A question that hasn't been asked for a while

[Jackhass]

Well, I've been drawing comics since I was a wee lad...the dream to be a big famous comic artist was always a dream in the back of my mind. Probably all started when my dad's friend signed me up to subscriptions to a bunch of old Disney comics...Mickey Mouse, Carl Barks Duck books and so on. I was poring over those books before I could even read properly, and once I did learn how to read I went over them all again (many times in some cases).

So that's where my love of drawing and notion of wanting to be a cartoonist probably started.

As for why I specifically started this comic...well once I figured out you could get free webhosting for webcomics, there really wasn't much of a decision. It had to be done! My original two characters (Baker the sheep and Shandy the monkey) were kind of inspired by something specific, but I don't think I'm gonna' get too deep into that here.

[Keffria]

I can remember trying to draw comics as early as seven years old; I wish I'd kept all the old junk I drew, because some of it was so screamingly awful -- it'd be wonderful to post it on the internet.

My actual (former) comic was drawn out of boredom; for two years, I enjoyed myself, and when I found myself bored again, I quit.

My next project is (loosely) based on a short story, but I don't know if I'll ever figure out how to get it started. For some reason, every time I sit down to draw the first page, I draw a blank.

[Mvmarcz]

my brother looked at me and said "You should do a comic strip"

tada
many failed attempts later we have junkRIOT

[Corgan_dane]

Once upon a time, I was born.

My dad was a preacher, and so we moved a lot. As a result, I often had no friends because I was constantly the new kid. I read a lot, and drew, and developed an active imagination.

Skip forward to age 13-ish. I started drawing for fun, because I was clumsy and chubby, and I found that girls liked having things drawn for them.

At age 15-ish I begin doodling in an attempt to make my own comic book. My hero is a large bug in spandex. Now, I'll repress those memories again, thank you.

Ahead again. Age 19 I discover manga style. Make many bad pictures of manga faeries for a friend with a faery fetish. Also attempted to start a comic. Gave up on the manga style, started drawing "Dane's Lunacy." Finished a grand total of three strips. Deadhead is created as the "sidekick" character for Dane, the main character.

At 23 I started a blog called "The Annoyances, Grievances, and Miscellaneous Thoughts of Corgan Dane." It gets good hits. I start doodling Deadhead again in Astronomy class at college. This morphs into a vague comic idea about an alien (adapted from a small demon character I used to roleplay) crash-landing on an earth devoid of life.

...and so it all began, and my blog died, after being reviewed and given a perfect score. Now I have three webcomics, and I love it.

I'm actually making money now using skills I learned while attempting to improve my comic.

Ain't life grand?

[Dave Against The Machine]

Well. I never really had any interest comic when I was younger. I remeber a bit while back, I played the sega genesis game, Comix Zone.
I was like. It would be cool if I could make a comic. So I drew my first stix figure pannel. Never made past one pannel. Time went on, and on, and on.
A friend had introduced me to the joy of web comics. Wasn't hooked at first. But one day I was, bored and desided to read it. From that day on, I was hooked. And I read for a good bit. One day I was talking to someone, and i had desided it would be hilarious to see. So I drew a litte 4 pannel comic on some notebook paper. That moment on, I was hooed on comics. So Drew another, and another. Then I gave it a name. I called it, "HEAD WOUNDS". I actually almost called BACKROADS, HEAD WOUNDS. Cause its basiclly all the same comics, just drawn much better, and reworded. I had draw 10 comics of HEAD WOUNDS, then I broke my arm. So i was unable to continue drawing. After I healed I drew one last one. But did keep going. After about a year years of designing posabiliy characters I desided, time to start back up. I didnt make it past 1 comic. But i kept drawing what I had thought I wanted to be the main character, which tured out to just be a charater I use for the first few comics, then killed him off in a terable "trying to get a date and spontaniously combusting" incadent. And finally, BACKRAODS was officialy born. And im all like YAHHHH time to get a CG account and start my comic.

[Kilre]

I remeber a bit while back, I played the <b>sega genesis</b> game, Comix Zone.

Go Sega!

[Escushion]

I started doing comics around 8; I'd do my own stories of the Dark Horse Aliens comics. I even sent them some drawings and a letter, and they sent me instructions on how to properly go about submitting a comic to them. Nice of them; my letter wasn't even typed .

High school had me doing a couple really crappy comics, one based of an MMORPG and another that was basically DBZ + Power Rangers. Blegh.

Then there's my current comic. Yay!

[Cope]

My answer is boring, so I'm just gonna say an alien anal probe made me do it.

