On making comics – AKA – why am I doing this to myself again?

Yes, I am making another comic. I know, after the last one didn’t take up six months of my life or anything. And that was 24 pages, this one is over 100. What am I doing to myself?

I had a think about this, and I reckon I’ve worked out why I find comics so attractive to make. Writing novels and short stories is great, I’ll never not write them, but comics and graphic novels give me much more latitude to express myself. I’ll freely admit I’m not the best writer, despite having grown up reading books. Comics and TV shows were much more influential on me as a child.

In my mind, creating a comic is like making a TV series or a film, with all the creative freedom you want and on 0.0000001% of the budget. You get to hire the actors, design the sets, do the cinematography and write the script at the same time. Each panel is the perfect shot, and you only need to ‘shoot’ it once. I also find that expressing myself visually is much easier than writing prose – I sometimes sigh at the task of describing a room, character or scene, when I know I could draw it exactly how I wanted it with much less effort (and enjoy it more).

While I am proud of Powerless: Some Kind of Hero, and enjoyed (most of) the process of making it, it was also a test. A test of the Manga Studio software, a test of my new Ugee graphics tablet, and a test for myself to see if I could actually create a full comic. And now I have the bug. I can see the possibilities comics allow. I have story ideas that could easily be films or TV series, but I don’t have the contacts, the reputation, the massive team of specialists or the hundreds of thousands of pounds (and more!) to make them. But, with a comic, I can make those same ideas come to life, almost as if I’d filmed them myself.

Ultimately, that’s why I’m doing it. The pure, creative freedom. That, and I don’t have to spend hours standing out in the cold, pissing rain to film just to capture a thirty second scene 🙂