The Making of Weekend With Yuka (Patreon)

It's been almost 6 months since Weekend With Yuka was released digitally and now that people have gotten their physical copies in the mail, it's a pretty good time to talk more in depth about making this book! I like talking about my process but I didn't want to put a big ol' lengthy thing at the end of the book that would just cost more money to print so I'll just place my thoughts about it here on patreon for everyone to read.

I thought I had started drafting a document about what I wanted to say a while ago but I can't seem to find any sign of that doc existing anywhere so sorry if my thoughts are a little unorganized and scattered about, I'll try my best to proofread this before I hit publish, haha. Sorry that this post will be very long and full of images, hopefully you find this interesting! Also just to say it even though I'm sure it's clear: This post will contain spoilers for Weekend With Yuka so read at your own discretion! Go pick it up on my itch.io before you read this blog post!

So it all goes back to working on Exposure in 2018, which I can briefly talk about for a second. I had been drawing The Red Muscle but I felt like I wanted to do try tackling an explicitly erotic comic and I was messing with designs first before anything.

At some point during the writing stage, I got contacted by a well known erotic comics publishing group about working with them and I pitched the idea of Exposure, but while writing the story I felt less and less confident in being able to make something sexy enough that didn't feel excessively pulpy. I told them it was story focused and the sexual content would only go for a few pages and their response was essentially "we're looking for porn comics, go somewhere else if that's not what you're making" and I was so FURIOUS that I made a mad dash to draw the whole 36 page comic in a month or so. I put the comic out right away and after a few months I had made more money than what I was offered by the publisher. Of course my petty ass tweeted about it without naming names, and that made the owner of the company unfollow me (which I know burns bridges and is NOT smart but I needed that haha).

It was at the time that I drew this final picture to go at the end of the comic that I knew I had developed a real connection to these silly characters and wanted to do something more with them at some point.

I think it was about a year later that I had an idea forming that started from wanting to show a story from Yuka's perspective. I thought about how working independently was a surefire way to burn yourself out if you don't have a lot of discipline for setting boundaries of work and free time, which is just a part of any self-employed work and everyone will stumble before they figure it out. I felt that the sexy stuff in Exposure was so fleeting and tried to tell myself that THIS time I would have characters that stand on their own and I would earn myself some excessive sexual content this time around in like a... guilt free way or something.

I had developed a decent method for writing The Red Muscle but I thought that my ability to pace the amount of information given on individual pages was not strong at the time. I used this opportunity to turn my rough outline into a more rigid page-by-page style script. I didn't get as detailed as outlining what would be in each specific panel but I started getting a sense for when a page felt like it had enough. The only important information here is dialogue when someone speaks, and a clear description of what the reader should see if I wanted to have a specific visual. Everything else would be up to improv based on how the layout of the page took shape in the drawing stage. It's REALLY bare bones. Here's an example of a few pages:

I started drawing the preview when I noticed that the comic was growing much bigger in scope than I expected. I started thumbnailing pages of what I was calling Exposure 2 before I had even written the ending, sort of hoping I would find my way to it as I spent more time with the story (which I did eventually but I had no idea how I would get there). To this day, I still think I overwork my layouts/thumbs to a degree that really slows down my work speed and it's something I'd like to improve on with my next comic, but have some samples of my thumbnails here, NSFW warning:

Some things you might notice:

If you haven't read the preview you'll see a more congested page 1, which I always felt was cluttered and weak but didn't fix it until I was working on the full book. The sex scene was different, starting in the living room after their heart to heart and moving to the bed with some different dialogue that later got moved around to the shower scene I added later. There were some experiments with poses on that last page of thumbnails here, which was pretty common in the thumb stage as I wouldn't have a clear vision in my head of what I needed and I even have a layer of the drawings that I thought were too good to erase but I didn't end up using in the final layouts, so have the collection of "gone but not forgotten" drawings. They're not organized in a particular way but maybe you can piece together where most of these belonged in the story:

Jumping back a bit, I had been trying to experiment with updating Yuka and Ren's designs because I felt like they looked a little crazy in Exposure and thought I could ground them a bit more to fit the story and where my aesthetic sensibilities were going in general. I have a few drawings of them as they were evolving that I'll toss in here too:

Ren's new look was based on Naoki Urasawa's art as I was starting to read Asadora at the time and I loved Asa's eye size and shape and it felt like something I hadn't done for any of my characters.

