What I Wish I'd Known about Making Comics (Patreon)

The first comic I ever made was in my final year of high school. It was for my Writer's Craft class, and I didn't have any digital art know-how at the time, so it was made literally by stapling together folded pieces of printer paper and drawing on that. It was black and white, angsty as hell, and involved a double page spread where I'd used red nail polish for blood spatters. I wish I knew where the hell that thing went (probably the bin). It's undoubtedly horrible, but part of me remembers it fondly because it was the first time I'd dabbled in a medium that combined my love of art with my love of story-telling.

It was a long time before I dipped my toe into the comic waters again. Grayscale was the first long-form webcomic I really tried my hand at, and those of you who've been with me a long long time might remember my experimenting with style in 3 Dog Night. These two I remember with more of a wince, because I stumbled with them. Hard. Looking back, there was a lot about comics I didn't know then. There's lots I still don't. So I thought I'd write down a few of the things I wish I'd known about comics, before starting comics.

The first is that they take forever. Maybe that seems obvious? At the time, for me, it wasn't. I was in animation when I started experimenting in comics again. Every second of animation required about 12 drawings. By comparison, comics sounded like they'd be a breeze. I felt like I could cram so much more story-telling into one page of a comic, than I could one second of animation (and I could). As a result, I had absolutely zero reservations about starting a long-form comic. It was only when I started encountering impatience at my lacklustre updating schedule and a discouraging lack of time in which to finish pages that I realized it may have been wiser to start with something smaller. That is, if I could ever manage to write a story short enough (Cinderfrost was first scripted to be 30 pages, so you can all see how great I am at keeping things short). Eventually, I had to recognize that I'd bitten off far more than I could chew with Grayscale (plus, my co-author was mired in grad school, of which she got her PhD like last week) so that got put on hiatus while I tried my hand at more manageable comic goals.

The time commitment kind of leads to the next thing I wish I'd known: this isn't a race. In the early stages, it was easy to feel discouraged. I was comparing myself to artists whose output seemed impossible to match. Weekly update schedules were pretty standard for many, if not more frequently than that, and I saw the abuse heaped on my favourite artists when they missed an update, or went on hiatus. I'd received some myself. It was, at that time, very easy to feel like a failure if I wasn't producing more than a page a week. More than, so that I could have a backlog and some time off to script the next chapter. It's worth mention that I never achieved that gilded dream of a cushiony backlog of pages. I was, as my burnout post from a few months back entails, burning the wick at both ends always. And this wasn't work I was paid for, so it all had to happen in the evenings and on weekends. What I wish I could have told myself at that time, is that slow-and-steady counts too. Whatever gets the job done. There's no point running yourself aground trying to meet time expectations that, for whatever reason, don't work. Find the schedule that works for you and stick to that instead, not somebody else's. Comparing yourself to others is never going to be fair. Everyone's circumstances are individual, their strengths unique. Speed has never been a particular virtue of mine, and I'm content with that now. I've found the pace that works.

I mentioned that I made lots of mistakes? Yeah, some of them are common pitfalls that cracking literally any book on comics might have helped me avoid. Things like: cramming too much into one page wrecks the pacing, dialogue balloons need to be drafted/sketched in to ensure they fit and don't awkwardly overlap artwork, figure out the dimensions you're printing at FIRST and make your template with trim/bleeds so when it comes time to print you aren't having to redraw or edit pages too heavily. These things all came to me by trial and error instead (mostly error). Nothing wrong with that, but I could have saved myself some time and hardship by taking an online class or buying a book first. I did read Scott McLeod's 'Making Comics' about 50 pages into Grayscale, and despaired, because I thought 'I need to go back and fix all those pages now.'

Which is the next thing, DON'T DO THAT. I know people who've been redrawing the first five pages of their comic ad infinitum from the day they started it several years ago to this day right here and now. Even if I'd started off stronger, with more research and a shorter project under my belt, I'd still have made mistakes and plenty of them. So I adopted the motto 'done is better than perfect.' I've determined that mistakes give past work some charm and serve as milestones, showing how much I've improved. Tiny fixes are fine, but redoing pages all-together is a no-no if you ever want to finish the darn thing.

The last thing would be, that a lot of the impatience I experienced due to all of the above is a pretty normal part of the comic process. There's nothing more frustrating than spending 12 hours on a page that will take 12 seconds to read, but that's just the way the medium works. Impatience that you can't just blurt out what happens every time somebody asks a question is also normal. It's pretty hard to sit on the answers when you know it's going to be another 6 months before that particular plot point gets explained, but it will be worth the wait. I wish I could say that this helped cultivate my patience, but... not really. I'm still chomping at the bit to get to the next page, the next plot twist, the next character reveal, you name it... But that's what keeps the whole thing fun and interesting ;)

I say I wish I'd known all this earlier, but in a way I think some of it I had to learn by experience. I couldn't understand how long a comic really takes until I started making one. Learning by my mistakes is a pretty standard process for almost every skillset out there. And patience? That's out of my hands. It can't be taught. I will continue sitting on story secrets for four fricken years while plodding sloth-like along towards the next chapter impatiently.

I hope, if nothing else, this is entertaining insight into my process. What about you guys? Have you ever been interested in making comics of your own, or have you already? Do you experience the same impatience to get to the good bits or is that just me?

Cheers!
~Demi