If you have been thinking about making a comic for yourself, allow me to give you a bit of advice.

JUST DO IT!

This message is for anyone at any level of skill but especially to those like me, that tend to second and third guess decisions especially when it comes to dreams and aspirations. Don’t let your mind override your heart in this instance, you have a story to share whether it’s serious or just meant to entertain, let it out.

With that said, there is one thing you should allow yourself to pause for consideration for, this issue is important and should not be set aside if you’re serious about taking the steps necessary to becoming a published comic creator.

Will I be able to dedicate myself to doing this right?

This is a red pill, blue pill sort of question.

The red pill leads to hours of study, lots of stops and starts and a quality product.

The blue pill leads to an on-the-fly sort of experience that hops, skips and jumps to different things at different times and may or may not lead to a quality product.

Both pills lead to something that may be fun, it’s all about how you’d like to spend your development time.

In this series I will break down the elements of the red pill scenario so that you can see in some sort of order how you could be going about building your comic, the blue pill scenario has the same elements, it just runs on the chaos rule: there are no rules.

In some instances these elements can be broken down further; I will try to do that when time permits.

For now, these are the topics I plan on touching over the next few weeks.

• Story
• Tools – Get Organized & Be Productive
• World Building 1 Concepts, Reality & Scope
• Audience
• Characters
• Style pt. 1 – Drawing Them In.
• World Building 2 Location, Location, Location
• Collaboration – Pros & Contracts
• Format – How You Want To Share It
• Style pt. 2 – A Panel Discussion
• Protect What’s Yours
• The Fine Print – Self Publishing
• Promo 1 It’s Ok To Be A Tease
• Promo 2 The Saturation Game
• Promo 3 Outside of the box

In the meantime, start thinking about the sorts of things you want in your comic, write down notes as you get your ideas and remember the only stupid ideas are the ones you didn’t give a chance to.