My motivation is a bit personal. There was a time when I took a 2 year hiatus from basically drawing in general because I was addicted to playing an MMO. I made some friends which was great, but after starting up again I felt great shame that I didn't draw for such a long time. Not wanting to experience that shame is my motivation to continue with my comics and my art.

I felt shame because I let down the few readers that I did have and also because that is two years I could have been using to improve my art. When I started drawing back in middle school, I felt then that I had started really late. Everyone else I knew said they started drawing from when they could hold a pencil and now I was two years behind the curve again.

Now I have been drawing again for a few years and feel great about it. Even though my new comic doesn't have an amazing first chapter since it is a slow moving story at first, I don't want to go back and remake it since time is limited.

Time being limited is the number one reason why I would never reboot my comic. Though I do want to go back and redo some panels.

I'm feeling this real hard right now too, so I'll be watching this thread. Good luck to both of us.

My current comic is actually a reboot of a comic I did in 2010-11 and I STILL have the urge to reboot the start from time to time.

I do feel weighted down by some writing decisions, when I started the comic I introduced a lot of things that didn't really build up to anything and just kinda got dropped or forgotten like plotpoints and even characters I thought would be relevant to the story but weren't, I should have started with a lot more research in certain aspects of the comic but the main thing is the beginning chapters are really boring, I told a lot of the story instead of showing it. The story has evolved so much compared to my original plan and I wish I could foreshadow things better, I still get much better ideas for the the start of the comic that I wish I did back then.

Having said all that I still feel like I wouldn't reboot the series at all, mainly bc I've been working on it since 2015 and I feel like it's more difficult to go back and fix things rather than just keep going. It's difficult because the section I want to reboot is probably somewhere at the start eps 1-15 but I feel pretty ok with the episodes after that and I like my art's natural development sooo I don't know how to reboot it even if I wanted to bc my art is so different now, do I match my 2015 art so that the flow is good? if I do it with my current style then it won't match the episode after it and it'll be weird. This turns into such a headache.

But the main reason I won't reboot is that I realised a lot of my readers are happy with the comic, they like the slow start and how it builds up to more drama later they think it's really fitting for the type of story it is and if I reboot it and add more stuff to the start it might really damage the overall tone of the story in a way. It was really reassuring to read comments that express how they binged the comic and like the slow pacing.

While I probably will never completely redraw/reboot I'm not opposed to making minor edits to things like changing colour contrast on pages, very minor shading and art edits and changing the text bubble font (bc when I started it was my handwritting) but only when I'm completely done with the series. The problems I faced are kinda specific to my series but I hope it helped you in a way.

If the urge to reboot was only to fix the art, I would say to keep going forward, but from the sounds of it, you're more concerned with the story and the plot.

This is a tricky situation to be in, my friend.

On one hand, you can't really continue forward until the beginning matches where you want your story to go. On the other hand, rebooting means starting from scratch and potentially losing a huge portion of your readers in the process.

There are a lot of things in the early part of my comic I want to change, though it's mostly dialogue related. My comic get's pretty complex the further in it goes, and the beginning has a huge role in this. So if I mess it up, I'm in for some serious missing plot points later down the line.

As of right now, I'm making small adjustments to the later chapters based on what I've already written. To me, I view the stuff I've already published as set in stone, and unchangeable because my readers have already read it and this is what they now know as being fact. Going back and changing large chunks of the plot can be disorienting to your readers - after a time, they probably won't be certain as to what they should believe anymore.

In the end, this is YOUR comic. If you're unhappy with it, then there isn't much point continuing on until you are. You might lose some readers while rebooting, but you could potentially gain a larger following by adjusting your beginning to a standard you deem more acceptable.

pushing through it is the best situation unless you want to introduce new plot-points that way just reboot earliest chapters that may cause plot-holes but meh, you have to take what you can get, if your worrying about losing potential readers because of the art or bad dialogue, that's what social networking it useful for. showing off non series related art work, and business stuff.

Re-working an old piece is generally easier than creating an entirely new one; I've felt that one.

Personally, I have a problem with starting something altogether. I can have a story down in my head, but as the perfectionist I am, I feel the need to continually work and "improve" that piece before bringing it to the physical. Of course, all things can be improved; reflection and revision is invaluable. However, if I follow my mentality blindly, I will ultimately never bring it to the real. (Because I'd be dead before I deem that piece worthy.)

So I keep on going with my current series. The first couple of pages could use a face-lift, and probably a story rework. But it's far more important that I finish what I started in the first place, and I value the real, tangible audience I have right now far more than any hypothetical readers I could gain from a reboot.

I started Maxiboy in 2014, when I was writing a lot of cool (to me, of course) projects. As all those projects went nowhere and life started spiraling down, my will to create basically anything died. Maxiboy was the final nail in the coffin at the time because it was the only project that was being drawn at all and then my friend gave up after drawing 11 strips. I had written 19 at the time and I just let go.
Come 2017 my friend decides that he now wants to do it for real so we're back in business, baby. I hadn't written anything for real for like 6 months at that point so we come back slowly and here we are.

