#comics is writing & rewriting & drawing & rewriting & redrawing & then final art

[erysium]

You've talked about writing your comic in a few asks before, I was wondering if you have advice/ resources for artists writing their own comics? I've only ever scene stuff for writers writing for an artist and would love to see what goes into your scripts.

haha I'm a little shy about trying to give advice this, since I feel like I'm a lot weaker at writing than drawing! writing is really stressful & difficult for me.. I would never want to write for someone else, because a lot of my 'writing' process is really just drawing things out, and seeing what works. When I edit my scripts for anyone else to read over, I cut about 2/3rds of what I have written in as notes - stuff that mostly only make sense to me (ie 'referencing this scene in chapter 3,' 'an expression like in that scene in that cool amv' or 'this part inspired by the ending of that movie/book/etc') as well as the 2-3 what-if versions I have for every scene, that I sometimes only finalize/decide between when I'm working on thumbnails and finally seeing how it all flows on the page together. or after someone who's helping me edit takes a look and has thoughts. When I have an idea for a scene, it's also usually in some visual form - so I'll jot down some notes in my story doc, and then sketch out the acting & feeling I'm imagining to see if it feels like anything when it's down on paper. As it sits in my notes for months or years (while I'm working on and reading other stuff,) that moment might change a little in my memory, or develop more..or the point of that scene might feel less clear when i reread it with fresh eyes, and it might get cut.

I guess for overall advice - find a process that works for you! If you're a more visual person, you can find ways to work visuals first, and then trace your steps back to extract the story from those cool visuals, and then figure out how to puzzle piece all those cool visuals & moments together. & ofc, reading a lot, watching a lot of movies, listening to podcasts or anything narrative, is important for developing your voice & priorities & style as a writer, the same way you do as a visual artist. :-)

(This is what i wrote when I was reorganizing the flow of the first 10 pages in this chapter - I have an idea of the conversation's exact wording written down earlier, so I'm just figuring out if the emotional beats makes some sense with the overall tone in mind, sometimes having a good idea that pulls things together better (highlighted in purple so I don't forget it) or greyed out so I can ignore it (but not deleted, so that I remember that i already had that idea & discarded it for a reason) .. also Kye is always 'k' in my notes & Sonya is always 'v' because i don't want to write their names out all the time lol)

[blackstarchanx3new]

A messy FSR Art/writing contest

Finally decided on this haha.

We're doing a creative lil contest because me wanna see my boys.

There's two categories, art and writing. Since a lot of you guys are writers and I don't wanna leave ya out.

For the art side here's some suggestions:

You could do a panel redraw (There's 400 pages so that shouldn't be hard to find smth you like XD)

Do smth new art/comic wise with the characters.

Make memes (Not template ones you gotta draw it haha)

For the writing portion:

I'm open to virtually whatever. There's not really a specific length or writing style you gotta adhere too. You could make a script style thing if you want. Whatever floats your boat.

Scene rewrites or new content. I'd be interested what FSR fanfics would look like.

Only real rules are for this contest: All submissions must be SFW and must be submitted before the 1st of February. And you must reblog this post with said art and tag me so I see it.

Normally I wouldn't care what you make for this AU, do what you want, but for the contest specifically it must be SFW.

Prize would be doodle from me. Basically my commission rules would apply if you know them. SFW drawings only.

I think I'll max out at four winners. Depends on how many entries there are!

Two from writing and two from art at max.

You'd reblog this and tag me in the work.

I think it'll end by the first of next month hopefully that's plenty of time. ^w^

If you got any questions feel free to ask this is meant to be fun.

[floofrights]

Hi. As someone who hopes to one day start my own webcomic, I'm fascinated by how your deleted scenes archive features almost complete art that follows a widly different route that that of the final narrative. It's a bit mindblowing to me, honestly.

If I may ask, how does your process work? Do you follow the conventional script -> sketch -> final art workflow and just take "kill your darlings" to heart regardless of which step you're in, or do you use the art itself as part of your writing (and consequently rewriting) process?

My process is very unconventional and also very flawed in a lot of ways. But it's the process that works for me. Sometimes.

(This is gonna be really long by the way and also it's probably gonna be wonky and messy so be warned lol)

When it comes to making a chilli issue, and just most of my comics in general, I don't write scripts. Would making comics be a lot easier if I did? Probably. Certainly. Absolutely. But it's not my process. At some point I'd like to start writing scripts before I work on an issue, but it always just felt easier not to.