[Yeahduff]

Been drawing forever. The idea came and went several times and by the time I graduated high school I embraced it and have been doing it since.

[Dutch!]

For those who know the story already, I'll be short and sweet.

Friend said to me 'we're making a webcomic and you're drawing it'. I said 'bullshit, I don't have the time'. Now it's two years later and there's nearly 300 of the buggers up.

Before then I wasn't aware of webcomics. I was shown Sluggy and laughed at a few...and haven't been back since. I prefer newspaper comics as you can probably tell from the style of my own stuff. I grew up on Footrot Flats and Snake Tales with a few collections of Herman and Andy Capp for good measure, so I'd say that's where my influences come from.

I think I did a few cartoony things in Grade 3/4...but...now I'm teaching it and STILL doing cartoony things in Grade 3/4.

So yeah...I didn't want to do one cos I didn't have the time.

[The Neko]

I started to draw comics in 3rd grade, but stopped doing them until high school. And here I am now... barely doing a journal comic. Hurrah.

However, I've been reading comics for a long time. Mostly, I liked the newspaper-style format and read a lot of Foxtrot, Outland, Calvin & Hobbes, and others.

I think the oddest series I used to read was "Pogo". A lot of the satire and parody didn't make much sense to me at the time since that form of literary analysis was beyond my comprehension, and a lot of it was before my time of political awareness.

[Humbug]

I was already enjoying comics at a very young age. I never attepted to draw one because frankly I was quite bad at it. I did however like to copy some of the pages of my favourite comics for fun. But I eventually grew out of it when I hit my teens.

I only found out about webcomics a year and a half ago. My cousin pointed me to 8 bit Theatre, my first webcomic. (Sad isn't it?) As I was browsing I noticed an ad to Elvenbaath. After looking through it I was inspired to do my own webcomic. Yup TDot, if it wasn't for you I'd never even thought about drawing comics. Come to think of it, I really should thank you. *Glomps*

[Sortelli]

Someone introduced me to webcomics in an RPG online through the comc EOI--Then they linked me to another and another.... Pretty soon I thought--Hey! I loike reading these, maybe I can put my writing and art together.

The first comics I remember drawing were on lined paper and stapled together by me and some friends into some little comic magazine called Comics Corner or something like that. This was in grade school.

I can't remember much about it other than that there were some things my friends did that totally went over my head and I tried to redo the joke into something I thought was funny in my collosal ignorance. I am very ashamed of that. Good times!

I've considered myself an artist since age four. Although, honestly, I'm more likely to say "cartoonist" if I ever tell a person about that because the words "art" and "artist" are full of negative connotations in my mind nowadays. Cartoonist sounds like you're funny and approachable. Artist sounds like you're going to spend forty minutes haranguing someone about Deeper Meaning.

And that's if I tell someone at all. You have no idea how crushing it is to my fragile needy ego when I tell someone offline about my comic (especially when it is someone from the demographic most likely to have enjoyed or seen it) and they look at me blankly.

And that comic I did started out as <i>stick figures.</i> ... <i>Copied and pasted</i> stick figures. I had already known how to draw, but the comics were born out of a pissy fit I had as the chatroom scene of the 90s died after I had spent so many years playing non-appropriate characters in fantasy-only settings. Later on I kept thinking about all the possibilities that setting had for humor and EOI was born.

[Phact0rri]

well I'm in the minority here, as I didn't ever try to draw (save for a few scribbles here and there) until I was sixteen. I was told I couldn't do things like that when I was little, do to a misdiagnosed mental problem, that was later diagnosed as bipolarism, they basically thought I was mentally challenged, even though I tested off the charts on iq tests.

at any rate, I was quick study, and tried my first comic (which lasted a whole issue) when I was seventeen, this was a print comic btw. then when I started college (aged 19) I gave up drawing all together, for a number of years. it was not until I started decypher almost three years ago now, that I got back in art, and comicking having to reteach myself all the little bits about art and stylized drawing.

[Toxic]

I saw 8:1 in the college newspaper, and thought I could do better.

No, seriously!

I also know how 8:1 got it's name.

Tell us!

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

I also know how 8:1 got it's name.

Tell us!

http://comixpedia.net/index.php?name=Se ... 575&page=1

[McDuffies]

Like Cortland said, all kids draw, it's just that some of them stop at some age and forget to draw, others continue. I am one of those who never stopped drawing. And in fact, I was always drawing comics... Well, when I was really small, I didn't bother to draw it regulary, if a character moved a hand, I'd just draw a hand in different position on the same picture, and then when the picture would get too cramped, I'd draw a new one... So call it comics or not. Anyways, I remember regular comic attempts from when I was five or so, too bad I haven't got them saved.
Back then comics were very popular in Yugoslavia, it was easy to catch that up.

