My comic started as a bad fanfiction. What about yours? Share your experience, comics and novels

oliveoly 2021-03-09 06:08:10 UTC #21

My story started as a bunch of different dreams I had. I tend to dream almost in movies, where I am not involved but can watch all that is going on, and rewind if I do not like it...
Anyway, I had two different dreams about my OCs for some show...
One in which Mikhail was an Angel, and going to the yearly prom of peace between heaven and hell in order to find himself a date
The other in which Stefan and Mikhail were roommates and Stefan was a superhero who pretended he was just really into cosplay as a way to hidehis secret identity from the other.
In the end I wrote a story about Mikhail being an Angel whose roommate on Earth is Stefan and tries to blend in in the human world even though Demons keep trying to kidnap him. ^_^

Also, I wanted to challenge myself into writing a love story because I generally hate those, so I decided that they would end up together

Larua1997 2021-03-13 03:23:53 UTC #22

Mine started off as one of those middle school "I made a comic and put all my friends in it" and now we have powers like Sailor Moon. Back then, in my circle of artist friends, it was kind of an unspoken rule that all of the comics we made would include character versions of ourselves and people we knew.

Many (many lol) years later I worked to develop into something that makes sense and be its own story and own characters. Despite it's crappiness and cringe, my friends really loved the comic and have been asking me to finish it for decades (as I left them hanging back in the 90's).

antonioIII 2021-03-13 03:45:31 UTC #23

Oh, interesting...
In my case, Back to 2019, i was in a certain Artist server. Around the end of the year, the Adm decided to start some Role Play. Then i created my Character.
The RP didn't really end well because of me and the character(I noticed i created stuff that 'd be troublesome to the others members' characters), but since i had already created so much about him, i thought "Huh... i think i can put him into one of my universes... This one!"
I was already wanting to start a webcomic, and used him as a prototype.
Then, i created my Doctor A in Webtoons, but moved him to Tapas.

ninjashira 2021-03-13 05:11:59 UTC #24

My comic Hollow kind of started out in its initial concept as speculative fanfiction too. The instigating thought was, "What would Card Captor Sakura be like in her twenties and the magic is gone? How would spending her formative tween years doing magic and risking her life affect her as an adult?" And then it snowballed from there.

I like a good LGBT romance, so I made the main character male so he can crush on his "Shaoran" equivalent, and I made his tween magic years reminiscent of classic magical girl anime, with similar tropes and events, but with lingering and cumulative consequences that ultimately left him depressed and broken, with PTSD and panic attacks.

Then the story turned into a whole statement on nostalgia, leaving your childhood behind (or not?), moving past trauma, and glamorizing the past. As it is now, I think it's fair to say that Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura were definitely instigating influences to the story, but Hollow has become its own entity that stands on its own. In my opinion, anyway!

Sairren 2021-03-13 06:05:46 UTC #25

My novel started as a chaotic mess of memes and jokes in a YouTube video series. It was made to emulate the old RPG video game styles of Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem. All the while following the logic, inside jokes, and RNG of a D&D campaign. It even got to the point where it was fully voice-acted near perfectly, and voice actors behind two of the main characters enjoyed the ridiculousness of it.

However, things started getting a bit too chaotic and I decided to rewrite the entire story from the beginning. A few months later and now I have this novel getting a new, full chapter every week. The characters are still the same as when they were originally created, and there's gonna be comedy sprinkled in. But it's not gonna be nearly as chaotic and messy as it was originally.

cyborgmermaid 2021-03-13 06:16:02 UTC #26

My novel started off as escapist daydreams and developed through the years. I originally made some of the main characters up in middle school and I think the only thing that hasn't changed from their conception is their hair color.

hjpetersonauthor 2021-03-13 08:09:51 UTC #27

My comic has pretty much been the same throughout the time I've written it (superhero comic partially inspired by the movie "Overlord" and a podcast episode I listened to about Unit 731), but my novel, "Godswater", has gone through a lot of changes. Most of the character names have stayed the same, as have the way most of them act, but the magic system in particular has gone through several overhauls. I've rewritten it several times, too, and every time I do, the period in history it's based in goes forward, too. In the first draft, it was a straight up sword-and-sorcery book. Next, it was based on the renaissance/age of enlightenment. Then, it was a little more American Revolution-y. Now, it's based in more like 1880. Next draft will probs have tanks at this rate lol.

sc101 2021-03-13 08:24:30 UTC #28

Mine began as a dark joke about suicide. Then boom plot

telari 2021-03-13 13:20:03 UTC #29

Like a lot of things I write or draw, I get ideas from my dreams, which tend to go hog-wild because of my medication for bipolar. I keep a notebook just to write those down. Like some sort of perpetuum mobile, I often get nightmares with elements of nuclear danger, radiation sickness and stuff of this kind, which in turn makes me obsessed with researching them, and that again fuels what I dream about, and so on lol. Also, I'm a huge huge nerd on all things prehistory, palaeontology, astronomy and astrophysics, so a lot of big parts of my worldbuilding is supported by the more unusual theories that I find cool.

