Where did the idea for your comic originally come from? Adapted D&D campaign? Character concept? What made you look at it and say, "hey, that's a pretty good idea for a comic"?

Bonus points for original sketches, pictures, or radioactive spiders.

(totally stolen from Alejandro on Skype)

It was during the second half of 2003, I was sitting at the PC 'talking' via instant message stuff back then to a mate in another town, working on the early script for a musical production I was writing for my then primary school to perform with the grade 5/6s the following year.

My mate told me that he was going to write a webcomic and I was going to draw it for him.

I said 'I'm a teacher! I don't have time to draw comics and stuff!' etc, not having actually heard the term webcomic before at all, or even been aware that you could find comics online at that stage.

Within half an hour I had scribbled out a little pencil sketch of Casper, one of the main protagonists from the musical, catching the bus for the first time at his new school.

I scanned it, sent it off and... yeah... I think I had a few more drawn by the end of the night.

I dug up the images, too, so you can compare. The first of each is the original hand drawn one, and the second is the original one redone that went up when we worked out how to make webpages, etc. I seem to have misplaced the original of the fifth... or maybe by then I had gone back and redrawn them all into their current published states. I can't remember. It was over 12 years ago!

I replaced the handwritten text in the originals with PC font, but otherwise, these are the originals.



















The strips in the School Spirit template with the name and date, etc, are still the same ones up online at the start of the archive now, except at one stage they were gradient shaded in black and white, and then after 160 strips I went back and coloured them all as well. But the art work has never changed since any of them were published online.


So yes, there you go!

School Spirit started out as a primary school musical production I was writing for the following year, and ended up a webcomic I was writing before I had even known or read a single webcomic.

School Spirit: The Musical was performed for two or three nights in October of 2004, with two Acts, about a dozen scenes and twelve musical pieces I wrote. It had a running time of about an hour and a half, including the intermission between Acts. The kid who played Casper (because he had the right coloured hair, a line I actually included in the play) is now 22 and about to embark on his first year of teaching himself now!

So there you go. From little, dodgy primary school musical play to a webcomic currently pushing towards 1700 regular strips and 150 Specials, and a lifespan approaching 12 years. I am quite confident in saying that nowhere on the entire internet are you likely to find another webcomic that had a live-action version of itself performed by the time it had been online for a year!

And yes... this is my first and only webcomic project.


Now bring on the rest of your origin stories!

Nahast was indeed born from D&D, but rather than an existing campaign, it was the contest Wizards of the Coast did to choose a new campaign setting. The winner of that contest was Eberron, but I gathered my friends and decided to create a setting inspired in the myths we had read about in school about the Aztecs and Mayans, rather than the European that every other fantasy world is based on.

We didn't even made it past the first round, but I was left with a write up about Beldatz, the city where heroes would make their home base as they explored the wilderness and dungeons. Conveniently isolated but connected at the same time, it made for good adventure material. Derrexi and the Hawk Maidens were NPCs, and once everyone else lost interest, I looked at my concept art, and my notes, and decided... there's a story to be told here

I still toy with D&D/Pathfinder material based on Nahast, which I should prolly finish and publish.

The map below is the earliest, most complete version of the world. The latest and more focused in the comic is here.

Haha! This is a good one!

The War of Winds was heavily influenced by Robert Jordan, Tara K Harper, Anne McCaffrey, and David Eddings.

What it Takes came from the ANGER that was me after being forced to sit through the movie "Elektra."

I think Xylobone Tomes may have actually started with an idea my husband had for a comic, that of an old vampire and his cat. Somewhere there is a sketch he did of them, but I'd have to really dig for it. Then some time later I drew this wizard, Pizzik and his cat, who I thought was interesting, and scanned to put in my folder of characters.



Then some months later, trying to think of webcomic ideas, I drew the skeleton that was to be Saga, who I never envisioned with a cat, but who I knew I wanted to have a cute assistant.



Some of the history of the world of Xylobone Tomes I mutated from the worldbuilding I did for my first abandoned webcomic. Though the old comic is far from canon now, Xylobone can be said to take place 9000 years later. Another major player for later in the comic I swiped from my second webcomic.

I lol'd. But at least something good came out of that movie, eh? xD

I'll share too. XD I actually thought of sharing some of these thoughts back when Sarah made her thread about writing supernatural creatures, but it suits this topic just as well, if not better.

I knew a long time back that I wanted to write a ghost story one day since they have always fascinated me, and the first character I came up with that would eventually be part of Lapse's ensemble was a little ghost girl who, at the time, was named 'Jocelyn'.



