How did you make your first comics?

[teasidesketches]

I never posted any comics publicly until I started my current comic, but when I was much younger I would staple together some printer paper and make little comic books like that with ordinary pens and pencils~. I didn't get much further than a couple pages, but it was still fun!

[VibrantFox]

i never did whole comics until the past few years here on tapas but it started as pencil on lined paper drawing canon x oc shorts or 4-koma styled comics inspired by fandoms i was invested in at one time or another.

I didn't start doing sketchbooks till high school but the content was essentially the same with fan characters or ocs set in world based on stuff i was into. I'd actually written a script of a story that was inspired by the sonic franchise that i'd wanted to make into a comic but never actually drew the thing out save for a few random sketches.

i didn't go digital until a little before and as soon as i was on tapas and those were in photoshop. I'd draw the things out on printer paper and either scan or take a photo of em then draw over it in PS. I think I'd attempted to use csp but when i realized i couldn't save in the demo version i'd draw everything out, take a screen shot and then edit in photoshop. it was the least convenient method and the level of quality is obvious but they were a thing and somehow got attention

it improved once i switched to medibang maybe a year later (still early in the digital art journey) but quality wise it looked somewhat better (none of the pixel grid from csp). it's still super weird looking at those old comics but kind of cool seeing the changes and improvement over time.

[Lucca_Vendramel]

My first comic ever was a recap of the 6 Star Wars movies, but with my friends and relatives as the side/other characters and me as Luke
That thing was thicker than a J.R.R Tolkien book

[djwaglmuffin]

Lol. Pencils and pack after pack of printer paper.

When I was practicing that's what I would do. I then got my first tablet and started doing everything digitally. As long as you're productive it pays for itself.

Also: My first comic was a Slayers doujinshi. I also did a thing for Poltergeist and an original old west title before I started working on my magnum opus

[Freemints30]

Other than the typical pencils and wax crayon and later with colored pencils. My first digital comics were on a tablet(not for drawing) with my finger, as I couldn't find a stylus that would even work with it. Now that tablet can't charge anymore so I guess its days have ended. I have never posted any comic just drew a couple of pages and got bored after at most a month.

Example:

[vothnthorvaldson]

It's so old (29 years ago!) that I only recently remembered, but I actually draw a comic before the current one. It was on a calendar-type notebook, in pencil, and it was a sort of digest of all the Gulf War related news I was reading in different newspapers. Compiled by a 10 year-old I wish I still had it, I would have a good laugh

[joannekwan]

Age 5 - 12 Ball point pen on printer paper stapled together, with each page as its own scene. So I guess they were more like storybooks, but had speech bubbles.

Age 13 - 17 Ball point pen in spiral bound notebooks. I had one on-going series about a bunch of kids mucking around, it lasted over 40 individual spiral bounds of varying thickness, from 60 pages to like 200+ pages each. I always got a bunch during back-to-school shopping.

[baasinsimple]

Well, my first online comic attempt is not publicly available and hasn't been for over two years now. Which is both good and completely sad, but whatever. It was a less evolved version of my "current" webcomic, I've learned that things like FireAlpaca aren't great ways to make comics, while it's brother programs like Sai, and Medibang are amazing. I've been using the same art tablet for over four years now though and I don't think I'm getting a new one any time soon.

[lynestjules]

You're all so fancy with your ballpoint pens, printer paper and staplers. lol

My very first comic was made back in 1994 in elementary school. I used lined paper and an HB pencil. I kept everything together with a paperclip. lol. I was just starting to learn English, so there were spelling mistakes absolutely everywhere! I remember it being a VERY DARK and violent comic about domestic abuse.

We didn't get a computer until I started High School and didn't get the internet until my senior year. I got my first scanner and wacom tablet in college.

Even the original Megami Shiizun comic was made in High School 19 years ago with a small sketchbook, HB pencil and a black liner pen. It's absolutely terrible!!!!! I still have it up on a shelf in my studio. It's nice to see how much I've grown as an artist and as a writer. The comic available online is the re-write which is only 6 years old. As you can see with this old piece of artwork from the original, I've come a long way..

