How did your story begin?

[mayday]

How did you conceive your comic? Did it begin with the characters, theme or setting etc? I would love to hear your stories!

My comic CRUSADE began with it's main cast.
These four were highly influenced by RWBY (an animated series by Rooster Teeth) originally. I had just binged the second volume and I was still in that phase where I enjoyed making fan-characters. It was kind of juvenile, but I did it for my own entertainment, so whatever. I dropped the characters for a while, and came back to it a few months later. I decided to remove the characters from that established universe, since I liked them but there wasn't much I could do within the confines of that world (I pretty much stopped making fan-characters when I realized how hard it was to write them, since you have to fit all these specific rules). As for the story? It started with "Ok but what if Yami was a witch and also didn't have a stupid hairstyle" when I was redesigning the characters and thought that Yami doing magic was fun.

While the designs came first, when I came up with the story it influenced the designs. They went from a very high-fantasy style to regular fashion that changed from day to day, which was due to a huge shift in the tone and magicky-ness of the story. The setting came last, but the story developed a lot with the setting. Characters came first, and were evolved by story. Story came second, evolved by setting. Setting came last.

[AnnaLandin]

About 7 or so years ago, I thought "man, it would be fun to make a story about a wandering swordsman and a kid some day", and "it'd be fun if it had an overarching storyline, but also smaller, self-contained episodic moments, kind of like Hellboy does."

.... And between then and now, a LOT of brainstorming, planning, scrapping and re-planning was done. Those two basic ideas are still in there, and the main characters are the same, but it took me a looooong time to finish tinkering with the outline of the story. Heck, I didn't come up with the main antagonist and their goals until about six months before I posted the first page of Grassblades.

[shazzbaa]

A friend of mine in college had invented his own tabletop game system (think like Dungeons & Dragons) and setting, and ran a couple games with us to help him test it out. Since he was obsessed with Celtic mythology, it was heavily influenced by that culture, and the magic system was built around learning magical runes that you could write and activate as spells.

Usually, he said, you'd learn those runes from the gods, and you'd get visions to teach you new runes, but some mages were self-taught. Since I always have to be weird and different, I wanted to play a character like that. "How do I learn runes?" I asked. "Do I have to like... experiment with them? Oh man! Would I need to just trial and error my way to new spells? Are self-taught mages just covered in the scars and consequences of spells that weren't written quite right and went wrong?!?"

"No, I imagine you'd just see them in a dream," he said.

But I still liked my idea. So I started jotting down notes for a setting where magic is unreliable and the only way you can learn new spells is by experimenting with the runes you know, and the remains of miscast, half-failed spells are common. I put down ideas of what sorts of spells-gone-wrong would be interesting to fiddle with, and, since this was clearly a silly, self-indulgent idea at this point, I decided to just sketch out some of these characters to get it out of my system so I could get back to working on the stories I actually wanted to finish.

OBVIOUSLY THAT, UH, TURNED OUT A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY THAN I'D PLANNED

[zetina]

the Suck it!! story began with...

Twilight series reviews.

yup.

And so the off-hand remarks and ideas the reviewers had would spark my own ideas which ended up with a concept for my own vampires and a romance with one. That was, like, 4 years ago and by now there's barely a shred of romance left haha! It's just this one vampire's apathy vs a super rambunctious teen girl who wants to get him to be... not apathetic. An anti-thesis to a paranormal YA romance book, basically.

[LoboSong_Hitaka5Ever]

My friend's and my current comic was thought of after I was able to use an unfinished drawing by another artist for my old lineless tutorial, where I put my newest OC with her long-time OC, and immediately I thought of the non-canon storyline that I itched to my friend in 2014. Then I wrote a story so that we could do a comic for fun/practice

Now our next one for the future came about after I heard a song that the comic title is named after. As of now, we're working on character designing and I finished our prologue and have begun writing chapter 1. We still have a long way to go, but its a start and I think people will enjoy it I certainly hope so anyway, haha

[joannekwan]

For Demon House, I had been seeing a lot of demon-y things on tumblr and was reading Daryl Toh's Tobias and Guy comics. This spurred me to create two demon designs (now Fawn and Haxan). I looked at them and thought, "Gee, these demons look cool! I might do something with them later." Then a couple weeks later I was on a train going into the city and we passed by some small houses and my mind wandered to a haunted house scenario. I thought, who better to haunt this house than my two demons? I then created more demons and a hapless human to get tossed into the mix and so Demon House was conceived.

