Where do your best ideas for your comic(s) come from my fellow tappies? This ragestache comic perfectly sums up where I do my best thinking for my main comic, Life of an Aspie1. Maybe its that hot water that relaxes my mind?
Mar '16
Mar '16
My life. And my imagination because I daydream of scenarios that will never happen irl. At least I can make it happen in my comic trololol oh gawd I need a life.
Intense burning hatred for a movie, comic, game, or other work of art.
There are few bad ideas, and any idea canwork well... if somethingd oes not work well, if a work of art sucks... then it has failed to use its concept well.
Take for example... Raiders of Atlantis, inetresting concepts, terrible movie. I would take that concept, the idea of a lost world of myth having devolved into a psot apocalyptic state of being, and I would turn it into something good.
(I have never done this with Raiders of Atlantis, I am just explaining how my thought process tends too work)
Aside from personal experiences with friends and other people I work/go to school with, I'm prone to coming up with ideas and story designs while driving. I'm in a car A LOT of the time so I've conditioned myself to go into brainstorming mode while on the road, hah^^
Music is usually what sets off a lot of my ideas for storylines! Mostly because I listen to music everywhere I go so that mixed in with my surroundings and personal experience and just the world around me really brings out the best of my creativity!!
But my really good ones always come from late nights where I'm half-asleep (sometimes pumped with coffee) and not really aware of what I'm doing, I just type away at my computer.
Like Arach, I definitely feed off music. I have a spotify where I pretty meticulously make playlists for series, characters, settings, story arcs... Sometimes they tend to be a lot of the same things so I delete them but it helps me organize my thoughts and try and be coherent and focused on what I'm trying to say.
.... Also, not to condone bad habits but I think a bottle of wine with a cigar or some green gets me into the same frame of mind as most my comic characters and lets me write their dialogue a lot better :'D
Mostly from either sleeping or day dreams. Sometimes I'm just working on something and an idea for a comic pops in immediately. I wouldn't say all of them are winners though...
Dreams, personal experiences, anecdotes from other people (non comic artists, so they would go to waste if I don't use them).
While walking and no-brainer activities, also on the shower.
And sometimes a new song will create a full scene on my mind.
My writer and I both work in a lab. So for our comic VSEPR2, alot of the story comes from real life lab experiences. With a dramatic super hero flare of course. So, if there is something going on at work that strikes us as funny or adventurous, its shows up in the comic. 
The writer for the comic I illustrate Goblins of Razard gets her inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen and dark fairy tales. That and a mix of DnD games I suspect.
I'm similar to @futureboundentertain, except for me it's not UGH I HATE THIS but just mediocre stuff/fun stuff that I enjoyed but wanted more out of. Ideas that were fine but didn't go where I wanted them to go, or concepts that I want to see filled out in a different direction.
Weird deconstructions or reinterpretations of existing properties will also give me ideas -- someone talks about how you could easily interpret Disney's Aladdin as an unpleasant vizier trying desperately to protect the kingdom from a con-man, and I love that! We have the beats of the story there to interpret -- Disney's Aladdin -- but that story isn't really there. I want to make that story now!
Also D&D characters, but let's be real, most of my D&D characters are just me wanting to take an archetype I've seen somewhere of a character that never gets to be the protagonist, and play out their story, so it's kinda the same thing. I want the story I allllllllmost got somewhere else, but not quite.
Lol. I can definitely relate with good ol Calvin there. I was a smart kid in school just like him. I simply didn't feel like doing my homework (until the last minute) is all. Many a school night, I would forgo doing my homework in favor of playing something on my Nintendo GameCube or later my Wii/PlayStation 3. Even now what with me having my own responsibilities as a young adult, I still feel like goofing off sometimes instead of drawing new pages for my comic.
When I'm in bed comfortable and falling asleep but half the time I tend to forget it the next morning. Some ideas come from dreams too. One of my main antagonists early designs was based off of a sleep paralysis episode.
I usually get most of my ideas from gaming or my real life. There will be moments in time when I see something funny or interesting and I begin imagining what could be behind that thing that caught my eye. For example, "6:30 PM" and "On the House," two one-off comics I plan to work on, were inspired by certain people I see during my life. "6:30 PM" was inspired by a young woman I saw working as a librarian who looked absolutely MISERABLE. And "On the House" was inspired by a baby-faced bartender who looked like the biggest sweetheart. The bar wasn't like a normal bar or a more happy bar, no, this bar was notorious for bikers and even gang members to hang out in. He didn't match his environment and I began to think of a story for him.
So basically, my ideas come from what I see and who I meet in my life.
When I get angry at something, this comic1 of mine gets updated. I'll feel fine after making a strip of it. As for the ideas of where it came from, it's probably from the depths of my silly brain.XD
tossing and turning in the middle of the night until eventually getting up and scribbling on post-it notes stuck to the closet in a sleepy, frustrated stupor works pretty well for me. although its worth noting that i used that strategy to plot a majority of my comic, which i restarted halfway through chapter 2, so, uh, be sure to edit when you're rested. 
i've also gotten ideas for characters from anecdotes my friends and family have told me, as well as reading poetry. looking at street photography is pretty good for settings.
and of course, from reading other stories.
random stuff. I can be reading a book (or comic), listening to music, sleeping (based a few stories off of my dreams), images on google, pictures in books, talking to my sister, watching my pets, reading a quote, etc....I write lots of stories (because I can't draw, sadly)...and take inspiration from everything
