How long did it take you to plan out your main comic?

[ahhvecadoes]

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.

[KoreanTacos]

planning? The heck does that mean?

[joannekwan]

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.

[niinasalmelin]

About 5-6 years of planning until I finally gathered up my courage and started drawing it.

[thomasfallaeriksen]

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.

[timinabox]

I was planning it for about some time

[ashriott]

I started the idea and concept of Malleus Maleficarum 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.

[Rueleer]

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

[indagold]

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.

[MidZM]

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.

[revisionstudios]

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).

[cgphils]

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.

[KuroTorii]

My comic, Those of Fate, 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.

[insomniascrawl]

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.

[thischickdoesart]

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.

[PopChromatic]

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.

[mileshonor]

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

[WasHNooB]

- WasH

[spadesart]

i did a bad thing and did 2 or so weeks of central planning before starting SPIRE

however the concepts for the world it takes place in started in 2015, when i was in cascade cabaret. it's also where william, cog, alpha, victor, caravan, and alphonzo were made. victor, caravan, and alphonzo weren't featured in CC, they were originally characters i made for fun to give william and cog's world concept more depth. everyone else was added during the 2 weeks of planning.

i actually started working on spire because i lost round 4 and got waaaaaay too attached to william and cog and their world to just drop them. i even postponed another project i was planning because i enjoyed writing them so much (but william fucking died in round 4. if you find my entries dont read them theyre ugly. but honestly i couldve done round 5 i was the only one that prioritized getting rounds done because i loved my characters so much.)

[Aspie_Gamer]

Life of an Aspie existed in my head for years ever since I drew the first sketch of what would become the main character Susan Graham way back in 2011. Since then, so much changed story wise before I put to digital paper my ideas for what a shoujo esque comic should be in my mind in the summer of 2015 here on Tapastic. Here are a few ideas that fortunately changed for the better or were outright nixed.

1. Susan Graham originally didn't have Asperger's Syndrome, but as I started imagining dialogue in my head for her character basing it off of me and conversations I've had with other people growing up, it just made more and more sense as time went on to make her autistic which in hindsight is one of the better decisions I've ever made in my life because of all the nice feedback I've since gotten from readers regarding this aspect of Susan's character.

2. Susan, Hiroshi, and Takeshi would've originally been in a love triangle. Yeah...this was nixed for obvious reasons. Average girl, nerdy guy, and hot popular guy. C'mon! lol

3. Ayame, the girl Susan beats the hell out of in Chapter 4 for hazing Mizuki and calling Susan "retarded" originally had a larger role in LoaA being the snotty rich girl (in the final version of LoaA, she's a bit more well off than Susan, but not that much) crossed with the familiar Alpha Bitch trope which of course goes hand in hand with the former trope as well. Since not too many readers like Alpha Bitches including myself, this ended up being the reason why I took Ayame out of the story four chapters in.

4. Speaking of Ayame, her two cronies (well only one of them could actually be called that.) Risa and Tachibana started life as two girls that were simply shown in passing during Chapter 1. This was before I decided to write them in as Ayame's friends. With the aforementioned girl now out of the picture, Risa has since stepped up to be the "antagonist" (she's not really. Not in the traditional Stock Shoujo Bullying Tactics sort of way anyway.) of LoaA with Tachibana having her own role to play that I haven't decided on yet.

5. Finally, Yamada Sakuya, the guidance counselor that Susan performs yoga with in Chapter 5 was a character that wasn't planned for initially. Around the time I felt like throwing in a yoga scene to the start of Chapter 5, Yamada immediately sprang to mind as a second guidance counselor (Susan's grandmother Helen being the other one.) whos method of guidance would differ significantly from Helen's (which readers haven't seen yet, but will in Chapter 6). Oh and fun fact, the idea of Yamada's style of being a guidance counselor came when readers pointed out in the comments section how direct she was being with Susan to the point of "probing" the girl for information. (I honestly had no idea I was writing her the way my readers felt her character was behaving until it was pointed out to me)

tl;dr Years of having LoaA float around in my head saw the story from your generic shoujo manga to something that is more shoujo influenced than it is an actual shoujo manga.