I need a panel repeated… “STAT”!

Ever read a comic book and you come across a panel, and suddenly get deja-vu?  You stop and stare at that panel and realize you have seen it before.  In THAT very issue, no less.  So you flip a couple pages back and find the same exact panel that appears later on.  More often then not this happens on the same exact page.  No, you are not dreaming, and no the artist did not draw the same thing twice.  Before the age of digital Production, this was basically done by a photocopier machine.  You would hope that the artist at least put the panel they wanted to repeat on a light-box and just redraw it a second or third time, but mainly, the entire panel was just copied and applied elsewhere.  Now-a-days, the artist just leaves a note for us to “STAT” a certain panel in in the Pre-Press stage or for the colorist.  It is our job in Pre-Press to make these repeat panels.

That is simple enough, right?  Very straight forward, and happens in just about every comic book we make.  Here’s an example:

On this page, the artist just needs the 1st panel repeated (STAT) in panel 3.  All we have to do is select the entire panel.  Copy it.  Paste it, and drag it to where it has to be repeated.  Flatten the image if still in Grayscale, and convert to bitmap.  Very simple.  But what happens when the artist supplies us with something like this?

Batgirl #9 pg.4 by Lee Garbet & Jonathan Glapion

In this case, the artist needs us to STAT certain elements of a panel, but not others.  He asks us to “repeat people from panel 2, background from panel 1″ adding in the Batgirl figure drawn in panel 3.  He needs us to repeat parts of the background from one panel, and yet replace parts of another with a new foreground and middle ground.  This is gonna take some work to do.  I’ll take you through how I tackled this particular page.  The fun begins!

using the lasso tool to make a selection

The first thing we want to do is select all the people we need to copy into the new panel.  Just use the lasso tool and as best and fast as you can, follow around the figures.  Hold down shift to add to your selection if you happen to raise your tablet pen or close a previous selection.  Once you’ve completed all the selections, copy that selection.  Don’t worry too much if you didn’t “cut” them out exactly.  If you got some of the background in the selection, it’s ok.  We’ll touch that up in later steps.  For now just get the people copied and pasted for use in the third panel we need them for.

copy & paste

So now you copied the figures you need into the panel with the Batgirl on the rope.  Now is a good time to zoom in, and clean up all the line work around those figures, in case you got any part of the background by mistake.  This is where you make sure that you only have the necessary parts of the patch that you need to use, and nothing else.  Also, this is where you zoom in and see if any artwork needs to be replaced that is missing now that you have it separate.  For example, in this piece, we zoom in and see that the woman’s hair is not going up to the border like the above panel, and we need to fill in the rest of her hair, and clean her up a bit in this new panel.

art cleanup and fill

Now we just go in with the pencil and fill in the missing pieces.  We do all around the patch, until we are completely happy with how this new stat looks.  Everything is where it should be, all the line work is neat and cleaned up, and filled.

art cleanup and fill

finished art patch part I

Now we have to get the background in there.  Here, we just want to repeat what we did with the figures.  Select all the parts you want from the background, going around the figures you do not need.  Once you select all the art you want to stat, copy and paste it onto a new layer.  Move the art down to the panel we need it in.  Line it up with the border of the new panel.  Now we can see all three parts in the new panel.

selecting the background to keep

the background on it’s own layer after copying it and pasting it

the background combined with the patched in figures

[The Batgirl is on a separate layer that we will bring back to the front in a future step]

Getting Batgirl back into the middle ground

What I did next, was make the two patches of the people and the background have about a 50% opacity.  Change the opacity if the layer in the layer palette options.  This awy we can see all three pieces as one, even though they are on separate layers.  This way we can go in and delete pieces of artwork that we don’t need once the three pieces are flattened.

new selection

Next, I selected everything around Batgirl, and did an inverse of that selection.  I did that because I only want to keep the Batgirl art from this layer.  I want no white background around her.  Once I deleted around her, now the other layers will fall into place without any overlap.  The point is to have all three layers seamlessly integrated, and having to do the least amount of redrawing as possible.

the background now will be “behind” the Batgirl art, where it needs to be

middle ground and background integration

more art fills & corrections

Now when we add in the people from the foreground layer, we see that a lot of patch work needs to be done.  We need to zoom in and fill in the missing artwork so that all the layers feel combined as one.  We need to make it all seem as one piece of artwork that was drawn all together, even though it wasn’t.

more art that needs to be finished up to each different layer of art

all three layers combined

Once you touch up all the artwork, and you are happy with the three layers looking like one, you can flatten the image and convert to Bitmap.  This will threshold the piece, and give you one whole page yet again, now with all three layers combined.

ALL FINISHED!  off to colorist as a final corrected page

And there you have the final finished corrected page where we patched up and combined different parts of three panels to create a whole new panel.  If I did my job correctly, it should look like the artist drew that whole panel himself, even though we just took elements from already existing panels, combined them, and patched them up to completion.  It’s very cool when you think about it, and I’m sure a lot of people just overlook something like this, and also just pass it off as a REPEAT panel.  It’s obviously a little more then that as you can see.  Even though the information was already drawn, just by making selections, copying and pasting, we can create a whole new panel.  This is a majority of the type of art corrections that come across our desk.  Recently, a lot has been left for the colorist to patch, or stat themselves, if it is a straight forward repeated panel.  The more extensive patches and corrections, like above, are done right here in Pre-Press!

Next column, I will take you through another type of patch for a page that I had to construct for Brightest Day #0.  It’s a page where 7 different artists drew 7 different drawings, and I had to combine them all into ONE comic book page.  It took some serious playing with to fit all the elements into one page, and I’ll show you how I did next time!

Until then,

Corey Breen