Instead of a script, I write a very rough outline in my sketchbook, with notes so illegible only I could read them. I often deviate from these notes as I'm making pages however. Sometimes I'm about to hit a story beat and I decide it can be done in a slightly different way, so I do that instead. But I don't differ too much from these notes. For the most part.

When it comes to dialogue, it's very on the fly. I may have specific character quotes in my head when I'm planning out an issue, but most of it is only written in the moment when I'm actually making the page.

In terms of art, Chilli has a very "simple" style, and that was on purpose. I used to draw final lineart in my webcomics, and I found it very tedious. What I'd often find is I'd like the undersketch of a panel more than the final art. So when I started making Chilli, I just used the undersketch AS the final lineart, and I developed and refined that style as time went on.

When actually making an issue, I start off by figuring out the panel layout of a page. Sometimes this can be edited as I work on a page, but this is where I visualize the panels ahead of time. Once the border is done, I begin to draw the lineart. Sometimes I make a rough undersketch for a panel if it's particularly complicated, but usually I don't do that.

Once the lineart's done, I go back and give a thick outline to all the characters, and any other elements in panel, to make them pop from the background. It also makes it easier to color the page. Because the coloring process in Chilli is so simple, I often just use the paint bucket tool.

Now for dialogue! Again, this is usually only written at this point in the process. Even if I know what HAS to be said, HOW I say it can be tricky to figure out. Once the dialogue's done, I create the speech bubbles, and then boom! Finished page.

On an average day, I can draw four pages of an issue, but this is far from my limit. If i really wanted to, I could make 5-6 pages a day, but my wrist would absolutely not like that lmao.

And so day by day, I work through an issue, four pages at a time, until eventually, I have a finished draft! Does this mean the issue is finished? Nope!

Once a draft is complete, I do a mini "round of edits," where go through and make little changes fit to my liking. This could range from editing dialogue to make it less clunky, to redoing an entire panel. Once this round is finished, I set the issue aside. I don't work on it. I don't even look at it. I need it fresh out of my mind.

Eventually, usually about a couple weeks before it's released, I go through the issue and do an even bigger "round of edits," rewriting even more dialogue and redrawing even more panels. I do at least a few more rounds of edits until I'm finally satisfied, and that's when the issue's released.

Sometimes however, things can go horribly wrong.

Issue 12 was supposed to be a completely different issue. It was supposed to be the start of a new arc, but as I was making the issue, I just found myself unsatisfied and not that confident in the story I was setting up. So I scrapped that attempt halfway through, and instead began work on the issue 12 that would eventually release.

"Red Meat" in particular was a very troubling arc to make. I made probably about 300+ pages for that arc, and I ended up scrapping over a third of that. I did not do a good job at planning out the story for that arc, and it ended up biting me in the ass later when I realized I didn't like where the arc was headed.

Issues 25 & 26 were both drafted at this point, and I didn't like either of them, issue 26 specifically. The problems they had couldn't really be fixed in rounds of edits either, they were fundamental problems. If I wanted to fix them, I'd have to scrap a lot of what I'd already made.

So I did.

I redid a lot of issue 25, and I scrapped that version of issue 26 entirely. It was for the best ultimately, but in the moment it felt very demoralizing having to scrap so many finished pages.

Issue 27 also ended up being way too long (like almost 70 pages) so I had to cut a lot of (finished) pages in that one too to keep the pacing up. I cut out a lot of good stuff from that issue, but it was for the best. Even after those cuts the issue's still tied with issue 12 as the longest chilli issue.

What happened in Red Meat was a worst case scenario though, and going forward, im gonna make sure that something like that never happens again. Because, fuck. It didn't feel good scrapping those finished pages lol.

My process is very messy and slightly taxing, but it's the process I'm familiar with. I would not recommend doing what I do, especially if you've never made a webcomic before, but instead to try and develop your own method that works for you! Different processes work for different people

Thank you for your ask! Good luck on your webcomic journey, wherever it takes ya!

[superflatpsyche]

How to Make Comics

Hello! I definitely meant to answer this question earlier, but I knew it’d end up being a really long post, so I wanted to be able to sit down and answer this properly.

First off, I’d decide what kind of comic I want to create. Will it be a huge epic? A gag-a-day comedy? Will it ever be printed?