She eventually became 'Silhouette', the shadow girl. Name change was necessary due to the design change, and, well, 'Jocelyn' was exclusively a masculine name in the era I had originally tacked her to. Who knew! :U

She was just kind of floating in a void on her own with no real story until I was watching some ghost show on TV, and it occurred to me that people don't write ghosts in fiction the same way that people claim to encounter ghosts in the wild. Nine times out of ten ghosts seem to be written one of two ways in fiction, and it's either as dead -- but otherwise fully lucid -- invisible humans ("You can see me?!") or spooky scary things that act as the story's monster for the most of the story's duration, if not the whole story. When real people talk about encountering a ghost, the ghosts seem like sad, confused things, bound to old habits for no fathomable reason, or completely and utterly unaware -- possibly, not even sentient at all. I wanted to write about those kinds of ghosts.

At this point, Bianca, Eli, and the Girl in White all emerged as characters simultaneously, and I drew them all immediately.



This is the first drawing I made of each of them -- Eli on the top left, the Girl in White on the top right, Silhouette with a much-closer-to-modern design on the bottom left, and Bean on the bottom right.

I think at first, Bianca was merely a medium, and the story started to come together proper some months later when I struck upon the idea of her 'dying', and exploring what the world looked like from a confused spirit's personal hell. =P Tripod came some months after that, which gave the story some much-needed stakes in the second act. And... that's about it. xD

I've rambled about this on Tumblr before, (full ramble here, if anyone's interested) but Castoff was mainly inspired by 2 things: A dream I had in college, and the color theory class I started taking shortly after. Trying to explain the second one might drift into spoiler territory, but in the dream Vector was the leader of a rebel alliance (or something), and he built up this massive army in order to try and assassinate the queen, who turned out to be his mother? The dream ended right when he stabbed her in the chest and went "oh wait, you're my mom and I just suddenly realized this, OOPS"

I changed.... basically everything except how Vector looked. The very first sketches of him are very, very similar to how he looks in his final design (though he was much angrier originally- he kinda had Arianna's personality but meaner. That was the first thing that changed.) Arianna came in later, and originally she was actually much... bitchier, for lack of a better word? Much more angry and greedy, much less likeable as a person. You think she's bad now you should have seen the first few drafts. Yikes. :U

Over the years as the story developed it ended up snowballing, adding in more characters, plot points, and worldbuilding elements, and about 5 years and several iterations later, here we are.

Early concept art of the lovely protagonists:

OH... OH my....

Okay... uh, Plague. David's origin came from a dream I had back in 1995. The dream revolved around a cavern which opened out onto the ocean. Above the pool of water was suspended a shark cage and in it was this shark-like humanoid. Initially the face was REALLY sharky but as I "watched" it morphed to something more and more human looking. The cage was then lowered into the water and he was released.
The next scene found him tracking a woman down. He comes out of the water into his partially submerged and nearly ruined building. As he approaches the woman, he realizes she is someone he knows. The next part was very emo... him bawling on the floor realizing how much they had messed with his head.

THAT was the seed by which all this madness started. Those who have read M&A know that the shark cage and the scene from the cavern both survived in their way.

Plague was the sequel and sat idle for over 13 years, until the idea of the virus and bringing in the brothers Martin.

From there KEZ put the idea into my head to take a story (ANY Story) and turn it into a graphic novel adaptation. And THUS my webcomic career was born.

Ha ha ha! These are a really interesting read! I'm particularly interested by you guys who were inspired by dreams ... it's really cool that your subconscious came up with these ideas and then you ran with them.

So, basically, I spend a lot of time just ... play-acting in my head. Like pretending to be different characters and talking to myself. When I was younger, I used to pretend to be characters I'd watched on TV (the way you do - like, I'd watch Star Trek and spend the next three days playing the entire cast of the Enterprise). But I gradually started to develop my own cast of characters and settings. The characters would have specific personalities, but their roles would alter wildly depending on what setting I felt like 'playing' at the time. A lot of the stories where rubbish and for my own entertainment, but every so often I'd come up with something that fascinated me and I wanted to record it.

I still do this, and that's ... pretty much where everything I do comes from. Due to the way this works, it's kind of impossible to pick out a specific inspiration. For instance, Marion started off being a side-character who was the girlfriend of a completely different character who's been in my head for much longer. She was doing a different job, and looked also quite different. But it was still her, and I could probably draw a diagram of how she got from there to where she is now ... but I'm not going to, because it wouldn't make much sense to anyone except myself.