As for Heavy Horns, I was doodling around and came up with a guy with bull horns. I took a look at him and thought, "oh no, he's hot," so I put him in my back pocket if I ever needed a character like him. Then I sketched another guy, for coloring practice mostly, and I thought, "oh no, he's hot too." After sketching more of the two the idea came to me that perhaps they should be a couple. At the moment, Demon House was going on pretty well and I had a healthy amount of subscribers. With a shot in the dark I started a new series, posted a teaser chapter image of the horned guy and stated that if enough interest was shown in this I'd make it a full fledged series. Well, people were interested to say the least. I was sweating as I actually had to come up with a whole story for the two. So I buckled down and drafted an entire outline within two weeks and then the rest of the story in the following months.

Now for my latest series, Sarota Springs, I started with a name, Church (inspired by the Red vs. Blue character). I thought, "oh boy, this name's so kickass, I really want to make a character called that and have some sort of story around them." So I come up with a story, it sucked; I trashed it and started from the ground up. I designed Church's character after a certain wardrobe aesthetic I like and have been pinning on pinterest and thought it'd be well suited to a horror story. I added in more horror elements, and at this time I had binged Stranger Things and I really liked the tone of that series, so a lot of the atmosphere is informed by that I think. Anyway, I liked this new story so much I added it to a list of series people could vote to be the next one I do and lo and behold it won. Now I'm super excited to start it in December!

[Quinineer]

Faery Tales was originally going to be a short, ~10 page story...I'd read somewhere that it was good to begin comicking with a short project, easy end goal, etc. etc.

I've gradually built it up and focused on a rough plot. I never script anything(well, I tried once and didn't care for it much) so small details evolve and change to fit the story better. I don't think of it as a thing I have to do, just as an ongoing "pet" I feed and let grow. Also, it lets me indulge in drawing a variety of hugely impractical fight scenes. : D

[Emma]

I've always enjoyed making small comics for my friends, where they read them and gave their input. One day, I looked at a random drawing of a guy and a girl, and I was like... "why not make a romance comic about them when I get older?"
And that was how Elena and Dave from Friends or Lovers were born.

[jurinova]

I've always been interested in creating new characters, world building and coming up with story ideas. Most of the time it's just a way to pass time but occasionally something sticks and becomes an actual project.

This happened with my current comic, Home is a Distant Wish, which I started working on about ten years ago or so. At the beginning I simply designed some characters for a scifi setting and didn't think much of it. Slowly I started to give them background stories, which lead to some more ideas and world building. However at that point it was still nothing very interesting, so I left it for a while and worked on something else.
When I returned to this project I decided that it needed more depth, so I actually infused it with an unused military story of mine and a couple of "leftover" characters I had designed but didn't have a place anywhere. This is when I properly started working on the story and gave it a more serious tone. That was really the point when everything suddenly seemed to fit together and the story became what it is now. Now there's not much left of the original ideas I started with but considering how young I was back then it's probably a good thing.

[Mane]

Custode was initially supposed to be a 50-ish page long one-shot about this bookish looking girl ( prototype Alexis) that runs a library with her stylish friend (prototype Katja) but is actually a powerful witch sent to keep an eye on an area bound spirit that occasionally acts against the local human population. This was YEARS ago, I even have 3 to 5 pages done somewhere, but it never went beyond that. Last year, when I was desperate to start a project, any project , I dug up this story idea from the recesses of my mind , tweaked it a bit, developed the story a little more and made it longer, and decided to start with this as my first long term story. I had only done one-shots before. Commitment issues I guess. And a tone of fan comics, the longest of which being a little over 100 pages that took me over 3 years to finish. I thought Custode was a good combination between a simple story concept and intriguing details that I could handle working on long term.

@joannekwan - that's how I make a lot my stories too. I sometimes just draw random characters and if I end up liking how they look I want to create an entire epic for them .

[vongcw]

Aetherwar actually started as a boardgame!

Hahaha. A friend of mine came up with an idea of different magician types fighting across a board with different skills. Thus was born the classes. Enchantress, Magician, Sorceress, and Witch (male). He asked me to design a few of the skill cards for him and I had a bit of fun designing around10 cards? However, he never proceeded with the game and it was left at that.

The idea was left alone for a couple of years when I picked it up again because I thought some of my art concepts were kinda cool and cute. My favourite was of course the Enchantress, now my main character. I designed my own board game after that. It was a little complex: a 1 vs 4, asymmetric game (co-op and vs). 4 people worked together to stop the one player playing the bad guy who controlled a player like entity as well as creatures pouring out of four different portals. The idea also unfortunately went on hiatus because life, although I would really like to get back to it when I have time.