With digital comics, you could give each page a different-sized layout or even animations if you wanted to! These are all things that are hard to translate into a physical book. You also wouldn’t need to worry about things like page bleed. Or color choices - in my experience, digital art prints way darker than you’d expect.

The stories I have planned and am currently working on are graphic novels, so I don’t have much advice when it comes to newspaper-styled weeklies. But, if this is the kind of stuff you want to make, then my tips might help!

My starting point for making comics was having some character designs lying around that I wanted to use for something. Some people come up with the story first, but for me, it was the characters. If that’s your style, then concept art is a good way to plan out the “feel” of your comic:

IMO it’s very easy to fall into the trap of drawing concept sketches forever, so at some point, you will need to move on to outlining the plot of your comic and writing your first draft. All first drafts suck, so once you’ve reached the end, you’ll immediately have to go back and edit things as needed.

Some resources I used to figure out how writing works are Wired For Story by Lisa Cron, as well as Jim Butcher’s Livejournal posts.

Comics invariably take a long time to make unless you choose a super-simple art style, so I included things like camera angles and other details in my script, to remind myself how to draw a particular scene when I finally reached it. Here’s the script version of a page I finished and posted a while back:

Scripting your entire comic this early on means that you won’t be investing huge amounts of time into making any changes to the story. Rewriting is much faster than redrawing.

The next big step is sketching thumbnails of how your comic pages will look. Ideally, you’ll want to have finalized sketches of every single page before going any further, but you could do one chapter at a time, depending on your workflow. Here’s what that looks like:

At this stage, I’m mostly focusing on page layout, panel shapes, and speech bubble placement. It’s also a helpful tool to see where your double-page spreads can go (this is when two pages of a physical book are used to create a single, double-wide comic page).

And now comes the fun stuff: deciding what size your comic should be. I didn’t want to think about this at all, so I just grabbed this template from online:

And also this template for double-page spreads:

And these are the sizes I draw Control Freak at, with a resolution of 350 DPI (the minimum recommended resolution for printing is 300 DPI).

Thanks to these templates and the groundwork laid down in the last steps, I can now actually start making the comic! Here’s how I use the template - note that all of the speech bubbles are placed in the “live area”, where they won’t be cut off during printing.

And here’s the finished page:

Now repeat for as long as it takes to finish your comic!

I personally recommend picking a very manageable art style, as comics take ridiculously large amounts of time to make (I have learned Many Things about this from working on Control Freak), but you do you!

Hope this helps you make whatever comics your heart desires ^^

[matiiiih]

I finally started translating my comic to english??

It’s really stupid and my perfectionist ass, who has now been working on this same project (in form of starting from the beginning over and over again) for four years now, still isn’t quite ready to let it go but still, (and maybe that’s excatly why) here we go!

Basically it’s a neighbourhood drama comedy about mafia members, new mafia members and former mafia members who try to cope between underworld and normal life. You might recognize some characters already since I have posted art about them here before.

--

Former mafioso Rachel has been laying low during the last decade after her gang splitted up for more or less tragic reasons. Now she wants back the fame and glory of her past days. However, the comeback needs to be striking and that isn’t happening without a new and impressive crew. New partner in crime turns out to be a witch who has fled from her home country because of some very suspicious events. In return she wants to integrate into the new country and life. The past, though, isn’t as dealt with as one might think and it comes back to haunt each one when old wounds are opened. One the other side; a story about overcoming grief, finding your place in the world, community, (found) family and everyday life.

--

As I said, this project has been in my mind for some time now and it’s kinda crazy to think how many times I have been rewriting the script, redrawing pages and refining things. I think it’s because of my perfectionism towards my own art in general. Also, comics are really hard to make since they take so much time and work, it’s not that simple to go back to edit things and you have to have a long lasting motivation. But at the same time I’m kinda glad I did do all that thinking and redoing since the story and character motivations finally make sense. I have learned a lot about writing, drawing and my characters while making this forever project. Now I’m actually glad I didn’t go with my first idea since the current one is so much better. I think I’m finally ready (or as ready as I can be) to share my passion project with other people. I’m kinda nervous though since I have been keeping it to myself so long, but well, I’m probably going to do the pages anyway and they take time and effort, so I might as well let others see them too. 

I don’t have any too specific schedule in mind since this is a passion project and I want to keep it that way. I like to do something else (other art, illustrations, animatics…) every now and then, I’m just a student right now and art is primarily just a hobby for me. The schedule might clear up as we go but I guess I’ll inform about new pages here and on my insta anyway! At the moment the five first pages are up!

