Inside a day in the life of an award-winning comic-book artist, whose indie hit is being adapted into a Netflix series

The series has won three Eisner Awards (the comic-book industry equivalent of the Oscars), including for best continuing series this year.

It follows a woman who belongs to an organization that hunts and kills monsters that prey on children.

Few details have been revealed about the Netflix series. Filmmaker Mike Flanagan, director of horror movies like "Doctor Sleep" and the Netflix series "The Haunting of Hill House," was writing a pilot for the series, but he said last month that he's no longer attached to the project.

During the pandemic, Dell'Edera worked from home, but has been going back to the studio. 

Some might not think that an artist sticks to a typical "9 to 5," eight-hour workday, but Dell'Edera tries to. 

"I'm very methodical," he told Insider. "I like to schedule my days in a certain way."

"I don't have a lot of time during the day and try to do a page a day, so need to optimize my time," he said. "A lot of artists do sketches to warm up, but I stopped doing that with 'Something is Killing the Children.'"

"While I read it, I imagine what I can do" with the pages, Dell'Edera said. 

A comic-book script functions similarly to a movie or TV script, with panel descriptions and dialogue for the artist to refer to. Some writers give more details for what they want to see than others, but Dell'Edera said that Tynion gives him a lot of freedom, "especially after 20 issues" of the series.

"He's still the one with the ideas," Dell'Edera said with a laugh.

"It's a rough, fast sketch to have an idea of the composition of the panel," Dell'Edera said of the process. "I run that by my editor and make tweaks if need be."

The ProCreate app costs $10 on the App Store for iPad.

Dell'Edera said that he used to draw on traditional paper with a pencil, but working digitally is a massive time saver.

Sometimes he will ink pages traditionally by printing them out and tracing over the digital drawings. But now he only does this for some "splash pages" (drawings that take up an entire comic page rather than a single panel), action sequences, or covers. 

Each issue of "Something is Killing" is typically 22 pages. So he can usually get one issue done in under a month.

"Most of the job is done in the first two steps (reading the script and sketching the layouts)," he said. "The rest if more mechanical. I'm not used to changing what I've set out in the layout. If I go off the path it takes more time."

The series isn't without its violent fight sequences. But he also enjoys the slower character moments.

"There are some parts that have a lot of action and then some issues have no action at all, just people talking," he said. "That's fun to draw, too, because it gives me a chance to make the characters act on the page."