So where do you get your inspiration?

[Blackaby]

You know, where did your webcomic come from? How did it start? Did someone put the idea into your head or did it come right out of the blue?

Forgive my dippy questions, but I love reading other people write about their comics.

[Mr. Caravaggio]

I don't know if my reply is worth anything since keenspace ate my account just days after it's birth and I have no way of showing anything, but...

It's strange, I find most plot ideas and story concepts come when I'm reading the news. I'll read a story about how japanese scientists are developing artificial skin that can sense not only heat and pressure, but light, and so I'll go to my science fiction story and see if I can plug someone with light sensing skin into the later plot. Another example: I was sitting around one night and realized that I didn't really know anything about schizophrenics, so I looked up a bunch of info and started reading it and with each problem and trait that was outlined for me I started writing a scenerio for it. Many text books just go over the facts, it may be a kind of cheating, but it's really pretty easy to just sit and try to imagine how those facts transmute into emotions upon hitting the real world.

Of course there's so many stories about the war right now that I've also been gathering info for a war comic I'll probably never draw, but it's just become such a habit to archive things like that now.

[Dutch!]

Old story, but the question was asked...a friend told me we were going to make a webcomic and I was going to draw it. I drew up a picture of a kid from the primary school musical I was writing and away it went. Both are now realities.

As for inspiration...I spend up to seven hours a day, five days a week, with kids. Need I say more?

[Cope]

The sources of inspiration were and are far too numerous for me to give even a halfway accurate answer. The concept of my comic was conceived four years ago, and it's changed so much in that time that I'm not even sure if I can refer to it as a continuous project (it started out as a furry comic, and the only constant has been explosions, shooting and super soldiers in a contemporary quasi-real world setting).

Ultimately, I'll just say it started off in my mind as a minor flight of fancy created merely to amuse myself. A brain fart, basically. Almost every story and character I create begins that way, because, well...it's fun.

Of course, then I make the mistake of trying to turn this thought process into something physical and realise how utterly stupid it is.

[Joel Fagin]

Long story.

I used to write fan fiction for a game called Phantasy Star - it was good practice for a supportive and critical audience. A friend of mine wrote a series of unrelated mysteries aournd a Hunter character named Alys from Phantasy Star 4. They were very good indeed, and I was inspired to write a similar series about a similar style of independant woman. I chose Shir Gold who was a theif from Phantasy Star 2 and a seriously underdeveloped character I could have some fun with. The stories I wrote were called "Against the Wind", "Before the Wind", "Change in the Wind", "Chasing the Wind" and "Storm on the Wind" and were a big hit, especially for this other writer who edited them for me and got a bound copy for his trouble.

And then it occurred to me that, really, I had developed the world and the character so far beyond what the game had that if I simply changed the names, it would be unrecognisable as fan fiction and a wholly original work.

"Shir Gold" became "Cher Desilva" (now an assumed name) and I sketched a plot for a prologue called "Like the Wind" to fill out her story a little more.

- Joel Fagin

[Jackhass]

I've been drawing and doing little comics for years...since I was a kid. Once I discovered there was free hosting available for webcomics, there's was no question about it...I was gonna' make one.

I create and think up characters like crazy...it's my favourite thing to do. I have pages filled with hundreds of different little characters I've dreamed up.

A lot of these happen to be animals...so I decided to simply put a bunch of these characters together into a single comic, tying it together by having them all live in the same Zoo supposedly.

A lot of these characters originally showed up in my sketchbook some time ago...I just took them and assigned personalities and situations to them. A lot of the characters represent facets of my own personality, others are simply based around a concept I thought was funny, and some are based on friends and family members.

[Andrew Hickey]

In my case I was reading some of the notes in Dave Sim & Gerhard's Latter Days collection about what Sim planned to do after Cerebus finally finished, and about photorealistic art and using photo-reference. I started thinking how Sim could do a really, *really* good non-fiction comic, and then thought about how few of those there are.
I also thought about some similarities between Cerebus and the Beach Boys/Brian Wilson album Smile, and that led me to think that Smile would be an interesting subject for a comic.
At the moment most of what I do is photorealistic stuff using a lot of photo reference, but I'm planning to explore more comic art techniques over the next few pages...

