So why comics, anyway?

[Glambourine]

Someone asked me this while I was inking some strips this morning, and I realized that it is a really good question that doesn't get asked a lot.

So I'll ask it: why did you first get into comics, and what made you decide that you wanted to spend really long hours working on comics?

For me: I got "The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes" for Christmas when I was five, and I bought two Uncle Scrooge reprint comics with two stories each by Carl Barks at some point in the next year. That was pretty much it as far as getting into comics went.

The wanting to spend really long hours doing it came from a lunch I had with one of my father's friends at nine or ten--I told her that I wanted to draw comics when I grew up, and she said "Well, you should be a doctor instead and do comics in your spare time," and I thought "No, actually I *shouldn't* be a doctor." And there you go

What about all of you?

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

I like to draw and had some characters that just stood there on paper. So making comics was a good way to put them in a context and have them actually do something. I still remember the first time I gave them dialogue bubbles. It's like they came to life in a sense.

The LIfe and Times of Scrooge McDuck is pretty good, by the way.

[Rkolter]

Scrooge McDuck was always one of my favorites.

I ramble. A lot. So I wanted to learn how to condense an explanation.

And I always wanted to know how to draw.

The two just meshed.

[Perk_daddy]

When I was 10 I had a friend who introduced me to comic books. The next time I went to the grocery store with my mom I picked up Transformers #42 (this comic is to me like Scrooge's #1 dime is to him):


Comics became part of my blood. It's still my favorite storytelling medium. In junior high and high school, all I did was draw cartoons and give 'em to my friends. In college I did a regular strip for the paper, and I've also been doing editorial cartoons for the city newspapers where I've lived since 2002. When I stumbled on ComicGenesis, I hadda start Cooties.

I love the CG community, because I don't have any friends or family who give a crap about comics. You guys motivate me to keep at it, whether you know it or not.

I need a tissue...

[Black Sparrow]

I got into webcomics relatively recently (2003ish or so), although I'd always squirreled away my dad's old superhero comics. Upon discovering webcomics via VGCats, I had an "aha!" moment. I love to write and I love to draw. Why not do both at once?

And here I am, still at it.

[Elegant Gremlin]

there was a post on another forum about comics... so I made a quick one up and posted it (meant to be the only comic I'd ever make)... guy who owned the site hired me to make comics for the site, and I haven't stopped since (well, making comics in general... the deal with that guy only lasted about 2 months)

[TigerEye]

For me I'm getting into comics because I have a story I want to tell and I like the way comics look. I also really like working in ink and though a comic would be fun to do with my other artistic things.

[Col]

I think my parents got me a few comics to keep me entertained in the car for a trip, and then they got me the Calvin and Hobbes collection "Something Under the Bed is Drooling," which was the first book I actually took the time to read by myself instead of just stare at the pictures. Superhero comics sucked me in from there, and they're all I read now. I always enjoyed drawing the characters from comic books, so it was inevitable I'd start making a comic. Comic Genesis made it possible to actually have a site and put comics on it. Thanks Comic Genesis (then Keenspace)!

[Siabur]

I used to doodle all the time. Growing up we never had a whole lot of money, but art supplies, paper pencils, were always around. So that's where my imagination took me. Comic books weren't something I was into until GI Joe 24, and then my comics were basically myself in a similar world, which has evolved over 25 years. I was told once, by an influential adult, that I needed to have a job while practicing my comics and drawing. At 16 all I heard was quit drawing get a job. So I did. Doodled off and on, but it's been a struggle to get back into the daily habit of drawing anything. With computers it's easier to publish and with a number of comic comunities I hang around on there's more support!

[Dr Legostar]

i wish to entertain people, this is the easiest way for me to entertain the most people.

[Redtech]

Garfield!

Yes, I was a dab hand at drawing him back in the '80s. Why draw now? Well I think it's more along the lines of "why not?" I don't know anyone else who does it, gives me a new hobby worth doing and gets me to create something I can be proud of.

[Ida]

I've been loving comics for as long as I can remember, starting with Donald Duck and Asterix when I was in Kindergarten, but I didn't have any apiration to make them myself before I was about 13, which is when I first heard of manga. At that point (generic and awful and sailormoon-ripoff) story ideas just started to condense in my head, as they have been doing that ever since, and begged to be turned into something "real". That I chose to do comics instead of, say, writing prose fiction, is of course mainly because what inspired me to compose stories were just that, comics, but also because I have a very visual imagination; when I think of my characters, I think of them as 2D drawings with a distinctive look, and to me, at least THIS story without images would feel unfinished.

But mostly, it's just because comics are neat.

[RemusShepherd]

Was having a problem getting my written sci-fi stories sold professionally (getting paid at semi-pro rates is easy, but I wanted the big leagues). I had artistic talent. I had a story in mind that could not, no way, no how, ever be published. Thought I'd try comics, see how I liked them and see how successful I could be.

There was also sort of a bet involved.

[Legion]

I honestly have no idea.

I just decided one day that it would happen, and then I woke up here. And one of you people still has my original pair of pants. And my money. I don't know who. It was dark.

