Hello Reader,

It's crazy when I think about how I've spent 2 years on a comic and all I've made are 6 pages. That's not through a lack of trying or effort, because I have hundreds of drawings and documents for my comic.

It's a trap I've found myself sinking in, not realising it until I was up to my neck.

And I'm going to tell you how you can avoid the same fate.

Take your time

It may seem counter-intuitive for the guy who spent 2 years on something only to produce next to nothing to tell you to take your time, but what I really mean is to make a plan and don't skip over any of the comic-creating steps to get to the "fun part" faster.

You need to build strong foundations and I'm not including the general idea or concept of your comic as that's very subjective and too broad.

What's more consistent, however, is a strong script. I'm not an expert writer by any means, but checking and double checking that your script makes sense, is engaging, develops a story and has an arc your characters can go on are all good indicators that your script is good.

Think about your art style

For the artists in the room, you're probably overthinking your art style. I'll be covering this more in an upcoming video on my YouTube channel where I explain how I finally found mine but I'll touch on it here.

The long-term goal for making your comic is to create something that you're happy with. That means all artistic decisions have to be ones that you're comfortable living with for a long time.

To help put this into context, one of the gravest errors I made was to settle on an art style that I wasn't particularly practiced in for the sole purpose of creating the comic quicker.

"Simpler" styles are broadly faster, but if that's the only reason you're doing it and you've not really done it before then you're going to have a miserable time creating your comic and it'll either take you longer (because you have to learn a new style at the same time) or you'll create an inferior-looking comic.

For my attempts at this, I checked both of those boxes.

Pick things you're good at

Creating comics is a great way to learn how to create comics. But there is a lot to learn about the comic-creating process. Panel composition, panel transitions, word balloon placement, page layouts, pace, flow, style, visual storytelling. The list goes on.

So while you're learning all of these skills, pick things you already know how to do relatively well. Similar to the art style point above, pick a simple story to tell that's not going to challenge your writing skills too much.

Pick some software or a medium that you have a lot of experience with.

Choose a format that you've used before.

That's not to say that you shouldn't experiment, because you absolutely should. But experiment with comics that don't matter as much. Comics that are just for fun. Not comics that you're pouring your heart and soul into.

Analyse the Market

I'm a big believer that art should be created for the sake of expression and not for a pre-existing audience. In principle. But if you want your comic to be read, then it's a good idea to see if there's a taste for your genre, sub-genre or niche.

By going to places like Reddit and looking at subreddits for [insert your niche here] then you can get a gauge of what people are into and what the interest levels are.

You broadly shouldn't allow the audience to dictate your creativity, but if you're intending on telling a story to an audience, it's a good idea to pick a story that they're going to want to hear.

Also, it stops you from being months into your project only to realise that one of the most successful webcomics of all time is telling basically the same story as you. Which, yes, happened to me.

Pressure is good, but beware of the dosage

Setting deadlines and goals is a good way to keep yourself honest when creating. It can be very easy to slack off and let the comic kind of die on its own, so giving yourself some accountability is always a good thing.

But do not give yourself a hard time if you miss a deadline because it'll make you do two things and neither of them are good.

1. It'll make you rush through your comic, which will inevitably impact the quality
2. It'll stress you out unnecessarily which will compound over time

I did both of these things and they are probably the two things that caused me to stop creating my comic and starting over after 2 years of working on it. Don't know what I mean? Well, I cover the story in this video here.

Be aware of what you don't know

Making comics solo is an option that I generally prefer. It may be the control freak within me that likes it or it may be the shy introverted kid that has never really gone away. Either way, I like it.

But if you work alone and don't have any sort of feedback from anyone then you could be walking head first into avoidable traps.

I believe that if I had taken advantage of a community and engaged with it then I probably could have saved myself a lot of time and heartache.

But good communities are difficult to come by. They're either too big, so you feel kind of lost or too random, where you'll post a question and get either nothing or bad advice or you'll get incredible advice, depending on the time and day of the week.

So try and find a community or an individual to help act as a sounding board. By just showing someone who hasn't been staring at the same words and pictures for the last few weeks or months can be enough to add clarity that you seldom get on your own.

And, yes, I do have a community you can join. See below for that. But if you're not ready for that just yet, then hopefully this newsletter can serve as a pre-emptive sounding board.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find answers when you don't even know what questions to ask and my aim for this newsletter, and my YouTube channel, is to answer the unaskable questions.

Have a great week, keep going and I'll see you next week

-John