I was minding my own business. Living the straight and narrow. I hadn't touched a pencil in that way for some time. When the nights got long, I'd reach for that old spiral notebook I keep in the night stand, and scribble down a few words, entertaining notions of scratching out that magnum opus. Then the daylight returns, and the train of life smacks me out of bed and drags me down the tracks of another Thursday. Thursday, Library day. My son Shuffles around the shelves of children books, while the missus disappears into her teen fantasies. I think about my own childhood and seek out those "how to draw" books. I dip into Dewy's 700 section and teeter a few spines. That's when I picked it up. A little blue number called "Make your own comic strip". "I'll get this for Jack" I thought to myself. Sure. Who was I kidding. Before you could say "Mid-life crisis", I was turning my Noir nonsense into Funny paper fodder.

These have all been fun to read! I love seeing how things formed from then and nows.

Ok lets see how not-TMI I can make the cluster-F of how Entanglement originated. XD

Entanglement started out as a roleplay in 2000 between me and some friends in a 'looking back on it now holy shit was it abusive' chatroom service known as bravenet. As the years went, and 'friends' left, I tweaked the story more and more with stories I wanted to cover, ideas, etc. Originally I had 8 different stories but the day I came up with the title for the first book I realized all 8 stories were entwined for the 'big finale' of book 8. After the last 'friend' (see: abusive ex) left in 08, I chucked everything I had into a pot to break down honestly all the crap that was holding me back and started to fix all the huge glaring problems I wasn't ever able to fix (because god forbid I do anything without other people's approval).

Like let me tell you there was so many elements from shows I loved that convoluted the crap out of this to the point it had to be reworked if I was going to tie the 8 books together properly anyway!

The biggest change was Xellous, who is one of the few original characters from the "beta" that is still in the comic. She was originally every abuse pocket under the sun. Name it, she experienced it. (I think I made her my beat stick being one of my first OCs and I just needed SOMEthing at the time in my control). Nowadays she's still from an abusive background, but it's culturally abusive instead of malicious intent of her parents (Women of Tir society are seen as symbols of status and not much else 8D; So Xell, getting tired of it, runs away from it because she doesn't know how to fight it to change it). She's also not a ball of hatred anymore with little to no redeeming qualities. She's, instead, very cautious but a curious little sheltered naive button who is probably going to get herself killed at this rate. @[email protected] She's observant, but wants to be chatty, but is struggling with the concepts of what her culture has taught her and what she wants to do and isn't sure what is okay and what isn't. It's a lot of fun writing her at this point due to all her inner struggles that I haven't gotten to touch properly yet in the comic /WHINE.

The story itself has changed so much. It used to be a giant religious context of everything mythical and religious on Earth and what happened to them to why we don't have magic + stuff anymore but I ended up changing it to just a whole new world entirely. (It still follows themes. All my species are inspirations and hints to myths floating about, and a lot of the issues they run into are the same, but the context of "humans screwed up this is why we don't have nice things" is no longer the key factor XD). TBH I think it's freed up a lot of my problems, too, by allowing me to explore unhindered from trying to tie everything together and can just explore more openly.

Meanwhile in 2012-13, I joined Artist At The Ready 3, An Original Character Tournament I had been following (I knew the people who started the first and always wanted to join but never had the guts to). (OCTs basically are comic artists versus one another, AATR took the element of a creator + team versus creator + team). I was eliminated in the third round but it really ignited my passion for making comics, and it forged the path that I KNEW Entanglement HAD to be a comic. 2014 was prep work and Entanglement went live Jan 2n, 2015. (Originally I was thinking Entanglement be a story-illustration novel series that I was waffling on but the tournament really sealed it for me to go into comics lol).

Mine has a bit of a curious one. I made comics throughout my high school years, and then put them aside completely when university consumed my time (from 98 to 2001). But in 2000, out of nowhere, I sketched the page below:



I knew it referred to the birth of a hero/superhero, but had no idea what to do with it, what would be the framework of the story, who the bad guys might be (at the time we were still under Syrian occupation, but I wasn't going to go down that route)... In any case I knew the limit of my abilities and I really wasn't equipped to create such a comic. So I put the sketch in a drawer, just in case. Six years later, after the July war, when I was full of anger and disgust and frustration at my helplessness, some startup digital magazine contacted me asking if I wanted to submit a superhero design to feature in their first issue. I came up with Malaak as she was in the character sheet below: at the time the design was more than half sarcastic in regards to superheroine sexiness standards which are matched only by Lebanese beauty standards (let's not go there) and so on. Man I was bitter!



