July 4, 1862. During a trip down the Thames with Reverend Robinson Duckworth and math teacher Mr. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Alice Liddell and her sisters insist on hearing a story. So Dodgson invents one about a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole and embarks on an amazing adventure. Little Alice is thrilled with the story and asks Dodgson to write it down in a book. It takes him two years, but Dodgson finally hands the manuscript over to Alice. It’s titled Alice’s Adventures Underground. In 1865, the book is published by MacMillan and achieves enormous success. The title has changed – it’s now Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – and the author, Dodgson, uses the pen name Lewis Carroll.

 In 2007, the Walt Disney Studios start working on a new movie inspired by Alice’s adventures. It’s a perfect story for the cinema, and for a comic strip. That’s what they thought at Disney Publishing when they began creating this graphic novel last year.

So everything starts with a sketch. Usually it’s a set of quickly drawn, rough geometric shapes. But the artist needs it to first understand how to spread the panels on the page. It’s like a map of what he will draw later. The page is now ready to go to clean-up: Literally, the panel is cleaned up, backgrounds and characters are defined in detail. Lines become thinner or thicker to give the characters a full and complete physiognomy, and to give depth to the scene. 

It’s also at this point that the illustrator shades the page with gradations of grays and blacks, creating what will be the atmosphere of the whole scene, and setting a clear indication for the painter.

From the sketch he goes straight to the layout: the page is still in a sketchy version but it already gives a good idea of how big the panels would be, what point of view to use, and how much space must be left to place the balloons with the dialogue. The first step to final paint is a base of flat colors. These are usually darker than the final palette because the painter will use them as shadows, while going over with the digital brush to create the lights. Marieke Ferrari experimented with various painting approaches before finding the right one. She started with the character of the Mad Hatter, whose bright colors immediately attracted her attention.

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Interestingly, in the first version of the movie’s script, Alice didn’t fall alone: McTwisp, the white rabbit, holds her by the ankle to pull her into his hole. The scene was replicated in the graphic novel manuscript, but before the illustrator drew the page, the filmmakers made changes to the script. The scene is now more similar to the first fall, which Alice took as a young girl, seen so many times in so many adaptations.

And then comes the digital version. Alice’s Digicomics are the final link in the chain, offering the very best of this masterpiece. Thanks to its digital version, we can slip down into Wonderland and, page after page, devour a story that was created way back in 1862 yet is utterly perfect in modern digital format.