#though i've forbidden myself from starting a second project

[thelonelyshore-if]

the thing they don't tell you about writing an IF is that suddenly every single story idea you have you end up being like..........damn this would make a cool IF.................

[abyssalzones]

What's your comic writing process like? I'm starting to get into making my own comics and I really admire your work!!! Any advice?

Ah, intrepid traveler, you've done well to journey to this secluded mountaintop spire, in search of the answers you seek. I indeed can provide such forbidden comicmancy knowledge... at the cost of your mortal soul...

coughs. anyway, I'm going to warn you immediately that what works for me does not work for everyone else, and in my experience the way I do things can prove very slow and discouraging for anyone who is more interested in the actual "drawing the damn comic" part of the process. I only do it this way because I enjoy weaving a narrative web that feels not only fully contained but re-readable, but my projects are often so long and my memory so shitty that I can't just keep all of it in my head! It would spill all over the place and make a really embarrassing mess of brain-juice. Not ideal.

but as for my own process, uhh... I suppose a comic would be fitting, right?

a little choppy but you get the idea.

as for turning words into art, I've been experimenting with figuring out the best way to do that for a little while now. Originally what I was doing for something like Ad Astra Per Aspera was to take my "script" and sketch it out on paper very loosely, before transposing that onto my canvas and working from there:

...but, I've found that can make it kind of difficult to space everything around on your standard page-size, and the thing I'm having the most problems with currently seems to be finding the sweet spot of panel-size proportions. So, I've taken to printing out standard thumbnail templates (you can just find these on google) and sketching very tiny panels in those, which seems to give me a slightly better sense of scale... (mild chapter 5 spoilers, sorry ad astra fans)

but I have yet to totally pull through on this, so who knows, maybe I'll try something else in the future!

As for advice, this is probably most applicable to me, but as a disabled artist I have a very hard time managing my workload without literally working myself into injury. I don't think I talked about this publicly but when I was working on that ten year anniversary comic I was literally drawing every single day for 3 solid months. Sometimes, in my case, I really can't bring myself to stop once I've latched onto an idea, and sometimes I find the most rewarding thing I can do with my time is to draw- but I seriously cannot overstate: Do not fucking do this.

You will fuck up your wrist, your back, your neck, your eyes, and probably your mental health. It's a well-known fact that mangaka have a lower life expectancy than the average japanese person due to the intense workload imposed on them by deadlines and personal expectations. Comics are a very demanding artform, and even though I'm not on any sort of mandated schedule there are times where I've toiled away at something when I likely should have been exercising or taking vision-breaks. Therefore the best advice I can give you is to chill the hell out.

Namely, find parts of the process you can be lazy about, and embrace the laziness! You don't like digitally sketching? Don't do it! Skip it, or maybe find a way to traditionally sketch things out in advance like I do. Hate lineart? Don't fucking do it. You really don't feel like wasting your time writing 72k words of comic scripts? ...then, don't be like me. skip that part. I'm a flawed human being and what works for me might not work for you.

The second most important piece of advice I could give is to read comics. Of all kinds. The reason for this is pretty self explanatory: In order to figure out your own comic-making style, you should first pick out bits and pieces from the artist's buffet to add to your plate. Manga, graphic novels, american comics, european comics, weird niche little webcomics, funny papers, anything and everything. This advice rings true of pretty much any art form, but I find it to be essential to honing comic-making skills because so many things you feel will just come intuitively often don't. and that's okay! nobody is born knowing how to leave space for speech bubbles or shape their panels in a way that imitates stretches of time. The best way to figure out stuff like this, in my experience, is to study the "masters", and then after becoming well accustomed to the basics, figure out what rules you want to bend or break to create your own style.

I consider myself to be in equal parts a writer and an artist, which lends itself well to making narrative comics, but maybe you're a bit more of an artist and want to focus on panel-by-panel visual storytelling. Or, conversely, maybe your talents lean closer towards writing, and the art itself is more of a secondary skill. Regardless of your unique blend of talents you can and should make a comic, you should just also be aware of your strengths and try to hone in on those- there will always be opportunities to build up skills you lack, but focusing on what you do best will always lead you in the right direction.

Anyway, that being said, here are some recommendations in no particular order:

Monster, Naoki Urasawa (!!)

Bone, Jeff Smith

Witch Hat Atelier, Kamome Shirahama

The first IDW run of Transformers comics (namely More Than Meets the Eye and Lost Light)

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (!!)

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll (really any Emily Carroll comics)

Kill Six Billion Demons (webcomic) (!!)

Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo

The Third Person, Emma Grove

Tintin, Hergé (can be super racist please be wary)

Dungeon Meshi, Ryoko Kui

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Cucumber Quest (webcomic)

Jellyfish Princess, Akiko Higashimura

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda (!!)

