kid.

CHANGES

Because of my drawing style (which is such a big part of how comics stories are read), the book was going to be sold as a middle grade (aimed at approx. 8-12 year olds) graphic novel and because the book was bought by four territories (Australia, UK, Canada and the US) it also needed to fit into certain publishing parameters. For example, the main character needed to be 12 or under so the book would be put into the middle grade section (and not the YA section) in bookstores in America. I was asked to change certain words and phrases (e.g. op shop to thrift store) and change iced coffee to a non-caffeinated drink (soda was suggested but I landed on milkshakes), things like why I was starting high school in year 8 needed to be explained, I couldn’t mention sanitary pads without explaining periods and I was asked about changing Vegemite (one of my brother’s absolute favourite foods/hyper-fixations) to peanut butter. I pushed back on the Vegemite change (and some of the other Australian wording changes); instead I leant into using asterisks* to explain things that might be confusing for international readers (anyone outside Australia). I really wanted the book to feel like my childhood growing up in a beachside South Australian suburb.

*My inner Terry Pratchett fan wasn’t mad about this.

A collection of some of the Oh Brother scripts and thumbnails from over the 7 years working on the book.

The biggest change that I had to do was making the story chronological and giving my character a narrative arc. Initially I didn’t really want to do this, partially because I think 8-12 year olds can read non-chronological vignette-y type stories but probably also because I was afraid I couldn’t write a chronological narrative. I’ve never felt confident in my ability to write narrative, I’ve always considered myself a character-focused writer and plot just sort of happens as a side effect (this is why I love autobiography - story/narrative is generally already in-built). My solution to this narrative problem was to create a friend character (called Callie), who is based on a combination of a few of my close friends (and their experiences meeting and interacting with my brother). The personality of and interactions I have with Callie in the book are based predominantly on one of my very best friends from high school (they know who they are). And one of the things I actually enjoyed about having to re-write the book was to get to include their beautiful energy and show my love for our friendship in my story.

First sketch of Gina and Callie together.

FEELINGS

With all these changes needing to be made, I had to go back to the start and outline, script, thumbnail and draw the whole book again. Obviously I had the original book I’d already made to use for reference but it really felt like I was starting from the beginning. I’m not going to lie, it was pretty hard to sit down and re-write the book. On top of having to revisit some tough memories, I also had to weave in a whole new narrative about myself & my amalgamated friend. I felt weird (and still do a little) for creating this fictional narrative, even though it is based solidly on experiences, interactions with friends and feelings I’ve had. It definitely felt like I was lying to the reader. But now that I’ve finished writing this version of the book, I think that it is a much better book for the changes and I hope that people will see the emotional truths in the narrative sections that aren’t 100% accurate (not that any memory can be 100% accurate ‘cos our brains re-write over memories all the time!)

Current scanned and printed thumbnails on top of their original drawings.

STEPS

Here are the steps that I have gone through to complete this new version of the thumbnails:

(1) Outline
I had never written an outline before, so I wasn’t really sure exactly what needed to be included (and I’m still not sure). I ended up with a 3 page text document that explained who the characters are, highlighted some of the major story beats, and outlined the narrative journey and ending for the characters. I received a 3 page document from my editors with suggestions and things to think about when I moved onto the . . .

(2) Written Script
This was initially quite hard for me, as I haven’t written many scripts for other people to read. For my mini comics I usually settle with a dot point list of story beats or just go straight to thumbnailing out the story, as I’m more of a visual thinker/writer. I gave myself the goal of writing 5 pages a day (3-4 days a week, basically whenever I could get studio time outside of other work). This helped me to break down the daunting task of re-writing the script into manageable chunks (it was still pretty hard though). What I did enjoy about the script stage was the puzzle solving of taking the stories I already had from the previous version and working out how to fit them in the new version of the story.

I wrote the script in Pages (Apple’s word doc program) because it’s free and I already had it. I set up the pages so each page of the word doc related to a drawn page of the comic and formatted it so I would view two pages at a time, so I’d get an idea of where the page turns would be, which are super important for a comics story flow.

The text itself was written kinda like a film script with each panel numbered and followed by the dialogue or brief description of what is in the panel. Like this:

Example of a page of my script.

Once the script was done, I sent it off to the the editors for feedback. I mostly have contact with my Australian editors (who take all the feedback from the UK, Canadian and US editors and collate it for me to read). It’s such a great opportunity to have so many eyes on my work but, heck, it’s suuuuuper daunting too. I found feedback on the script initially overwhelming and needed a little break before I took it on board and starting applying it to the . . .

