Right away or short comic first?

kavaj 2021-02-02 00:16:48 UTC #1

Based on your experience, did you work right away on your main comic or you completed short comic first? Like for example, for practice reason etc. Btw i can’t give like anymore since my quota for today all used up But i really appreciate your answer!!

Working on main comic right away.
Completed short comics/other short projects to build experience first.
Others.

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TedGravesArt 2021-02-02 00:20:34 UTC #2

I started making a different comic with a friend a long time ago, and that project fell apart. Years later I realized how much I missed working on a continuous story like that, and started work on Heaven Hunters. Some might call that having a short project to build experience first, but both were intended as a main project.
I will say that doing the failed comic first gave me a very good idea of what to expect from doing comics, and prepared me for the amount of work that comics require, which is the point of doing short comics first I think.

kavaj 2021-02-02 00:25:34 UTC #3

I agree i think i need to experience the workload of doing short comic first before committing to the long haul. Hearing other people’s reasons may give me some lights. Thanks!!

migxmeg 2021-02-02 00:29:55 UTC #4

Still working on our "short comic" after about 6 months (probably with another 6 months to go) and am I glad we decided to try that first! What a learning experience!

I'll add that I'm very grateful that this took way longer than expected and isn't close to over. We jumped in without a full story, buffer or really any clue about how making a comic was going to work. The plan was to complete a short story in about 4-6 months.

I still feel like a total beginner in so many ways but I think by the time we start our next project we will be able to make a much stronger start to our story (and more sophisticated artwork), which would help hook and hopefully entertain readers! We can also be much more strategic about putting some assets together to help me make panels and draw characters faster. Also I think the "finished a project" achievement will probably be a great thing to have.

surin 2021-02-02 00:32:54 UTC #5

Personally I am currently working on my first webcomic and it is my main long comic. My mindset is that obviously I am going make a lot of mistakes as it is after all my first webcomic, but in the end if I do regret it (working on it right away because I don't have enough experience) I can just reboot/restart it instead of working on a short comic which is hard for me because ideas don't come that easily to me and when they do they never stay short T.T
And I am probably going to enjoy making my main story which i have been excited about for forever so it is all that matters for me currently

vothnthorvaldson 2021-02-02 00:38:46 UTC #6

I went for the super long comic first, knowing very well it is not the greatest idea.
More than 2 years later, I still think it was not a great idea, but I'm not sure I would be still drawing comics if I had gone for a more reasonnable project, but with less passion for it.
So I think if I could go back in time I'd do the same again.

So I'd say that if there is a smaller project one really wish to work on one day, sure, it's better to start with this one rather than the large one; but if there is not enthusiasm about a small project.. I'd go for the big one with enthusiasm.
At least as an amateur. If the idea is to make the large project super professional that's another thing. There would probably be a redrawing necessary, and redrawing hundreds of pages is not the most gratifying process in my opinion.

IndigoShirtProd 2021-02-02 00:44:42 UTC #7

My current comic started off as a smaller, side project. And in comparison to the main one I was working on before, it still is. However, this current project has ballooned out in size and scope. I still think of it as small, but it's pretty big.

TedGravesArt 2021-02-02 00:44:46 UTC #8

vothnthorvaldson:

I went for the super long comic first, knowing very well it is not the greatest idea. More than 2 years later, I still think it was not a great idea, but I'm not sure I would be still drawing comics if I had gone for a more reasonnable project, but with less passion for it. So I think if I could go back in time I'd do the same again.

So I'd say that if there is a smaller project one really wish to work on one day, sure, it's better to start with this one rather than the large one; but if there is not enthusiasm about a small project.. I'd go for the big one with enthusiasm.At least as an amateur. If the idea is to make the large project super professional that's another thing. There would probably be a redrawing necessary, and redrawing hundreds of pages is not the most gratifying process in my opinion.