Note that I did not grow up with manga so I am seriously behind on a lot of extremely influential japanese comics such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, basically any of the original Shonen Jump comics, but they're widely considered building blocks of the genre so if you love the artform I think you should give them a try! Same goes for classic non-shonen manga genres like various Shoujo, Josei, Yuri, Gekiga, ETC.

same as above applies to a lot of classic DC and Marvel works, I unfortunately am just not a big fan of superhero comics... but I'm sure there's good stuff in there. a couple of my mutuals talk about booster gold and the blue beetle all the time so I'm assuming there has to be something worthwhile.

...and many, many, many more that I'm forgetting! I noticed as I made this list that, to my knowledge, hardly any of these are made by black or just non-japanese-mangaka BIPOC artists, which makes me sad about the gaps in my own comic collection. Therefore, anyone is welcome to add their own recommendations in the replies!

now go forth, and combine images with text!!!!!!!!!!!

[lil-melody-moon]

Wow, you really are a writer! That would be a cool game. You should totally at least turn that into a book. I should really get my writing going again, but I really have to get out of my writers' block first. What do you usually do to get through writers' block?

Also, have you ever completed a novel/large work before? What did you end up doing with it? What was it about, if you don't mind sharing?

I plan on writing a book about it - well, maybe three, this is a lot of material - but this idea still needs time to develop. Creating a world with magic and its own rules takes time and it's a difficult job to do - I don't wanna have a world that is simply created, I want it to be rooted as deep as possible. Before tackling that I would like to try with a shorter, much less complicated story though 💜

Writers' block is the worst, I'm so sorry for you *hugs* To be honest with you, I only had a writers' block once and that was at the end of junior high so... 2014-2015. I just stopped writing and let myself relax after trying to learn how to do it. Once I came back to it my narration started to flow and I somehow stuck to writing for so many years now, 12 actually. To come up with ideas or to deal with "what to do to make it to the next scene" problem I search for music that could fit in the moment - or it finds me by playing randomly and I create ideas "out of thin air".

I usually play one of my playlists on Spotify: "Oldies" or "Other cool oldies" and sometimes sit, write something or just write whatever floats to my head. Sometimes I gotta delete a bug chunk of text to make it better, but that's how it is.

I would say that yes, I've finished a novel/large work before. It's all fanfics, but I do have three projects completed. I've linked every work so if you're curious, go ahead and check them out! A fair warning for the last one, please, read the tags before diving in the story, I don't wanna traumatize anyone XD

First would be "Tales of Forbidden Love", written in 2016/2017. It's my first longer fic, written in English - there might be mistakes in the text, I was learning English by that time. It's a story reader-insert for a character from "Yu-Gi-Oh Arc V" series named Yuri. I remember having a lot of fun with it, even if it can sound depressing now. I was 18-19 years old back then, the years that everything was overly dramatic for me. Word count: 60,473

Second would be a much shorter fic written for "Five Nights at Freddy's" called "As Much Alive as You". I've written it in 2019 right after the FNAF VR came out. I was into animatronics at that time, Glitchtrap appeared and I remember I had that idea of putting a ghost girly in this game. It was connected to the unfinished fic by the name of "Atonement". It's also a reader-insert story. Word count: 8,331

Third would be a fic for "Tommy" the musical, named "His Sweet Candy". This is the largest fic I've written and I like to jokingly call it "a wet dream put in words" because what kicked the idea was me watching the musical and a few days after that suddenly thinking that I wanna be used and fucked by Uncle Ernie. Skip ahead a few months, add a huge help of my dearest friend, add encouragement from another bestie and her tiny idea of wanting to be shipped with Tommy and I've created a story where Tommy has a younger sister who is unwanted by her parents, but she has her Uncle Ernie and really, who would he be if he didn't pay attention to the tiny girl? He only didn't realize that the girl will genuinely love him... This is the fic written in 2024, I had tons of fun with it and it's the first fic where I've made an actual oc out of my self-insert. Didn't think it'll work this well! Word count: 113,492

[oh-my-damn]

OMG THIS IS SO CUTE

thank you so much @mrs-elsie-barnes for the tag ❤️

First Character You Wrote a Fanfiction About: Steve Rogers. My answer is basic and boring, because I didn't start writing fanfic until 2021 when I got bored during quarantine. I actually didn't know fanfic was a thing, or what it really was, when I started writing it - all I knew was that I was doing an MCU marathon and felt feral for Steve Rogers, so I decided to get it out of my system to make myself feel better. It turned into Electric.

Last Character/Current Fixation: Currently it's definitely Bucky Barnes. Bucky has me in a chokehold, currently. I've never written for solely Bucky before (he's in Electric because it's a throuple, but other than that I've never written for him) but I am now back to writing for The Devil Inside which is a project I've been working on for literal years. Thunderbolts Bucky (and especially the end credit scene) is doing a lot for me, though. It's fuelling me rn and I'm excited to finally write for him! Before that, it was Astarion from bg3 whom I still adoreee ❤️

Fic You Are Proudest Of(shamelessly self-promote yourself): Oof, this is a hard one. I'm definitely proud of Electric bc it was my first and I finished it (at 199 chapters). But I'm also very proud of The Stranger as well. Out of my tumblr fics, I think I'm most proud of Highways and Heatstrokes, primarily because I finished it but also because it was just so easy to write. I had the entire plot planned out from the beginning, which has never happened to me before or since. The idea came from one single scene in a movie about a truckdriver, and my mind just ran a mile a second from there. It was honestly such an incredible feeling, to be inspired and having it strike like lightning, in that way. I miss that.

