The Making of Rough

Behind the Scenes 04.2025

The short story

Rough was based on a short story I started writing somewhere between 2020 and 2021. It followed a similar chain of events to the comic, with Arthur retrieving a drug stash, Yura catching him in the act, following him to the park, and provoking a fight, which would lead to Arthur pulling a knife on him.

I reach into the opening and produce a familiar plastic bag. The bottles of artane inside it clink. Hard to believe this is my last time visiting this place. Should I feel sad? Relieved? Not sure. Though I don’t care enough to think about it now; it’s hard to revel in nostalgia when crouching beside a nasty piss-stained wall. Maybe I ought to leave an autograph on it as well. In chalk, I mean.

“Oho-o-o, is that a stash?”

I jolt.

“No wa-ay!”

My hand snaps to position. My body does a sharp 180 turn. I lock eyes with a stranger. Another schoolkid, fair-haired, looks disheveled. Somehow I didn’t hear his footsteps. How? Have I gotten this careless? Or has he been snooping on me from the beginning? Fuck, whatever the case, that smile is no good.

“What’s in there?”

He walks up to me and leans in, trying to get a better look, but I hastily shove the loot into my sports bag. Why is he here? Everyone is supposed to be in class. Man, this is bad. I have to get out, now.

“None of your business.”

“Hah?”

I stand up. Not even gonna put the brick back in its place, who cares. Just walk off.

“Hey-y! That’s kinda rude, don'cha think?”

Ignore him. Whatever. Walk on. He’s trying to get a reaction.

“Brother, come on,” I hear him running, chuckling behind me. “Don’t be like that! Life’s hard, I getcha, we’ve all been there!”

The script was very similar in parts, but had to be extended and adjusted to flow well in the new format. There were also significant deviations in how some events unfolded, the most obvious one being the vortex – in the original version, it simply didn’t exist.

“You guys have a meeting spot under that bridge, right? Man, I knew it. I’ve found a bunch of syringes there before, yeah. That’s sick.”

You what?

“Hm? Hey, what’s with the weird look? Not the place?”

“...No. I've never even been down there.”

“Huh, really? Wanna check it out?”

“No.”

“Ri-ight, you’re in a rush. Then maybe next time.”

There will be no next time.

“So, you do this often?”

Gotta concentrate.

“Heh, weird. Didn’t expect you of all people to be into this.”

I need to find a quiet place to dump the stuff.

“Like, I don’t know you, but you never had the vibes. Know what I mean?”

Somewhere no one will want to look. 

"Like Kostik? That dude looks the part." 

The river should work fine, as long as it’s in a secluded area.

"Heard how he tried to brew some speed at home and almost died?"

Maybe the sewer passage at the end? 

"Well anyways, that's bullshit." 

No, it's been locked for months.

"And you know how I know that's bullshit?" 

Then where do I… Oh.

"Cuz I gave him the fucking recipe!"

Yeah, actually that isn't a bad idea. 

"It was for sedatives, man! The jackass shat himself on call and wanted to save face, you just kno-"

"Let's go under the bridge."

“Huh?”

In this version, Arthur just threw the bottles in the river and Yura reacted the same way he did in the comic. I wasn’t very satisfied with how that panned out for several reasons: 

• It seemed dumb and out of character for Arthur not to have thought of a specific place to get rid of the drugs beforehand.

• He most likely wouldn’t choose a river as a dumping spot (a public toilet would work better).

• The story didn’t feel “PAFL enough”.

I first considered adding an anomaly for flare, just to resolve that last issue; but then I realised it was a great solution to the other ones as well! What’s more, the vortex allowed for an entirely new scene with Arthur stumbling too close to it and Yura being forced to rescue him, which added a ton of dramatic tension and characterisation opportunities. 

In contrast, the original conflict was resolved as soon as the knife was pulled. So they just calmed down, laid around for a bit and went home.

 Old doodle based on the short story.

Other scenes

While the short story made up the core of Rough, the little scene at the orphanage and the flash forward of Yura vomiting in the club were not part of it. The first came from a separate chibi-style comic that was planned to focus on the suicide of Arthur and Tsar’s common acquaintance. 

I eventually decided the style looked too goofy for such a heavy topic and instead just used some of the comic’s pages as the base for the orphanage scene in Rough.

 Chibi comic pages.

Since the short story opened with Arthur already at the school stadium, all the context was given through internal narration. It didn’t bother me in written form, but in a more visual medium, I hoped to show instead of tell. So this scene helped with explaining what he was doing and why. 

Plus, it was a good opportunity to show Arthur interacting with someone he’s actually friendly with in contrast to how hostile he acts towards Yura. And having snippets of little Tsar and Ivan seemed like fun.

