Consistency

Consistency in the art is crucial when producing a comic. When it comes to drawing just about every comic book artist advises to just draw the characters over and over, familiarizing yourself with the design and build up a reference archive to refer back to.

Manuel Gutierrez developmental work for Marvel's "Blade" miniseries.

Mark Silvestri's development work for the reboot of "Cyberforce".

Like in the games and movie industries all aspects of the character be considered including expressions, weapons, clothing, colours etc. which will aid in the process of reproducing the character or object repeatedly.

A comparison of Stjepan Sejic's Development and final pages for "Twitch".

Perhaps more than the games or movie industry the comic artist's knowledge of the design of elements of within their story is of the utmost importance. In the movies and games elements are designed, made and put to use by animators. Producing comic art is more comparable to 2D animation where the character is reproduced repeatedly for each frame they feature in.

Stjepan Sejic's 3D character sculpts utilised in final pages for "Ravine".

3D illustration has becoming more prevalent over the past few years and this is slowly filtering into comic art. Stjepan Sejic used a combination of 3D modelling and digital painting with great success while making his graphic novel "Ravine". The 3D helped to keep high levels of consistency throughout the 2 current volumes as well as produce an art style that was easily recognisable as Sejic's. As a result of combining high level 2D illustration with detailed 3D models, at points the imagery in the books bridges the uncanny valley with its realism.

While there are no quick solutions to producing consistent, high level comic art understanding the subject matter is key. The issue I have been having with the consistency of the art in the 2 test strips will hopefully be (at least in part) by doing more in depth character designs as opposed to the quickfire ones I have been undertaking.
Employing design practices from 2D animation and the employment of 3D into the art pipeline are ways to aid in this matter.