Okay, so here's how NOT to make a comic. And just for the record, this is a one - off example and not typical of how I work. i.e. I'm not a complete goof.
First of all, remember Monstrum? It's a comic series I started many, many years ago. Many years ago. And now I'm on issue three. Here's how much it's changed from the first issue to now:
Where did it all go wrong?
It started at the end of issue two, where I added in a teaser for issue three, which I hadn't written. So, then I had to come up with a story.
It took a long time to get around to doing this. Infact, I had more ideas for the following issue than for the current one. Then, when I finally wrote it, I had made such a tidy little adventure out of it that the character development was practically non-existent. And the story was too neat. It was all a bit too Scooby-Doo. There's a nice rule about most serial writing that leaves your characters in pretty much the same point at the end of each story, they've gone on an adventure but very little has changed. I quickly realised that this wasn't the direction I wanted to take for Monstrum.
Also, I always imagined Monstrum in colour, so the artwork and printing arrangement would need to be changed. A long time passed. Then I re-wrote the script. Then I wrote some shorter scripts and played about with the artwork. I posted one up on Comicspace and started drawing another one. Halfway through painting it I decided it was rubbish and stopped. I carried on with other things. More time passed. Then I went back to the script for issue 3. I started drawing it. Then I stopped. More time passed. I started drawing it again, from the beginning. Then lots of stuff happened, so I stopped for a bit. I thought it would be good to paint it. But then I started doing work that was computer coloured and painted, so I thought this would work better. Thus doubling the amount of work I had to do. Then I decided that rather than print it A5, it would look better in trade format. All my drawings were the wrong ratio. I inked it all, scanned it all and had to chop and photoshop it in to the right format. I didn't like the font I'd been using too much, so I thought I'd to make my own, without any clue what I was doing. Then I decided to send some pages off as a submission package. So I coloured, printed, painted, re-scanned, made a font, lettered and printed (again) the first ten pages, did a mock up cover and all the other stuff they asked to see. Now I've just got to do all that with the other 38 remaining pages.
And that's the long, idiot way to make a comic. It will be finished, some time.