[Eunice P]

Because I read too many sucky comics and watched too much boring cartoons during the 80's that I swear it to the world if the world cannot offer good entertainment for me, then I shall create something that will definitely entertain myself!

Well, it kinda worked. And I didn't expect I would actually gain some fanatical fans online.

[Dburkhead]

I grew up on superhero comics. When I was a kid I wanted to be a superhero and, quite frankly, a part of me never outgrew that. Most of me got "respectable" and 'practical" but there's still a part of me inside that wants to kick bad-guy butt.

Add to the mix an interview I saw some years ago by Mark Hamill. In that interview he was talking about a comic mini-series that he was writing titled "The Black Pearl." One of the things he said was that the comic showed why the "costumed crimefighter" concept does not work in the "real world." The problem with that, as I saw it, was that the only thing you can "prove" or "demonstrate" with fiction is what assumptions you start with. If you start from the assumption that Costumed Crimfighters don't work, of course your fiction will demonstrate it.

That was the genesis of my own idea--take a very close analog to the real world--take something close to the traditional "superhero" concept and try to make it work in a fictional world as close to reality as I can manage. That means no super powers, no "high tech" gadgets (a la Batman), no single individuals who is not only a World Class athlete in several, mutually contradictory, disciplines, but also a top level scientist in multiple fields (also a la Batman), just someone with the kind of abilities that a realisic person could acheive with sufficient motivation.

The story simmered in the back of my mind for years. Part of the reason it just simmered was that I didn't see any real market for the story--I didn't think it was saleable either as prose fiction or as a professional comic. However, in recent years I discovered webcomics and it eventually dawned on my that I could do one myself, telling the tale that was begging to be told in my mind.

And so was born Cold Servings.

[Princess]

I grew up in a house full of comics, I learnt to read on garfield .

At some point aquired some of my grandad's collection, which included playboy comic anthologies (including the Gahan Wilson) and some risque comics about a sexy french gamine (I think it was called Clemintine Cheree?) Which I used to always sneak-read ( though they are pretty tame by todays standards.) There was also a few of Robert Searle's books (Belles of st Trinians) which were awesome.

My baby sister incouraged me to start a webcomic.

I had been drawing pictures of my characters for a few years, but I never added speech or multiple panels until a few months ago. I graduated so I also finally had the time to draw a comic.

I obsess over my characters- They are like my babies most of them are very vaguely based on/composites of historical figures. I keep research folders of uniforms, clothing, interiors and objects. I have drawn up family trees and insignia guides. (lol not that it shows yet).

[RemusShepherd]

This particular comic and story comes from the bilious fires of rage inside me.

[CaptainClaude]

Reckless Youth was originally a superhero comic book thing which had basically the same cast, but we were all shoddy superheroes. I was playing around with the idea of a savior character and eventually, I just gave up on the whole thing.
That was about when I discovered Sluggy Freelance, and RY turned into a strip thing, Claude's evil clone double became a midget who made illegal porn and Joey's genius superhero character became a bumbling evil scientist.

We are WAY better off now.

Inspiration now comes mainly from jokes in conversations which I'll expand and now the plot has started to take off, it's kind of running things on its own...

[Soap Committee]

My high school Marine Science teacher spent a whole segment on Polynesian mythology, which was so fascinating that I wanted to make a whole comic with a rather different take on it. For art, I'd only read Sailor Moon and Ayashi no Ceres at that point, so I had a whole motherload of Watase as an influence.

[Jim North]

Taken straight from the RotD FAQ:

Q: How/Where/When did you come up with the idea for RotD?