[Rhonder]

I have many many comic drawings from when I was a little kid that are mostly colored pencil and regular pencil on printer paper I would do tons of fan comics for series I liked (pokemon, zelda, digimon, etc.) and get like 5 pages in before dropping it to move on to something else. Lots of fun though! I continued starting and dropping projects all through middle school until I finally settled upon this really cool, big, magnum opus-y story that I was sure I wanted to work on! Then I spent... like 10 years doing and redoing and writing and rewriting that. And then finally dropping that to move onto something new is how I wound up on my current tapas comic

[Strontium]

The first comic I ever made was in the first grade! It was really more like a picture book but it was my intent for it to be a comic. I just... really knew nothing about comics XP

I have it archived on my tumblr - you can read all of it here!

[TeddyLemon]

I doodled comics on my school notebooks when i was in elementary i wanted to be a manga artist in japan in the future so i thought i didn’t need to learn how to color cuz mangas are all black and white (i hated coloring too, it always hurt my wrist lol) and then i learned digital art and webcomics. My passion flared up some more and now i love coloring haha.

[Hysterical_Ryu]

The first comic I remember making was back in 8th grade about an inside joke I had with my friend. It was mixed with Pokemon (and another inside joke, which was about... Pokemon lol):

Back when I made this I was already considering starting a webcomic so I guess it was good to have some practice! There's also another slightly longer comic in this same sketchbook that was a side story of the webcomic I wanted to make.

[DiegoPalacios]

For my first comics, as a kid, i colored like a toddler and had a horrible calligraphy. I had to read it out to my family and friends because only i could read my own writing.

i was the target of many jokes about becoming a doctor because of that XD

[silverraven0]

I remember back on my elementary school I made some sort of comic with cats with pencil on a lined book. I never get around to finish the second page I think.

Then if I don't get it wrong, at 2015 I started to draw some sketch draft for a comic (on also a lined papers with pencil) that even until now is half finished but I already know what I want to made out of it. A few pages of it :

[Shanny8]

When I was little(elementary school) I used to A) draw 1 page comics on notebook paper and color it with crayon or B) fold blank paper in half and make my own comic books...

Once I got to middle school I started out drawing 4 page adventures of my own transforming robots(I was a big Transformers fan back then), then started making 8 page issues(complete with cover art) of my little group of mutants(I also had started reading X-Men back then as well)...I pretty much stopped the robot stuff and kept drawing the other comic basically up til I graduated and went to art school; at that time I had bought the "How To Make Comics The Marvel Way" book and started attempting to draw on a larger scale. I had the wrong everything- wrong type bristol, wrong type pencil, wrong type ink and wrong type brushes- I got frustrated, but never gave up; I eventually started buying the right stuff once I went to an actual art supply store. I kind of eventually gave up on inking with a brush and tried to pick up inking with nibs(I didnt get good inking with nibs until 2001).

Unfortunately I dont have any of my old comics with me- I packed what little I still have away. Most of them were destroyed between the many moves I have made over the years and though I did have some that I saved to an external hard drive, I put the drive away as well.

[Kelheor]

The same as I am doing it now, really Only I used screentones (it was manga competition for Jump) and my husband was helping, because the schedule was very tight.
I still love the cover and the idea though (which was changed for this competition), so maybe one day we will try to remake it.

You can even read it on Medibang, hehe. I thought of putting it on Tapas, but the art is really not so good.

Master of Keys - Kelheor

[PabloRomero]

I think it was in old printer paper (those that had holes on the sides) My father brought that from work, back in the early 90s. With my cousin we used to do short comics with stick figures and we named them after us. It ussually was very violent stuff.

[irene_addler]

I'd never drawn a comic in my life until I started the one I'm working on now back in January (which is why it's not great, but is slowly getting better!). Sure I wrote a lot, but I never thought about drawing what I'd written. It's like drawing and writing were two different things in my head. Then I saw Lore Olympus somewhere, and got hooked on webcomics. Then one day I was like...hey...maybe I could do that. I got a basic drawing tablet for Christmas last year specifically for drawing webcomics and haven't stopped since I got around to installing CSP! Wow...I just realized how impulsive I am...

[skicoak]

Pssssh.....paper.

We used crushed berry juice and cave walls back in my day.