100%! Yeah, the conventional wisdom is to start with a short one to get the experience under your belt, but keep in mind that nothing will burn you out quicker than working on something you don't actually want to work on, when a shiny attractive story is waiting right behind it. Make sure you care about both stories, or making the short one will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

GloamingCat 2021-02-02 00:46:55 UTC #9

Everybody recommends me to start with a smaller project, to practice first and blabla. But no matter how many other ideas I tried to think of, none of them felt as right as my magnum opus did.

My heart kept telling me: "start with your magnum opus".

I started with my magnum opus.

Rhonder 2021-02-02 00:48:22 UTC #10

I gave the "others" response, because both approaches are equally valid. I think the better approach then deciding just on "long vs. short" is to assess your goals for the project, weigh them against the pros and cons of long/short projects, and decide accordingly.

The first step is goal analysis, or "What are you trying to achieve by making this comic?" Any answers are valid, pretty much, but some are easier or more efficient to approach with longer or shorter projects. Some common goals you see a lot are:

I want to tell this story I've been working on for a long time!
I want to get better at drawing/writing and think comics are a fun way to do it!
I want to build an audience on Tapas/Webtoons/Other/Social Media!
I want to eventually make a living off of my comics!

There are surely others, though!

Next, look at some of the pros and cons of long vs. short comics.

Long comics pros include:

if you've been working on writing/thinking about it for a long time, you're probably really passionate about it!
longer stories have more room to play around with more detailed/intricate world building/characters/events
You can easily form a brand around that particular story because it'll be a focal point of your artistic work for a long time

Cons include:

Depending on your skill level when starting out, you may find yourself improving quickly after starting. It's not uncommon to have a little bit of remorse about your earlier pages, either having less skilled art or writing or composition compared to your new episodes.
Time to completion is long for long comics (obvi lol). It's more common for long projects to be abandoned before being finished relative to short comics. Complete projects look better on a creative "resume" than abandoned ones, typically.
Similar to the above, if you go all in on one idea and it doesn't take off in popularity, it becomes increasingly less likely that it will explode as time goes on. If you have consistent growth that's a good sign, it means that people are starting the story, getting interested, and continuing to follow and read along. If you run into long patches of plateaued growth, folks may not being gettting hooked early on and continuing to add onto the back won't necessarily help that.

On the flip side, short comics have the following pros:

easier to complete due to time economy. completed works look good on a creator's creative "resume", typically.
Low-stakes way to test things out and experiment. If you try out a new writing or art style and it doesn't catch on, no worries! You can start something else after this one finishes. If something does catch on, awesome! Keep doing that. You don't have 10 years of work riding on how successfully the early bits of the story hook people.
Quick and easy way to gain experience. You'll get better at art, writing, and composing comics (which is a separate skill set, in many ways) and those skills will continue to make each new project a little better than the last.

& short comic cons:

depending on your size limit, you may find yourself overly constrained by a short project and not able to explore ideas you want to.
Some people find short story writing more difficult an unappealing.

Now, my subjective personal opinion and suggestion is that 'short comics first' is the way to go. They have very little opportunity cost and I feel like the gains that you get from just making comics and practicing on low-stakes projects are incredibly valuable before committing years to a longer project. Especially if someone's aim is to grow an audience or especially try to make a living off of comics, figuring out what's marketable and how best to market it is also important imo.

But I'm not here to tell anyone how to live their life and fully empathize with people who are really passionate about a specific project and want to dive right in I was like that for over a decade myself. It was only after seeing that main project of mine fail to get off the ground a dozen times that I reevaluated my goals and changed my approach lol

kavaj 2021-02-02 00:49:08 UTC #11

Hahaha i thought i’d make spin off slice of life comic strip with characters from my main comic, so i get used drawing them a lot first, also composition etc. That’s my consideration xD. But the point about enthusiasm is very valid!!

DiegoPalacios 2021-02-02 00:50:05 UTC #12

It all depends to the enthusiasm...... if a project doesn't excite you, it will be harder to work on it and give your best.

