What sparked the idea for your comic?

[isabelleArne]

For my new comic Radiant ( out next Thursday, so very soon I'm pretty eggcited ! )
The idea is kinda old, I got the first idea 2 or 3 years ago maybe, and it was in fact a dream I had. A very very vivid dream, I have had quite a few of those in the past and still have, I love those dreams and write them down in the morning to keep them.
So to this dream I added 2 other dreams I had in the past and made a story with those.

It changed quite a bit but honestly some parts are going to be exactly like the dreams I had. Just better structured so it makes a logic story ( cuz dreams ain't always logic ! ) This also mean that this story is very dear to me and lived in me for so long that I am quite glad to take it out of me.

My dreams have been my inspirations for many years : here are some concepts that were made right after some of the dreams that compose my story

The first one is rather old and the style of the comic is not so realistic but It's a style I enjoy doing more.

[shazzbaa]

Runewriters actually schism'd off of a friend's game concept!
I had a friend in college who was creating his own tabletop system (Dungeons & Dragons style games). He was obsessed with Celtic myths and culture, so the magic system revolved around writing mystic runes and activating them to cast spells, and if they're written poorly the spell goes off wrong. His lore was that most people learned runes in visions from the gods, but it was possible to be self-taught.
I wanted to play a self-taught character, and so I asked him, "How does my character get her runes? Did she have to experiment? Oh man, would every self-taught mage have things horribly wrong with them, from the effects of casting spells by trial and error and runes that weren't quite written correctly?"
"Nah," he said, "I was imagining you'd learn your runes, like, in a dream," but I still liked my idea. I jotted it down, and didn't stop thinking about it, and it eventually transformed into an entire world inspired by that concept of runes as self-taught trial-and-error spells.

[punkarsenic]

There was a War sprang from a story / game made up between me and a close friend. I lost the friend, but wanted to keep the story alive, developing it into a comic. It's weird because of that; theres some creative decisions I wouldn't make now, that I couldn't scrap because they were integral to the story we wrote at 15 or so. There's a lot of rewriting-as-i-go.

[Strontium]

Want to know the event that sparked my comic?

Seeing THESE SUPER COOL OSIRIS SNEAKERS

I mean just look at these sneakers! They're SO cool! Who wouldn't get inspired by them?

Now of course my comic isn't about sneakers and nobody wears these sneakers but... they're what inspired the line of thinking that lead to my comic.
And it's a great story to tell when people ask, "what inspired your comic?"

[conbon100101]

True story here. Mine started because I drew a girl in a wedding dress and trenchcoat with a knife in hand. Then went...why? Then tacos happened. Apparently tacos are huge inspiration because I now have two comics, 30+ characters and years of work ahead of me. All because of one girl in a wedding dress and trenchcoat and tacos.

[BurntSushi]

I'm trying to find that spark. For now I just know: Fairies(the flesh eating &/or tricksy kind), Planes(the Bartimaeus Trilogy kind), and a dose of ultimate evil given form.

[Mari]

When I was a young teen, I drew a guy with bunny slippers and was like hey I should make a comic about this and have everyone be gay.

cannot find any footage of bunny slippers, but art was something like this, just maybe a third more ugly.

There was no idea. It was horrible. I did that for maybe two years, until I deleted all of it from the interwebs and rewrote it completely. Then I rewrote it about 50 more times until I relaunched it in 2010 and it now being somewhat better

So spark was to make gay comic about bunny slipperboy. Now bunnyslippers have disappeared

[Aspie_Gamer]

Good question OP

Two things sparked the idea for my comic Life of an Aspie. Shoujo manga and Asperger's Syndrome.

In my younger days, I went through a phase where I read tons of shoujo manga. After a while though, I was "meh" towards the whole genre since most of them fell into the predictable plot of "mousy girl ends up with hot guy early on". Initially, I just wanted to make a shoujo manga where the main girl was American in a Japanese high school setting. However, once I started brainstorming the kind of conversations Susan would have with her peers basing them off of conversations I had with my peers back in school and with my folks growing up, it just made more and more sense to make the main lead of my comic autistic. (I have Asperger's irl, but you've probably already guessed that from my username huh? lol)

In hindsight, I'm glad that things turned out the way they have for my baby. The best thing that's been said about LoaA is how refreshing or how well Susan's been portrayed as someone with Asperger's. Notably, I've attracted the attention of either people who are like me or people who know somebody in their personal life who is autistic and thus has LoaA hit close to home for them. I can honestly say I wasn't expecting that to happen, but I think its a good indicator I'm on the right path with my comic.