So finally the link (in english): 

https://tapas.io/series/Wannabe-Villains/info

In finnish/suomeksi (enemmän tehtynä koska syyt):

https://wannabevillains.tumblr.com/

You can also find the links (and my other platforms) from my pinned post on my tumblr page!

[maiji]

Process and wip images for A House That Holds Long Limbs (Part 3)

Previous process and wip documentation: Part 1 / Part 2 

Read the pages for part 3 here (full complete version will be linked from YYH North Bound master post)

In Parts 1 and 2 I went through the transitions between idea, script, thumbnails and final art in quite a bit of detail. This time I’ll share script and thumbnails and point out some of the biggest changes, and then talk about how I scan and clean the final artwork.

Script and thumbnails

Biggest changes:

Dialogue changes every-freaking-where. Changes in word choice, moving things around to make the dialogue flow better, rewriting to make things flow better up to the umpteenth hour (i.e., right when I’m inking). 

Page 24 “It is enough to know the letter has been delivered” - this thought has been transplanted onto the next page. I was also running out of space on each page for so many wordy words. Looking back now I’d probably like to move Hokushin’s “I can read it, not that she needs to know that” earlier in the sequence of panels, but it’s too late and whatever.

Page 25 split into two pages because 1) the dialogue started growing on the first of the 2 pages and I wanted to give more emphasis to the woman dropping her “tee hee I’m matchmaking” bomb and Hokushin’s “lol get me out of here” expression.

The last page with Raizen did not exist in the script or the thumbnails. I tacked it on at the last second because the previous change increased the page count to 9. I’m drawing 2 pages up on an 11x8.5 sheet of paper (so each page is about 5.5 x 8.5), so this meant I was left facing an empty page. I impulsively threw in a “meanwhile, Raizen’s shenanigans” for fun.

As an aside, this level of dialogue is what I was anticipating the hypothetical “let’s separate Hokushin and Raizen with some random NPC offering a job” scenario to involve (see Part 1 process and wip discussion). You can see why I was so eager to ditch that idea and find something simpler and more efficient.

I feel like "I was (too) careless!" is such a stock (shounen) manga phrase. Therefore I must work in "Seems like I underestimated [...whatever thing they underestimated]" and "Impossible!!" into upcoming parts of the story lol.

Inking

Part way through inking I actually ran out of ink in my new cartridge. I had started the comic with 0.3mm Muji black pen, and it ran out a while back. I switched to 0.4mm (because that’s all they had in stock at the time)... and then actually ran out of the ink part way through on these pages. @atorier lent me a 0.3mm refill so these pages mix both thicknesses in the art. I can’t really tell the difference though... can you?

Part 3 was super fun to illustrate because it’s 90% subtle facial expressions, one of my favourite things to draw. The downside is WAY TOO MANY WORDS BEING SQUEEZED IN EVERYWHERE. I’ve never been very good at managing my speech bubbles - drawing them, positioning them, and fitting words in them. I never give them the time needed for proper planning and I often write rather impatiently, as if I am jotting down a note, instead of carefully lettering each word. They’re simply very sloppy, which results in a lot of mistakes...

It used to be that when I made a mistake in the later stages of the art (mainly, inking) I’d cry and throw everything out because I’m a complete failure, this is all worthless, etc. Nowadays I’m like uhhh... #@^&^#$!!! Oh well. Depending on the mistake I still have moments of I’M A COMPLETE FAILURE, but then I just redo it on the side or add a note to myself to fix it on the computer for the final version. Here you can see a whole bunch of mistakes around lettering and placement of things.

And this is just to make it more legible. It’s still ugly lol. (That’s why I use a font for my webcomic...)

Scanning / editing

Long Limbs is drawn in black and white which makes it a hell of a lot easier to scan/clean/prep final art. I use an old Canoscan LIDE110. I’ve upgraded once or twice but always to another Canoscan (basically whatever the latest version of this series is). It’s a cheap workhorse and lots of other scanners use Canon’s scanning technology so it’s always suited my purposes very well.

For black and white lineart, I scan at 600 dpi black and white. These are my settings as they show up in the default scanner software:

For clarification, the only parts I really pay attention to/change is Color Mode (black and white) and output resoluton to 600 dpi. Most of the other stuff was already calculated or set.