Parallel to the board game, the story for the characters developed. They gained names, backgroumds, enemies, all kinds of things, and finally today my current storyline.

[eleoza]

My comic started with no plot, no idea's, no detailed character designs, nothing xD
It started randomly because my best friend was complaining and annoyed by the many BL comics and told me he was glad I didn't draw a BL comic. Being the good friend I am I instantly wanted to troll him and out of nowhere started my comic to rub it in his face.
The basic idea was to have 2 guys who hate each other and see what would happen. Also I never planned to get serious about my comic, the intention was to just draw a few pages to keep the joke up. But then I kinda got really into it and kept going cuz I liked it ^^

[timinabox24]

well I did have about 12 or so people and nothing to do with them, so then I thought I would start making comics about them
then after a few years I got bored of doing the same thing all the time so I wanted to try something different
so I did and so now I am working on my current comic
comics are really just coincidental tho, it's the easiest way to do something with the ideas I had

[Wishjacked]

Some TV channel had a marathon of 24 going on, so of course my family all curled up on the couch and devoted 24 hours to watching it. This meant the computer was free, and I desperately wanted to write something. Since I only had 24 hours but no actual plot or characters, I totally pantsed a story-- I went with the first character I thought of (a student vampire hunter), made a blog, and began writing blog entries from my character's POV. I made up every character and plot point on the spot as I was writing it. I actually did a fairly good job of passing off all missing plot details as an unreliable narrator. Ended up writing like 7k words on that blog, ahaha. And four and a half years of developmental hell later, that hot mess became Crow Summer.

[edmourabarbosa]

My stories usually are inspired by some music I hear. Children of the Moon was inspired from "Love Cats" by The Cure. I just thought "I should write a story where the protagonists were cats. That would be awesome." So, yeah, cats.

[respheal]

Galebound came about from a few different sources:

First, back in junior high I had this cliched-as-hell story of a fantasy kingdom torn apart by war etc etc where there were six people called Guardians. Each Guardian was beholden to their respective element and had to obey its wishes, like it or not. So the first seed was "a group of people who must obey the orders of another group, willingly or not"

The second, an idea from a character quirk generator: "A character who never asks a question" which morphed into cannot ask a question, which then got me asking, "Why?"

Third, my family was watching The Adventurer's Down Under and there was this one scene where a mouse wakes up a boar all, "YO I NEED A RIDE." That got me thinking of the trope where there's some hapless guy in a stable and the main characters suddenly burst in like, "I need your fastest horse now!" and I wanted to write about that hapless stablehand.

[rainbowolfe]

I can't remember what caused my first comic (Destiny Awaits) to happen, but I know it started with Tai and Alistair. Then followed by the rest of the main cast and about 7 chapters of work and a pretty heavy outline. But then it went through this huge metamorphosis and is totally unrecognizable from what it looks like now lmao. However, because of a severe change in personalities, I could no longer maintain a certain relationship dynamic between Tai and Alistair.........

So my solution was to just create an entirely new comic. XD Thus the birth of Royal Pain! I started with Vee, Mallory, and Steffan (and another character who hasn't been introduced yet). I pulled some inspiration from Kamisama Kiss (great anime, btw) and got to work defining the settings and considering possible major plot points!

[Izzy]

You know when you're in the shower, and you start to have random, but kind of really concentrative thoughts? And then after you watch a ton of random scifi/crime/action shows while eating a ton of junk food, you go to bed feeling like you weren't productive at all that day and have weird dreams due to having an inactive mind?

That's honestly how Chimera started out lol

[spadesart]

oh man you have my characters Cog and William to thank for SPIRE. They were originally made from the MusicalOcs meme (design 2 characters from 2 random songs and the third song is their relationship) (yikes look at that old art), and I really liked them so next time one opened I put them into an Original Character Tournament called Cascade Cabaret. I lost round 4 but I was too attached to my characters to just drop them and since my CC story was super rushed and poorly made I wanted to give them the story they deserve!! during the half a year or so I was working on CC I built up the world they came from in my head and began to want to write something around it. I had also drawn up a concept for an upgraded cog (SPIRE's placeholder name was literally just upgrade AU) and about 3 months or so later I started outlining and writing the comic!!

[hades]

Ark was originally created for me to get a better grasp at drawing anthros while enjoying it. It's come a long way since then [including actually having a plot and likable characters] and is still a staple at pushing me to improve both my storytelling and my art work. It officially turns...3? [since initial development] on Halloween. :]