[Jim North]

My Mom's an artist, so my brother and I were almost always doing something creative or other while we were growing up. Drawing, sculpting clay, painting . . . if we showed even the remotest interest in something artistic, Mom would set us down with whatever materials we needed and lets us have at it. Until I picked up on writing in high school, my favorite thing to do was draw. When I was . . . I guess eight or nine, I started up a comic strip called Justin's World that was basically a ripoff of Calvin & Hobbes. I kept it up for quite a while, scribbling whatever silly idea popped into my head into my notebooks, eventually graduating from rough stick figures to actual drawrin's of peoples.

While I abandoned Justin's World (though not Justin himself) eventually, I continued sketching stuff in the corners of my school textbooks, on the backs of my school notebooks, and generally keeping myself distracted by drawing instead of putting a lot of thought into my schoolwork. Unfortunately, I really was just doodling and screwing around instead of actually trying to improve my artistic abilities, so I didn't improve very much during that time.

Later - much, much later - a buddy of mine asked me if I'd ever read Penny Arcade before. I told him no and asked him what it was and he said it was a comic strip on the internet. My initial reaction was "A comic strip? On the internet?! Can you DO that?!" Of course it turned out that you damn well could and I greatly enjoyed the handful of PA strips I saw that day. It wasn't until a number of months after that, however, that a fellah I met on a Sonic the Hedgehog forum linked me to his webcomic - Sam & Fuzzy, which has been on my regular reading list ever since - and I actually got into the webcomic scene properly.

Eventually I, like many people, thought "Well, hell, I could do this!" and came up with the idea for Role of the Die. I started a little development work, writing down gags and drawing the characters and so on, but gradually it slowed down to a halt and the idea fell to the wayside for several several months. It turned out that just sounded like a fun thing I could do wasn't enough of a reason for me to stay interested . . . go figure. Well, after that several several month stagnant period, I finally got a reason . . . I decided that I really wanted to work on my artistic abilities, and the most immediate way I could think of doing that was to actually start up RotD so I'd have a constant excuse to draw and improve.

And so I started working on it again, making new scripts and rearranging the old ones, developing the character concepts further, and working on a website, and everything else. Nearly a year and a half after its original conception, I started RotD up and have worked on it sporadically ever since.

Of course, as Kat mentioned, I gave up drawing RotD a while back and she took over. So if RotD was meant to help me improve my visual art, why did I give up that aspect of it? Well, that brings me to the reason I'm working on starting my next comic.

I feel, in the end, that I have gone just about as far as I can artistically with RotD. In the end, it's a very simple strip with very simple visual needs . . . it's more or less Talking Head Theater with only the occaisional breakout panel. If that's as far as I had wanted to take it, then I would probably still be drawing it, but I wanna do other stuff and I felt like I was beginning to stagnate with RotD. So now I'm working on Lattice, which will be much more action oriented, and the graphic novel format will allow me to work in a much more non-linear environment, allowing me to work on all sorts of different artsy stuff.

And them's my reasons.

[Royal Blue]

My current (and only) comic actually sat in my head for five years, and went through a number of plot changes that is best described as "obscene".
I actually started its most recent form late last year, and finally worked up the courage to put it out on the interweb.

Comics...seem to be a happy medium for me. I love music, art, and literature. With comics, I can make art and a storyline at the exact same time. Now I just need to come up with a theme song, and I shall reach supreme happiness.

It's more for fun than anything when it gets right down to it: I've made stupid little comic strips for my friends all the time over the course of high school, and a webcomic just took a small leap of faith in my own abilities.

[Corgan_dane]

Damn. Forgot I had more than one comic.

Okay...well, for Scarecrow, I started it because at the time Many Tidings Grim was just a gag comic, and I wanted something more substantial. I don't remember how I got the idea. I just needed to do something that could mean more to someone than a cheap laugh.

Haiku (the newest) is just for kicks. Really. I have no real update schedule, and no fans. It's a place to get practice drawing random things. Also, I love the minimalism of strips like Bunny, and I wanted something simple, that I could pop out in an hour, versus the 3-4 hours a strip for MTG or Scarecrow will take me to produce.

Frankly, I don't care if it gets any readership, which makes it a blast to make. Scarecrow seems to have developed a sort of cult following...so I'm doing my best to keep up with it.

I love webcomicking. It makes me creative, and gives me something useful to occupy my time with.