What Inspired you to start writing/drawing comics?

[KilljoyConstruct]

For me, it was the series Animosity by Marguerite Bennet and Rafael De Latorre.

I remember the first time I saw a volume of it in a comic book store while I was visiting family a few years back. Everything about it, from the premise to the artwork, intrigued me. I wanted to buy it, but I didn’t have any money on me.

A year or so later, I saw it again in my hometown comic store. I had money that time, so I snatched it up. I read the whole volume in less than a day, and loved it even more than I thought I would.

And then I thought, “I wanna create something like this!” So instead of writing one of my stories, War Cogs, as a novel like I had been planning, I turned it into a comic series instead. And that’s how I got my start!

So how did you guys get yours? What inspired you to start making comics?

[Ramonkey]

The death of the great master of writing Gene Wolfe last year. It was on April 14th, hours before the fire of Notre Dame.

My dream is to honour his works, and I will be happy if at least one person can find in my comics and tales a minimal fraction of the grandeur of his art.

I think many here can empathize with what inspired you. Everyone has this moment of "I want to do this". Oh, I could spend the entire thread naming comics that changed my life... but don't want to bore you. I leave you instead with what really told me at my face: "you have one life. Start drawing".

[KizKat]

A lot of internet comics, such as Sarah's Scribbles, Safely Endangered, Strange Planet and Catana Comics to name a few. But before that in Uni I read a really good book: Making Comics by Scott McCloud. I was looking at it from an animator's point of view, but damn it is a heck of a good comic study. It was really inspiring and a joy to look through. 10/10 recommend because its really insightful.

[Leverance]

I started to like stories with the book Taynikma (it's also done like a comic and is drawn, I really recommend reading it). Later it was Harry Potter, not the new books, I don't consider them canon and the writing is well, crap to put it politely in my opinion.

To be able to craft stories people could fall in love with, teach them new ways to see the world, be someone's safe place and freedom. That's the beauty of writing, though, it can be extremly difficult since no matter what you do, there is no guide book to follow. Just general suggestions.

Is worth it either way, because my passion is to become a published author some day.

[RatTastic]

For me, it was creating adventure time comics for my classmates! It had just released when we were in elementary, so me and my friends would make comics about it then share it around with our classmates! So I owe a lot of my love for making comics from adventure time

[AmataLenna]

For me it was the Sonic Archie Comics. I read them religiously every month growing up and wanted so bad to make stories like that. I tried to copy the work as a kid, learned all the artists, made little fan comics.

Of course I grew out of it but still kept the collection even as I moved into getting an art degree.

Sure it was kind of cringe but even now I just want to give people what those comics gave me as a kid. Some world to escape to and loveable characters.

[Ardelvion]

Ballroom e Youkoso is the one that inspired me. I felt that it changed a lot of people's perception about competitive dancing and it's what made me think, "I wanna make comics that'll inspire people to be themselves or to make society be accepting of the weirdness in every one of us."

[darthmongoose]

I was a teenager and I was getting really into anime, which was pretty new in the UK at the time (it was around the year 2001) and a friend said "Oh hey, you like that Japanese anime stuff, don't you? There's this comic on the internet like that called "Megatokyo", you might like". I LOVED it. (I'm not really still a reader of that comic, but I have fond memories and still have a signed sketch by Piro kept safe).
I hadn't realised at the time that there were comics on the internet, and seeing somebody from outside Japan just making manga style comics on their own and uploading online and people reading them blew my mind. I've loved webcomics ever since, and I guess I'm unusual for somebody over 30 in that my first exposure to comics was webcomics, and I actually hadn't read a physical manga until I got one in a Forbidden Planet in Glasgow a couple of years later because back then, living in a rural area and pre-Amazon being a big thing, I just didn't know where to get manga from.
I later diversified my tastes into all sorts of comics, both print and web, and I've done work for both, but webcomics are very special to me because of how widely available they are, so I've always kind of felt like at heart I'm a webcomicker.

[humhumsong]

Because I watched Bakuman! I just watched it this year, that's why I start making a comic this year. It really inspired me

[WolfUnderTheMoon89]

I hope I an answer even if I'm working on a novel insteads of a comic

But I started writing it to have something real, something to hold in the end. I did 14y of RP with these characters and finally got the courage to write their stories down and share it with the world

[IdiotWithPencil]

like all great artist of our time, sheer un relenting boredom

[SagaHolmgaard]

Always loved to read comics. I even remember being too young to read myself and sad because my parents wouldn't read comics aloud for me - not because of anything against comics they just thought reading the panel format aloud was bothersome!

Discovered webcomics (monsterkind to be precise) however when I was 14-15, and that's when I got interested in making my own. Tried a few times, and failed a few times. Now I'm finally confident enough to take on a long webcomic project, which ended up being 'Reclaim' which I started drawing last year!