surenlicious 2021-03-13 15:36:39 UTC #30

Eh. I started writing my novel Jade Kingdoms out of spite. I was so done with my family's BS and their refusing to admit we've all suffered so much over the generations, I started writing my own story about healing. The plot came to me very easily, like it was all coming together and together with my art I am making the story unfold slowly. I began writing it on August 1st 2017, and now we're here today.

thecrystalrook 2021-03-13 15:49:32 UTC #31

Mine started off maaanny years ago back in 2002. Tenchi Muyo just started airing on Toonami and I really liked their take on space pirates, so I made my own RPG Maker game inspired by it. But being that I was 13, it made NO sense. A couple years ago, I revived it as a manga and fixed all the junk that didn't work together

djourner 2021-03-13 16:01:11 UTC #32

My story started off a D&d story, complete with content and lore pulled straight from d&d, but with my own twist to it.

A lot of the characters from that time still exist, they were just remade into versions i consider more interesting now, in a world that is completely my own. ^^
It's wild to remember THAT is how it all started... And to try and pair the current versions of the characters with their old edgy selves xD

Stargazer31 2021-03-13 19:00:37 UTC #33

Mine started off as a love story between MC and Loki, who was basically marvel Loki at this point, and how they went on the run from Odin. Then I thought "That's cliche. Let's do something different." I rewrote it several times, until I was happy with what I had. Now, MC is a lesbian, Odin is the neutral drunk guy, and Loki is back to his mythological roots.

CursedBeasts 2021-03-21 21:19:08 UTC #34

I have to kindly disagree with you calling your old fanfiction stupid. You had fun creating it, and it gave rise to your original world eventually, so I don't think it's stupid at all.

I mean, both my comics are still technically fanfiction, one for Star Wars: the Old Republic, and the other for Jack Kirby's New Gods. Who knows, maybe one day I'll create an original piece too.

I just wanted to tell a story, partly out of spite at a segment of the fandom, and because I felt like my favorite characters in the game were dealt a short end of the stick. So that's kinda how Bestia's Wrath came to be. A culmination of, at the time of its inception (February or March of 2018), 5 years of developing my own takes on the characters.

As for my New Gods comic, I just had an idea for an origin story for my character, and that's kinda it.

bulletcrucifixion 2021-03-21 21:32:52 UTC #35

Hi here is my work :
https://tapas.io/series/Mermaids-ffxiv One day I was picturing my ffxiv oc as a mermaid, didn't know it would lead to a story
https://tapas.io/series/Sniflheim-civil-war : 2 lines in game they never mentioned it again, I decided to go further
https://tapas.io/series/The-Strange-Visitor/ : AU I decided to explore and wanted to tackle time travel

Darth_Biomech 2021-03-22 01:53:43 UTC #36

My comic started as a horrific unholy warped image of Star Wars with a premise of "what if you're a human cyborg bent on revenge that accidentally got stuck a million years in the past where there's no humans and only aliens? Also what if it's an shooter-rpg like Mass Effect, but before Mass Effect was actually announced?" It was horrible in every way, down to the "I like that image I found on the internet, I'll include stuff from it in my game now" behavior. Thankfully, it basically strangled itself long before turning into anything concrete, even if it took ~10 years.
What it turned into, 14 years later? You can check it here:

Basically, nothing in common with the initial idea, it even has humans now (back then I thought that "no boring hairless apes" is a cool revolutionary groundbreaking concept).

adderfly 2021-03-22 03:08:07 UTC #37

Love the Synastry backstory!

adderfly 2021-03-22 03:10:46 UTC #38

I was planning another comic but couldn't get myself to start publishing it because I felt like I had so much growing I needed to do as an artist before releasing that project. I thought it would be fun to do a quick little self-contained minicomic on another topic to practice before my big project. I didn't have any ideas right away, but I'd been doodling a teenage girl with really long red hair, and came up with a backstory about why she stopped cutting her hair years ago when she was a child. And then my "little practice project" got really out of hand, and turned into a very big passion project that will be 2-3 books long upon completion. So... yeah. Here I am today, once again way more invested in a project than I meant to be.

Lunar-Turtle 2021-03-22 09:07:44 UTC #39

Very messy backstroy, lol

iHateFridays 2021-03-22 10:37:53 UTC #40

I started my comic since I wanted to have a go at making a story that wasn't fanfiction. XD That ended up being a lot harder than I thought tho... however I'm glad I did, since now I want to make more original content. I still write fanfic tho lololol