I shrunk her big anime ponytail after someone compared her to Renji and Rukia's child from Bleach and I told myself, "something needs to change" LOL

Since then I've also seen other designs with that same pineapple top ponytail and I'm glad I moved away from it, I don't want Ren to look like a design a lot of people would think up (even if it is cute sometimes)

Yuka's design changes were me trying to find my own stylization of monolid eyes that I felt would be cute while studying the faces of real photos of ladies that had a similar energy to what I imagined for her. There was one model on IG that I think had the biggest impact on her final design, and it's a part of how Yuka ended up a bit thicker than she was in Exposure:

It's funny to look at my refs and some drawings in the final book because there are things that look like I was copying this one lady, I promise I did not look at any of these pictures as I was actually drawing anything! The most egregious is a photo I have of her eating a fucking corn dog, I really had no idea that was there until just now hahaha, it feels embarassing but I swear it's all coincidence!!!

Also just because I set the image aside, here's the ref for Yuka's outfit in the opening scene and cover:

I'll also throw this in here since I'm not sure where else to show this, but I also went through the trouble of drawing up the floor plans for both Yuka's apartment (which is more like a townhouse but whatever) and the cabin the two stayed at on vacation. This REALLY helped me get a sense of where things were and how to stage a lot of my panels that made for a stronger final product than if I didn't spend that time, and it's something I want to put the effort in to do more on other works too:

The whole middle section of the cabin (the bathroom, main area, living room, and kitchen) were all based on a cabin I stayed at with friends up in Lake Arrowhead. I drew the layout from memory a good few months after the trip but I luckily found the link to the original listing we used to rent the cabin and took some of the pics to help me fill in some blanks in the final stretch of inking. The outside was inspired by the cabin too but I think those rooms I mentioned felt the closest to how it really was in real life.

Anyways, I had drawn/released the preview and was searching for my ending as well as fixing the overall structure of the story every few editing passes. Some scenes got added like the shower scene, small editions like the repeat mention of hockey and Yuka knowing how to figure skate, and I made a massive change to the dining hall scene after the two went swimming.

Originally in the dining scene, Yuka didn't ask for Ren's input (because I didn't add that Ren wanted more responsibilities until later) but instead the two would chat it up with a random vacationer sitting next to them at a busy table (which would have been packed but I got to give them some space in the final scene). They would small talk as Yuka and Ren would vaguely talk about their photography work and the vacationer would give a "wow, sounds like you love your job" type of narrative poignancy. It was then going to be followed up by the dining hall starting a group game of Adult sized Hungry Hungry Hippos (watch an example of what I'm talking about here), where Yuka would be the hippo and Ren would push her on the cart and Yuka would be one of the handful of adults going crazy amongst a bunch of kids of different ages.

This sequence was soooo chaotic! Sorry I don't have any sort of visual to include for this scene. I knew it was going to be such a hassle to draw and it felt really childish, maybe not the right mood for them (but nowadays I think I could put them in equally ridiculous and playful scenarios but I'll save those for Bumpers comics). I ended up cutting the whole thing which I feel happy with because I got to give Ren some time to shine a bit, but my only regret is that I feel like the last handful of scenes move at a pace that's much too fast, just whipping by from the beach to the bunny suit to do like a passing joke or two before moving to the next scene and I do wish I found something to slow this particular scene down a bit. I do think Ren shoving the whole pizza in her mouth is one of my favorite jokes in the whole book though, so it's not all bad.

To jump back in time a tiny bit again, I made it to a point where I had drawn all the way up to the first page of Yuka and Ren out on the lake before I felt like I had spent WAY too much time on this project. I put it on hold to pivot back to Red Muscle to so the readers I was accumulating on Tapas wouldn't be left out to dry (like they are right now, sorry...). The timeline here is a bit messy since my WWY files are not all dated correctly from being saved over or things like that, so I THINK I only worked on chapter 8 in this time but it took me SO long. It's also hard to tell since chapters 6-8 were all written as one chapter that just had too much happening in it so it got split up into 3, but that's going down a whole different rabbit hole. Regardless, I was like 1-1.5 years into working on all of these comics and I was going through the same thing I was writing about, I was burnt the fuck out!!

It was really tough to spend that much time on a single project since my personal life at the time was going crazy. My whole family had to move to the edge of California in the middle of nowhere (I have since moved back to my hometown area), the pandemic started and I didn't get to see people I cared about enough, and I was soooo frustrated feeling like I was developing my skills and getting pretty good at this whole comics thing but I didn't have anything to show for it! I was feeling so proud of the writing I had done for all of my characters but I was feeling so gridlocked creatively and career-wise. I still haven't had much success with the art career side of things to this day but getting my book out and being able to work on other ideas again has alleviated some of those pains.