A: I used to work as an usher for a live theater show that didn't draw very large crowds, so I spent most of my time sitting in the back row, doodling in my sketch pad. At the time, I was relatively new to the concept of webcomics, so amongst other things, I would fill my time back there by entertaining the notion of starting my own comic. One day back in late 2001, I scrawled the words "Role of the Die" across the top of one of my sheets of paper and sketched the first picture ever of Jim North. It was rather easy to do, on the whole, since Jim looked like me, and I'd been drawing myself for many many years before this. Then came Kat, then Rabid, Jammer, Dave, and finally Mouse.

The characters themselves were based partially on friends of mine, but the rest of where the idea came from . . . y'got me. It just sorta all tumbled together in my brain all within those first few moments. Of course, even though the idea's conception was almost magically instantaneous (like most ideas of this type are), I had to spend a great deal of time hammering out the details. The versions of the characters that first popped onto the 'net two years later had at least as many differences from the originals as they had similarities. Except perhaps for Jim . . . having based him upon myself, I pretty much knew his character personality and design from top to bottom from the very start.

Q: What made you decide to make a webcomic in the first place?

A: It's a cheap, common answer, but it's still true . . . I was bored.

Q: Surely boredom isn't enough to keep a webcomic going, though, is it? They're a lot of work, after all.

A: Don't I know it! But yes, quite right . . . boredom simply isn't enough. It wasn't until a year after RotD's original conception that I actually started thinking seriously about turning it into something real, and by that time my reasons for making it had changed completely. I've always had a little bit of talent for the visual arts, but it wasn't something I'd tried to tap into seriously at that time. My efforts had run more towards the written word . . . short stories and the like. Still, I wanted to expand my efforts and my horizons, so I started up the comic in earnest so I would have a constant excuse to work on refining my ability to draw.

Q: Where do all your ideas come from?

A: If I knew that, I'd send a drilling team to that spot, dig that sucker dry, and live off the proceeds. As it is, I generally rely on random inspiration combined with actual experiences at the gaming table.

[Cortland]

I'm a graphic designer, and I spent about two years working at a dingy little print shop for the Stupidest Boss in the World. That's about it!

[Alschroeder]

Superheroes are often referred to as "modern mythology". Some go direct to the source, like Captain MArvel, Wonder Woman, or Thor, but a lot are modern spins---Superman a modern Hercules, Flash a modern MErcury, Sub-Mariner a modern Poseidon, etc.

And I noted that most super-heroINES weren't as successful---and few of them did the same thing, look to mythic archtypes.

I thought about Athena, my (and Homer's) favorite among the Greek pantheon, and how she might be updated as a super-heroine. (This was literally decades before Grant Morrison called ORacle a modern Athena, and Athena wasn't crippled or anything.)

Then I thought of "the most unlikely secret id motif", and I was suddenly thinking of Daniel Keyes FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, where a mentally-challenged janitor became a STephen-Hawking level genuis. (Made into the movie, CHARLY)...and thought the two could be effectively combined.

I conceived MM decades ago, but the idea of Marvel or DC putting out something with a mentally-challenged alter ego, I knew the concept would probably fall prey to the PC police...

But with webcomics, I can self-publish, and I've been enjoying it EXTREMELY so far.---Al

[Bwerith]

The spark for my comic came from an earlier story idea of mine, about a princess rescuing her wannabe rescuer, that I intended to make into a RPG game. Not sure exactly where that earlier idea came from. Probably just an effort to turn the tables on a cliche.

Anyway, I wanted to draw a comic, but most of my ideas were too complex for me to draw, or too full of promise for me to butcher at that stage in the development of my skills. So I turned to this story, thinking that it would be short and simple.

Ahaha.

Of course everything I touch turns into a monstrous sprawling epic. But at least it STARTS simple.

[Dr Legostar]

I like science fiction.

I always wanted to make a comic.

I can't draw very well.

I have an ungodly amount of Lego.

I have a digital camera.

The rest is history.

[Komiyan]

D&D. Bloody D&D...

[CaptainClaude]

And where did yours come from Blackaby? eh? EH?!