Tips For Starting a Webcomic
Welcome to the first blog post of the year! Youtube and blog posts may not be monthly for the time being- lots of life stuff is happening! At the same time, I’m dedicating the next few months to finish my webcomic, Dear Samar. I’ve been making this comic since 2021, and I’ve learned many tips and tricks while making it. In this blog post, I’ll recommend some resources that have been useful to me, as well as the entire script from the video. Enjoy!~
Resources:
Writing
Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field
Movie scripts are surprisingly similar to comic scripts! After my slap dashed attempt of making a script, I decided to take a screenwriting class in college and it has helped immensely. This was our textbook, alongside reading actual scripts (in this case, for the moving Juno).
Drawing
Understanding Comics, and Making Comics by Scott McCloud
These were my holy grail as a kid, and still to this day I reference them a lot. The textbook for my sequential narrative class was Understanding Comics. Start with Understanding Comics, then Making Comics. That’ll help you understand the structures and rules of comics.
Draw Stronger: Self Care for Cartoonists and Visual Artists by Kriota Willberg
I developed carpal tunnel issues in college. I found this resource after an artist I admired recommended it. At minimum, every thirty minutes, take a five minute break and stretch stretch stretch!
Visual Inspiration and References
Pinterest has always been my go to for reference images. You do have to be careful about copyright issues, so most of the time I try to make my own references photos using myself, handmade or real props, and anatomical dolls.
Comic Anthologies
I think comic and art anthologies are great when you don’t know what style of art you want to make! There’s a huge spectrum of art styles in anthologies. They’re always a visual treat. You can find many anthologies at your local library or indie bookstore. One that I grabbed of my shelf as an example is Heartwood: Nonbinary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy.
Inspiration for Me and Dear Samar
I’ve loved reading graphic novels ever since I was a little kid. And truly, what inspired me to make comics in the first place was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I checked out that book so many times when I was younger and I always was in awe of it.
What cemented my love is, if you haven’t already heard me blab about it in my other videos, is Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. I also really admired Mari Costa’s early work, specifically Peritale and Life of Melody. I love her style and colors, as well as her character dynamics.
For Dear Samar, there were two comics I took inspiration from. What inspired me to make a sapphic love story in the first place is the Kase-san series by Hiromi Takashima. I was absolutely obsessed with this series when I was a middle and high schooler. For me now, I don’t think the series deserves that level of obsession haha, but I still think they’re cute!
The color scheme of my comic is directly inspired by Blue Delliquanti’s O Human Star series. Delliquanti uses multiple monochromatic color pallettes to describe different times or perspectives. My comic talks about the past a lot, so I needed a visual language to help describe shifting times. While Kase-san may not have my current love, O Human Star still deserves all my love. I think a lot about the ending of that comic!
Script
Hello! If you don’t know me, my name is Caitlyn and I’m a midwest artist who loves to read! Last month I took a break from making videos, and it was very much needed. I was able to rest, and work on making pages for my webcomic, which relates to this month’s video!
I’m currently wrapping up my first longform webcomic called “Dear Samar”. It’s a teen rated romance/drama comic about a young widower who meets an artist and they develop a relationship. However, each person has their own relationship baggages they must overcome before they can develop a much deeper relationship. The story talks about grief and loss, and the complexities of love and relationships, specifically how relationships change as each person grows and evolves in their lives.
I thought I would finish it up last year, but now its shaping up to end in mid to late spring. As I’m recording this, I’ve made 234 pages of a continuous story since 2021! That’s a lot! It’s very hard, but also very fulfilling, so in this video I wanted to share some advice on how you can start making a webcomic. These are just general tips on if you are considering starting to make comics. I’m not going to talk any specifics like your pages should be in this format on this website, or here some data on when to post your comic to get the most traffic because bleh that’s just not me! Here’s the first tip:
Make comics for yourself, not others
My first piece of advice is to simply have fun! Whether you want to make a webcomic as a hobby, or to add onto your illustration career, you can’t forget to have fun with it. I don’t mean to sound discouraging, but there’s a lot of elements to comic making that are simply not fun. It’s incredibly repetitive, time consuming, and just simply the “end” of a project seems so far away and daunting.
