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

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

- WasH

i did a bad thing and did 2 or so weeks of central planning before starting SPIRE1

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.)

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.

I've been working on JODDAS VAPD since I was in Middle School, and it doesn't follow a plot, but rather short story arcs and situations that happen in my life. However I have two series I have in the work, the one I'm in the process of working on I have been working on for about three years (story, characters, etc.). The other one for about 5 years (originally was going to be a book). For a legit story I guess quite awhile before I even consider making it a reality, but I still enjoy creating random comic strips.

Am I the only one who started a comic with no plot in mind? yes? no? xD

My comic Doragon Konpaku1's main sequence of events has been pretty much solidified, it took me a few months to conceptualize the idea of it, and a few years later I generally understood the basic path of the story. Now, I pretty much know every single major event I want to have happen. Filler content and side content to serve as buffers between the major arcs are more or less in progress atm, but needless to say, I have a lot of ground to cover, and I'll likely be working on this comic for a very long time.

I'm actually more or less still in the very early portions of Chapter 2 from my original version of the series, the revision has done a much better job of expanding the world and story. Very proud of my work thus far.

If you want a series to blame for triggering this story's inspiration, blame Asura's Wrath. People probably won't get the parallels for a while though

For my comic "In The Midst" it took me one week to come up with a basic layout of the plot. Then week 2 usually is when I make the concepts for the characters. I modify and adjust story details as I go along as long as it hasn't occurred yet, if it will ultimately benefit my comic.

I actually started my comic with the plan make it single episode gags, like many others, but then people started to ask if there was going to be a story to go a long with the fantasy setting.

I don't know why, but I said there would be a story when there wasn't supposed to be, so then I put myself into a hole.

After that every moment of the day turned into a grind to plan out the entire story and make sure the weekly update didn't catch up with my ideas.

I think it took me 6 months to plan out 10 arcs that would span over 10 years, with some minor to major holes still needing to be filled in the later 4-10 arcs. I managed to finish the 1st arc a week ago, and the next 2 arcs are completely written out. Now I'm till working on the remaining 7, but they are still in development. So the story is still in development after 1 year, but everything is almost completely planned out and is just waiting to be drawn.

Had a basic idea and let it sit for a couple of months and when I decided to start it up as a test project all the background details and things came to me. Should have tried to make a buffer though first

I had the idea for the main plot back in 09 while in high school. The only problem I had was starting the comic off, even the finial version of my comic I still kinda don't like the way it started off.

I've redrawn the comic about 5 times (all with 50+ pages until I was unsatisfied with it) and have rewritten it 7 times and it's still changing. The way my comic is going now I love it an I'm excited to see it evolve over time. I may even post some before and after images of all the redrawn characters

For my newest comic Host I think from the initial brain storm + concept art to working on the first page was about 5 - 6 months of planning. I took a full year of making pages before posting anything and in that time I fine tuned the story. Brain storming and planning is my favorite part of the process but the hardest part was which direction to go in emotionally and trying to fit everything in and still flow well. My previous comics are shorter and took less time planning, maybe 2 - 3 months?