I have been thinking (after being asked couple of times) about comic making, and I really can't say I could give any ultimate truths about it. I mean I don't know how to make good comics myself, I can't tell you that you must do this and never do that and stuff. This is a subject where I'm afraid there is no easy answers.

If you want to make a comic, then go ahead! Make one! Even if your comic sucks, you can get it done, and learn from it. It might be crap, but now that it's done, you can move on to do other comics and stories and stuff.  First hand experience is always first hand experience, and failures are what we learn from. Just learn to lose first. First attempts are usually crap. They are the piles we fall face first into and feel ashamed of later. It's up to you if you stay there, face in the crap pile, weeping about it, or get back up, laugh about it and continue your life.

I've been there. During my young life I've made more mistakes in the comic business than I'd dare to confess, so I guess I have some stories I could share from the experiences I have of having my metaphorical face meeting the pile of dung.

So have some thoughts. These are my own personal brain wanderings and not any ultimate universal truths, so feel free to take what you need and ignore the rest. Apologies beforehand for my bad habit of rambling redundant nonsense, my brain likes side tracks. The following uses canine comics "genre" in the examples, mostly because my own comic is one and it's easier to compare.

First an important one:



Before starting to draw your comic, you better know what's going to happen in it. Know what the end is going to be like. Know what your characters will go through. Know who your characters are. What are they like? Knowing is half the battle, you know.

Comic is visual storytelling. So in order to tell it, you naturally need a story to tell.
No matter how cool your initial idea is ("I want a story of pirates that are dinosaurs!" "I want to make a story about an elf who falls in love with a centaur!" "How about a dog comic in space!" etc.) if you have no plot to your story, I can tell that you'll probably do couple of pages, got stuck with the comic, put it on hiatus because you're too busy leveling your pokemon right now or something and just make up excuses, and then probably redraw the comic because "you don't like your old style anymore" if you ever even pick it up again. (I personally got to page three every time, four pages only once, some other people manage to do twenty pages before stopping.) Having no plot is begging for art block, and no one likes getting stuck with that.

I know it is possible to make a comic by improvising. I have seen good comics done like that, but improvised comics are usually comedy and tend to be often on the absurd humor field, since it works well there. It's good for surreal stuff. I bet there are people who can make epic adventures by improvising, but they are either geniuses or very, very experienced with it and know what they're doing.

But if you want to actually tell a story, you better have a story. Having a script can save your life. The script doesn't have to be in the actual official script format (personally I find the script format boring, and it doesn't work for me) but at least writing down plot points from floating in your braind can make them clearer, and seeing them on paper or text file can do miracles to arranging the plot points and scene snippets into the order in which they make sense. A script is a tool to organise the messy ideas into an actual story.

When I started Wurr, it was only supposed to be the first three pages (the prologue), but got soon carried away since I found it fun to draw. Thus all I had to work with was bunch of characters, the world setting of dogs versus hellhounds and the fact that Iacar's bunch was going to be evicted out of the hellhound lands. Within the first year of Wurr's existence, I managed to make 25 pages (partly thanks to the then kinda-ass-pulled-back-then Niftynose-episode). But after the initial idea was already done, I had pretty much run out of fuel. There was no plot to follow, nothing to work towards. During the second year of Wurr I only drew seven pages in a whole year with even three months between two pages on several occasions. (Geesh, I feel sorry for my older readers, it must have been pretty frustrating to wait for anything to happen!) After two years of making, I got to visit a friend of mine, who was also working on a comic trying desparately to make it's plot work just like me, and during my visit we brainstormed our comics for DAYS on end resulting in the first version of Wurr's script. Even with big holes in it back then, it was something to work towards to. The following year I finished Wurr's first book, got it to print (self published) and got to start the second volume, and I've now been able to keep up weekly schedule with the comic even with schoolwork and very long schooldays, critique projects, martial arts hobby, social life and all that jazz with only few exceptions when I'm really swamped or art blocked.

Script brings motivation. I know what's going to happen, and I can't wait to make it happen! I want to tell this story! I like it so much I want to tell it. (This is also the reason why I avoid answering plot-relevant questions people ask me. If the comic will answer it, I'll let it answer it. I know from experience that if I already tell what's going to happen before I get there, I tend to lose my interest. I have couple of times made character ref-kind of lists telling everything there is to know about my characters, and then finding I didn't get myself to draw the comic since I had already told everything there was to tell. I didn't have plots for my comics back then, so it was kind of double kill.)

Actually, here, have a tiny photo of what the current script of Wurr looks like (some bits blurred for spoilerless-ness. No idea if you can tell anything from it):


The script starts from Azrabak's first appearance, so we're still at the start. Clear, isn't it?

If you have a story, you're already on better ground than half of the online comic makers these days. Young people, when starting their own comic project often start with making unique characters, and start ahead with them without making a proper story first. I know having good characters is very important, there can hardly be any story if there is no protagonist to have the story happen to, but people get so in love with their special characters that they tend to forget all the actually important stuff. To quote a Finnish saying, that's climbing ass-first into a tree.