[artamazon]

I had always made silly little comics when I was a kid, but it wasn't until I worked on a comic book game that I got serious about it. Many of my coworkers on that game were professional comic artists, and all of us were living and breathing comic books. I learned a lot about different artists, writers, the industry, and of course how to actually make comics. They were all very inspirational and really pushed me and encouraged me into making my own.

[Shanny8]

I've always wanted to create/make comics since I was a kid...

[KiabIce]

Wonderful story!

As for me, it all started with watching Sailor Moon on regular TV along time ago when I was 6 or 7. Also Dragon Ball Z used to play in the mornings as well. At this time, DIC, a company of Disney, produced the English version of Sailor Moon and I was crazed about it. Even til now I still love Sailor Moon it has a special place in my heart. I may not watch it that much but I'll always remember being a kid copying pictures of Sailor Moon and DBZ and competing with my sisters to see who drew it better.
Eventually about when I was 25 I stopped drawing very anime like. In fact one manga series influenced me a lot it's called Peach Girl and I loved how the creator Miwa Ueda drew. Another favorite influencer is Amano who drew the concept art for Final Fantasy Series & Vampire Hunter D. I love his art still to this day!!!
As you can tell I'm influenced bu a lot of manga still. Oh yeah! I forgot to mention The Last Unicorn.

That's all I can think of for now! OH yeah the Tarot Cafe by Park Sang-sun. She also influenced my art work too.
Blade of the Immortal influenced me too. OH YEAH Studio Ghibli always has a place in my heart too!

[azzy-m]

My game plan used to be to learn animation (either by teaching myself or going to art school), pitch my dream project to someone in the industry, and hopefully profit.

Until I discovered Space Boy, and dived ass-deep into Webtoons. I then realized that this is actually a totally viable place to post my dream project - combining writing and art - and I don't have to worry about people meddling into my artistic vision, lmao, because I'm working on it alone, or mostly alone.

And now I want to make comics, haha. I've never been an avid comics reader as a kid like most people here. Webcomics and comics in general is kind of more of a recent interest for me.

So yea. That's why I have a lot of respect for Space Boy - it's the thing that got me into comics in the first place.

[kitschensyngk]

I read newspaper comics every day when I was a kid. I was mostly into Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes.

In my senior year in high school I started reading Sluggy Freelance and discovered you could actually publish comics on the Internet. I read a lot of them through college. One of them, Fred Gallagher's Megatokyo, was a huge influence, mostly for his artistic style, but it also taught me that it wasn't always necessary to end each page with a punchline so long as it moves the story along.

[Freemints30]

Well when I was a kid I played alot of Pokemon mystery dungeon and Pokemon Rom hacks and wrote several fanfics of my OC's. Of course they were self inserts but I had a lot of fun making them.

What inspired me to start applying art to the mix was when I found Pokemon sprite comics. So I at first started editing Pokemon sprites for my own comic to editing maple story sprites to making my own sprites in MS paint to actually drawing. Not a single one of them was released due to my poor ability to focus on a task at the time.

SO my start were a bunch dumb Pokemon sprite comics and Rom hacks

[thel3tterm]

When I was really little, I loved reading newspaper comic strips. My dad owned a lot of old comic anthologies that I would read through, and I usually was the first to ask for the Sunday paper. Though I didn't always get the political humor, I loved the goofy expressions and one-liners. Visual humor is still one of my favorite things.

When I got a bit older, I adored watching cartoons, and wanted to capture the same feel, but of course didn't have access to anything more sophisticated than stickynotes to make flipbooks, so I started drawing lots of comics for my friends. Usually it was on lined paper or in the spare pages between class notes. Sometimes I would attempt to make some kind of a plot with dramatic characters and the like, but a lot of them were just about shenanigans and inside jokes between my friends.

Years later, at some point in early high school, I started making a webcomic. To be completely honest, it was started on a whim and posted on some obscure forum. I literally made up the plot as I went. It was REALLY bad in retrospect, but I learned so much while making the 200+ pages it wound up being.
It's still my favorite thing that I've ever made, and its weird to think that if I wasn't bored that one afternoon or didn't decide to go 'fuck it' that it might not have existed at all. I might not even be doing art anymore.

(My current comic is actually an attempt at remaking that old one and reshaping the plot into something coherent. I loved the world and characters so much that I just couldn't leave them collecting dust any longer : p)

[miramiee]

I'm inspired by people, as corny as it sounds. I genuinely think there is a story in everyone waiting to be told.

It was probably Studio Ghibli that started the fascination and appreciation for others. In many of their films, there is this quiet layer of humanity embedded into the flow of the story. Whether it be someone laughing or eating or persevering, Ghibli's delicate depiction of the human experience (especially through fantasy) has always charmed me. Since then I'd always wanted to preserve that same reflective tone and honor humanity in an idealistic way even for just a bit. The world is so sad, man. It's the tiny moments of connection that really make it all tolerable. (at least for me)