Right away or short comic first?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.....

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.

That's a great middle ground.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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

I can only speak to what’s worked for me over the past few years and doing it on a full time basis (albiet with wildly varying degrees if financial comfiness).

I’m a big believer in small stuff first! There’s sooo much you learn about the drawing, writing, and the language of comics when you’ve started and finished several projects. You also get a ton of practice FINISHING things which, yes, does require practice a lot of the time.

I also really focused on the speed of my output so that now if I wanted to make my 1000-page epic it wouldn’t take me ten years but instead probably closer to two or three. But I also learned that a lot of my ideas starting out just... weren’t very interesting or good and if I wanted to do this full time with my magnum opus I don’t think it would’ve been possible for me if I started with it

The past decade also really taught me where i’m actually most comfortable in the process of creating comics and I don’t think I’d know myself as a creator as well if I had only done the one comic I remember thinking was my magnum opus when I was 18.

I have too many ideas and things I want to do and I’m going to die one day and not be able to get all of it out before that happens so I am just completely focused on working in a way that will allow me to efficiently get as much of it out of my brain and onto the paper as possible.

Think for me I was burdened by long form ideas at first.

So, though I can only speak on my point of view, I do find it much easier to draw and write for something that isn’t nearly as long and at least has a definite beginning middle and end. Very motivating to want to finish walking out a tunnel that can at least see the light at the end of.

For long running comics many web comic creators drop out early on because of other things come up whatever that is, losing motivation, tired of the idea etc; while this may not be the case for you it’s still a possibility many new creators face. So if this is your first comic I kind of do recommend just going the short comic route so you don’t commit to anything long term that you may not even want to do in even a year from now.

The short comic can even take place in the world of your long running idea, many possibilities to still have fun with it without burdening yourself at the start

I only make short comics, and I love how I can determine my own pacing and am highlighting bits and pieces from my novel and get that baby the readers it deserves. XD I USED to want to have my own big comic though but...my art style back then was...eh.

I created my long story first, then thought "I know how to draw! I should make this a webcomic!" Then, six months and hundreds of panels in, I saw the advice of "start with something short" ¯_(ツ)_/¯ But my passion was with my main comic anyway, so whatever

I personally think I've enjoyed drawing something long-form, I'm not sure if I'm the type of writer/artists that thrives in short or simple projects

No regrets! There's more then one way to skin a cat!