A question that hasn't been asked for a while

[McDuffies]

I am curious about when and how you folks started doing comics or rather, when was an actual moment you started doing them and what was the exact mothivation.
I know that some people have been doing comics since childhood. I know that some others decided to go into it only recently. Some have creative urge, others were simply bored. Why do writers expand their doing into comics and why do illustrators do it? Etc.
What was your earliest comic beginning?

[BrownEyedCat]

I've always drawn a bit and written a bit, and had real difficulty finishing things.

I started thinking about doing comics when I decided I found the basic figures standing around that I was prone to drawing boring, and that I liked images better when there was some story to be gleaned from them. I made a few attempts at things, but they were poorly planned (ie, not planned at all) and didn't make it past a few pages.

Until . . . what, sophmore year in high school? I was inspired, and draw a short storyline with all my friends from another message board on it, on the backs of any loose printout I could find in my binder. I found my that with comics, my drawing and writing abilities complimented eachother - I didn't have to write backgrounds, and comics don't require great sophistication in artwork as long as you get the point across.

After that I started planning Those Destined, but it was about a year and several false starts before it really got going.

[Killbert-Robby]

I am curious about when and how you folks started doing comics or rather, when was an actual moment you started doing them and what was the exact mothivation.
I know that some people have been doing comics since childhood. I know that some others decided to go into it only recently. Some have creative urge, others were simply bored. Why do writers expand their doing into comics and why do illustrators do it? Etc.
What was your earliest comic beginning?

Ripping out the middle page of a comic book and making a comic about a man that got burnt to a pile of grumbly ashes with eyeballs...Nas...

[Rkolter]

I didn't know webcomics existed until someone turned me onto Something Positive back in 2003. I thought it was a cool idea.

I read a school newspaper article about bombs terrorists might use and it was entirely filled with false information. That got me mad. and I thought, hey, I could do a webcomic!

So, I started Reasoned Cognition to teach myself to explain science better, to have a site I could point to for common science answers, and to teach people about science and that it isn't always scary.

[Cortland]

It's silly to say "I've been drawing even since I could hold a pencil!" because that's true for EVERYBODY. Children learn to draw before they learn to write, and if you look at any parent's refrigerator, you're more than likely to see a couple cute pictures drawn by the kids.

I grew up reading the morning funnies, and my inspiration for making my own comic strip came from Bruce Blitz, a cartoonist who sold VHS tapes on drawing comics that my dad sold in his art supply store. (Yeah, having a dad who owns an art supply store helped, too.) I filled up little hard-bound Canson sketchbooks with strange and funny comic stories.

When I was in college, I started doing a regular comic for the school newspaper, and I really wish I'd started sooner because it a whole lot of fun. When I graduated from college, I started drawing a new comic for ATPM, a Macintosh e-zine.

The decision to do regular web comic came during the darkest days of my life, when I lost my job in 2004. I was going crazy with anxiety and boredom trying to find a job and sitting around for hours on end waiting for the phone to ring. Even after I found a job, I kept up the pace to get more practice at drawing and to help vent some of the daily workplace pressures.

... been almost two years now, and I haven't missed an update yet.

[Realityendshere]

Webcomics started for me when my long time friend, and current webmaster pointed me to Megatokyo. I shot through that in a few weeks and I wanted more... so he showed me Applegeeks, Machall, etc... Pretty Soon I had read all of those and I continued my search. Eventually my brother expressed interest in creating a comic. I suggested a webcomic. "Huh?" he said. So I showed him all the stuff that I had read. He was hooked. And thus the events leading up to the incredibly unpopular Reality Ends Here was put into motion.

[Blackaby]

I drew pictures of my pet rabbits in primary school and made them say funny things.

NO ONE GOT THE HUMOUR
IT WAS RABBIT HUMOUR

EVERYONES A FUCKEN CRITIC

[Dr Legostar]

i wanted to a make a friend of mine laugh. And the result of that desire is the very first comic which appears in my archive.

[Col]

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

No, seriously!

[Dr Legostar]

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

No, seriously!

still working on that, I see.

[Bustin]

Well for me my very first comics I did back in grade five.. they were about a superhero called 'banana boy' and his fights with random villians... like killer kiwi, and hockey stick man. Well after that I mostly drew bigger drawings less comics. more doodles and paitings of the sort. But three years ago is when I first had an idea for a webcomic. I was going to make another fantasy highschool type comics... but decided against it after I couldn't gety my characters to look right.

Anwyay about two years ago i was sitting in class doodleing and I randomly drew a chirstmas elf. One drawing of this elf led to another, and soon I was thinking up a plot names, other characters, what medium to use. I downloaded photoshop and began to practice shading, i bought pens and a few sketchbooks. I spent a lot of time doodleing this comic in HS... many many pages of notes were doodlefied. Anyway I started drawing up the actual comic about a year ago.. and have been colouring those origional drawings and drawing new ones. I have scrapped many a character or plot line in the process but that is how melf came about ^.^.

[Prettysenshi]

I knew what comics were, but weren't really into them. It was until I read Witchblade and some manga in 1998 that I really got into it.

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

i always liked to draw from the beginning, more so than the other kids. First it was cars, and then video game characters.