Hahaha! My neighbor and I used to play act Battlestar Galactica in her back yard (I was always Apollo and she was always Starbuck). And like you, we use to take and extrapolate plots and adventures based on the cast and our own whimsy! We found Earth long before the show did X)

For MoonSlayer I needed a story for a single manga volume (that I later changed for a 3 volume story). It was a bet between a fantasy writer and me.
I already had a complex world, and I wanted to write a story in a far future from all those novels and create a link with my latest saga.



And this little drawing was the origin of everything.

This sketchy page is part of the first storyboard I wrote in the bus 2009-2010. XD I had some concepts from little Syrma and Puck from 2003, but it was only a random character without background.



And later concepts: http://moonslayer.monicang.com/files/20 ... -c-res.jpg
http://moonslayer.monicang.com/files/20 ... -b-res.jpg
Alherani was a read head in her first concepts.

I wish my dreams were that cool/inspiring! :O

Chirault's origin story is pretty simple, if I go way back to the start. I used to hang out in a lot of paintchat rooms, and I'd usually doodle fanart or random characters in there; one day I doodled this (or something like it):



Some of the other paintchatters started drawing their own characters talking to this face (usually teasing him) and I'd erase and redraw new expressions and add dialogue so it was almost like a lil conversation/draw rp-- over a few days and a LOT of interations, he developed a pretty defined personality. One of my friends in the chat started drawing one of her characters on his shoulder all tiny (Teeko), and after doing this for a couple of weeks I was hugely fond of their dynamic and the personalities we'd set up. So I asked permission to use Teeko in a comic, got it, and just sorta.... started drawing?

Separately, I'd also been turning over this concept for a plot involving a tiny little maquette that represented a world that would affect real places if it were touched or jostled (like a voodoo doll but for a whole planet)-- in my original idea, Kiran was going to end up being saddled with transporting it somewhere, but I quickly changed my mind about a chapter in.

When I think back to the very beginning I almost can't believe how little time I spent prepping the idea before I started. It was probably maybe a month between that first doodle and page 1 being drawn? Almost everything that's happened in the comic since then was developed totally on the fly, as I went. To be honest I partly credit that as why I've managed to keep myself interested in it for like 8 years; I can just keep evolving the story ahead to suit what I want to be making, rather than tying myself to the plot I envisioned as a teen.

Bonus poopy doodle!

bonus first ever colour art of kiran :U (Yes, Teeko's hair was originally purple)

Thank GOD I'm not the only person that does this. I guess it's sort of like fanfic, except I never bothered writing it down because (as you say) most of it's rubbish. And even very young I was mostly interested in inserting my own characters into dimly-perceived holes in the story (goddammit, LOTR needed some girls!) and basically playing with the setting. With the better settings I'd end up creating an entire side-cast of my own creation and by the end barely interacting with the actual people or storyline at all... these days I mostly hang out in my own worlds, though I still enjoy taking other peoples' for the occasional test drive; I'm less likely to come up with entire stories from this playing, but I do get the occasional good scene.

Anyway... Sunset Grill....

It's a bit complicated, really. I finished my second novel in... early 2005, I believe. Over the course of the next three years I started three new novels: the first a sequel, back when I was still getting requests to see a partial/full manuscript from my agent query letters and still had hope; the second a young-adult science fantasy... thingy which was frankly more complicated than my skill level could write, the third a futuristic/Victorian mashup that relied far too heavily on imitating bits of Cordwainer Smith. All three pancaked on me. The third I stuck with the longest -- I think I got to seventy or eighty thousand words on the first draft, which I then tossed, and about thirty thousand on the second try which just... dragged... to... a... halt.

By the time i came up with Sunset Grill, I hadn't written a word in several months. This is significant. One of my writer friends recently made an analogy that really struck a chord -- writers are like sharks. If sharks don't keep swimming, they die; if writers don't keep writing, they die. I was slowly suffocating.

I had been playing with DazStudio -- the Poser-like 3D program I use to make the comic -- for a few years. One of the big criticisms of both my novels was that I had a tendency to "white room", to give no description of the surroundings and very little of the characters, so they ended up as vaguely-defined silhouettes chatting with each other against a featureless white background. I'd started building sets and characters in Daz in an attempt to kick-start my visual imagination and make myself "see" more stuff instead of just hearing dialogue (my default state). As I drowned in writer's block, I started playing more and more with the program. It felt vaguely creative, and it burned time. I was also playing with redoing the setting of my first novel and turning it into a roleplaying setting for the group I was playing with then. It was cyberpunk, but by that point I was bored with cyberpunk and decided to fast-forward the setting a few hundred years and throw in FTL, alien contact, and a weird UN/Empire hybrid government that for whatever reason seemed appropriate to the setting.