Unfinished drawing from 2022.

I’ve had the bathroom scene in mind for a good while. I can’t talk too much about the details, since it will be finished only after the hiatus. 

One bit of trivia is that the reason for Yura throwing up (pills from some girl not mixing well with booze) was lifted directly from an unpublished short story about Yura and Sanya’s walk home from the club. I think it was written in 2020. Maybe I’ll go back and edit it for publication at some point… I haven’t looked at it in years.

Is the takeaway that Yura keeps doing it because he forgets? Is it a form of self-destructive behaviour? Is it me being creatively bankrupt? We’ll never know.

To accompany that, the lyrics for Slova were written roughly a year and a half before the song’s release.

Anyways, the scene has gone through multiple iterations, but I was never really happy with how it was turning out. So when I was planning the adaptation of Arthur and Yura's first encounter, it seemed like a natural inclusion. Even if the two stories happen years apart, they’re both first meetings in a sense.

I considered either slapping this scene at the end of the comic or using it as a framing device (using that term very loosely here). Perhaps the first option would’ve made more sense in terms of pacing. But then we wouldn’t have Yura’s big puke as the opening page, so you win some you lose some.

Weekly process

Ideally my weekly work schedule for the comic looked something like this:

• Monday - Tuesday: storyboarding (optimally for a couple weeks in advance);

• Wednesday - Friday: character lineart and backgrounds;

• Saturday: screentones and typography.

In reality, it gradually slipped as the drawings and backgrounds of the comic became more and more demanding. The posing and hatching during the fight scene and the following one with the vortex were very time-consuming, so I often ended up finishing the pages early Monday mornings (in the Warsaw time zone at least).

Storyboard and sketch layers. So messy...

Of course this made the schedule slip even more, and by the end of the run I was unable to storyboard anything in advance. The last months of publication had me rawdogging the pages and hoping for the best.

Basic lineart and the finished page. The crusticles add a lot.

What lessons can we learn from this?

• Don’t use the same exact schedule for a comic you’re drawing from scratch (Rough) and a comic that was 70% complete by the time it started publication (Execution). When Rough resumes publication, I’m thinking of making the pages bi-weekly but dropping like 5 pages at a time instead of the usual 2-3. Though I might still use the same weekly schedule as before, but only if I storyboard everything up until the ending in advance. 

• Use special brushes for hatching. I really like that specific hatching texture that I only get from hatching by hand, but it costs hours of extra work. Just gotta make my own hatching brush to match my style at this point.

• Write out the script in plain text before drawing to ensure the flow is right from the get-go. The amount of time I spent tinkering with typography and speech bubble sizes because I was indecisive about particular wording is frankly embarrassing.

Miscellaneous notes

I can't draw pretty boys

I don’t think my style is very well suited for drawing pretty people, I guess it’s too rough (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA). Or maybe I’m just not used to it, since prettyboy features are not really my taste.

All this is to say, I could not figure out how to draw Arthur’s face for so long. It bothered me all the way throughout the comic’s run. I can draw a cute girl. I can draw a shovelface man. I cannot draw a pretty boy.

At some point I figured out, ah! Right! Pretty boys are often drawn with longer eyelashes, right? I think? So I gave Arthur a sharper, more distinct eye shape. I don’t think that helped much at all, but I guess he started resembling a cat more. Which is kinda cute.

It’s been a year and I’m still really bad at drawing bishonen. At least the single prettyboy in PAFL is fun to doodle - he’s all sharp angles and you know how I love those.

Irony poisoning

One thing I've realised while working on Rough is how scary it can feel to post sincerely. As in, committing to a serious tone sometimes feels like painting a big ol’ target on your head. It’s silly, and I thought I'd long overcome that barrier, but apparently not. 

I've always left some room for irony even in my stories’ more serious moments. If someone makes fun of something you've made, well, yeah, you can just laugh along. If something ends up looking cheesy, then so be it. 

However, some of the themes Rough touches on couldn’t be treated lightly. There was no real room for jokes in certain scenes, and just posting those felt unusually nerve-racking. What if it's disrespectful? What if it's juvenile? What if it's pretentious? What if it's plain boring to read? It felt childish to worry about such things as an adult, but when do you know you're mature enough to portray difficult topics in a tasteful way?

Thankfully, the feedback I ended up getting was very reassuring. No, honestly, it was such a relief! I’m very grateful to everyone who left supportive comments/messages at the time of publication. I don’t want to ramble on about this since it’ll just come across as self-congratulatory, but you really gave me a lot of courage going forward.