Process: Brandon Graham

Over the last year, I've mentioned, I think probably repeatedly, that I admire the work of Brandon Graham. Graham has recently turned to tumblr, a platform through which he has shared, among other things, process work. My favorite bit of this detritus from this detailing of how the sausage is made is the below layout guide, which Graham sent to artist Giannis Milonogiannis for Prophet #31.*

It's easy to forget that comics is a collaborative process; often, we want a clean division between "writer" and "artist," but I think it's important to remember that many creators are both, even if they are credited as one or the other. Here, Graham is stepping into a part of production that we tend to think of as the artist's purview; elsewhere, like in the Marvel Method, the artist is probably much more responsible for the plot of the book than the writer is. One of the things thats interesting to me about this is the way that each group of creators seems to work differently, so that one particular thing that makes for a successful collaboration between Graham and Milonogiannis might not be useful for Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips or for Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. There is, it turns out, more than one way to make good comics. 

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*I don't think I'm going to do a top ten list but, if I were to, chances are that Prophet would be the book of the year. If you haven't checked it out yet, its time to give it a shot. 

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