In late 2022, lacking a creative project, I decided to go back to the vague story ideas I’d thought up out back in the outback about a failing offworld colony, full of post-Soviet decay and post-truth Internet. Winter ’22 and then 2023 were spent first trying to co-produce it with an artist pal and then, when that didn’t work out, trying to teach myself digital art, with the self-imposed challenge that if I got to the end of the year and felt like I’d progressed adequately, I’d try to do the comic myself in earnest in 2024.

So 2024 was spent giving the whole comic a Proper Go, again with a sense that I’d review again at the end of the year if I was actually having fun with it. It has been, and will continue to be, a serious learning curve; here are some of the main lessons I’ve learned by doing.

Making a webcomic isn’t one skill, it’s a bunch of different skills flying in close formation.

Obvious really, but a shocking amount of effort when you’re actually learning them all from scratch; you realise why the credits for most successful pre-internet comics had one person doing pencils, one inks, one letters, one colours… Writing is a skill; art is a skill (and drawing expressive people is a totally different skill to drawing plausible mechanisms or cityscapes); visualising a scene and segmenting it into panel layouts is a skill; inventing and applying colour palettes is a skill. All of these I’m essentially teaching myself from a baseline of zero (except writing fiction, from a baseline of ‘I worked hard at this ten years ago’).

Added to all this, webdesign and website management are another skill (of which more anon) and trying to get anyone’s attention about The Thing I Made in the hideous algorithmic nowhere-land of 2020s internet yet another, which I mostly can’t be bothered with. Learning is fun, but it’s A Lot, especially when this is a hobby for fun and the minute it stops being fun I don’t have a reason to do it.

Accordingly, workflow matters a lot

I have found it quite difficult to mentally jump from one skill to another, and have found it easier to apply each skill to ‘batches’ of pages than to apply each process to a page in sequence. I try to script out an entire chapter at once (though changes invariably come later), and then draw it in blocks of c.4-5 pages, first with rough sketches and panel layouts, then working out props (including 3d models to help with perspective, and 2d patterns that can be distorted into backgrounds), then lineart, then colours, then shading, then speech bubbles etc, to a block at a time.

I have adjusted the ‘stages’ of design (this is what I’ve been using in the last few months) and while I still don’t have this nailed, I think an update schedule and drawing approach based around batches of a month’s worth of pages is currently feeling easier and more time-efficient.

Practice (and process) makes my art both better and faster, but there’s always something new to learn

This project was partly a learn-by-doing approach to teaching myself digital art, and I’m getting there. My art is still very much Not Good but is visibly improving as I discover shortcuts and become more practised and comfortable. These improvements make my drawings look better but also make it quicker to churn them out. I have found a relatively consistent way of drawing faces (which were definitely my weakest point and I hope are now merely weak), and various tools and technical techniques to make things go faster (without, hopefully, being quite as obvious about it as all the low-end high school romance webtoons out there assembled from the same prefabricated Clip Studio assets.)

However, as soon as I get comfortable with one thing I discover I want to get better at the next (I’m still rubbish at clothing, for instance). It might be one day I’ll reach a level of ‘fundamentals’ such that, rather than going through complex processes, I can just pick up a stylus and bash out what I want to. But that feels a long way off.

The temptation to go back and fix things is strong

A lot of the story was formed before I started drawing it but a lot more of it has emerged over time. As I get better and more comfortable with all this, I’m realising I have accidentally boxed myself in, or missed opportunities, in early pages, and now have concepts and parts early on that I want to change. I also note little infelicities in writing and art that are worth fixing.

I’m conflicted about what to do here. Chats on various sites (Spiderforest discord, mainly) have been helpful with the sense of a webcomic as an early draft. Kill Six Billion Demons reset itself fairly early on to make a bunch of Early Episode Weirdness line up with the massive plot that Abaddon later delivered. I am tempted to make tweaks – but I am also worried that way leads endless tweaking and no forward progress. Hum. Better to resist for now.

