For how long do you plan your comic/series to run for?

[Rosso]

took me ~4 months and i'm not even done with the first chapter yet :") which is fine this is all new to me and i am still learning BUT!

I have a rough draft of NO MORE than 20 chapters over 2 seasons.
worst case scenario it'll be a ~20 years project and i am absolutely NOT DOWN FOR THAT! 8")

i'll try to condense things to the best of my abilities (less than 20 chapters hopefully? shorter chapters??) i have a lot of of stories to tell and i wanna see it finished in my own lifetime LOL. I know i'll get more efficient as time goes but it's kinda hard to keep up when you already have a full-time job and other time consuming hobbies.

[Freemints30]

Well I have finally finished 50% of my script now, and my heaven, your heaven, has only have probably 10% of that material. Really my comic was originally 21 chapters (11 pages, not counting cover and end pages). However with how my script is it might be 25-30 chapters(11-13 pages, not counting cover and end pages).
This is going to take a while.....

[Wumbl]

I know my comic has another year or so to go... I've been at it for a year and a half so far.

[ilustrariane]

i have no idea....my plot is long, and i only update one page per week, i try not think about that too much to not get discouraged XD

[Jenny-Toons]

That's a pretty good question. I did kinda set up my work to last a good minute. Like, in development along, my story has 20 comics attached to it in total. Now, whether or not it can be expanded to 20 years is debatable.
But I think somewhere around 5-10 years, to be optimistic? The comics are mostly for myself anyhow, so I WILL be finishing them in order to read them again and again XD

[beta1042]

Hmmm well I've been going at this for nearly a yr now and I'm just about finished with 2 volumes out of 5... So I guess that means I have about another year and a half XD

I remember going into this thinking I could do it in a yr, but then people liked the story so I wanted to add more fun side stories and character development and well it's grown into what it is XD That and I totally cannot draw and color as fast as I thought so updates are shorter than originally planned.

[Nullyish]

I’ve been working on mine since 2016 and initially I thought it would be 2 year. Now it hasn’t even reached a half of it v.v
Probably another 2 years.

[Pandastrophic]

I expected 5-6 years in total on my current comic, I'm on my 3rd year now and I'm hoping that after I'm done with uni I'll be able to speed up the comic a lot more. I honestly don't want it to last more than 6 years, that's too much for me I'd probably get bored and making sure I'll be able to finish this comic in a realistic time frame helps me keep going.

[CarolRiverArt]

Well I usually think the story and go to a process where I feel that the story starts growing. I write, erase and rewrite a few times. Most of my comic have been planned since little. But others are planned in some months. Depends on my inspiration I guess.

[Zhengo]

I feel like it will go on for a while. There's a lot of arcs to go through and I like to waste time on character interactions xD

[darkone4587]

For a good minute, it's generally up to how much I want to drag out the plot of the various Volumes.

[A-weird-girler]

Freacking heck I have like 9 gosh darn plot points and a long plot so it's gonna be like a good decade or so knowing my slow ass

[indagold]

Hrmm hopefully will be over within 1-2 years. I did comics that lasted 4-7 years and I ain't doing that shit again. Took way too much time out of my life and i'm thinking I might not work on a comic series for a longgg time given how stressful it is lol

[GrimRose]

Hmm, this is exactly why i ask this question. I love comics don't get me wrong. I understand the more complex the story the longer it takes to create. But i only have so many years of my life to dedicate to drawing. I don't want to just work on one story and that's it. I'm guessing it will take anywhere from 4-6 years to finish Spellbound. The biggest factor as to whether ill finish it within that time is well... free time. I honestly wish i could work on comics full time, but currently they are only a small portion of my time. Hey maybe that'll change. I don't know.

[GrimRose]

Yes, definitely!

Especially if your project has several chapter/arcs. You need to know realistically how much of your life you are going to dedicate to finish a story.
We have only so many years of our life to dedicate to creating. You don't want to spend all your time on a project you won't enjoy or wont finish.

Long running series can take anywhere from a couple years to 10!. If all your series take 10 years to finish, you might only be able to do 4 in your whole life time.

[GrimRose]

I think a good way to gauge the length of your project is with milestones and a number of episodes in your story. If you have an idea of how many episodes/chapters of your story you can see how long it takes to reach one of your milestones and then you can get a good idea of the length of your project.

[yozhikisblue]

I've been thinking about this quite a lot actually- since I wrote a fairly detailed and extensive script spanning multiple chapters before even beginning.

I think 10 years is not an unrealistic estimate x') But at the same time, I've poured a lot of myself into the script and characters of this comic, so even saying that, it doesn't feel like a long time, so much as a testament to the sum of my life experiences so far. I guess that's why I'm confident that I'll stick with it. I know it's something deeply meaningful to me, even if nobody else will ever recognize how or why that is. The question is- how will I feel two years from now? Five years from now? Will I only become more dedicated, or will I falter due to mundane things, like lack of recognition, and feeling like I should be putting more effort into advancing my illustration career instead?

Time is all we have, after all.

[ZombieOwl]

since mine is a gag-strip with no real plot, I guess it'll go for as long as I can think up ideas... Which is kind of daunting to think about(running out of ideas, I mean).

[Milhamah]

Right now "Milhamah: Fighting Words" is sort of in a pilot phase. I'm introducing (while designing) the large cast of characters and getting a feel for their everyday interactions. In the meantime, I'm seeing how readers react to it all.

I'm hoping to develop the true saga maybe a year from now. I don't want to spoil much, but more than 20 chapters are outlined for the entire plot.

Because my art is vector-based, I'm able to reuse it as video game sprites. So I plan to add those graphics to a "Milhamah" roguelike that I'm programming on the side.

[Kuma]

I have enough material for 3 trilogies of books, so at a chapter per week, I have at the very least 2-3 years if I got for the shortest version