(3) Thumbnails
After I gave myself a brain break from the script feedback and reminded myself not to take it personally and that my editors don’t think that I’m a terrible writer (which is what my jerk-of-a-brain naturally jumps to thinking), I was able to see how useful a lot of the editors’ feedback was for my book and start to put even more of those story puzzles together (I can’t emphasise enough how good it feels in my brain when I make good story connections that I didn’t see before!).

Some original pages of thumbnails. Ink drawings with limited texta colour and some whiteout.

One of the main pieces of feedback I received on the script was that I needed to cut out about 30 pages of story (minimum) to hit the maximum number of pages the publisher could print. The printer that my publisher uses prints pages in groups of 16 - so that means the page count has to be a multiple of 16 within a specific range of page count options that are average for the type of book being published. It was the hardest thing having to cut out scenes that I’d had in the book from the beginning but didn’t really fit in this new version of the book. The one I’m still the most sad about is the Vegemite Parrot story.

My amazing partner Owen formatted a thumbnail template with guidelines so I could more easily draw up panels (which is my least favourite thing to do, my panels are often wobbly at best). There were four comics pages to each sheet of thumbnails. I drew the thumbs about a third the size of the final printed page with a uni-ball ‘eye’ fine pen (and colour-coded some of the characters so it was easier to tell who was talking). Then I’d scan the pages in, cut them into individual pages and hand them back to Owen (with a plain text doc of the script) and he lettered the thumbs digitally so that they were readable.

Some original pages of thumbnails. Ink drawings with limited texta colour and some whiteout.

In the future (whether I’m working on personal projects or with a publisher) I think I will merge the script & thumbs stages, as I found that I edited script pages a lot as I adapted them into comics (when I realised that a certain angle might not work as well or I needed more space or panels [or less!] for a particular scene). I think going straight to thumbnails would reduce the amount or at least some of the type of feedback I'd get from just a script version.

Some original pages of thumbnails. Ink drawings with limited texta colour and some whiteout.

When I finally finished the thumbs, I uploaded them to Dropbox and emailed through the link to the editors, which was super underwhelming. I really thought it would feel good to finish everything but just sending off the link really didn’t do much for me. What did get me excited about finishing the thumbs was when I printed out a physical copy of them for the Comic Art Workshop (which I attended in November 2022). Holding the 270 pages of comics in my hand made a HUGE difference in how I felt about finishing the thumbnails. It felt like I’d actually made a book (obviously there is a lot more to do still, but holding the printed copy made me feel better about all the hours I’d spent working on it over the past year).

Gina is smiling, wearing a pink t-shirt and round silver glasses and holding the printed copy of the Oh Brother thumbs next to her face.

After completing the thumbnails, my next step was to get the book ready for . . .

(4) Sensitivity Readers
The final step for the thumbnails was getting them ready for sensitivity readers (a sensitivity reader's job is to read a manuscript and make sure that the story is sensitive to marginalised groups - for me, specifically the autism community). To get the book ready, I needed to go through my editors' feedback on the thumbs (which was minimal as most of the major story feedback was at script stage) as well as re-read the book (again) to try to cut down even more text on certain text-heavy pages. My editors will also do copy edits (probably more than one) on the book, making sure all the text meets the publishing house’s style guides.

As someone who hates re-reading their work and is not a succinct storyteller (I always want to over-explain everything, like right now!), this is a particularly hard but essential part of the writing process for me. As well as making these edits, I also created a 3 page comic introduction (page 1 pictured below) to the story and a little afterword (which explains more of what happened after the story in the book finished).

A page of pen sketch drawings that introduces Gina and things that she likes to do.

The editors gave me some really good feedback for tightening up or clarifying some of the plot and I think I managed to catch a few things that I would've kicked myself for later, if I'd missed them. So even though re-reading my own work pains me, I know it's the right thing to do.

What’s next

While I wait for the sensitivity readers’ feedback and initial copy edits, I’m going to get stuck into my pencils. The amazing Owen has done it again and has helped me set up templates for my pencils (which I’m going to try to do in Procreate for ease of editing and convenience of being able to take with me wherever I want) and a page count tracking spreadsheet (to help keep me on task). I’ve got to pencil the whole book by the end of April, so I’ll be heading into the comics mines and probably not posting (or generally leaving the house) much. Wish me luck!

An illustration of Gina holding an iPad, paper, pack of pretzels and a cup of tea and wearing a sash of pencils and a cap with a candle melted to the brim. Gina is looking unenthusiastically at a cave made from comics pages. The cave has signs stuck to it that read “Welcome to the comics mines”, “Danger RSI Ahead”, “Turn back and back up your harddrive” and “Beware of papercuts.”

Bonus

If you want to read about how I went about thumbnailing Oh Brother the first time (it’s a quite different!), you can read my I’m All Thumbs post from 2017.