Incineroar and Chesnaught Chapter 1 - Postmortem

When I started writing the comic, I had quite a few thoughts in mind. Mostly my thesis. I wanted to start writing a comic but I also didn’t want it to get into the way of my last year of university. So that’s why I decided to make it a silent gag comic. Little to no lettering, no need for translation, black and white for low investment when printing. Ez pz right?

Well, close but no cigar.

Turns out gag comedy is harder to pull off than it seems. Timing becomes crucial and the most elaborate gags which require a couple of pages lose their appeal when they’re separated a week from each other. I mean, archive readers will almost always get the best experience, but that doesn’t mean you gotta leave your serial readers behind. So I did what I thought would be best and extracted every last bit of space of every page to make sure it would fit in one page. And then my plan to print this comic in a half-letter format went out of the window because now the panels would be too small to read, so that meant I had to print in a bigger format now and that would mean a bigger investment. Oh yeah, I also had to modify the pages I had already done to adapt it to the new ratio cause otherwise it’d cut some panels and ruin all my bleeds.

I required a lot of help to get it in time. Drawing this made me realize my technical skill still has a long way to go before I can reach my inspirations' level. Also, pre production most certainly saved my life and streamlined my process. For all of you guys out there drawing a comic read this. ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS PUT WORK AND TIME INTO PRE-PRODUCTION. Decide how many pages will your comic have beforehand. Are you gonna print it? Decide which format, and work over it in high dpi. MAKE PRINTING TESTS. Is it meant to only to be read online? Adjust yourself to make sure the reading experience on the platform you choose is the best one. 

Patreon deadlines are also harsh and less forgiving, since you gotta make sure you got the content on time before the month ends. Otherwise there’s a chance you might risk having patrons miss out on content they should have gotten. It’s most important to have a queue, since  most certainly things will go wrong eventually (especially if this isn’t your full time job). So you gotta be ready to keep delivering.

The reception was better than I expected. It’s rather weird, you throw something out into the void of the internet and in the beginning it gets a couple of likes and retweets. Then it gets more and you get accustomed to it, but then you get comments and people talk with you and you realize this project is starting to reach people you didn’t even think it would. And a lot of people told me they enjoyed what I drew. It was a rather hearthwarming sensation. 

It also made me feel like I wanted to go back and redraw everything from scratch so they got something better than what I was giving to them. 

When you throw a project out there, it comes pressure with it to deliver something that it’s worth people’s time and money. I often got the feeling that the page I had drawn a couple of weeks ago was no longer good enough for my standards, but I couldn’t go back to redraw it because I had to work on next week’s page and the one after that and still juggle my thesis work over that. In the end, sometimes I had to make a choice between delaying the page and let it pile up so it was up to my personal standards or releasing it without being fully satisfied with the way it came out. Deadlines be like that. Turns out making a weekly comic it’s not so much about your ability to draw good enough, but your ability to draw good enough FAST, prioritize what needs to be done and have some good time management.

Now, what comes next?

Since my first thesis presentation is coming closer (first couple of weeks of December) The second part of the comic will remain on hiatus until mid-December/January. I’ll still make gag/porn strips to fill in the meantime, but understand these might be smaller since my priorities will be set on my thesis’ work. Weekly patreon NSFW sketches will remain active until further notice.

So that’s it, thanks for reading all my rambling up until here. I'll be seeing you around!