The net is awash in art tips – lessons on specific things are what work for me

There are an infinity of drawing guides on the internet and I have found almost none of them helpful. The same search term will get you Fine Arts degree stuff and dudes who just want to get a perfect lensflare on yet another sameface anime girl in an incredibly beautifully over-rendered background. There are also generalist “teach yourself from scratch” sites which I also find unhelpful – I tried drawabox on “fundamentals” and stopped after drawing a bunch of boxes because I don’t care about drawing boxes and the exercises were doing absolutely nothing for me. I can only really learn by doing and I can only consistently make myself care about doing the thing if there is something specific I’m trying to do – that’s been the whole point of the comic.

Where I have found a particular thing sticking is when I have a specific object or concept I’m trying to draw and there’s a guide to help with that. The Etherington Brothers’ guides are great on individual things (although in the most unhelpfully diffuse format possible – please for goodness’ sake sell me an ebook, I’m not buying a massive stack of £25 hardbacks); individual Clip Studio tuts are also often good, although also often obviously targeted at people who aren’t me.

Website management hasn’t really got any easier

I wonder if one of the lesser reasons for the decay of the internet into its total capture (front end, back end and finances) by a handful of hideous megacorps – social media being the big one – is that it feels like far more of a headache to do your own website than it was a decade or two ago. I learned my WordPress skills for uni websites circa 2010, since which I’ve forgotten most of them, and while the backend of that hasn’t really changed at all (this horrible Gutenberg thing aside), finding hosting and making it work is the same amount of a faff as then and setting up SSL certificates even more of one. Generic ready-made site builders like Wix are crap and the bespoke webcomic plugins for WordPress exist but need a few technical skills to make work; Toocheke was a struggle for me; Comicpress is great and well-documented but hasn’t been supported in yonks so one day (The great Erin Ptah has had a better time with Toocheke with than me, here are her reflections). CSS and WP theme design is yet another skill and one I now have essentially no interest in learning again except to get a viable website.

I’ve only glanced, and might glance again, at Tapas/Webtoon, but last time I did they seem to be forcing a vertical scroll format, have rather worrying TOS, and absolutely awash with indistinguishable romance manga slop. Which might be where the readership is but I don’t care enough about the numbers to make that compromise. A much more appealing and more old-internet solution seems to be the site Comicfury which does most of the hard work for you. If there’s a next time I would probably use that, like my pal Crow-Caller.

Momentum is essential, but so is time off

From the beginning I’ve tried to do something with OUBLIETTE every single day, on the basis that keeping good habits and keeping the comic in my head are positive and self-reinforcing. I think this was a good approach with two main problems. One, when I fell off the wagon (usually due to a holiday or some other full-time commitment) it was really hard to get back on it. Two, it was getting exhausting and increasingly conflicting with non-comic things which also matter to me (like a job, partner and life). I found that giving myself one day off each week made it much, much easier to keep the momentum up but I haven’t found an answer to the first problem yet. I had a huge amount of personal and work commitments pile up and basically had to write off late November through to Christmas. But I’m back in the saddle!

Audience feedback: not obsessing over numbers is essential, but positive feedback is incredibly motivating

From the endless variations on “please review!” on fanfiction.net back in 2004 I have seen creative friends who associate their self-worth with online audience feedback to the point that a lack of it actually hurts them, and am determined to avoid that. It helps that I’m older and have less to prove; I don’t care about ‘number goes up’ and I don’t want a big following, that’s far too much grief in this day and age. But the sense of howling into a void can be thoroughly demotivating and the occasional comment from someone who is actually reading and appreciating things a powerful antidote to that. I have several loyal and regular commenters who really raise my spirits whenever I see something from them. And a very low point in motivation late last year coincided with a good friend – who I hadn’t even realised read the comic! – dropped me a message about one page. I think it’s safe to say without that positivity I might have given up.

See you in a year!

My next plan is to keep on this to the end of 2025, at which point – once again – I’ll consider if it is still worth the effort I’m putting into it, and I’ll also decide if it’s worth going back and fixing some early stuff. At current rate of Narrative Unfolding I can see the planned story lasting 500 pages, which if I don’t speed things up a bit is going to be ten years of my life. And, I’ll be honest, it’s a colossal amount of time and effort to produce something I still really hesitate to describe as “good” rather than “passable, but improving”.

But the time will pass anyway.