Industry practice is generally 1200 dpi for black and white line art, with 600 being a “if your computer can’t handle it and is gonna blow up... this is sufficient”. I rarely bother going up to 1200 mainly because I don’t usually have applications where I need it for output (this comic is not intended for print, for instance. And even if I ever do someday print it for whatever reason, it’s not likely to be bigger than a small comic). Scanning in black and white mode also conveniently kills most of the pencil lines I still have left so that post-scan cleanup work is minimized to a degree.

Here’s a shot of the page that was scanned.

Oh god look at all the mistakes that need to be fixed hahaha.

On the computer, I crop the individual pages and save them separately. Then I blow up to 100% and start selecting/deleting unwanted dust/artifacts/dots etc. Sometimes I also just use the eraser for cleaning fine details, but select+delete is faster for large patches.

This is also the opportunity to make corrections. To be honest, there’s not much retouching on these pages because I am lazy and trying to get them out as quickly as possible, so it’s mostly getting rid of artifacts, a few stray lines from ink smearing if I smudged or erased before it was fully dry, cleaning the shapes of a few letters to make them more legible, deleting errors and pasting the fixes over where the errors used to be, and any really stupid mistakes I’ve made - like drawing the fixes to Hokushin’s hitatare in Part 2. For redrawing/adding new parts on the computer, since the art is in black and white mode at such a high dpi, almost any brush will work great and look indistinguishable from the scanned lines when scaled down.

I save a high res TIFF for my archives. Then I convert to greyscale (better for maintaining details when I resize, since black and white can drop things that aren’t 100% black or white), and resize to 72 dpi at 700 pixels wide. 72 dpi has long been the standard for on-screen viewing - nowadays screens can display higher resolutions (e.g., retina) but this looks fine to me so I’ve long stuck with good ol’ 72. I arbitrarily picked the 700 dpi width - it seemed a good balance of “not too small” and “looks big enough to let you see the art nicely” on Tumblr. Below are my settings to resize:

Again, the above I mostly only pay attention to width and resolution. All the other stuff is mostly default or autocalculated. All my pages are different heights, which I don’t really care about since I’m just posting them on tumblr and pixiv. Finally I save as JPG for posting. 

 Ta da!

[comicteaparty]

December 7th-December 13th, 2019 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from December 7th, 2019 to December 13th, 2019.  The chat focused on the following question:

If you could redo one part of your story, which part would it be and why?

Cap’n Lee (Flowerlark Studios)

I can and do redo parts of my story. I’m working on a redux of the first two chapters of my comic, Dark Wings: Eryl (https://www.flowerlarkstudios.com/art-archive/eryl-redux-archives/ - rated M) right now. I’m doing so for quite a few reasons, some of which are very personal and have to do with my own growth as a person, not just as a creator. It was also to update the writing, partly to update the art, and because I took a three year hiatus a long time ago which created a huge, jarring gap in not the just art and writing, but also the tone and direction of the comic. I also sometimes go back and adjust speech bubbles in old pages to close plot-holes or fix some badly-written dialogue. I feel that if there is any part of my story where redoing sections can improve the entire course of the comic and readers’ enjoyment of it, I will. And if I don’t, I run the risk of losing inspiration for the entire comic because I can’t figure out how to work with an older part of it. Rather than twist my plot into pretzels trying to explain something carelessly written a decade ago in current scenes or allowing plot-holes to open, I go back and fix the bad parts. Reduxes are often seen as taboo by a lot of comic creators. But if looking back genuinely helps me to keep going forward, then I will.(edited)

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

For Phantomarine (http://www.phantomarine.com/), it'd be less about rewriting existing things, and more about... adding back in the extra pages/detail/fun-stuff that I originally wrote, but had to cut out to meet a reasonable page count per chapter. With the number of hours a single page takes to paint, I really REALLY have to streamline things, or I'll never finish this damn project Good news is, I think it's helped the pacing in its own way. And I have lots of fluff and fun stuff coming down the line that I think are better suited to the story anyway. So... I guess... in a different world, I'd simplify the art style, so I could just write more? Yeah, that. Let's go with that.(edited)

AntiBunny

We all have things we'd like to redo, but if we kept rebooting we'd never make progress. That said in AntiBunny: The Gritty City Stories http://antibunny.net/ I'd probably have set it in the 1980's instead of present day. It's hard to write mysteries around google and cell phones, or to keep the superscience impressive. Grounding it in a known time period would have been easier.

