Comic writing is a lot tougher than I thought it would be.
I had no idea that writing a comic would be as hard as it is.
You think it’d be easy. I mean, if you’re a funny person, then in theory you’d have jokes all day to tell. This rarely happens, however. It’s not enough to be funny, you have to be able to write as well. That’s something you have to do over and over again to get better at it. After awhile, you begin to notice how often you refer back to certain setups or jokes, and once you realize that, you’ll begin to become insecure about your writing. In a sense, that’s good, since it makes you re-evaluate your writing and pushes you to become better.
One thing you have to watch out for, however, is moving too far out of your comfort zone and never going back. It’s never good to shut yourself out of certain writing conventions, so long as you know when a certain convention is to be followed and when it’s not appropriate.
This comic took us about 4 hours to write. We threw out script after script until we got the above. Our general rule is that if we don’t laugh our asses off at the strip, it’s not worthy of publishing. This leads to some stuff being thrown in a bank for later use, which is great, since there are nuggets of goodness we come up with that just don’t flow very well for a given story.
Writing this comic really showed me how much I didn’t know about the creative process, and makes me wonder how people do a comic by themselves. It’s a lot of work to build and maintain a website, write and draw the comic, and then (eventually), making money off of your work, and I don’t know how you’d do it by yourself. It makes me look at artists and writers of comics with a new respect.
