YOLO'D!!!!!!!!!
I planned maybe 8 pages ahead at best before I started uploading (laughs)
I feel better knowing that other people also took a while to ramp up to a comic - that the idea didn't just spring fully grown from anyone's forehead or anything.
My comic is both a fan comic and a fixed-length story, so my case may be a bit specific. Although I came up with the basic plot in approximately 3 nights, I first spent a year storyboarding the first draft (~110 pages) from that plot, because I knew I'd have trouble keeping on schedule without one. But by that point I'd also realized elements of the plot were really stupid - so I came up with a more satisfying second draft and spent another ~3 months redrawing a third of the storyboards before I officially started posting.
Concept was finalized mid-last year. Decided to just write the first page as a one-shot for an intro to Lee's character and I actually liked it, so I kept writing. Most of the actual planning was done around January once I realized I didn't have a solid plot beyond some blurbs I had written in my notes app.
I can get the gist of it in two weeks, main plot points, key pieces of dialogue, etc.
But it can take two years or more to fine tune everything depending on how deep the story is.
However I started creating and posting pages immediately after I knew I had a solid introduction/beginning arc.
It usually start out as a smaller project that I write a detailed outline for, or simply sketch out with small thumbnails a few times. I can blow through it in 2 hours, or it can take 2 weeks. And after I've done that it can take years before I actually start drawing it.
I usually break the projects into smaller chunks. This makes it much easier to handle, and makes it easier to make changes along the way.
Because they do change a lot.
But projects also often comes in parts. Especially the longer ones. My main comic project started of as a 40 page one shot story. This was in late December 2012. But after a while it just started growing exponentially. I made the first chapter. Then ideas for more and more chapters came in. 7 months after I started sketchig the very first page, the plot for almost the whole story as it is now was there. And it will most likely end up at 500 pages. This was in July 2013. As I write this I have finished drawing 286 pages. And I have planned out 46 more. The plot have pretty much stayed the same ever since, but the story is constantly evolving.
I started the idea and concept of Malleus Maleficarum1 probably around 2008-2009, but only played with concepts and characters. It was also a shorter story back then. I started seriously developing it around 2011 and it took roughly a year to flesh out the whole story in a super detailed summary format.
In saying that however, I am constantly going back to revamp parts. Looking back at some bits I'm constantly going, "What the hell was I thinking?!"
So yeah, aside from drawing it, it's still very much work in progress.
Well, my current comic took only about 2 months in my free time to conceptualise properly. But my biggest problem is to not get distracted by other story ideas while trying to work on the main one. X"DD
Planning goes slow when you try to tackle a heap at once. :'DD
I came up with an idea of All Broken Gods 6 years ago. It wasn't the full story, just an idea. Then in college years later I started thinking about what to do with the simple plot I made, then started designing characters 2 years ago. I started writing the story a year ago and that took 6 months to write. Within those 6 months I also design all the backgrounds. Pretty long process.
I came up with the spawn of idea for Marked about 1-2 years ago which eventually lead into the storyline of it, which turned into the characters, etc. I'm still story-boarding the story even after a year of releases. All of the story's ideas, main plot points, and what happens is mapped out in my head, but I like to save writing it down for when I get to that certain chapter so that it reflects my current state of writing rather then an older one.
Let's see. Back in 2011 we took about 9 months to write the entire first draft. Most of 2012 was spent editing the writing. I also did a few "test" comics at this time to try and figure out the style I wanted to use for Midwinter. Did most of the major concept art at the end of that year, too. We started actually producing pages in spring of 2013 and have produced a chapter (40 pgs) every year since!
Only now, 4 years later, am I thinking I could reasonably try to do 2 chapters in a year. I'm working at home now and getting paid a lot more for the work I do, so I'm hopeful we'll be able to do better!
We're in a state of constant editing though. Things change literally up until it gets put on the paper, and we've rewritten every scene so far (sometimes more than once).
I started coming up with character ideas for Adventures in the Chromatosphere in 2012 and since then have been keeping a list of loose character ideas and story arcs. Then I kind of make up the actual pages as I go based on those loose ideas. I usually come up with a script of sorts, draw the page in a gridded engineering pad and then scan and finish it digitally. The most difficult stage for me is taking all those loose ideas I have and then planning out a page layout from that.
My comic, Those of Fate1, took ... well sort of over 10 years haha. But the story has gone in many different directions before I really sat down and properly planned it out completely. I was lacking courage to start on the actual pages for a looong time, but in the mean time I developed the world, characters and plot and I'm happy with how it is now. That being said, there are still a few things that are vague and I'll create as I go - like specific character ideas and such.
I admit that I am glad I waited and fleshed out the story for so long, there are many things in the first few revisions of my world I'm glad were changed of fleshed out before starting.
Idk, I kinda write as I go, I just drew my characters and sort of planned my story around them, it took me like 3 months or so and I just develop more deeply as I go.
I thought of the concept for Alice X way back in 2014 I believe, lol! It was such a random idea now that I think about it. In the 2 years until I actually started to produce the pages there was a lot of procrastination. The reason for that came down to writing the actual script. I find it easy to create a concept but when it comes down to actually fleshing out a story...mmmmyeah. Once I buckled down though, the writing of the first chapter took maybe a day with a few hours over a week or two doing revisions (I know, I know...procrastination is a hell of a drug). The full story was also plotted out in a day so it will come down to writing a script for each chapter going forward.
I don't know how other's do their pre-production, but for me, if I don't have a script I will probably run into issues later on. In the entire first chapter I've worked on for Alice X, I have not had to make significant revisions because I did all that revision at the written stage. I believe that a comic is only as good as it's written content. If I take away the pretty pictures, do I still have a competent story?
Once I was satisfied with the script everything else came down to assembly line ease. Using a script format helps me with visual rendering as that format uses visual directives (I do filmography and storyboarding) so going into thumbnails was straightforward and the remaining production just came down to refining those thumbnails as larger pages.
I was planning PopChromatic, or aspects of it, for about seven years before we started publishing. Major unwritten story arcs are that old. But the day-to-day plot is written about a month in advance.
Betwixt is a weird case because it draws from ideas waaaay back that I've had in my childhood, but if I were to talk about my "official" planning stage, I took about half a year of on and off planning (like from July 2016 - January 2017).
My favorite part was definitely creating a story different than those that I had written in the past - I intentionally dumbed down the art beyond what I usually enjoy drawing and simplified the story structure to give myself the most freedom possible to create a simple yet engaging story. I thought I would give myself a very simple start and end point so that I could fill in the gaps and have fun instead of stressing out about the issues.
The most difficult part was writing the intro scene. I made like five - six drafts of the intro, all vastly different. It was hard to cut back on exposition at the beginning so that it didn't feel cheap (or at least I hope it doesn't).
Some of the designs were a bit tricky, too. I didn't want Stein, the main character, to look weird, so I really had to mess with proportions. As for setting design, I'm colorblind, so I really wanted to make sure to plan ahead and give myself palettes that I can draw from so that I could be relatively sure that the background color wouldn't change too terribly.
It'd be real cool if you could take some time to check out my comic, Betwixt, and maybe subscribe...
Click here to read a tale about lil' kids and frogs: https://tapas.io/series/Betwixt