I drew one comic once in 3rd grade called Bobo the Stupid. I only drew one since it was for a project.

Later I started to make up my own characters. It was fun imagining them doing stuff, but that's as far as it went; they just lived in my sketchbook and kind of stood there. Some of them even showed up in some art projects in college.

Later, the school newpaper needed more comics, so I decided to put these characters in a context and really make them do stuff. The End of Things was a gag comic that ran once a week in the paper after that, along with Strange Happenings and 8:1.

Once school ended, I stopped drawing it. But then yeahduff kept bugging me to put it on the web like he and Col did. Now here we are. All the comics previousy metioned look completely different now from their newspaper incarnations.

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

[Garneta]

My first comics that I can remember are from jr. high, when I did a couple one panel "far side type" comics. ALas, no-one else found them funny, though.

I started drawing RotD when Jim announced to me that he was going to stop doing it. I've wanted to do my own for awhile now, but couldn't think of anything I really wanted to do. Then I thought up the basic storyline for Distant Eras a few months ago, so I started it up!

[RemusShepherd]

I am curious about when and how you folks started doing comics or rather, when was an actual moment you started doing them and what was the exact mothivation.

The *exact* motivation?

I had been bemoaning the fact that I could not get any written sci-fi published. Most of the advice I got from the newsgroups were to keep writing -- that the most important part of success is doing the damn work.

I countered with my belief that the most important part of success is social skills. I can write brilliantly, but because I'm an asshole and pariah whose sanity is only borderline, I have problems selling myself to editors, keeping a creative schedule without breaking down, and framing stories in ways that appeal to the normal human beings who would be reading them.

These little arguments came to a head in a discussion I had with Warren Ellis on his Livejournal. His advice, as I'd heard over and over again, was to do the f-ing work. I shouted back that I could do tons of work, and it would all be ignored, and his success was more due to luck and his ability to network.

That's when I decided to put my money where my mouth was. I took a story that had been sitting in my 'un-sellable' folder -- something that I hadn't bothered to finish because I knew no publisher would go near it -- and I decided to make a webcomic out of it. Partially because it would a direct intrusion into Ellis' field, and partially because I wanted to see if a combination of my writing and artistic talents would be more attractive to audiences than my writing alone.

As I see things, there are only two outcomes and I win either way. If Ellis (et al) were correct, I could end up with a successful webcomic. If I'm correct, my comic would be almost totally ignored...but I'd win the argument. Not that it matters; I'm sure Warren has forgotten the whole thing and doesn't even know that I exist. The wager is with *myself.*

So far, the results are indeterminate. I just started buying ads (I'm not wimping out by doing this half-way; I'm going to try and make this successful by any means I can ethically stand). I won't know for sure until it's over.

I can say that I was wrong about one thing, though -- I *do* have the ability to work on the same creative project every single day for long periods of time. I thought I'd have a sanity slip long before this, but I don't think it's going to happen. That's good news. Now if I can only learn to talk to editors without having an uncontrollable urge to throttle them...

[Kris X]

I guess I blame it one the need to draw and having nowhere to exit the need.

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.

Plus I was a huge fan of newspaper comics...My earliest comic before webcomics was Bugsbee. He was a dog cartoon I made up after reading the syndicated comics in our newspaper daily--Wonder what happened to him. So eventually once I got into the highschool newspaper staff I was able to shove in a few of my editorial cartoons and I've been comicking ever since.

[Black Sparrow]

My motivation? That's a toughy.

I'd been drawing and writing for years until I discovered webcomics. Basically, I thought "Wow, that's the perfect way to combine my two hobbies." Thus, I guess my primary motivation was just to see if I could. I dabble in a lot of hobbies, and, when I started out, this was one of them.

[Kilre]

I started with a crappy little one-panel series when I was seven or eight. It featured these kids who like to fight crime, were ninjas, and ate pizza. That was so long ago I forget everything else...anywho, a few years later I started up Row and Bee, these two...things...that liked to kill each other. Since then, they've turned to politics and making fun of pop culter.

Writing is good and all, but I like to have visuals sometimes with stories.

[LibertyCabbage]

i posted some info in a similar thread not too long ago so i won't repeat the same things. instead, i'll show some new stuff =/

i've mentioned before that i did a comic w/ my friend chris in 2nd grade (so i was 8 years old) called quest for the future. well, i have a folder of about 30 pages of it, front and back, that i've kept over the years so i scanned a few for y'all.

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i176/ ... /QFTF3.jpg by me
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i176/ ... /QFTF1.jpg i think i did most of this one...
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i176/ ... /QFTF4.jpg by chris
http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i176/ ... /QFTF2.jpg the end... or is it??

also, an early incarnation of freedom fries
http://skippycartoons.deviantart.com
the earliest stuff is from july 2003 and this was awhile after i'd already been "drawing" the comic on paper ... so it gives you an idea of how long i've been doing the comic =/ the art's obviously by my sister who does the mspaint comic peabody which is in my sig.

[Doll]

A lot of my friends had started blogs, so naturally I wanted in on this obnoxious fad. Unfortunately I didn't have anything of note to write about so I decided to start a comic instead. It had a bit of a following in blogging circles before I horribly neglected it.