Profesional Superhero Comic style?

[NicolasStegmayer]

Hey! I was wondering, is anyone here trying to get into companies? I mean, like, in my case, while I have a lot of stories I want to tell, I also want to practice so that I can draw comics profesionally, in marvel, dc, image, dark horse, etc... Basically, superhero style comics.
Is anyone in kind of the same place?
And, apart for that, i want you to read my comic and give me a critique, mostly on the art style... how far do you think i am? Be honest! (the art style has changed a lot lately so i recomend mostly giving opinions about the last pages)
Yo can send a link for your comics and we can all give eachother critiques about how far we are from fitting to the aproppiate style
Thanks!

[Shanny8]

Back in my 20s- yeah, I wanted to be an artist with mainstream comics...but it never happened. I didnt have the patience or discipline like I do now- now though, I've abandoned that chase. I like producing & creating my own material.

Taking a glance at the link, you want to practice your anatomy a little more- facial construction, body proportion, perspective & composition, and shading/hatching/feathering. Since you're working in black & white on this comic, you want fill those big negative spaces with background stuff; you dont have to background every panel, but enough where readers get a sense of establishment- if doing a page with 5 panels, there should at least be backgrounds on 2 of them.

Vary/change up your panel shots- dont have so many close ups, and see if you can try to incorporate some perspective shots/angles into some of your pages. Make your pages more dynamic- if you look at a lot of your favorite superhero books, the action shots are the more dynamic, perspective ladden, in-your face type shots.

USE REFERENCE. When drawing police cars, trucks, semi- automatic assault weapons, doorways- even clothing(wrinkles; kinetic energy and movement controlling the direction of which way the wrinkles go); reference helps toward creating a more plausible page/scene.

Some degree in realism: looking at the page where the truck starts flipping- the truck should've been dented up in certain areas. Once again going back to reference- watch movies and see where cars or trucks have had an accident and the impact points. I had a scene in my comic where I had to render out a guy tearing through a couple of cars- the impact, the debris(broken glass, broken pieces of the vehicles); I had to establish that to make the scenes sellable. One of the things that oddly helps me get those scenes done is that I have this weird love for doing destruction scenes...lol.

I'm not trying to be mean or discouraging- these are a lot of the requirements that you as a comic artist must know how to do(and do very well) when submitting your work to mainstream companies. There is no excuse as "these other guys know more than me" or "I dont have access to a lot of the resources that they do"- if you have internet, and you're posting this comic you have access to various resources to improve. Get a sketchbook, and practice in it everyday that you can, then start trying to translate a lot of the stuff you learn into your actual comic works. It's not going to happen overnight, but it can be done; you just have to want it bad enough.

[juyunseen]

So here's my thoughts after reading your stuff.

First things first. PROOFREAD. If you plan to be taken seriously, take yourself seriously. For example on page 5 your hero says "Whhat?! Arest me? Come on dude, I just caught this guys!"
If I'm not mistaken, this should read "Whaat? Arrest me? Come on dude, I just caught these guys." There's other spelling mistakes that taking the time to proofread or finding a friend to proofread will fix.

Now onto the art. The obvious first comment is that you need to practice anatomy. A sketchbook will help with this. Like @Shanny8 said. Practicing with reference is the way to improve. Think about it this way, learning to draw is really just learning what things actually look like. We all have an idea of what objects, people, ect, look like, but most of our mental images don't actually match the reality of the situation. Learning to draw is learning to pay attention to how things look, understanding how they sit in space, and knowing how to construct the object from shapes and forms into an images that is convincing.

Next, your backgrounds are sparse. I used to despise doing backgrounds, so I feel your pain. I just wanted to draw the characters. But if you ignore the backgrounds, your story loses a feeling of location. Every scene will blend together and your audience will become lost quickly. This was the biggest problem with my first attempt at a long-format comic. The backgrounds were blocky and crude, or empty and barren. I wasn't using reference, and it really showed. My current comic (here if you care) began with a ton of backgrounds, because I was forcing myself (and still am) to learn and care about the space my story exists in.

If you're really looking to pursue professional superhero comics, you need to start drawing from life. Take photos of places you're familiar with near where you live, and draw them. Feel free to trace your photos at first. This will force you to really look the image, and will over time teach you how to translate objects into lines. Lines don't exist in the real world, but they're all we have if you're drawing in pen and ink. Learning to bridge the gap between reality and linework is hard, but rewarding.

My final thought begins with a question. Do you, when you're sitting down to plan your page, draw the whole page? Or just individual panels? I ask because a lot of young comic's artists think that the panel is king, and if you're working in a vertical format or a strip format, then that is true. But you my friend are drawing pages, and a page is a whole piece inside of itself. If you start thinking about the layout of your entire page, you begins to learn how to properly make your page balanced and flow well.

You've got a lot of work ahead of you, but choosing to start and make a comic is the only way to learn! Hopefully this had been a little helpful at least.