By the way, a few words about originality in this point. I find it endlessly amusing when people who read Wurr come and comment about how original my characters are. Let me tell you a little secret. When I created the characters of Wurr, I specifically made them as little "original" as I could. Morri is inspired by the hellhound seen in Hellsing anime (his name was originally Morrigan, by the way. After I later found out that it was a real name, and belonged to the Celtic godDESS of death, he got namechange) being dark grey canine with multiple reddish eyes after doing DA search that proved there are hundreds of characters sharing this description. Iacar has large fangs, because at least 90 percent of all monsters have those, he has overly muscular frame since that's how people often mis-draw wolves when they want to make them look strong, and he has three eyes after doing a bit of DA search confirming that three eyes is a standard for "special" characters. (I just didn't want his face to be symmetrical which is why the eye isn't in the middle.) Iacar's markings are also inspired by half of all the animal characters ever animated by Disney, plus Balto and such, in that when he smiles, the corners of his mouth stretch to touch his marking outlines (just look at Balto, the Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood and such when the characters smile. That's where his marking comes from). And so on. Pyramos is my own little joke about sparkle dogs, with his design including among other things, a bit from certain Warhammer figure design, Torn from Jak II game, the T-rex and the raptors from Jurassic Park plus some real life dogs, dog markings and mutated cows. ...Except maybe Iralbe's tongue-eyes,I have no idea where that came from anymore. That's probably the only thing I can claim to be my own invention, but I bet I've seen something similar in some kind of nature documentary somewhere to get the inspiration from. Well, Iralbe is otherwise so generic in all ways possible, so it doesn't matter. With most of the details in my character designs I've went to great lengths in confirming that every single separate detail/feature can be found in at least half hundred OCs or real life animals out there to make them as little "original" aspossible. Just for my own amusement. Their markings are also kept at the minimum, partly because I'm an animator, and I know what it is like to draw a character over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and I don't want it to feel like a huge chore to draw my protagonists! After all, comic is a VISUAL media, I have to draw the characters ALOT in all those panels to tell the story. My plot is kinda long, not "manga-long", but still long enough that I don't want it to feel forced. (That last part is actually the reason why Wurr is a "dog comic" to begin with. I did plan the prologue originally to work with orcs and elves instead, but as back then I was a lot more insicure with drawing humanoids, within the time I spend drawing one humanoid character I can draw ten dogs, it became canine comic purely out of being easier to draw. And it also became fun to fiddle with a culture adapted to quadrupedal beings.)

I often feel awkward when I see people creating characters with as much details and markings and accessories as possible, specially when they then proceed to draw a comic, with a wall-of-text type prologue about an angient war, then skipping to the main character being born and possibly seeing their mother/father/whole family being killed by the bad guys (specially in Finnish doggy comics), then good versus evil fight where the protagonist leads the good guys into victory to fulfill an ancient prophecy, (and going to hiatus after running out of ideas/getting tired of making the comic) and then claming very loudly how original their comic is, setting blood hounds to gore anyone who has "stolen their ideas". I personally don't see it original when I have to read a story that I've already read hundred times before, with only differently colored protagonists. I honestly can't tell them apart anymore, I've read so many of them, and... Well, the only thing setting those comics apart is what their protagonist looks like. It's the same story all over and over again, with a bit of plastic surgery and make up here and there between comics. They are so similar I could call them adaptations instead of comics on their own. Why? Why is it so?

I don't actually mind that much about it, we are all noobs at some point, and it's just natural for your first attempt to suck (I know mine did! And hard! And still do. Geesh, you have no idea of how many things it's possible to rip off at once. I'm just glad I had never heard of internet back then). You can still have audience or atleast friends to read your stuff and encourage to improve, which is a great thing. It starts to bother me when people get rabid paranoid about the uniqueness and special-ness of their cookie cutter work and start to lynch people who they think are ripping them off.

If you have great, awesome characters but no story, you don't have to make a comic. Why not just draw your characters, make pictures of them and show what they are like through their images. Maybe tell their life stories or history in their picture descriptions. Let them grow and evolve, and when you some day feel that there now is a great story to tell about them, then you can go for it.

When designing outlooks for characters take into account that you have to draw them over and over again for pages and pages, of course depending on how long your story is. I personally recommend short stories. Epic scale adventures and dramas are fashionable these days *coughguiltymyselfcough* and it has possibly something to do with how popular the Japanese comics are nowdays. I advice you not to take manga as an example in storytelling. While average web comic artists in DA struggle to produce pages regularily to begin with, many series being on stand for weeks at a time between pages, Japanese comic artists push out twenty pages every week to be able to tell their stories. Plus most of them have several assistants helping them which is an advantage most web comic artists never have. Just don't try to make the next Naruto, you're very probably not going to succeed and will only get stuck with life absorbing well (and Naruto in itself is not the best exampleofhow to write stories,but that's something I can rant about some other time). Specially don't try to make an epic scale story if your average update timing is one page a month, unless you want that to be the only comic you will ever make, and be still doing it when you're 80 years old with no hope of ever reaching the end.

I myself needed a long talk from one of my old teachers to realise that with all those tens of different worlds, settings and story ideas that I have, I'd never ever get to see them done if I had done Wurr as I had originally planned (several story arcs with no actual ending and at that point no actual plot to go with either). He reminded me of the importance of ending by asking me if I still wanted to be stuck with this one project ten or twenty years from now. No, I don't. I have way too much stories to tell and Wurr is not what want to have as my life work. Wurr is my first work, my trial ground, I want to get to the better stories when I'm done with it. I want to be done with it someday, I have more stuff to tell.


..... Oh, looks like it's 3 AM already. Darn, being sick has apparently screwed my day rythm. Ahem, I think I'll go to bed now, I can continue about this topic later. See ya, peeps! Sorry for unorganised ramble mess! Maybe I should start writing my journals during daytime...