Making comics is quite different than making single illustrations. I’ve loved the medium of comics for a very, very long time. I love the combination of telling stories with the element of art - I just think it’s an incredibly moving thing to hold and to read and to live in those stories! I always remind myself of that when I’m working on my comic projects.
If you’ve never made a comic before, it can definitely be a vulnerable process. Not just comics specifically, just whenever you are building up a new skill. So again, start by making comics for yourself. When you feel confident on what you’re making, then share it with people you trust, then share it wider online if you want.
If your goal is to make a comic that’s widely popular online, well that’s probably not going to happen! After a quick Google search, it’s estimated that there’s 55 million comics posted on Webtoon alone. Popularity is just a small drop in a huge bucket of water. Don’t be afraid to make a comic that’s niche and incredible to you alone. Others will come and read it and enjoy its authenticity.
Start Small
I got this tip of starting small back in high school, before I started art school. One of my teachers in high school liked reading and making comics, and they told me that if I want to make comics for a living, I needed to practice by starting with bite sized comics. By starting small, it will then build the skills for making something larger.
How small are we talking, and how many should you do before a big one? Well there’s no answer for that. I got a lot of my training in my sequential narrative classes in college. We always started the semester by making a zine. I think zines are a great way to start. All you need is a tabloid sized piece of paper and a pencil.
Can you tell a complete story in 8 pages? How about just 3 panels? Can you tell a story without any words? How about in color? Along with starting small, research other comics and read, read, read. You can learn so much from what’s already out there in the world.
Find your own working style
Starting small is also great for discovering your preferred medium to work in, art styles, and if you want to work with others. Don’t be afraid to experiment! Your process of how you make comics can change as your skills develop. For example, I started “Dear Samar” by inking traditionally, scanning it, and then shading digitally in painttool SAI with a small plug in drawing tablet. Honestly, I thought I would never switch over to working solely digitally with my comics, up until Covid hit and I needed an easier way to turn in my sequential narrative homework.
I now work in procreate on my ipad, and most of my work now is all digital. But going back to developing skills- I chose to draw Dear Samar in monochrome because I was too scared to color it. It wasn’t until college that I discovered that I’m actually pretty decent at picking color schemes, and I really enjoy working in color. Now as I’m finishing up my first webcomic, I now know that my next comic project is going to be in color because I want to continue experimenting and develop my skills.
Comic making is an incredible medium for collaboration in the art world in my opinion. Let’s say you are not as strong as a writer. Bam! Ask a buddy who likes to write to see if they want to work together on a comic. It also helps reduce the workload to work with someone. But for me personally, I like having hands on all sides of the process of making comics (aka I’m very anal about the work I make lol). And like, I’ve always preferred working alone. You may want to work alone too, which is great! You just have to have two sets of skills to continuously build: writing and drawing.
There’s so much more to do before you start making the actual comic.
This is one area I discovered personally while making Dear Samar. I started out with some sketches of some characters, and a rough outline with dialogue of the entire story, and then I just started. I don’t recommend this to anyone. Like the whole reason I thought I was going to finish my comic last year is because my script is formatted so badly that it’s not marked at all what events happen on one page versus another. The adhd side of my brain that has issues judging the length of projects was like, ‘yeah I can totally get it done. It’s only, like, 30 pages to do.’ When it was more like a hundred. Yeah! I can’t do that again on my next project.
So basically what I’m saying is start with a very very good gameplan. You should know the art style, coloring style, locations, characters, worldbuilding, fonts even - just everything before you start penciling the first page. For fantasy and sci fi, you definitely need to make sure your worldbuilding is sound. Your readers are smart, and you can’t half ass a reason why the world is like that in your story.
All that being said - this will sound contradictory, but don’t be afraid to make slight changes while you’re making your pages. There’s definitely been times where I rewrote an upcoming scene or changed a location because it just wasn’t working. However, if you’re making a big change, then start over with the gameplan, and start the comic from scratch again.
Specifically with your script, I think it’s good to have plot “landing” points, rather than it being a one to one script thumbnail comparison. When I was making the thumbnails for my comic, sometimes I discovered I had to make a change to fit the art. Text, or script, is one format. Art, or thumbnails, is another format. Comics is the combination of the two. Sometimes what you wrote in your script just doesn’t translate directly to the art. How do you recognize when that happens? Well, when I was making the script for this video, I was thinking it over, and I think it purely comes from skill and practice. There’s no easy answer other than make a bunch of comics and learn from them.
Be good with taking a critique (and learn when to accept it and when not to accept it)
I learned how to develop a thick skin with critiques in art school. I was constantly getting advice and suggestions from others on my pieces, and had many of the classic ‘stand in front of your work while the professor talks shit about it’ moments lol. There are a few things I learned from this process. The first is that art is always personal, for better and for worse. Again, you should make art for yourself. Talk about the things you want to talk about. But when others are perceiving your work, the viewing of art is also personal to them and their experience and what they consider as “good art”. But spoiler alert, there is no such thing as good or bad art. Its just art!
When someone is commenting on your work, there is a difference between “I hate the backgrounds” versus “The perspective on this building can be improved”. One isn’t constructive, and the other is.
Ultimately you are in charge of your own work. You know what you want from it. Be willing to take constructive feedback from others because most of the time it will improve your work. But don’t be afraid to dismiss feedback if it isn’t constructive, or if it goes against your vision. For example, in one of my drawing classes, I drew this angelic figure. It was a free theme assignment, and I wanted to talk about sin or some shit like that lol. If you can tell, it’s not my favorite work, but I like it because I learned from it. One of the critiques my professor had was that the drawing could be improved if I added shading to the wings. On a technical level, yes that would have improved the drawing. However, I disagreed with my professor because it went against my vision of the wings being ‘pure light’. So I recognized the perspective my professor gave, but I didn’t apply it because it went against my vision.
With another project, it was a two groups character design. With it, I had to make two vehicles that fit those groups. At the critique, my professor said it was technically fine drawings, but they were boring. And it wasn’t until he said that, that I realized he was right and it was boring! I wrote that feedback down, and now I have some good advice on how it could become better.
Know When To Say You Are Finished
This is still the best advice I’ve gotten in art - for me specifically. My anxiety comes from perfectionism. I’d get frustrated with my art in high school because I’d want to keep working on a project until it was “perfect”. But perfect never arrives. My teacher said there’s alway more you can improve on in a project, but at some point you have to say you’re done and acknowledge that your work is a record of your current skills.
In college, my professor commended a past student of his for stopping and restarting the same comic project over and over to make it better, and I highly disagree with him. It’s not healthy to do that! There’s so many things I could change about my comic if I just started over, but I’m not going to do that. I have so many more stories to write. Each project will be a progression of skills getting better and better. I just have to keep trying and keep making them.
And finally, for the love of God, do try and finish what you started if you post your comic online. This goes back to starting with a bunch of smaller comic projects. If you read comics online, or even fanfiction, you’ve probably come across many projects you’ve enjoyed and lamented that it’s unfinished and updated like two years ago. I think the main issue of this specifically is that people start posting their first comic online, it’s their very first comic ever, and then they don’t realize how long it takes to make an actual finished comic. Their first project is way, way too big for them.
But sidebar, if your current comic project is making you unhappy, obviously that’s not the goal of art and you should stop. Think of you first. Start small, and see if you like making comics, then try bigger and bigger projects.
Summary and Conclusion
Alright, let’s summarize what my tips are!
Make art for yourself, then share with others. Make the comics you want to see in the world.
Start small. Practice by making a bunch of small comics to see if you like working in that format.
Learn what’s the best way for you to make comics. Everyone’s different, and collaborate if you want to!
There’s so much more to do before you start making the actual comic. My God, there’s so much more work to do…
Be good with taking a critique (and learn when to accept and not accept it). This just comes with practice. Art is very personal and its a very vulnerable process when you share it online, so take some time for yourself when you’re learning to take a critique.
Perfectionism is a false ideal. Keep going, and keep experimenting. Finishing projects helps with developing your skills. Comic making is a long and taxing format - so keep in mind your mental health when making them.
Thanks for watching this video! What tips do you have for making comics? If you’re interested in reading my comic, it’s called Dear Samar on Webtoon! I’ll be finishing it soon. The link to that will be in the description, and if you want early pages, check out my Patreon. Hope to see ya next time~! Bye!