I eventually finished Red Muscle Ch8 and got to focus all my attention on WWY again, and I found this Excel sheet online for planning out the amount of work I would need to do to finish my book by a set deadline (I didn't get to keep the name of whoever made this sheet, sadly). This sheet saved my fucking life I swear, I powered through the rest of this book with a clear goal and easy to follow steps to get me to the finish line.

Looking back at the completed work now, I'm so proud of how it all turned out. So many small things got added over the 2 years that really shaped these characters into complex, believable people (imo imo;;) that I want to take with me through my career for a long time.

Yuka is a competent and headstrong business woman that still needs the support of a loved one to accept her for her shortcomings and keep her grounded. She seems put together and self sufficient, but as seen in both WWY and Exposure, she actually is a big softy that wants to be pampered and talked to sweetly.

Ren is both a diligent worker and the biggest jokester you'll meet, but more than anything she cares about lifting up others and helping them succeed and be their best selves. She may have struggled in school, but she can accomplish so much when it comes to things she puts her all into, be it sports, games, or her jobs.

It gave me a second wind to write them into the world of Ami and Frankie, which I decided to connect when I got to Ren's flashback. Most of my creative juices lately go to developing funny interactions and situations for different arrangements of the 4 ladies and their antics they'll get up to together.

I had mentioned earlier that I was making this book to be my attempt at ACTUALLY getting to do a sexier version of what I wanted from Exposure, but somehow the ratio of sex to story got even more lopsided this time! There used to be more sex in the book initially; The first sex scene after the phone call was a bit longer, there was another one while they were in the shower that got scrapped for the emotional moment, and I was going to make the final scene with Yuka in the bunny suit a bit longer to give Ren her time in the spotlight. I think I got too attached to the characters and trying to get their goals and struggles across that the sex scenes felt like distractions for the most part and I condensed them a lot. I do feel really good about the one scene that survived though, I think it really shows Yuka finally returning to her natural element and unwinding from all the stress work was causing her and she starts to act more like her usual self from that point on to the end of the book. I remember being really proud of the sexiness of this drawing of Yuka reclining like a renaissance nude, haha.

Some last things I wanted to touch on: I had managed to find a lot of narrative threads to loop back around on by the end of the comic. I felt like they really tied the story together really neatly in a way that felt very deliberate, which might be ruined by me saying that they were late additions, haha. Yuka and Ren having their connection to hockey gave me my ending with my actual favorite pages in the whole book, which is a shame since they're like the last 2 pages!

Giving Ren a reason to be so aggressive about Yuka relaxing comes from her own past experiences with failure. Giving Ren a moment to drop her own guard when Yuka reassures her that she is appreciated was very narratively satisfying.

The small bit where Yuka sees a mom and her child splashing in the lake and finding a deep feeling of peace hints at Yuka and her connection to family and a desire to even have her own kids some day, which I hope I can write about soon. 

Ren making an off-hand joke about her mom rejecting her for being gay, showing that Ren carries a lot more baggage than you might think but she still manages to stay strong and support others despite it all. I ALSO hope to write about Ren and her family dynamic soon too.

Yuka having a loving and playful relationship to her parents that informs a lot of her behaviors and maybe a through line of where Yuka's personality and even libido comes from. I don't have anything I want to write about regarding that though, haha! Instead I do want to look into Yuka's self consciousness with her body image that for the most part is kept in check from Ren's affection, but there are times that it still troubles her and I'd like to make that the focus of my next serious story with these ladies.

My goal with this book was not to have high drama, in fact the stakes are quite low, but instead to build the most nuanced and relatable characters that I could. I wanted them to feel like they had tangible habits and motivations, and that the sex they have is for them and is a part of how they navigate their relationship. It was not to exploit or objectify either of them purely for the reader to have something stimulating to look at and hopefully that came across. I always felt like there weren't enough romance stories that allowed for healthy sexual relationships (since most romance manga is about first loves and being high school age) but lately I've been seeing a bigger push for similar stories to mine and I'm happy to be a part of this wave of sexually liberating romance.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end if you made it this far! I hope you've all found something to connect to with Yuka and Ren and I'm excited to put them in both more serious and more goofy comics for you all to read soon! I suppose with this written I can finally put this chapter of my life to a close after 2 years, hope you'll stick around to see what's next!

See you next update!