Sometimes one has a strong passion for more than one project, in these cases, is a great idea starting with the shorter one.....

allenT 2021-02-02 00:54:32 UTC #13

I didn't do it right away, nor i did any short series either. I only made an extra chapter to test my comic format before i took the plunge on my series, which was on idea & preparation stages for years already.

TedGravesArt 2021-02-02 00:55:07 UTC #14

That's a great middle ground.

jamontoast98 2021-02-02 00:57:57 UTC #15

I still think it's best to write a short comic and get some experience first, even if that's not the path I (and I imagine many others) chose. I just didn't want to draw anything else!

Inspector_Spinda 2021-02-02 03:39:25 UTC #16

I would saw work on whatever story you are most passionate for. I don't have enough ideas to think of a short comic to work on, but I am super excited about my current long project. I have friends who have tons of ideas so for them its more about not having the confidence for long projects.

Kaydreamer 2021-02-02 03:51:12 UTC #17

While the comic I'm working on now is intended to be a 5-ish year project, and it can stand on its own, it is technically a side-story. I've never made a comic before, and I wanted to get some experience through making this one before starting on the main story of my Dragonfeathers Project.

That said, Blue Star Rebellion is part of the Dragonfeathers Project and as such, I'm enormously passionate about it! That's the key - you have to be passionate about whatever story you're telling, so you don't get bored and stop making it. Blue Star will end with a hook into Dragonfeathers, so I can't just bomb out of this - I need to finish it and reach that hook, so I can draw my readers across to Dragonfeathers in future years!

borzoiteeth 2021-02-02 04:25:32 UTC #18

If someone only has one story to tell then I think that person should just jump in and tell it no matter how long the project is. If you only have passion for one story, it really is a waste of time to try to tell another story you have no energy for, regardless of the experience that could be gained doing it.

However, if you are a perfectionist and fear starting your comic on the wrong foot- I recommend doing a "pilot" episode, a trailer comic of your main comic if you will. If you have never completed a story in any form before I can't express the power of having personal experience in actually ending a project. It doesn't have to be your plot gone triple fast forward, it can be a series of montages! Doing this can help you avoid some of the cons that Rhonder has wonderfully detailed out.

On the other side, if you are like me and have a lot of story ideas and have very low self confidence there is a power move in doing many smaller projects. My main comic, Anamnesis, is an anthology of stories being told in 20 pages or less. They all center around particular themes I cannot let go of so I tackle it in many different directions. It will be 2 years old this year and right now I have 10 stories finished for it!

Doing these tinier projects put me in a headspace with less pressure. It helped audience members find me early before I get to my more serious larger projects and let's them know my taste in stories. It's helped me learn how to self edit and get rid of things that, as fun as extra details are, should be at best thrown as bonus side material and not be disrupting the flow of the main story.

It's given me and the audience confidence that when I start a new comic, that it will actually be finished instead of being abandoned. Not to shame those who need to abandon- I've did that a lot years ago too! But now when I call for a hiatus people see it as a break and not another term for burnout.

Llyrel 2021-02-02 07:21:45 UTC #19

Main comic right away.
Making comics is incredibly time consuming, and life is too short to spend my life on projects I don't care about.

Edit: (sorry, I can't get the spoiler to work for some reason ) Should go without saying, but this is true for me, of course. I had ONE story I really wanted to tell, which I'd already partially written, and a whole bunch of shorter story ideas I either didn't care enough about or that were nowhere near as developed yet and would have required even more work + additional skills I don't even have. Scrapping my "big" project to work on stuff that had to be done from scratch and/or that I didn't care enough about just because it was "shorter" would have taken me a lot more time/energy than just jumping right into the thing I really wanted to make. Am I going to make mistakes? Of course I am! But at least I'm going to learn while doing something I truly enjoy As I said many other times here on the forum, the only thing I managed to achieve by "waiting for the day my skills would be good enough to make the perfect comic" was wasting five years of my life while not actually improving on anything. Obviously things are different for everyone, but jumping straight into the one thing I really wanted to do was what did the trick for me.

