How did your story begin?

[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 They were originally made from the MusicalOcs meme (design 2 characters from 2 random songs and the third song is their relationship) (yikes look at that old art), and I really liked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.

[indagold]

Welcome Back Series I was brainstorming ideas 7 years ago for this one. I wanted to create a weird dream universe based on some of my dreams and wanted to combine my experiences traveling in the subway. A lot of it was doodling weird characters and trying to cement a story. I went through millions of different plot ideas and nearly gave up on it until I was told for my senior year of highschool I must do a comic. So I finally put together a comic over the summer vacation finalizing the plot, shrinking it down and I took the setting of every boring highschool slife of life comics and tried twisting it up. Then I gave myself a year to take a break and worked on the sequel which fleshed out more of the characters, introduced more, reworked and paid homage to the stories I abandoned, let you explore more of the universe which was never shown in the first comic and get an idea of the massive scope of the world.

Garden Of Mold was an offshoot from the above comic. This one was based off a few very vivid dreams I had and I tried working them into a story years ago. I actually put a similar plot in later on in Welcome Back Series but felt it was so worked into the existing story that it didn't have the same atmosphere or feel of the previous idea I had. I thought of going back and trying again with the plot points I thought up and worked it into a short 30 page experimental silent story.

[Puppisama]

VCvsDvsCFAD was going to be a story about how miserable poeple were, especially the main characters, but oh well, talking with a friend about corgis I commented something as "why not make a bestiary where all beast are corgis?" and instantly: CORGIBERUS.

I uploaded the first page of sad VCvsDvsCFAD on january, but inmediatly was left on hold, then, by the end of July I was having my common mental crisis of summer (I get so bored I get mad), and then decided not to waste anymore time feeling miserable, let's make a comic about the majestic corgiberus and how she kicks arses, and that's how VCvsDvsCFAD started to be, I was planing to make it a short comedy, but ideas to wild on my head.
Most of the characters of VCvsDvsCFAD come from somewhat real people, Yuuki, a guy I liked, Evil: my evil clon, or better said, my good clon hahaha.

[VikiKuli]

My webcomic Wednesday 7 was started by me hearing one song, just one song: I'm So Sorry by Imagine Dragons. And all the ideas just came flowing! It was very strange experience to say the least, but I got an image of Wednesday, the main-ish character of the comic and it all came from there! I started drawing character sheets and then drafting main scenes of the comic and then the actual pages. It happened very quickly and smoothly a comic never came that smoothly to be before and so I leaped at the opportunity to make it my focus for the next few years. Hopefully it all works out!

[niinasalmelin]

One day these characters just kinda invited themselves in my head :')

Numb ( https://tapastic.com/episode/492430 ) started as a pure horror comic that turned into comedy, drama, mystery, them back and forth for years until it settled down as what it now is. During this time I barely did any sketches for it, instead it all just roamed in my head 24/7.

It took about 4-5 years to do the 'final' storybpard which I started to work on back in 2012. From that time, there has been vaurious changed to the big storyline, but I've managed to pinpoint the key-line that remains unchanged. This was the year I started to draw the comic. I uploaded the first Pages here about a year ago.

What originally made want to do it was the fact that I've always wanted to be comic book artist, so better to start when you have the story in your head. It's also pretty personal story for me that I really really wanted to be my first one.

[atlas]

The idea for my comic Dragon Chapel came about when I was watching Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, with the original comic part of my Senior Project that I had to complete before the end of high school.

[Akhdas]

by having a child abusive father and horrible childhood. it's just kinda revolves around my trauma.

[Mr_B]

The basic concept of Biophilia came to me at some point in 2013. That's when the basics came together: some people have biophilia, and there's an international institute that teaches them how to use it. I originally tried to make it into a novel, but I didn't get far. While I liked the idea, it needed to be expanded upon and fleshed out, and there wasn't a compelling enough story in there at the time to provide a strong foundation. I had other things, comic and non-comic related, that I was more dedicated to, and soon it fell out of focus.

Cut to late 2015, when I had a surge of inspiration. It came from students. I teach an undergraduate Zoology course for freshmen at a university, and among the hundred or so students there were some interesting character types. I spent a lot of time thinking about them, how they would interact and what they would do in certain situations. Soon enough these thoughts developed into some of the core characters, using the students' personalities as starting points. And then, an idea for a story that placed the characters into the Biophilia context crystallized in my head. You could say that the idea gestated in my head for a few years and this was its moment to finally be born.

At first I wanted it to just be a one-shot, a single chapter that would leave many things unexplained but that would sort of tell a full story about the characters involved. But, as I was working on it, ideas kept popping into my head. My heart wanted to make a series out of it, but my brain kept insisting that it should remain a one-shot. I was firmly of the opinion that I shouldn't expand the story unless I had a clear purpose, in the sense that it was about something that mattered to me, in any way.

Come early 2016, I hit a rough patch. I was thinking about mortality and existence in general and future life decisions. A lot. I was not in a good place. I would have moments of utter hopelessness and some heavy thoughts appeared in my mind. One day, it dawned on me: the stuff I was thinking about can comfortably coexist with the rest of the world in Biophilia. I could channel those thoughts and they would live in the story, and I would feel a bit more at ease. I worked them into the comic, and they gave me something the story desperately needed: an opposing point of view, perfect for the antagonists.

After this, I made my decision: rather than a one-shot, I would try to commit to a series, for the umpteenth time in my life. And that's how Biophilia came to be. A sort of a Frankensteinian amalgam of an idea I had a few years ago, characters that sprung to life from experiences with real life people, and some good old-fashioned darkness thrown in for good measure.