Most Popular Fic: This is a hard one, because I have to divide it between Wattpad and Tumblr fics since it's difficult to track. For Wattpad, it's definitely Electric (currently at 1.5 Million reads) and The Stranger (currently at 939K reads) As for tumblr fics, for some inexplicable reason, my most popular fic turned out to be Ethereal, which was really just a self-indulgent crackfic I wrote for funsies and had in my drafts for MONTHS bc I thought it was just silly and fun and not serious at all. Who would've thought it would turn out to be my most popular one on here LMAO

Fic you wrote that you DISLIKE the Most: Hmm, this is a tricky one. I don't particularly dislike any of my fics persay, but I will say that I sometimes cringe when I re-read the first few chapters of both Electric and The Stranger. I can just tell my writing has improved a lot since I wrote those lol

Strangest Fic/People wonder where it came from/Why: Definitely Guilty Pleasures. It's very different from anything else I've ever written, and it was inspired by a very particular brand of porn that I enjoy (no I won't tell you which bc it's too embarrassing). So yeah. Definitely that one.

Strangest Thing You've Ever Learned For a Fic: Had to learn a lot about trucks and truckstops in America when I wrote Highways and Heatstrokes. Also had to research the MCU extensively (watching the movies over, and over, and OVER again) for Electric.

Favorite AU Type to Write: Hmm, I haven't actually written any of the same AU's before. I've done singular AU's, like Professor x Student for Diplomatic Negotiations, Truckdriver for Highways and Heatstrokes, and Boss x Employee for Sweet Heartache . I've also done step-cest (A Brothers Promise) and College AU (Philosophy 101) but I am just now realizing I don't actually have one I've done more than once?? Which is odd. I'll say that a fave of mine to READ though is enemies to lovers or anything that's inappropriate/forbidden (like boss/employee, student/teacher) etc but my ALL TIME FAVE is def A/B/O!!

Favorite Trope/Type of thing to Write: LMAO I actually HATE this trope myself but one that I have a tendency to do unconsciously is the miscommunication trope and/or the third/mid act breakup (I know, I'm sorry). I don't even do it on purpose but sometimes I get in a mood to break them up but I also write my men very soft for the most part, so this is the only way for me to do it lol I guess I'm a bad writer for that 😭

no pressure tags ❤️ @navybrat817 @georgiapeach30513 @ozarkthedog @writing-for-marvel

First, Best, Worst Fanfic Tag Game

This is coming from a different game I was tagged in about what fictional men make you feral. While going through them I realized I have a lot of fics that I've never talked about and I can't be the only one. Everyone has first fics, best, proudest, saddest, etc.

Let the chaos commence:

First Character You Wrote a Fanfiction About: Gaara from Naruto. Boy needed a hug. Murderous psycho but first thoughts were: That boy needs a hug and that's all he really wants.

Last Character/Current Fixation: Bucky Barnes. I don't think I need to explain this one.

Fic You Are Proudest Of (shamelessly self-promote yourself): Howling Witch. Not my most popular at all but I'm proud of it because I actually like how it's coming together stylistically. I actually feel like I'm doing something right with how it's developing. Not all the time, but some things. It's 3rd POV, named FMC, but I'm happy about it.

Most Popular Fic: Care. Period care fic with Bucky because I was in pain that day and wanted some care myself. Self-indulgent but it made me feel better and I hope it made others feel better, too.

Fic you wrote that you DISLIKE the Most: I know it's a hard one, and if there isn't one don't answer it. Personally I'm happy with what I have out right now. In the past, that hasn't always been true and I've had fics that I just didn't like when I went back to them. I had one where it was a Kili x OC fic and I just didn't like how the OC was going so I scrapped it.

Strangest Fic/People wonder where it came from/Why: I wrote several fics that were a LOTR/Hobbit crossover with Skyrim where the dragons were shapeshifting people and I made up an entire culture for them.

Strangest Thing You've Ever Learned For a Fic: Because of the last answer I became semi-fluent in Skyrim Draconic. Not Shouts. I mean conversational.

Favorite AU Type to Write: Vampires (even if they're bad in my current fic, I still have a thing for them) and Wolves.

Favorite Trope/Type of thing to Write: When the characters know they like each other and want each other but they aren't intimate or able to be together immediately for whatever reason. They may be flirty and kissy with each other, they may even have sex, but it takes them a while to get to actual intimacy. Don't know what to call it...Slowburn Express? I love the first flush of romance and writing that but I like writing what happens beyond that and the journey from that first butterfly sucker punch to being a truly, deep, and intimate relationship between two people.

That's it for now. Feel free to add some extra questions if you want.

Tagged list: @societyfolklore @mrs-elsie-barnes @sjsmith56