The final piece of this puzzle is my job at the time was cellar manager. We age cheese in cellars and most of it needs to be washed twice a week. So that job title mostly meant I was spending a lot of time standing in a cold cellar, washing hundreds of wheels of cheese while listening to my Walkman (It was 2007, okay? And I was cheap.) When I was still writing this had been valuable -- it gave me a lot of time to think -- but after the writer's block started I... still had a lot of time to think, but nothing in particular to think about.

One day I was down there in the cellar, lecturing myself about how I needed to stop playing around with roleplay sets and Daz and get back to real writing, because none of it -- especially Daz -- was going to be of use to me in the long run, and my treacherous bastard of a subconscious whispered, "you could use it to make a webcomic."

I thought this sounded like the worst timesink of an idea ever.

Buuuut it's really, really hard to get a starved and suffocating writer-brain to let go of the first spark of real Idea it's had in months. Thus, my main memory of how the comic started is fumbling my way through the day's cheeses with my brain on fire, the conscious half going no no NO it'll take too much time this is not the kind of writing you should be doing you should be working on another novel, it won't even build you a career in comics, everyone HATES Poser comics while the rest sang Ok, you know that spaceport bar that's in every space opera ever that the heroes spend five minutes in? It's about that bar, only it's about the people who come there every day, the background noise characters, and you can just use the RPG setting you're working on anyway, and there's mercenaries and a waitress and this do-gooder soldier and some guy I think is a lawyer and --

(The spaceport part fell by the wayside. So did the mercenaries -- I believe Murdoch was originally a merc. It never really sat well on him. There was this involved storyline that involved the other patrons (ie, me) trying to figure out what kind of mercenary he was, and somewhere in the middle the "gangster" lightbulb went on. Cue months-long building of intricate politics-ridden criminal syndicate....)

The thing I didn't realize for, oh, a year or two at least, was the sensible conscious brain was undercutting itself. I was sick to death of writing for my career. I'd OD'd on writing advice and the Breakout Novel. The comic was a way out, a way to do the stuff I loved -- worldbuilding and dialogue and characters -- and just ignore the annoying plot thing with its Three-Act Structure and its Turning Points and Conflict and all the other stuff that tripped me up, and it was a guaranteed market failure from the beginning so I didn't even have to care I was doing storytelling all wrong.

(Of course then the damned thing stopped being the string of vignettes and one-offs I'd imagined and started Making Plot all by itself. But that's another story....)

So yeah. The whole comic? Kind of an accident, performed against my better judgement and almost against my will, to keep my stupid brain from burning me up. And nearly eight years later, I'm still doing it. Life. Don't talk to me about life.

Very unthrilling. POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHOY if you care.

I wrote a story called "Coming of Ages" for Nanowrimo 2014, in which a young man named Caedwyl goes into the forest in search of a missing young lady named Meena. He finds her and a mysterious gate underwater near the village where he's been hiding for the last ten or so years of his life. He's seen this kind of gate once before, several years ago, when a girl named Atrina Vilanar disappeared. He plans to bring her back to her father, but by the time they get back to the village, the gate has been opened, and an invading army from an entirely different world has come out. They try to make it back to the capital city to warn everyone before it's too late. Caed is forced to deal with the reasons why he ran away, including for example, finding a bounty that's been set on Leawyn Vilanar's head, his long-since ex girlfriend...

I neatly finished the story with some of the month left, and wrote a prequel which I called Nightsetter, in which Leawyn Vilanar, not so long after her sister has disappeared, works with Caed to try find the witch who claims to understand the gate, which ultimately led to the setup for CoA.

By this point I was sick of writing and wanted to get back to comicking and was just super depressed with everything I was doing with Between Places. So I decided, hey, I like this story, I will make it into a comic!

For some crazy reason i decided to start Stargazer's Gate even EARLIER in the timeline, starting with Atrina and Leawyn dicking around with the gate, and Atrina disappears. Because I thought Atrina's storyline seemed like a relevant B plot anyway. I'm not throughly convinced this was the best idea and that my original way of starting it wasn't the best idea, but because of reasons i'm not going to explain here because this isn't a spoiler post, it's an 'origins' post, I made the decision that the best way to launch off was to start prior to Atrina's disappearance and then show what happens to Atrina in the tenish years between her disappearing into the gate and the start of CoA. And also what happens to Leawyn.

Caed was originally intended to be the main character, not Atrina, but somehow it ended up getting switched to Atrina being the A plot, and Leawyn x Caed searching for the witch being the B plot.

Well there were definitely spoilers in your first post, Tiana... I'd read it all and it spoiled your second post COMPLETELY for me.

(Yay for doulbe posts! )