How did your story begin?

[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. :]

[heterodont]

I always start with the characters before the story...

I honestly forgot how I started my first story since it went through so many rewrites. It started off with small characters being connected and then I just continued making connections until I was like, hey - this is practically a story! let me hammer out the details by fckin straight up jumping into a comic format

my other story, In Memoriam, which I'm still working on the buffer for started off with two things: 1. me realizing I have as much fascination with angels as I do dragons and 2. the idea of an angel referring to themselves as "Angel" for a human alias bc of memory loss so all they remember is what they are, but people misconstruing it as the spanish name and that was this guy. I didn't make the actual MC until a few months after that a friend and I went to disneyland, and that was this guy. It didn't occur to me after a few more months that I could make a story because I could 1. connect them bc they're both angels, since up to that point I was doing nothing with them and 2. make more angel characters. SO I proceeded to make a vague antagonist and three archangels, because I felt like I needed them.

Then after that It was me struggling to figure out some sort of idea for a story, which ended up having the overall theme of memory, hence the name!

[anitacomics]

Me and my high school friends had a rough idea about this undertaker's high school, and a very stressed main character. Also we laughed hard at a pun between the name Becky and the italian word for undertaker ("becchino"), and that was it.
There has been two more phases of adding and adjusting it while I was in college - I needed pitches for short stories and went straight to the silly high school ideas I had in a drawer. First just a two pages episode, then a pitch for a publisher...and now, with a backbone story, DAWN OF THE DAD is a whole project. This is also why I'm almost sure I won't leave it before finishing it, even if I plan it to be a long run

[Aspie_Gamer]

Life of an Aspie, like all good stories, began as me simply wanting to try my hand at shoujo manga. For example, Susan didn't initially have Asperger's Syndrome and eventually she, Hiroshi, and Takeshi would've all been caught in a clichéd love triangle. Yeah...typical shoujo fluff if you will. However, once I started picturing conversations between Susan and the rest of the cast often basing them off of real life conversations that I being an aspie myself often had with my peers back in high school, it just gradually made more and more sense to put Susan on the spectrum and for that alone, I'm glad that things ended up that way and I'm even more proud that so far, her unique personality has been the one thing in Life of an Aspie that has been consistently well received by readers.

As for the shoujo elements of the comic, eventually there will be some romance in the comic, but even when I cross that bridge when I come to it, I can say with a straight face that it will not be the typical formulaic plain jane girl falls for handsome popular guy plot. Heck, it won't even be the typical "fall in love shoujo style" trappings that are associated with the genre.

[technicallyevil]

Technically Evil started in high school, born of a game my friend and I created, where I would sketch a small ninja on a piece of paper and pass it to my friend. He would in response draw a counter attacking ninja and pass the paper to me. We would go back and forth with no real winner until the entire page was filled with ninjas attacking each other.

[Isky]

I spent like a month replaying old Final Fantasy games. (VI through X because they're my favorites) I remember being very stoned as I played them and thinking it'd be cool if I could write my own Final Fantasy-esque story. Originally, I was going to have it be a web novel, but then I thought it'd be neat if it had visuals so I ended up making it a webcomic even though I can't draw well. That's how Rich Fiction came to be.

As for how my story began? Definitely with the characters. I prefer having a plot driven by characters than characters driven by a plot. I feel less restricted that way. There isn't much I can say about my characters, but they are influenced by people I know in real life. Afterward, I came up with the setting. It's a mix of high fantasy and dark fantasy, but I also purposely made it have a dreamlike feel so I could do anything in it. Hence, the main character's name being Lucid. As for the plot itself? My characters and setting make it so that my story can just be a string of ideas that appeal to me.

I only have a few pages of the first chapter done so far, but I do hope to finish this story before I die. I'm taking my time with it.

[NickRowler]

This is the story of Crow's Worth

Back in 2004, I was bored with school and instead spent my time drawing in my agenda instead of paying attention in class (I was a B student). One day, I came up with a story about a magical alien boy. From there, I would write out pages and such. From there, I spent time making comic thumbnails for comics. In 2005, Naruto airs for the first time in the US. And that becomes my obsession and I began coming up with "Naruto-like" story and such.

So at that point, I had two major ideas. One about a boy and his brother and their struggle to live with a world which is highly racist against their magical species OR a Naruto satire comic which started out as a joke which I told my sister. I chose the second one. But as I was writing it, I start to drift away from the whole formula and made it more about a man who does not comprehend how lucky it is for him to be alive and his lady friend who feels like she has the worse of luck. I originally wrote about 12 chapters plus some extra stuff (so 200+ pages). Then I get writer's block and just stopped.