But then I remembered my forgotten sketch, and I started seeing an origin story, so I figured I would draw just those first few pages and post them. I did, and then the story kept coming. I threw in some of my friends as a joke, because I was sure this would be just another short-term art project (those were the days where I had recently joined dA, was in full discovery mode and was trying out random ideas all the time). But the story kept coming, it got quite serious (and cathartic), and the friends thrown in started really fitting in and adding elements to the story that I had not guessed at first, etc. So it became a six-volume story published in print, only recently finished... That original sketch made its way unchanged into the comic, page 3 of volume 1:



I am incubating a prequel, though...

HAHAHA HOO BOY

I will try to not ramble.

So Heracles Knot began in 2006 - although it has roots that go back to 2001 lmao lmao kill me - as an rp between me and my then best friend! We had just gotten into Supernatural and, for me at least, the idea of Urban Fantasy was still kinda fresh and shiny. I think shortly after that I watched some Dresden Files but tbh I have the attention span of a peanut so that, uh, didn't carry through. ANYWAY so this rp went on for ages. And in 2007 I met my buddy Noel, who does Ignition Zero, and through him I encountered a whole new range of the genre, including Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name. Originally HK, which was then titled Carpe Noctem and had a COMPLETELY different plot, was going to be done a lot like HINABN. But then I got the idea for Raventown.

In 2010 I started that, and I continued to draw it until 2013, at which point I shelved it and started on HK instead, carrying the main characters - Leland, Jaida, and Clark - through. Constantine and Ransom and the entire Carpe Noctem world was revamped so that it would fit the Raventown story and a couple other stories because everything I write is connected because I hate myself.

And of course when I set out to work on HK I wanted to make sure it was diverse, so I tweaked characters here and there.

UGH I really wanna join in on this! This looks super fun!

Lucifer's Playground had originated from a very bad day I had and I know I was incredibly mad that day(I don't remember about what though)... But I went for a jog and I'm one of those people who tend to not be able to get over something until days later, I'm not really like that anymore but back then I was... So... poof I was just thinking of my anger annnnd then I started getting all of these images of pretty much a female Lucifer... There's nothing really special about it...
(But the current story of LP definitely did not originate from that angry day, only Lucifer did.)

But I continued with that main idea and eventually developed it into something more, even creating a sidekick(Beatrice) for Luci.
LP was originally going to be a very comedic story xD no drama whatsoever, and it was definitely going to be 18+

Now, Lucifer's Playground still had the same name, but for very different reasons, because it was a comedic story it was for the sense that Hell was fun for Lucifer.
Lucifer was still one of the main characters and so was Beatrice.

Original Lucifer: She was never an angel, or a devil, she was actually just a keeper of damned souls that God had created because he needed someone to watch out for the ones he wouldn't carry on into his realm, but she was very uh... vulgar? She was incredibly sexual, would drink a whole ton and was very excitable and always wanted to have fun... in some ways and others... Oh and she was very violent, but not towards Beatrice.

Original Beatrice: Her soul was going to heaven but got caught in the underworld by accident, and because she had already been tainted she was refused Heaven and Lucifer kept her(especially because that was the first time something like that had happened.), feeling bad she couldn't do much for Beatrice, Lucifer just had Beatrice be her personal ferrywoman/girl kind of like what they have in Greek Mythology. Before Beatrice died she was actually a peasant girl in the medieval times that died from illness, but that didn't really matter since it was just some background information because the actual story would take place in the underworld and on Earth in the late 80s early 90s.

Occasionally Lucifer and Beatrice would go to the mortal realm together to have fun, Beatrice wasn't really mischievous, she was actually pretty much the same, the only difference was that she was 13 there, while she's 16 in the current story.
Lucifer would once in awhile cause havoc but she would make sure she cleaned up the mess since she didn't want the big guy punishing her. xD

And from time to time Beatrice was allowed to be a reaper for the underworld, making her oar turn into a scythe.

I didn't have old sketches of the ideas because it was hard to decide if I really wanted to go on with this story, but I made an an example:
(you can see at the bottom right corner there is kind of like a stone throne that is destroyed... Hell was going to be blue and red and sort of dark...)
-We see a full figure of Beatrice and just a head of Lucifer, Beatrice was going to be around 5ft and she would wear a dark long robe, she also had much shorter hair but she was still blonde with blue eyes and her skin was more of a greyish (because she was dead...)
-Lucifer still had the same body type but she was more around 6'5-6'7 and her hair was INCREDIBLY curly, from start to finish, current Lucifer only really has curls towards the end of her hair now xD also as a joke she was going to have a curl on each side of her head that would point upwards like they were devil horns
And here's a silly sketch I drew of Lucifer sitting on the boat Beatrice would use to take Luci from point A to point B.