Eightfish

@LadyLazuli (Phantomarine) I just read through your archive and ohmygod, wow! Your art is so beautiful. The colors! The backgrounds! Every page is like a painting the panels are so well put together. And I love the way you draw the seaghosts all together. I can't imaging how much time that took. And the worldbuilding is fantastic and creative, and the dialogue flows so well, and I'm so invested in your characters (when are we getting back to Phaedra??), and your villains are so fun. Cheth is so fun to see, and such a unique idea, I am so into it.

twothirty

i actually did redo the first half of chapter 1 (http://versecomic.com/) when i came back to it after 2-ish years. I opted for a much slower start to introduce readers to this world where things aren't perfect but people are getting by. Originally i had it start off in the midst of a catastrophe and i just wasn't feeling it. I always ruminate on the pacing of my story, i think the first book moves very fast, and there's some scenes i'd make a few pages longer to just get in some more dialogue...

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

@Eightfish Oh my goodness!! That’s so wonderful and so kind of you to say. It’s my only current story idea, so I’m putting all the effort in that I can muster. Thank you for checking it out! This is the last of the chapters that help flesh out the outside world - we’ll be seeing a lot more of Cheth and Phaedra very soon... for better or for worse. I can’t wait to get back to them and FINALLY tie all the threads together Thank you again!

seetherabbit

The only one that I would do a redo would the first story in Vulperra https://vulperra.com/comic/flash-gauntlet-1/ Apart from giving it a George Lucas (redrawing it with improved graphics aka art skill), I would also add in pages before and after the 10 pages thats out. What I would add is Flash Gauntlet (the main character) tell the tale of him fighting the demon in the story. There's one story that I did a redo on before it got published, which is this one. https://vulperra.com/comic/guardian-of-castle-bogo-1/ What I changed was the climax and the ending. The story is about a bunch of people in a castle that has only one guardian who protects the rest of the citizen from monsters and such. No one else wants to use weapons and the guardian is tired of his work and tries to throw it on Flash Gauntlet. The climax is that Flash Gauntlet convices the others to help the guardian out by making better defences around the castle. In the old version, the citizens learns to wield weapons instead. I didn't like the old version because I felt it was too preachy, and the ending gave me a bleh feeling. There's a couple of things in the story that's being published now, and one future one that I could change, but that's more minor things that I think I don't need to go back to. I'm more of a "let the mistakes be and leave them as a reminder to get gudd" kind of guy. Unless I hate it the story, like the Castle short

Capitania do Azar

Oh I have done so many edits over at https://www.sarilho.net/en/. They're mostly to text (for clarity) and minor edits here and there for continuity or correcting mistakes. Tho more recently I found out than I have the time I shouldn't let it reflect anything less than my best work, so in the latest chapter I've moved pages and panels around to make for a better story flow (even adding pages when I realized I would go over the initial number of pages I planned)

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Sometimes I think I should have started the story with Victoria's situation at home and her relationship to her mother, since that is pretty important for the plot. But to be fair...not showing this at the beginning created a little bit more intrigue and I guess I'm not far enough into the plot yet to really want to change anything of substance.

sssfrs

I would redo chapter 2 https://tapas.io/episode/1486719 to improve the art and change around some of the dialogue

Ooh there were also some details I forgot to include in the most recent chapter

Deo101

I think I would want to add some pages to slow my pacing down, and also spend a bit longer on backgrounds. I suppose in theory I could add pages in now, but I think I'd rather put that effort into moving forward!

snuffysam

In terms of art - a lot lol, the early art of Super Galaxy Knights http://sgkdr.thecomicseries.com/comics/ is pretty bad. But I'm almost finished redoing all the chapters that were drawn on paper & didn't have shading, so that won't be a problem for much longer. In terms of the writing and pacing and stuff, I'm mostly still good with my earlier work? The one thing I regret is the end of Book 1 Chapter 7 - the part where Cahe straight-up murders three guys. I feel like it doesn't make that much sense for his character, and doesn't even resolve the "we need a rounded out team" thing very well. An ideal redo would change Cahe's ability to make more sense for his character - say, he can put a shield on Pejiba that reflects all damage to her back at her attackers. But making a change like that would make it impossible for Mizuki to use that ability while fighting Zebugu, which would take away one of the major aspects of that fight. At the very least, I'd probably cut out the page where Cahe kills the tank driver :p