In all seriousness, I guess I've just always wanted to tell a story, and comics seemed the most fun way to do it.

((EDIT: Oh, and Asterix. Definitely Asterix. ))

[Allan_ecker]

How I got to making comics is pretty similar to the other stories I've seen here, although when I started I was probably accurately termed a Poseur.

But let us consider why one might stay here, in comics. We certainly don't get a lot of respect from the Arts and Entertainment establishment-- hell, if you're Neil Gaimen you still get asked why not do a "real" book this time. Us in webcomics, let alone Comic Genesis, are viewed with scorn and pity by even other comic artists.

Wanna know why I'm still here after all these years?

THIS IS THE FRONTIER, BABY.

People in webcomics are doing stuff that's never been DONE before. There are scroll comics that go on for tens of feet, comics in genre's that haven't been invented yet, comics that speak to tiny niches and comics that speak to everyone. The explosion, fuled in part by Comic Genesis, is allowing SO MUCH TALENT to be expressed that nobody can even keep track of it all.

Yes, there are wannabes, hacks, and borderline copyright infringers. There are punks, poseurs and the terminally clueless. But everyone, everyone, EVERYONE gets a voice, and everyone learns. Pretty soon poseurs start to spin harder for a laugh, hacks start digging deeper, and infringers hit the public domain up for scripts. Eventually you've got artists looking for truth, commentators looking for answers, and word-imagesmiths plumbing through Shakespeare and Da Vinci to find divine inspiration.

I'm watching a new-discovered medium fill up with the artists who will one day make it great. And in all that, I get to put in a few words of my own. How cool is that?

[Kemmy]

When I was a kid, my drawings all came out as cartoons. I have some old "comics" I drew when I was maybe ten, if that; comics were a genre towards which I gravitated naturally (though to be fair, I also write poetry and prose fiction and will likely do so until I die and/or the end of time...whichever happens first). I loved certain newspaper comic strips, and I used to sneak off to the library, sit on the floor, and read early collections of Superman comics. (My parents didn't encourage my comic mania. I was a girl, you see.) My sister and I also had huge armfuls of those tatty old Peanuts collections you can now get for twenty-five cents each at book sales. I read them over and over and over and over.

And I spent the first six or seven years of my grad school career filling about twelve little green sketch pads with a sprawling comic strip about three children and a not-quite-omniscient cartoonist. I did not do this for fame and glory. I did it to keep myself sane. That strip has died now, but I did use it to hone my comic-writing abilities and learn (I hope) the Secret of the Relatively Funny Punchline.

I.e., it's all fate. Fate, I say. And procrastination. Not necessarily in that order.

[OBS]

So I'll ask it: why did you first get into comics, and what made you decide that you wanted to spend really long hours working on comics?

A minnor car accident, 2 months of lamenting, and the jealousy of the success of my "influences" and their webcomics.

The really weird part is that I never had a strong interest in webcomics, or even traditional comics before I started; the webcomics I was reading when I started were only on Keenspot at the time (the method of which I discovered Keenspot, and subsequently KeenSpace, is a lenghty tale of an obscue video I watched in late 2002 and Google's image search).

Aside from the "Sunday comics" (which for some strange reason, we got them on Saturday) and what I saw in them (Davis' "bum eyes"), I've never bought or read a comic or graphic novel; I know nothing about the realm of traditional comics, who wrote what, what limited run comics were done durring the 80's, nothing. I actually feel that this has signifigantly limited my scope and abilities to create a webcomic because my desire to create on wasn't rooted in conventional comics.

I'm the fake webcartoonist.

As for spending long hours on it, well, I realized that I couldn't just fake it the whole way there. After 174 strips of crap, I developed a general story outline and imposed quality standards; THEN my free time started disappearing.

[Warren]

Peanuts books. We had a lot of them around when I was young.

Also Andy Capp, Family Circus (ugh) and Dennis The Menace.

I've been drawing off and on since I could swipe a ballpoint pen off my father's desk. Now I can cheaply reach tens of people.

Computers have made things even easier. I can experiment with different styles and genres (even ones I don't really like) in an effort to grow as an artist.

This is truly the WIld West. And I belong here.

Now to stop sounding so damn pretentious...

[RemusShepherd]

Wanna know why I'm still here after all these years?

THIS IS THE FRONTIER, BABY.

Quoted to serve as an echo chamber.

The publishing industry is ossified and dying, especially for genre stories. Drawing static artwork is a very rare occupation, unless you're doing it for an advertising firm. Art of the future will involve fusions of different media -- writing and moving pictures (movies), writing and interactivity (games), or writing and static art (comics). And of the new art fusions, comics have been least explored and have the most potential. Comics aren't locked into a 2 hour presentation at an aspect ratio of 4:3, nor do they depend on the user's hardware and hand-eye coordination. They really don't have many limits at all.

That's pretty exciting, and once you've stepped into the field of fusing artwork and writing together, that untapped potential is a good reason to stick with it.

[Allan_ecker]

I really think that when e-readers finally take off, people will be reading comics on the train, more than newspapers. I know I'm looking forward to the day I spend my morning comic-reading session already moving towards work.