[Potoh]

Harry Potter fanfictions I used to write 14 years back.
Nothing in Memorandum has anything to do with Harry Potter anymore, but that's how it all started and how my first OCs came to life.

[ahhvecadoes]

The phrase "Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?" from Wizard of Oz was straight up how I formed the story line for Heart Hex. I had an inkling of the backstories for the main characters for quite a while but could never find a way for them to fit nicely together until that phrase got stuck in my head and I made the first page on a whim.

Plus, I really, REALLY love demonology and the occult (I've owned an entire set of occult + paranormal books for a majority of my life) and always knew I'd have to do something involving demons.

[kyupol]

Virginia tech shootings back in 2007... And general angst about life. I have a combination of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and APBS ( adult post bullying syndrome)... That helped fuel it all.

At least how it all started.

But now God has partially healed me from APBS and PTSD, it's about doing His will and spreading His gospel. For now it's subtle because MAG-ISA was done mostly when I was an unbeliever... but future projects will be more blatant and in your face...

[redsblueyoungster]

Simply working at a superstore for I Work Part-time...IN HELL! with some inspiration from a light novel called "The Devil is a Part-timer".

[mpiradarada]

These are all fascinating! Great topic, OP!

Mine is one of the least interesting ones, though. Started out as a little idea for a local short comic contest on the theme of superheroes. I think what made it evolve was hearing people's real life stories and problems, which helped me saw the potential for a longer, more developed and serious plot.

[sefra114]

My webcomic, Oni x Fox, was inspired by my first trip to Japan! Seeing all the masks for sale at Asakusa really got to me. I knew I wanted to make something with a fox mask, specifically. Over that summer, it went through many versions before it became how it is now! The craziest part was, that I hadn't even planned on going to Asakusa on my trip! To think my webcomic would have never happened if I didn't!

[Wumbl]

I came up with Flirting With Death when I was writing a screenplay for my college course. I decided to make the two scenes I wrote into a full story, and then started the comic to tell the story. My main inspirations were Hellblazer and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which makes for an interesting combo.

I came up with From The Sky based on characters that I found myself absentmindedly doodling, and came up with a really unusual concept based on the art alone.

[randomladyaj]

I really wasn't going to make a full comic in the first place. I only wanted to just make a comic page to see how I could tackle the process because I wanted to try different art mediums. Beforehand I was trying out watercolor painting (which I am sticking to).

I decided to plan out one page scene Involving a girl I was going to name Pea complaining about another boring day. She goes about her mundane task and gets on a city bus for work and then as soon as she got off the sky got dark and she smile because she knows there's trouble afoot. Then a large monster was supposed to appear and then she gets all super powered and attack and stuff.

Well...since my brain likes to add on and fix things about raw ideas Pea became Tameka and then I begin to develop the small premise into a full story within a bigger story that I've been working on for a while now.

So I made Mercenary Bound to be a standalone comic to help expand the universe within my novel that I've written. Even though it's in the early stages I think this is really fun to do.

Oh and I found Tapastic by rummaging around deviantart and that also helped trigger making a comic, so a lot of your comics have inspired me to do so as well.

[trustingcolors]

Mine had started mostly from a pair of OCs I had and over the years I made more and more. When I was in high school, I used to do little sketches of just one shot jokes almost everyday and that expand quite a bit before I stopped for some reason. Then recently when I was in college, a friend of mine has a comic themselves on Tapastic and saw how cool she was doing her artwork and such that I thought, "Hey why not try and make my own? Challenge myself!" So I made my comic based on the OCs I had made. As the years went by, I think I developed a bit of a "better" sense of my characters and style of how I want to portray them so I think and hope that I can do my best with my series, Boy's Be Passionate!. And I just loved all the artists here so far with their comics and even my friend's own which was just a fan comic series, Sunshine Mafia.

[rubixforman]

Door of Destiny started (on paper) in middle-school and had first been inspired by Law of Talos. I had let my mind wonder a bit too much and soon I began drawing the first Door of Destiny page, but it was far from what is now. It was an on and off project that I had soon stopped working on, but never stopped thinking about.

Whenever I had some free time on my hands, I began thinking of it. Characters came flying off from the top of my head and onto paper. The comic went through multiple genres and restarts. Soon, I didn't even know where to start anymore or if I should even do it anymore.

Though as time went on, I got a few friends that pushed me create the comic. They even inspired me to create some new characters.

[lunaartemisasama]

A doodle

[Mecha]

I had a bunch of robot characters I had no clue what else to do with so thus my comic was born.