Need some advice on my comic

[GrimRose]

Hi, so i need a bit of advice from some more experienced comic creators.

I just started my comic about a month ago. Its a series of short stories and poems.

Luckily most of the stories and poems are already written. A lot of these stories are about a year or two old and I never thought i would ever get around to drawing them.

1. I don't have too much experience in writing and I was wondering if there is anyone possibly willing to give a second opinion/feedback. I want to include my strongest poems/writing so i might not include every story in the comic.
   For anyone interested in some of the writing i can send you a link to some of the stories I'm considering including.

2. Should I make a new separate project for the longer short stories? I have about 3 short stories that are a lot longer than most of my poems. I've found when illustrating, most of the stories are several pages longer than expected.
   One short poem can be up to 10 pages long. So these longer short stories will probably be 50+ pages. Would it be better to consider these a separate complete project?

3. I'm considering printing this comic in the future. If these short stories are big enough to print I would probably want to print a physical copy if i could.
   What are some things I should consider ahead of time if this is the case? (I'm currently creating pages at super high resolution)
   Is it worth printing?
   How do you print your comics?

Sorry if that is quite a lot to ask. I'm just looking to improve my process as best i can. I'm still very new to all this.

[GrimRose]

Short Stories From The Poets Mouth | Tapas

shoot forgot to include the link.

[Iris-Grimoire]

Can't help much with the first two (second one is always up to you and how your analytics are going, really), but for the third, just remember that it's usually cheaper (and advised) to print in multiples of 4 pages. So if you go to Artists' Alleys and whatnot, it's worth it to have something from you alone to sell, but if your story doesn't reach that amount you might want to sneak in some sketches or extra information as filler.

[Rhonder]

1.) my writing isn't super strong either so may be better off asking someone else

2.) Either approach is valid, hard to say which is definitively better. Like, for example, if you're only going to be working on 1 story at a time regardless (i.e. not doing like 25 pages of the longer story, then another 10 page poem, then back to the longer story) having them all in 1 place wouldn't matter much. But if you wanted the series to have uniformity in length then having these much longer stories might break that flow and be better served in a different series. And even then, at 50ish pages you could make an argument for either making each one its own standalone series or making another collection of one-shots.

3.) Not too knowledgeable on this either, but I'll drop @faeriesandents as a pair that has some experience with printing (among others).

[GrimRose]

I was considering looking into getting a table at the artist alley next years comic convention. Its mostly the reason i was looking into printing.

Also thank you for the advice about the pages! Most of the short stories are different lengths but I might consider adding extra art or maybe even small one page comics to balance the page count.

Even if i don't end up going I do want a physical copy though

[GrimRose]

I'd say they are probably going to be min 50 pages. Its hard to estimate until i actually start laying out the pages. I usually create a page per line- 2 line of poem. There are almost 90 lines to the longest poem/story. So its definitely a considerable length.

Its still a short story but i don't want to bother people by making a bunch of series for people to keep track of is what im most worried about.

[nostalgicroxas]

I'm not a comic creator but off the top of my head, I'd say submit and keep it all together as one project. One of the projects we had in college was to write a 15 page autobiography or piece of our thoughts, like journal entries. I took the challenge by making each page it's own entry, and together they weaved together "me". Some of them were meaningful (the new addition of the devil dog to my household against my consent) and some were just thoughts (homesick missing the ocean, an entire page about it). But all together, they are "a complete thought", so seperating them would make them individually weak. That kind of sounds like how your creation is - would be better together. I also know of people who have done anthologies with the idea of "this is a book that contains these themes" or "this is a book of works from 2017-2018 with the art from 2019-2020". That's not a bad way to go about it.

[Rhonder]

Again, it's really up to you and how you want the series to be as a whole- there are no wrong answers xD Like if you want the series to have all equal-ish length stories, there are strategies for removing the longer ones. But you also would be good to go just keeping the longer ones in as well. More or less a "Follow your heart" type decision