Creating a Comic: The Initial Concept

The Quack Addict? 

Creating is a strange process, at times its like we are possessed and the only way to excise the muse is in forging a world. A story can be crafted after years of notes, writes or rewrites, as in the case of the exhaustively detailed lore of Middle Earth, at others its a few notes and a doodle on a beer napkin a la Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Either process took bringing a concept from mind to paper.

Its not just full time artists who have ideas burgeoning in their head. Plenty of people have had conceptualizations that knock around in their brains from childhood, festering as they get older. A creative thought can decay the longer you have it in you, losing bits of it as time go by. Outside of it your brain though, that's where a brainchild can evolve.

I made it the bad habit to follow the former path. I was often impatient in the planning processes and so I never made notes, never wrote an outline or a script, didn't create sketches, or conceptual drawings or even storyboard. I just began illustrating comic pages. Some interesting stuff came of it, but honestly, while I improved artistically, the stuff I created was real dren. I ended up starting over, the right way making notes, storyboards and outlines, and the book, WOW Signal, ended up being much better for it!

I suppose I went in with a rather arrogant assumption that my raw creativity was the best work, and that any sort of edit or revisions simply
watered it down. Sure I wanted work out there as fast I could, but overestimating the value of my initial concepts ended up creating wasted time. So I guess my first point would be that it doesn't hurt doing things the right way.

This is a space cruiser I created in 1996

As far as creating a concept itself, sometimes I would take old work I had done, some of which was decades old and recreate it in the present breathing new life into it with more refined ability. Sometimes these old creations we made up during childhood with a little tweaks can be remarkably awesome. Going through old sketches I found a galaxy worth of doodles of planets with notes on each, and while some was I'm sure lifted from TV at the time others were quaintly bizarre.

I would warn people who want to get ideas, that watching, reading or just hopping into other media makes it easy to an set you up for hijacking creative material without meaning to. Instead just make notes on things in life that inspire you, and you can add a fantasy or sci-fi twist, like how some monsters are made by combining to regular creatures or how Henchgirl is as autobiographical for the author as it is fantastical! If you feel you need something to inspire you then consume older public domain work that you can be influenced by with fear of legal retribution.

As you go about crafting a world, bring a pen with you everywhere. You never know when inspiration will strike, and I'd say carry a notebook too but for me that's cumbersome. Instead I write notes on random pieces of paper, envelopes from opened mail, my hand, and napkins among other things, which are certain not to get lost.

When you've got enough put together its always nice to bounce thoughts off others, just to help further refine good ideas and bad ideas. Just don't bounce ideas off Stan Lee who knows where they will end up

That guy #SirThomas is okay, he's been making stuff since he was young and not all of it was poop. You can see his work on books like Frankenstein vs. Dracula, or many of the issues of Meanwhile...