In Retrospect (Complete)

Published: Friday, Jul 26, 2024, 11:00 AM UTC

Tags: #infographic (1) #inspiration (2) #make-comics (4)

On June 27th 2016 I posted the retrospective I did for The Rabbit and the Moon. Back then, I couldn’t do what I can now, which is to show really long comics vertically. At the time, I was using Wordpress and it hamstrung me with its limitations.

So, here we are, it’s July 2025.

I’ve rebuilt the site (yet again) and realized I never presented this retrospective infographic in the way I would have liked you to see it.

So here it is all together.

Thoughts Nine Years Later?

It’s been nine years since I wrote that retrospective for The Rabbit and the Moon.

It’s a little hard to let that sink in, so much time has passed, but here we are.

After that, I took time away from making comics for a while, and then I worked on the Lady of the Moon, which is a short side story that follows up with Rabbit.

And then, I got scared.

Scared of the idea of doing another long serialized comic. It would take me years to write and draw it. If The Rabbit and the Moon took six years, then the next one would lock me in for another six. And after that, another six years for a third? How many could I produce? And would it be worth it?

I think most people would quit.

I kinda did.

The Wrong Lesson

It did take me years before I remembered how Rabbit and the Moon got done in the first place.

Bit by bit over time.

A few hours of drawing one night. Thirty minutes here and there for storyboarding. A marathon drawing and painting session while I binge watched a TV show. An evening of rewriting a chapter. Some scattered thoughts I jotted down while taking a walk outside. And somehow after six years with all of that effort focused on one thing, what started as words became images, and images became a story, and that story became this website.

And I didn’t sacrifice anything. I worked a day job. I still watched all the things. Played video games. I still socialized with friends. I still lived a life. I don’t know if you can call it discipline or gumption or perseverance. I know it was a handful of minutes here, a few hours there, and over time before I knew it, it became something.

It was just a thing I was doing along with other thing.

And, that’s how the comic really got done.

And the lesson I took away was the wrong one.

I had to shift my mindset from this idea of one comic being six years, and more towards the idea of enjoying the moments of working on it. Looking at things in the long term like that certainly kills momentum for wanting to those things.

I began experimenting with doing shorter stuff in the years inbetween then and now, but in 2021 I started working on Magical Girl Kamiko. It was based off a digital piece of art I made in 2018. I thought it would be funny if Kamiko (that is, Takahashi Natsumi) decided that being a goddess, meant using her powers as a magical girl to protect humanity. And I like to draw pinups, so those things meshed together and produced the curent story.

Magical Girl Kamiko was going to be much more longform, but I wanted to make it a lot more flexible in how I approached it. So that’s why when you look at this new comic, there is, shall we say, a mess of different formats and types of comics. Some of them are sketchy single panels, some of them are 4koma style comics, and some of them are long, vertical comics, and certainly as I went on producing new installments they ended up becoming longer and longer pieces of work as I tried to put more story into each segment.

But I was enjoying myself, and that’s what matters.

Improvisation

My thinking shifted away from the idea of doing things in stages, that is, you know:

Starting with a complete script for the entire story
Storyboarding the complete thing
Penciling the comic pages
Lettering it.
blah, blah, blah…

That’s more of a traditional comic book pipeline. And, that’s not how I wanted to work.

Like I said, it took me six years to do one comic. A lof of things about you and your thinking change over six years. My thoughts on the characterization. My style of writing. What I thought was funny in 2011 wasn’t my sense of humor in 2016.

I also had a ton of new ideas, but none of them could be incorporated because in 2016 I was working with a story from 2011. My 2011 self. My 2011 writing.

The new idea is improvisation and being OK with the fact that not everything would be squared away perfectly. As a creator that made the comic feel alive and interesting. It’s fun to shape it week to week.

Now, this comic isn’t a bunch of one-off jokes, even though there are quite a bit of that in the story, but there is a lot of continuity between the individual stories. It’s hard to keep all of that consistent and in-mind. It is difficult when the body of work starts getting bigger and bigger. Despite that, I still like the approach that I took with Magical Girl Kamiko and making things a lot more improvisational and fluid.

Buffering…

Another thing that changed was the idea that I needed a buffer.

I hear you ask, “What is a comic buffer?”

It’s this idea that I would produce a bunch of comic pages before I publish anything. I would prepare a bunch of updates so that I could publish it in a regular cadence over a period of weeks.

This meant that if I needed to skip a week, or if I wasn’t feeling it, that wouldn’t be an issue, because I would have a buffer of pages that could be released on a weekly basis already prepared for me, by me.

But then that creates buffer angst.

Now, I have to maintain this buffer and it always has to be topped off. It becomes a chore, a self-imposed deadline. Then, as human nature dictates, I want to do it less.

I’m not doing this project for money, right? It doesn’t need to be on a deadline or a schedule. It is a hobby after all. And I didn’t think I needed to have this added angst of dealing with a comic buffer. So I just went without it.

I made comics when I felt like it. The times where I really felt in the zone I could produce a lot. I didn’t wait, I would release it as I got done and moved on to the next thing. There were other times where life was more important or I just didn’t feel like working on the comic, and it took a backseat and maybe they were just no updates for weeks or even months.

I’m okay with it.

You, as the dear reader, may not be, but, you will have to endure it along with me.

This is a space I created that allows me to be creative in many different ways. I have built enough of the space and I feel I can come and go into the space as often as I want, and in the way that I want to approach the space to do new things.

Here are the parts…

If you want to read the retrospective and learn more about the process and what I learned from doing the big ole comic, it’s broken into six parts where I talk about the construction of the comic, the tools I used, and how much time it took and who read it.

###Here are the parts: