How to Finish Your First Comic!
/Do you love comics? Do you want to make comics but struggle to finish them? You’re not alone!
This 21 page comic took me 1,127 days to finish. A little over 3 years! I had tried over and over again for almost a decade to finish a 20 plus page comic and I finally did it!
So what was different this time? I want to share with you the 4 biggest obstacles I had in completing my comic and what I did to overcome them so you can finish your first comic faster than I did!
Obstacle 1: Feeling Overwhelmed
Making comics can be a lot of work. When developing a project it's fun to build out the lore and world building. But before you know it the list of what you need to accomplish before you even start drawing your comic keeps growing longer and longer. Not to mention that the actual process of drawing comics is labor and time intensive. It's normal to feel overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done.
If you’re just starting out making comics, or trying to push yourself to finish that first longer comic, the first tip I have that helped me actually finish was: keep it simple.
Tip 1: Keep it Simple
Keeping it simple will mean different things for you and your project, but for me and this comic, I decided to team up with a writer friend of mine, Daniel Yen Tu.
With Daniel writing I only had to focus on the art. It also helped that what Daniel had written was very simple. 21 pages, 5 characters, mostly talking and almost entirely set in a single location.
Additionally, I know color isn’t one of my strengths. For my day job I work in television animation as a prop and character designer. In the TV pipeline I only design in black and white. It's the Color Designers’s job to color all the characters, props and effects. I don’t have much experience working with color, so we decided to keep it simple and have this comic be in black and white.
If you are feeling overwhelmed and struggling to finish your comic, take a step back and see how you can simplify it. If this is your first longer comic, I would not recommend tackling that 100+ page dream comic quite yet. Instead do a short, self contained comic set in the same world. Or a totally different short project.
For example, I recently finished reading Our Bones Dust, an excellent 4 issue mini series by long-time Mike Mignola collaborator, Ben Stenbeck. In an interview with Comics Beat he was asked, after over a decade of working on professional comics, why Our Bones Dust was the right book for his first solo series:
“It’s funny, I never set out to make this like my big debut or anything like that. I have a project that’s ‘my big thing’ I want to get to someday. This felt like smaller stakes, like an exercise in getting my own book done and out there before attempting something bigger.”
Here we have a professional comic artist who knows how to finish comics. And even he did a simple project before doing his “big thing.”
For you and your project, keeping it simple could mean different things. It could mean removing characters, making the style less detailed and time intensive to draw or offloading part of the process like writing, lettering or colors to someone else.
Just the process of making comics is a lot of work, do yourself a favor in the beginning and keep it simple.
Obstacle 2: Frustration
What I mean by frustration is that feeling you get when there is a perceived gap between your art and what you had envisioned the final to look like in your head.
For me that frustration would always come at the penciling stage. I love designing characters and doing thumbnails. But when it came time to actually draw those characters in the environments and poses from the thumbnails I would start to feel frustrated. And it's when that feeling of frustration compounded, I would begin to think “I’m not good enough yet” and quit.
If you feel that, know it isn't true. You are good enough right now to draw comics. It might not look like what you see in your head, but that does not mean it doesn’t have value.
My tip for overcoming frustration is: Don’t care.
Tip 2: Don’t Care
If you want your comic to be perfect it's never going to get done. For me this comic was a nothing project. Daniel and I started this project just to prove we could finish something. Because I didn’t write the story, if the art was terrible and the comic failed, that didn’t matter, at least I finished it.
Of course, in the process of working on the comic, I started to care. But by then I had my first success and was able to go back to that whenever I started to feel frustrated and wanted to quit. When I would finish a page and think “Well this looks horrible” I would look at the page I was proud of and say “but this other page is great. So I know it's possible,” and move along.
So I’m serious, just don’t care. If you work enough on your comic, you will eventually create something you are proud of. It might be a single page, or a single panel or a single drawing in a panel. Whatever it is, it will be a success and when the frustration becomes too much you can go back and focus on the success. But to get to that point, you need to not care.
Obstacle 3: Avoiding the Hard Things
In the beginning of working on my comic I would meet once a week with a mentor. They’re a professional artist who has finished a bunch of graphic novels.
It was good to have someone I was accountable to and to have weekly check-ins where I had to have something ready for review. But even though I was staying busy I was avoiding making progress. I was spinning my wheels. Technically working on my comic, but not making any real progress to having the finished comic materialize. I was avoiding doing the hard things, the parts I wasn’t looking forward to.
I realized I needed a serious deadline. One I couldn’t push back. Working in animation I have deadlines I have to submit designs by or it affects other people and can create a domino effect.
That means sometimes I have to submit designs even if I hate them. If a drawing is truly terrible the art director or show runner will note it and the design will come back to me. But most of the time the designs I hate the most get approved immediately.
Tip 3: Accountability to a Deadline
I needed an external deadline. One I couldn’t easily push back. A friend of mine told me about a small indie publisher, OneShot. Their second anthology was science fiction themed and submissions were open. Daniel and I prepared a pitch deck along with the pages we’d finished so far. And we were selected!
Just a note when submitting your comic for anthologies or to publishers. We liked OneShot because we retained the IP rights to our comic. Working with OneShot they only asked for exclusive distribution rights for 1 year. Don’t sell your IP rights!
Having an external deadline forces you to confront the parts of the comic making process that you might not enjoy, or are even dreading. At the end of the day, the comic has to be finished by that deadline. So it forces you not to be so precious and finish the task.
Obstacle 4: Procrastination
Oh boy this is the big one! Even after being accepted by the anthology and with a looming deadline it was hard to start working sometimes. I would come home after a long day, make dinner and all I would want to do would be to turn my brain off and play video games.
I would justify by telling myself “I can always work more hours tomorrow or on the weekend.” Which of course never happened.
In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, he talks about how willpower is a finite resource. It was a losing battle for me to make the decision to work or not every night. With my willpower spent, it was no surprise I would do the easy thing and watch a show or play games. So the biggest thing that helped me overcome this procrastination is my final tip.
But before we get to that final tip I want to tell you how you can read this comic I‘ve been talking about. The comic is called IN HEAVEN and it's about a kid who accidentally wakes up from cryosleep on a massive space freighter. He has spent his entire life in a simulation, and the next 30 minutes will be his first experience with the real world. The comic will be exclusively available in the Dream.exe comic anthology along with other incredible comics that explore the relationships between humans and machines. Click HERE to check out the Kickstarter campaign.
And now back to the final tip!
Tip 4: Schedule Working Time
In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work he says:
“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”
So the final tip is to schedule working time. For me that meant setting 8pm to 10pm Tuesday to Thursday to work. So even if I was tired and didn’t want to work, I would sit down at my desk and start working. Starting is the hardest part. But by setting those working hours you eliminate that initial hurdle and resistance to work. Once you get into the work state it is so much easier to keep working.
When setting your working time, be realistic and give yourself breaks. The last thing you want to do is burn out trying to sprint to the finish.
So that's it! Those are the 4 tips that helped me make the difference and actually finish my comic!
Keep it Simple
Don’t Care
Accountability to a Deadline
Schedule Working Time
I want more artists to experience the joy that comes from finishing a project. So hopefully you found some of these insights from my experience helpful.
So long, thank you and see you next time!
-Aaron Painter
Watch the video here: LINK
LINKS:
Our Bones Dust by Ben Stenbeck: https://amzn.to/3QlsmV6
Deep Work by Cal Newport: https://amzn.to/4jZolTI
Any Amazon links I post are affiliate links. I earn from qualifying purchases.