Not to mention that, as the time passes, certain stories/genres tend to become a little... well... outdated: think about science fiction, for example. A lot of the "classic" works nowadays still stand because of their message, but stuff like technology is completely outdated and makes no sense at all. Flying cars for everyone in 2020? Hahaha... no :'D
Granted, you could always rewrite the pieces of your comic that don't feel up to date anymore, but that's A LOT of work that could have easily been avoided if you started it when you wanted to. It's easier to forgive a sci-fi story in which the technology gets older with time, but to start a story with outdated technology right away? ...Eh.

Alsooooo: nothing grants you that once you're finally done working on the whole thing, somebody won't have come out with a similar idea that got much more popular than yours, so that now it looks like -you- copied the popular work. Being in the right place at the right time is extremely important to success.

...Which brings me to the reason why I jumped into this topic. Truth to be told, I don't really agree with the whole notion that "if your comic doesn't get a steady growth, you better leave it aside and focus on something else". I see this A LOT on these forums and... honestly, I think it's not a very constructive way to look at it. Many, many, MANY famous artists whose works we still love nowadays went through A LOT of failures. Disney, Tim Burton, Van Gogh... heck, Paul Cézanne didn't sell a single painting until he was 60 years old and he didn't become "famous" until after he was dead. The reason why they became famous was not "giving up after the first failure"... but continuing despite their failures. The Internet nowadays makes it so easy to measure your success with numbers, but thing is... those numbers are really not as objective as one may think.

Take my own comic, for example. When I started to post it (in a slightly different format), I had over 5000 followers on my Tumblr blog. The first chapter got 85 likes (around 45-50 just on the first day), and although the following episodes didn't get as many likes, I still had quite a bunch of people following my story, commenting on it, heck... someone even drew fanarts and once I stumbled upon a blog post that praised the story. Now, compare to Tapas. The comic has 46 followers, one of which is yours truly. When you put the likes of every single page together, the first chapter has less than 50 likes. I didn't get a single new follower for the past month, despite the fact that my comic is always in the "popular" category on Tapas. If I were to base my success on my Tapas stats and act accordingly, I would have already given up. Clearly the comic isn't "flying", so it must mean that I'm doing something "wrong", right? ...And yet there was the Webtoon version, which got over 40 followers during the Canvas Marathon week. Same story, same artwork. Is the story "better" on Webtoons? Heck no, it simply got more visibility on there, which helped me raise my number of followers.

In short: I know that if I could get people to like my comic in its old format, I can still get people to like it now. And I know that, if given more visibility, my story has the potential to grow a lot more than it's currently doing. So no, I'm not giving up on my "big" project just because of a bunch of numbers on a single online platform that gives me very little visibility to begin with.

I see plenty of great artists here on Tapas with amazing drawing and storytelling skills with less than 50 followers. Some are just not very good at promoting themselves, some others try everything they can, but write a genre that is simply not popular on this platform... honestly, there's A LOT of reasons why something may not fly right away, but this doesn't necessarily mean that your project is "bad", that there's "something wrong" with it or that you should "give up to make something that will be more popular". Granted, if you're looking to make a living out of your comic, that may be the way for you. But for everyone else... I'd say just do whatever you want and stop chasing numbers. Focus on finding marketing strategies, promoting yourself and for the love of God, don't focus on a single platform. Being talented or writing a story that fits into a "popular" category isn't enough to make you successful: marketing, being in the right place at the right time, hard work, not giving up and a little bit of luck are important too.

Puck 2021-02-02 09:58:16 UTC #20

I´m still only working on short comics and I´m training to draw.
I will not start with a longer story until I have a good visual memory for poses
and before I can draw them in a good style and before I can finish one comic
page pencil and inks in one day in a good quality.
Everyone has a different opinion about that but that´s my personal
quality goal, I see a difference when I read comics and someone has a fluent
style compared to someone with a not consistent style. I want my comics
to be fluent