Story stuff: There wasn't really any theme or point to it, imo. It was just going to be about mis/adventures that Lucifer had with Beatrice, and occasionally telling Beatrice some of the mis/adventures Lucifer had herself, like I said, it was meant to be very funny, so there wasn't any emotion to feel besides the giggles.

Why I didn't take this story on: Because there wasn't any real meaning to it I felt like it would be hard to draw/write, I felt there was no real ending to this, and that's what really worries me when writing a story, how to end it, because some times the story can suck at first but get good and move on to great and then end fantastic, some times be crap, go good, then end crap, or it can be a really great story throughout everything and then have a crappy ending, and I am huge on endings. I LIKE A GOOD ENDING. If I don't like the ending then I feel the story was crap to me... >.>

Also I felt this story was limited but yet... unlimited?? There are so many adventures you can come up with, and that's the problem for me.

Eventually because this is how I felt I just gave up on the story for now, I felt it was way out of my league. Especially because I only came up with this idea about 3-4 years ago, and I was really unsure about the 80s and 90s, and everything else (also I really hated the idea of researching at the time xD), I didn't know how to draw backgrounds which was going to be big for it because if not then I knew people probably wouldn't know where the characters were or what was going on.

Then I moved on to a different idea where there was more meaning and things were completely different, which is this one of now... But I guess it's still kind of hard to understand LP(because of my bad writing skills at the time)... So I think with the reboot there's going to be more answers there!

But with the original story of Beatrice and Lucifer I actually still plan to do, but with a whole set of different Mythology, but it's going to PROBABLY be a project that I pick on from time to time... Something to do for when I don't want to work on LP.

Anyway, uh... that's it!

So many different sources of inspiration in these posts! So awesome!

Title Unrelated is just the latest incarnation of characters I've had since childhood. Twapa has been around since I was probably 7 years old. Most of the characters in the story now are somewhat more recent, but fill the same roles as the characters I wrote about as a kid, pretty much.

Originally Twapa & co. were less-antho animal characters. There was a lot of Sonic, Secret of NIMH, TLK, and Redwall influence at various stages in the ongoing saga I would make up stories and draw pictures of.
(here's a drawing of Twapa pre-Untitled!, from 1999):


In 2000 I started doing a webcomic set in modern times in a "furry" AU of the real world. It's actually still online (http://untitled.comicgenesis.com/). It ended in 2007.

Title Unrelated is essentially a reboot of Untitled! (technically, U! and TU are canon AUs of each other, among an infinite number of alternate realities) - but the characters are drawn as normal humans this time around. It was originally supposed to be more different from Untitled! than it turned out to be... haha. TU draws more influences from shounen anime and my own life experiences as an adult traveling the world and coming to terms with my identity.

For a long time I didn't know how to make up NEW stories or characters, but I've gotten better at it recently, so after TU I'll probably move on to some other kind of story... maybe. XD

I'm intrigued about why you decided to reboot Untitled! ...
I actually had a similar experience with my first set of characters, they were in my head since I was a kid, and I tried a few different written versions before finally settling down to a long-form webcomic (Kaspall - and yeah, I also read NIMH and Redwall ). But once I finally managed to finish that story, I felt kind of done with those guys. How come you restarted with another version? I can't believe it was just because you couldn't think of any new characters - even if I couldn't think of a single new thing, I wouldn't want to restart Kaspall from scratch
Did you still feel like you hadn't done what you wanted to with Untitled? Or did you like the characters and world so much you didn't want to leave it yet?

Edit: And also, as you got better as the art, did you get as infuriated as I did with trying to draw human expressions on an animal face? .... or was that just me?

I remember reading the first part of Kaspall years ago, haha, didn't realize you'd finished it!

TBH I wasn't done with the characters, I guess. I initially didn't intend for it to BE a reboot, but a different story with the "same" characters, but some things wound up playing out really similarly. XD
When I say I couldn't make up new characters... I really mean that. I had a weird creative block about it. I was too attached to these characters and I wasn't ready to let go, even though I was done with the story/world of Untitled!.

And yeah, I was frustrated with furry art, that was also part of it!

Yup, finally finished it last year (it ... took a while).

