busybee comics

I definitely don't have an ending in mind, but the next little bit is going to fundamentally change things, hopefully for the better and making it a bit easier to move to an "episode" format since that's how I've been scripting things (even if it doesn't come across that way in the actual comic).

So, does Tessellate have a script?

Heh, my strip queue is huge now.

I don't feel like drawing anything right now so maybe I'll write up a simple HOWTO showing how I do stuff. Not that my tips are going to be all that useful, but I like to know other peoples' processes so maybe the reverse is true as well.

Tessellate is the grand arc while FOR YOUR ONLY would be the current comic. It stemmed from this much older idea I had for a webcomic called the Six Ribs of Doom where there would be six different stories and they would interact or reference the each other.

Anyhoo, FOR YOUR ONLY does have a script. Here. Basically after hearing the audio recordings of some of the rants, I fell in love with them and wanted to illustrate them. Then it kind of mutated and now the art and the text run parallell to each other. I would like to do one for all of the rants that are on the web, but a lot of them are extremely racist so I doubt I will.

It was also an experiment to see if I could actually follow through with a webcomic as I have a bad habit of losing momentum and never finishing them.

Back to scripting though! How I am writing my upcoming one:
I knew where I wanted the character to end up at and I worked backward from there. I am trying to answer the how's and why's he is going to arrive where he is going to end up. This still allows you a lot of freedom to make up junk as you go but gives you a definite compass in case it starts to meander or get too far out there. But that is just how I do it.

That rant page blows my mind in exactly the same way that Tessellate does.

I do work backwards in some bits, though I much prefer to work forwards. Or maybe I go forwards and backwards at the same time and sort of fill stuff in. In the case of Unity it's mostly been working forwards, since in Pernicious I did everything in a working backwards way and things kept on tripping me up and it got too complicated and I realized if I wanted to get where I wanted to go I'd have to basically restart everything, and I didn't feel like doing any of that. That was also the same reason I got sick of Eaveston.

The great thing about Unity is that every time I had an idea of where things COULD go I could just write it down and not have to worry about things not working out. I've discarded at least as much as I've actually followed through on, and it was in such a way that I could very well make use of the things I did start to develop towards that end (for example, I was originally going to have Juni meet Cynthia, Sam's sister, but the script I'd written for it was pretty lame and I decided it wasn't necessary, but now I have another character I can introduce in a later "episode").

Also my writing for Unity has been very episodic in nature and I think it works really well, especially since I can spend a couple of weeks doing a little mini-story until I get sick of it, I can then wrap it up, take some time off, then start up again on something new. And when I do a mini-story I don't really worry about what future impact it'll have, but I'm already finding how useful it is. For example, the restaurant episode (where Kali Rosha was introduced as pretty much a random thing) made the current episode possible - which is great since if it weren't for that I wouldn't have had any idea where to take it, and I was getting mighty sick of The Sam & Juni Show.