Hey, my name is CB Cebulski and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics.
There are a lot of misconceptions about portfolio reviews or certain things you
should and shouldn't do.
First and foremost, don't break the panel borders.
This is something I cannot emphasize enough.
Panel borders are supposed to be broken for special moments, probably about once
every issue.
If that, and if you break a panel border, break the panel border down.
The action is supposed to move from left to right, top to bottom.
Don't carry the reader's eye back up to the previous panel.
If you're doing it for artistic reasons or stylistic reasons along the lines of
people like Adam Kubert or Olivier Coipel, let them be the ones to do it.
They've been doing it for years.
After 20 years of experience, you can start breaking panel borders for
stylistic reasons too.
But please, it's my biggest pet peeve, just keep the action in the panel
borders.
Gutters, okay.
Do not blacken your gutters.
Gutters or panel borders between the panels are there for a reason.
They subconsciously give the reader a beat between panels to pause in the
action.
If you put the panels together, if you leave out the gutters, if you blacken the
gutters,
It completely ruins the reading experience.
Everything kind of melds together not just from panel to panel but as a page
and the eye won't really know where to go or won't process the information as well.
So, please leave your panel gutters white.
This course really is the next level.
It is extremely comprehensive in a way that we as Marvel have been looking for a
partner to do something with from storytelling to the basics of the arts
and the layouts.
Don't crop your hands and your feet.
There are people who don't like drawing certain things.
I know artists who are friends of mine who've been in this business for 25, 30,
some even 40 years.
They don't like drawing hands.
They don't like drawing cars.
They don't like drawing horses.
The list goes on.
But you have to learn to draw what you don't like.
Don't crop out what you don't want to draw because it will be noticed to people
by me whose job it is to know stuff like that but it will be noticed by the
reader.
It is very obvious and if you don't like to draw it, practice drawing it.
Keep drawing it, get better at it, put it in the panels to make sure that you get
better at it or find different ways to hide it in the panels rather than just
crop it out.
Speaking of horses and hands and cars, use reference.
It's extremely important and don't just use other comic books as reference.
Go out and experience life.
Take life drawing classes, go out take your sketchbook, go out into the street,
sit on a bench, draw people, draw cars, draw trucks, draw trains, draw buildings.
Oh, people who can't draw buildings, who just do boxes with you know, fake windows
in them,
No good.
Go out and look at what a building really looks like, especially when you're
drawing Marvel comics, you're going to draw New York City.
There's water towers, there's window panes, there's ledges, there's gargoyles,
there's all kinds of things that go into the architecture of buildings to make it
feel like New York.
And New York is a character Marvel book, so that's very important.
So, do not hesitate to use reference.
But if you are using reference and you're going to Google image search, do not take
the first image on the first page of the search.
Look for something that fits in and that you could use and don't trace it.
Please, use it as a reference.
That's why it's called reference.
It's there for you to refer to, not to copy.
Also, that's extremely important.
Stick to the grid.
Too many people, thanks to the comics of the 90s nothing wrong with that, I love
the 90s comics do crazy page layouts.
As a beginning artist, as someone who's submitting your portfolio review to
Marvel, who's someone who hasn't worked for us yet, stick to the grid.
Learn the rules of how to tell a story before you break those rules.
That is extremely important.
Consistency is very important, especially in facial features.
The two best ways to tell a story visually are through the use of hands and
with body language and there has to be a consistency to the features in each
character.
The shape of the eyes, the distance between the eyes, the size of the hands,
the size of the fingers, the length of the arms.
Focus on that consistency.
One of the biggest mistakes I see all the time is different lengths of body parts,
different spatial features that don't align and you can't tell who the
characters are, much less understand what the story is as you move through the
comic.
The first one is that you need to pay attention to inspiration and imitation.
There is a fine line between inspiration and imitation.
Some of the first questions I ask artists when I'm looking at portfolios is, "So,
who are some of your influences?"
And they'll list a couple and then I'll be like, "Oh, but you also like Dave
Stevens, you like Olivier Coipel, you like Terry Dodson."
How did you know that?
It's very obvious from your line work and that's something that it's natural, it
happens.
But to become a talented artist, to really get become a professional who's
going to have a style of their own, you have to learn to break the border between
the art you love and who you wanted to draw like and who you are as an artist.
I can't put a number on the number of portfolios I've critiqued over the years.
"Print portfolios, online portfolios, you know, in-person portfolios.
It's mind-blowing the amount of styles we get from different people around the
world.
It's mind-blowing to see how many people understand the Marvel medium and where
people's influences came from.
Naturally, when I open any portfolio, the first thing I'm going to notice is the
style.
That's what jumps out at me and that's always what'll jump out to anyone who's
reviewing a portfolio.
So,
"When I'm doing a portfolio review, I review it twice and review the style.
And then at that point, I'm asking the artist to tell me about themselves, you
know, the history of their background, their stylistic influences.
And then once I have a sense of the style, which I can get after two or three
pages, I'll go back and I'll look at the storytelling, which is obviously the most
important or more important part.
Anyone can have a style and styles can change, styles can improve, styles can
get worse.
We've seen it with even professional artists.
Storytelling is something that is almost inherent in people.
Yes, you can learn it and you can grow with it but it comes naturally to so many
different people and there are other artists I've known, literally I've been
reviewing their portfolios for 25 years and they haven't changed, they haven't
grasped what makes a good storytelling.
It's that combination of foreground and background, the way to use body language
to move a character from panel to panel.
"The way to lay out a page in the most efficient way to make sure that the
character gets from point A to point B where they need to block the shots and
make sure that, you know, there's a consistency between all the imagery.
That's where comic books come in most handy as a reference.
When you're designing and drawing and coming up with ideas, you know, there's a
reference outside the world.
And I said earlier,
Don't look at comic books for reference.
Look at comic books for storytelling.
That's what comic books are all about.
That's the magic of comics, is that with a pencil and ink, someone has gone in
there and told a story with their own hand and their own mind from scratch and
is moving those characters in a way that is so natural that your eye is picking up
on it, your brain is reading it, and you're enjoying it.
Storytelling, storytelling, storytelling.