selenicseas

Posted to Dreamwidth on 16 November 2024, backdated to 22 November 2021. Originally posted on Wordpress.

I've been drawing comics on-and-off since 2008. Despite that, I've only ever finished one comic: Veitlen & Nymue, which I drew in early 2018. It was the first comic I ever finished, and the first that I'd scripted from start to finish before I started drawing. That, I think, is why I finished it and none of the other previous ones.

I was having a lot of success with The Land of Two Moons. I'd scripted out most of the story when I started drawing comic pages, and finished the script soon afterward. There was no way for me to get stuck and abandon the comic like I'd done with so many others.

But I had to stop anyway. I started out with a schedule of 2 pages/week and for a while, I could keep that up. Then I started a new job and switched to 1 page/week. Then I stopped drawing pages entirely once chapter 6 was finished. I was constantly fatigued and in pain from the pace of drawing. Even after I got a screen tablet and could finish pages in half the time, it wasn't getting better.

Drawing has always been fairly physically taxing for me, and it's only gotten worse in the past few years. The kind of constant stress that drawing comics produces affects my immune system to such a point that I get sick very easily. For the sake of my health, I had to stop.

Webcomics gave me the kind of attention I wanted and a community of people I could regularly talk to if I wanted. I know if I'd interacted with the webcomic community more, I could have had more success or more readers. I'm still a little bitter that I couldn't do it.

Maybe in the future I'll be able to find a way that allows me to draw comics without destroying my body. I have plenty of ideas for comics, after all, but it'll likely be years before I can get to them.