I think a lot of people here will relate to the whole 'getting fixated on one group of characters' thing. I'm not sure I'd even call it a 'block' myself ... there are some characters you just have to get out of your system before you can move on to something else. I knew I had to finish Kaspall, for instance, because if I didn't, it would have bugged me forever that I never got that character set down in a completed story (they'd been with me since I was a kid, much like yours).

I guess I just find it interesting that you managed to finish Untitled!, but you still weren't done with them. But then a first full comic is always going to be a learning experience, so it must be nice to be able to apply everything you've learnt to make a better version of the story.

So mine is two fold.

The original story started back in 2004 when I while attempting to draw a person screwed up and made my main character Angry D. Monkey. I really liked how he looked and posted on a forum to show him off. Someone then asked if I'd put him into a comic and I decided right there that I should. Sat down and came up with a story and many years later and 400 pages I ended the series having lost the fun of it.

Fastforward to a few years ago was in a google hangout with friends and one "bullied" me into bringing back the comic because she loved the characters so much. It didn't take much and I decided to reboot the series by using one of the storylines I didn't get to in the original and expand upon it.

But Dawg what about.


Hockey Hooligans.

Kota's World started out based on me and my friends and quickly evolved into a very silly epic.
Errant Apprentice came from this shared universe idea I had in high school about a world where magic came back sometime in the 70's. There were going to be three series. One about an elf and dwarf who ran a detective agency, one about a modern day wizard, and one (mine) about a modern day knight. I held onto the idea for years and started working on it around 2005. 2006 I heard the song "Greenman" by XTC and the idea just came together from there.
Mailbox is an AU version of Kota's World in highschool. It's a cross between Douglas Adams style sci-fi, superhero comics, and Welcome to Night Vale. I just had some ideas about how to write those characters better.

XII started out in highschool with a play on designing characters based on themes, mainly anything related to some form of zodiacs. So ended up drawing a multitude of different characters all revolving back to some form of zodiac motif. They were everything from elements, to birthstones to different forms of the zodiac. Originally it was going to be more of a Cardcaptor type story, that would stretch out forever. But I decided it would be better to have a themed team of characters. That started me breaking down even further from fighting enemies based on theme like Sailor Moon to having more of an upgrade situation. But then I lost all my antagonists, so I started to think with more of a WHY attitude. Why do they have magic powers? Why are they fighting at all? Why is there a team? Why is the story being told at all.

3 years of spending time answering my own questions, and here it is!

Oh boy this one is a doozy. So I, like many others, was inspired by a dream. It was all the way back in 2005, and after the dream I had this sudden insatiable desire to start writing a story that at the time was randomly titled "Half Moon Diary." It was an urban fantasy about demon hunters, and the first story I had ever stuck to for a long period of time without getting bored of it. My usual habit was to get really into an idea for a month, then abandon it.


I wrote at least fifteen crappy purple-prose chapters of this thing that never saw the light of day, but I learned a lot about writing and storytelling through them. Over the years the idea grew and changed with me, until it became a mess. Like it had everything but the kitchen sink in its plot because instead of creating new stories, universe, and plots, I tried to cram every single idea I ever had into Half Moon Diary. It was a train wreck.
So one day in 2010, I let it all burn. I tossed out practically everything but a few main characters, and even then I changed all their names, except for Avril.
For awhile I had no idea what the now Untitled story was about. I knew I wanted my main group of characters to fight some kind of monsters, but I didn't even know their origin for a long time. I played around with the idea of mutants, or aliens, but nothing ever quite appealed to me as much as a supernatural origin, so I ended up sticking with that.

It wasn't until I figured out my theme, found-family, that things started to come together. I realised how I could use a post-apocalypse setting to enhance the bonds that formed between strangers, and basically everything came together from there. I developed it for about a year, then said SCREW IT, and began proper work on a comic. I started out drawing what I usually call my "pilot" Which was a 70-something page comic starring Avril, Eli, and James and titled Principal Meal. The universe was an early version of what Soul to Call's universe ended up being, so there are a few elements that don't match the final project, especially in regards to Eli's abilities. It was a great experience though, and it springboarded my desire to start my webcomic for real.
So at the end of 2013 that's exactly what I did.

To make an incredibly long story short, Bad Moon Rising was born from a Werewolf: the Apocalypse campaign that ended up the way most of these games do: with real life putting an end to things before any of the plots could be properly resolved.

But Mv (oh beloved co-conspirator) and I kept talking about what would happen to the characters afterwards, and somehow that evolved into a webcomic.