So yeah, when I finally started posting the strip, November 2017, I was posting the stuff I wrote 3 years before. It was painful to letter it. It was painful to read.

But, the way I see it, so is the nature of series. You grow up, you find your landing. Most series to me have weird stuff at the beginning. Remember Marie's kleptomania in Breaking Bad? Boy, that plot point sure went nowhere! TV Tropes has the Early Instalment Weirdness page with dozens of examples.

Yeah, it's different because it's a TV show. They can't simply rerecord the pilot five seasons in. But still, series are about evolution. Evolution of the artist, evolution of the concept. That's how I tend to see it.
This and I always think that the person that wrote that weirdly structured stories was a different person than I am today. Unless it's crazy terrible, I tend to not tweak it too much. Of course, there has to be a standard, but still...

Also, There Was a War is, I bet, faaaar from the last story you're going to create. And yeah, it's good to go back and make the story the better you can (though when you finish redoing it, I bet you might want to redo it again!), but you can also apply what you learn in the next big thing!

It may be the more arc oriented and zaniness of the superhero genre, but I also tend to see weird early mistakes as an opportunity to create. For example: in my second story arc, Maxiboy has to collect a chain of bombs before they blow up a bunch of schools. The problem: this is going on in a reeeally small town that should have two schools tops, maybe only one! To make matters worse, my partner drew FOUR SCHOOLS IN THE SAME CITY BLOCK! What the heck??
So now my small town has a really weird backstory involving rival principals creating a small town centered on unnecessarily large schools for kids of the region.
Embrace chaos!!

TL;DR: I deal with it by letting it be. Also, get weird with your mistakes!!

''My man, you might want to start taking the idea of writing comics seriously a tad earlier and like, I don't know, fucking start writing... now!''

You CAN'T make a bad beginning work.

But you can solf-reboot your comic.

In manga, the author usually uses the time-jump method to solf-reboot their series (Dragon Ball, Fairy Tail, 7 deadly sins,...). Or you can change the narative to other character, Or just reset the timeline, Or don't care about the continuum at all (20th Century Fox). The story will going on, but everything is newer and you can do more than just trying to fix eveything.

Honest to yourself, If it's bad then it is what it is, a bad creation.
Don't try too hard to fix something over and over. If you done did it, then you start a new.
If you couldn't honest to yourself, you wouldn't be able to see all the flaw in your works.
The next thing you do with always be better than the old.
So don't try too hard on yourself, it's better this way.

Play videogames, read book/comic, watch anime/movie/Tv show.
You can be both entertain and learn by doing so.

If you feel your comic need to be rebooted, then you should re-evaluate your project and honest to yourself.
Is it what you wanted to read?
Is it that good? How bad is it?
Why the hell can this project so messy? ect.

If the problem isn't that big and can be forgivable.
Any story can have plot holes and problems and still enjoyable.
Or you're just anxious and not believe in yourself.
Remember, your comic only need to be good enough, not god-like creation.

Yes, because I can use my newer knowledges and better skills to do a new thing, rather than keep fixing something that old and unprofessional.

Don't be too attached to your creation.
If you just want to have fun, then you can do whatever you want. No one care.
But if you want to be a professional, then you shouldn't lie to yourself.
You need to create something that people love to read and you can handle it, this isn't an easy task.
You will go nowhere if you keep lying to yourself.

Alright so my comic now was based on a horrible fanfic I made at 16 (I'm 19 now) and is basically just a reboot. it's been pretty hard not gonna lie. I mostly just scrap the parts I feel are cringeworthy and do feel weighed down by the original fanfic as hundreds of people saw it and will probably recognize me one day so hurray for that! I overcame it by remembering that all humans make mistakes and what keeps me motivated is the fact that i like my story. If I could give my younger self some advice is: Don't publish writing straight from your phone.

ok im twice the age and a little above the age you want replies from, but i want to address this topic.

my comic contains issues that are putting people off in the first ten chapters, I know these bits of the story are not popular but that's how it was written when i had the story on another website. to over come this problem I am not writing the same sort of content in to the story after the current chapter and hope people will pick it up and enjoy from chapter 11. I just find it odd that people always focus on one thing they don't like about something, especially when they can find other things in the same read to enjoy. my own feelings is if we allow people to shape our story for us we let go of such things as free speech and artistic freedom.

I also would like to add and I know it may not be as relevant to this topic specifically but I also know how it feels like to push through while feeling like the writing in the start of the comic is bad, I felt it back in my old comic in 2010-11 and... it's really bad, it made me feel like I couldn't write anything and I got really burned out from creating the comic, I didn't make comics for 4 years after it until the reboot in 2015. I know a lot of people keep saying to avoid rebooting entirely but there are other solutions like, rebooting only the chapters at the start that need to be edited to match the rest of the story. The creator of the comic Jamie is doing that by taking a hiatus while working on the comic then replacing the old pages with the new pages.