I sketched the characters from time to time but once college came around (2010), I wanted to make the series into a webcomic. That never happened. But after that, I rarely even drew the characters. 2015, I am depressed as hell. I felt lost and nothing made me happy. So I decided to go back and read my old stuff and was filled with a huge amount of joy. I than decided to put all my efforts into converting it into a webcomic (which a lot of rewriting of course) because honestly, it's the greatest thing I have ever created. Now the thing consumes my life...it is insane but I feel better because of it.

[J.Z.Castillo]

BioHazard began back when I was a Junior in high school. I was in Honors American History and I was VERY bored so I asked my friends as the teacher was talking about whatever America was doing in the 1880s what superpowers they would like to have. They told me and then I asked all my friends in other classes. Then I started drawing them as their characters with their powers and what not. I started showing them and they told me it would be cool to make a comic out of them. So I started drawing a comic with no script at all. It was something I was doing during class to keep me from jumping out of a window. At this point I started creating villains to counter the power me and my friends gave our characters and it became a fun thing thinking about which powers to use and whatnot. After a while I thought it would be cool to actually write a linear story with everyone included. I had a really tough time coming up with a beginning to the story.

The first draft it was me and my friends going to this abandoned factory after a night out partying (NYC life, I'm telling you) and getting zapped with some sort of substance (I know cliche as fuck). I hated that origin for two things, one it was very cliche and two I didn't want to use our real names. I went back to the drawing board (literally) and thought of another beginning. This time I created characters with similar names to me and friend's names (as in I would keep names that sounded similar or began with the same initial). After that I had to come up with backstories for everyone since they are brand new characters. I wrote about 5-7 drafts for all my characters until I reached an origin story and background I liked, which gave birth to many other characters who weren't created from the beginning. After I had all that figured out all the pieces started to fall into place and eventually BH gave birth to another comic I have already written but haven't started to illustrate that takes place in the same universe. Hopefully I can start illustrating it in 2017!

Your Heart is My Coffin came to me in a day. I sketched Augustus first because I wanted to sketch a guy with dark circles under his eyes. He then turned out to be a vampire LOL. I decided to give him a mate so I drew Vanessa and I liked them so much I started writing little stories for the two of them. Writing YHMC is so easy and fun because it's just small stories about Augustus and Vanessa from the 1600s all the way to present day. It lets me draw them in different fashion and times and there's so much freedom in it I love it! I wish I had more time to work on it.

[TACOBERTO]

Light and Dark Began with characters first, then I worked a large fictional world and story for the sole purpose of having them interact with each other :/
Originally rp characters for the most part, I drew inspiration from soooo many sources. Avatar TLA, Watchmen, Jojo, Deadpool, you name. I can't help but take inspiration from literally everything and find a way to incorporate it in to my own story. A burst of brilliance, risk, and a bit of madness was the final push to take this concept and publish it.

@mayday I'll be waiting to read Crusade when it comes out. I ADORE RWBY so you've got me hooked!

[dojo]

The short and sweet story of Paisley Brickstone is "I was mad at Homestuck, so I made a comic". Ironically, very little of my inspiration for the actual content comes from Homestuck (there's still influence of course but I feel like my inspiration comes more elsewhere). The longer explanation I'm not going to actually get into because it's really long, but basically Paisley Brickstone was originally going to be a dating game about monsters but then it turned into a webthing, but then it went back to being a game, but then it turned into a webGAME and then back to being a regular game, and it eventually evolved into the webcomic I'm working on now. The main character is the only thing that survived from the original idea. I still plan on doing that dating game in the future. Paisley Brickstone was basically on the drawing board for two years before I finally published anything, almost three.

A Perilous Journey, on the otherhand, came from a whole slew of ideas I had come up with while brainstorming RP ideas with friends. It involved characters I don't own, so I decided to adapt it into something completely on it's own since I liked the idea enough and it was something I really didn't need the original characters for in the first place. I have several other comic ideas I hope to eventually do in the future that came out of similar brainstorming that I think would work well, but they'll have to wait until I either finish one of my two current series or I somehow find time to work it in without messing up the schedule for what I'm already working on. Perilous Journey's story ended up being the one chosen out of the other ideas I had because I had sudden inspo while showering one day on the ending and basically took it from there.