Costa Rican comic creator Alberto González pulls back the curtain on his process
Hola! I am Alberto, a Costa Rican artist, writer and user experience / IT specialist who has been member of Kid’s Comics Unite / Studio (KCU) since 2021. Looking for like-minded artistic souls in the Internet has been a perennial interest of mine and when I got aware of KCU I knew I had to be part of it, to talk, learn and share about what I’ve always been more passionate at — comics, animation and character design for kids. Something I don’t get many chances to do in real, offline life so far.
For the Let’s Go! Anthology, I contributed a 4-pager (initially a 5-pager) first named Cracker Critters, later changed to Biscuit Birdies. For short stories like these I generally lean automatically towards humor because drama or more complex stories require more room for expression, in my opinion, and because the thought of a school girl being chased by birds going after her scout cookies cracked me up from the beginning. Therefore, talking about my own process to produce a short comic like this was the logical subject to cover, so Let’s Go (pun intended) into it.
The Process
Foremost, I’m a character design guy. If I see some character in the wild and I like it, I’m already sold on their story or show, whatever that is. Thus, my way of creation has always been characters first and everything else second — probably not the best approach to story development, but old habits die hard.
So, once the protagonist/journey Anthology theme was set and the reception of proposals started, I set on a simple premise involving a scout girl, her scout cookies and birds. Girl goes out, gets hungry, steals a cookie from her stash; a bird passing by catches the cookie, she chases the bird and escalating chaos ensues. That was the main idea. I didn’t even bother to write a script for it. A running gag in four pages, basically. I wanted action, rather than dialogue, to drive the story anyway.
Then it was about finding the right look for the protagonist — the scout girl. Even though my workflow is practically 100% digital these days, when I need to “think” of character designs and plots I still need my old-fashioned yet obsolescence-free notebook and pencils. I may have my iPad handy for design references on Pinterest and such, but at this time I like to have as few digital distractions as possible.
Some of the character design explorations for Bea the scout girl. Notice the blatant ripoff from Bessie the character from Nickelodeon’s The Mighty B at left — but as a starting point of course.
Initially, I started designing the character after my typical character styles, but things weren’t quite clicking yet. Then I remembered about this short-lived Nickelodeon show circa 2008 named The Mighty B. Bessie, the main character, is also a scout girl, and being a fan of Nickelodeon’s edgy character designs from that era I began using her as a reference point. Eventually I reached a point where I was pleased with her design, christened her Bea (after the show’s name) and jumped over to the rest of development. (I also began exploring some winged critters’ designs as I was going to require quite a few for this story)
The very first draft for the story had Bea driving a toy wagon and the birds literally singing for their cookie crumbs over and over. I’m more of showing through action rather than telling, so it was all pantomime at this point, no dialogue. I still like how some expressions here turned out.
I could have finished this story way sooner if I didn’t have to redo the pages, some even with finished inks, like three times over each. (See, this is what happens when you fly by the seat of your pants, have no fixed script, and want to hurry things up — don’t recommend it). Based upon insightful observations of anthology committee members (special mention to Jeff Larkin) having to redo these pages from scratch was awful, but if I wanted to make this the best anthology-worth story I could deliver, I just had to deal with it and grind over again.
It later dawned on me that this whole process wasn’t unlike dealing with a real editor at a real publishing house, where stories of discarding already-finished pages for the betterment of the story aren’t uncommon. As a learning process, a painful yet truly invaluable one, and a bunch of mistakes to hopefully not make again.
The original ending had Bea passing on her home’s porch at the sight of a fried chicken delivery guy. It was agreed that the punchline was falling flat so a new ending was required. This ending was in fact the very last thing to be resolved. On another version Bea still passes out, but this time at the sight of a chicken casserole, much to her parent’s dismay. This, however, didn’t seem to work either so I had to lose the dad (who appeared nowhere else in the story) and change Mom’s design to another more relatable to Bea’s cartoony likenesses.
Now you can understand what they mean for things that remain on the “cutting room floor”.Were this a more typical comics assignment, I couldn’t have afforded myself the luxury of redoing things over and over — but the value of this experience was in the process within, of making many mistakes and learn thoroughly from them — that’s valuable.
Inking and Coloring
Give me draft pencils and paper and I’m a happy camper. Give me pages to color and… watch me suffer. Color isn’t something I feel particularly strong at, and choosing a palette to work with can be an agonizing choice. I even considered briefly delegating the color tasks to one of my local artist colleagues, but I ended up taking the task myself aiming to have, at least, a consistent palette and tone across all pages. I hope the final result is, at least, passable. For a more extended work, you’ll probably see me tucked in a corner frantically sobbing for help.
Wrapping Up
The chance of being featured on an international (for me) anthology akin to similar initiatives I’ve admired and collected in the past (Kazu Kibuishi’s Flight series, whose participants made their way into successful artist careers, comes to mind) is an important, personal milestone and a personal bet into the career shift I’m looking towards more hands-on artistic / creative work, which may sound quixotic and defiant in the age of AI. My infinite thanks, of course, to the KCU Anthology team for making, in many ways, this project a reality.