The Making of Chicken Wings


A lot of people ask us how the strips are created. Well, surprise: We draw them! But seriously, here's a more detailed description, if you really want to know.

The typical process of creation goes approximately like this: Mike sees something funny during his work, thinks about how to turn it into a Comic Strip, draws a little sketch, scans it and sends it to Stefan. His sketches usually look something like this:



Then (as you may have tried just now), Stefan tries to decipher the scribbling and asks Mike a lot of dumb questions, especially about pilot slang he doesn't understand, until the concept of the whole strip is clear.

Then, in the darkness and seclusion of a quiet night, Stefan crouches with his hunchback before his desk, muttering strange and incoherent gibberish, eyes darting left and right until they finally focus on the paper in a wild and frenetic stare. Drool starts running out of the corner of his mouth as he focuses on the exerting task that demands the utmost of his intelligence and fine motor skills. Wolves start howling outside and... Okay, whatever, in any case he sits down and does the actual drawing work. First he puts down the whole strip with pencil. For this he uses completely un-fancy standard pencils, and usually pretty hard ones at that (HB or H), because it's only for a sketch and will get erased anyhow. Using hard pencils saves time by not having to sharpen them too often.

The next step is to trace the outlines and ink the areas that are supposed to be black. For this Stefan uses a variety of Pilot pens: Pilot Hi-Tech-C and Hi-Techpoint (because they're reliable and easy to get) and the ridiculously expensive, but exquisite Copic Multiliner SP.

Then, after some time to let it all dry, the pencil outlines are erased. The duration of this process is usually a coffee, a beer, and ocassionally one or two movies, and the final outcome looks approximately like this:



Until here everything was done by hand. The next thing to do is scan it, put it into the right format and then put the lettering on top. This is done using Photoshop. After that Mike reviewes it for speling misstakes ;-), and then it finally looks something like this:



Of course there are a lot of variations in this procedure. Quite often it's Stefan who comes up with an idea, or even more often, we hang out together and start joking and telling stories and then the ideas pop up faster than we can write them down. Also, sometimes the sketches get buried deep inside a pile of papers or a folder, either accidentially or because they're not deemed funny enough. Then some day they are recovered, reprocessed and either turned into something we consider funny or shoved back into the ominous pile.

Some strips are turned into color. Coloring a comic strip is a whole chapter for itself, so we'll save that for later...

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