Regret a plot point?

[sarrowsmith10]

For those who have long form comics, have you ever wrote a plot point early in the story and then regretted it later? How did you deal with that?

[cherrystark]

My series is a novel but yeah, I have. My series involves several different settings. It's great for character development but lousy for exploring the original location of my series. I haven't come up with a solution on how to fix it but I'm working to weave more of the storylines back into my original location.

[PaulDevers]

Not yet, I don't think! Only 3-ish chapters in so far, and I don't think I've gotten anything down I'm gonna end of loathing. I regret my first chapter's pacing a lot, but I don't regret what's in it.
OH wait, one thing actually. I established that one of my main character's got a notebook she jots notes and journal entries in, but have not shown her using it at all since then. Should probably fix that, but that's just a minor thing.

[DasIstWunderblyat]

Probably I have redeemed some of minor choices when I remade my series.

But I overall regret everything about it.

[Tanako]

man it's funny you said this because I just deleted 6 pages which equates to 18 scenes. a couple days of work and it SUCKS. what saved me is that those pages were still in sketch form and not posted so I was safe. but if it was already published like my older comic, I would have just had to deal with it. let it be. after all, it made sense to me when I first created it so I'll make the best of it.

[jmassat]

Fear of regret is why I try so hard not to post things until I've finished them. But it...doesn't always happen...

Right now I'm working on a comic where some things are repeating themselves. Chapters end with sudden bad endings, and the mysterious character does something mysterious. I'm not regretting the plot points so much as the tempo -- is it too repetitive? I think I'll only know the answer years from now.

Sometimes when you regret something in your story's past, you just have to roll with it, or you have to get creative. Star Wars said that Luke's father was a great man in the first movie and then threw that out the window -- THEN they made up a plausible excuse for it. Very often in the course of long-running series, entire personalities drift and change, and plot points are changed in hindsight or forgotten. But the "big picture" of the work is what people remember most and latch onto.

[jjfresh]

YES. I'm still ad hocing the remaining chapters in mine. Sometimes I change it up right as I'm drawing a page.

In my current comic, there was something I did in the very first chapter that felt out of place. I also changed something big in the main character and since I was redrawing all my old pages, I changed things up and how they will turn out in later chapters.

I go off what feels right in the dialogue, the events that take place in the chapter and the drawings themselves. Going back, there's still stuff that may feel wonky to me. It's either me overthinking it or it's genuinely weird. But you can't redo everything, so I try to work with it the best I can in later chapters.

[rajillustration]

I just keep going. After it's made into comic format it's like "well that's how I wrote that" because it just takes so long to fix that I'd probably stop and then just...never finished what I wanted to do, which was write a comic. The way I see it is I'm made up of many comics in my lifetime, so if I'm not perfect yet, that's fine.

Plus, if you ever do end up with a publisher, you'll end up changing things anyway with an editor so it's moot anyway. I'd only change if I ended up doing something either illegible (which I have done) or just accidentally really offensive (which I haven't done.)

[nathanKmcwilliams]

I left a scene out for pacing reasons early on. I kind of regret it, but I'm making up for it now kind of.

[DualDragons]

Perhaps a few minor ones but I'm mostly happy for what it is now considering I started in 2018 and was a far less experienced writer

[AmysGames]

Not usually the plot points themselves, but I've definitely found myself regretting the way I wrote particular scenes.

Which reminds me, I actually redid one of my old short comics a while back (including some of the plot details), and never got around to posting it on Tapas. I couldn't decide if I should delete the old one, or just leave it and post the remaster as a new comic, or what, haha.

[EmmyPax]

So I hate drawing vehicles, so I had this idea early on that my character wouldn't own a car, so that I could avoid drawing cars.

But then it backfired, because she's on an island with no public transport, and suddenly, it grew into this whole thing, her trying to get around the island and whether or not she could find a ride/if the roads were safe for bicycling and it became this whole THING.

As a result, it turned into a running gag about how she gets between places and this has resulted in me drawing MORE trucks, cars, bikes and motorcycles than I ever would have if I just gave her a car and let that just be some unseen force in her life I never had to explain.

Moral of the story: never draw attention to the fact that your character doesn't own a car! This just causes more cars!

[Legendofgenii]

Sometimes I regret writing things that I now realise are so insanely difficult to draw.