Honesty is so important in creating art for people. In creating anything. We’re all sitting here saying the same things. We’re trying to achieve goals that don’t mesh with reality, or just trying to get along.
Achewood creator Chris Onstad’s interview with Comics Alliance helps crystallize so much of why I love comics and sharing them online. Achewood is one of the few comics that makes me feel like I’m transported somewhere else when I read it, and Onstad really inspired a lot of what I make and how I share it. Now that I’m actually hustling to make it as a cartoonist, a lot of the frustrations Onstad vocalizes in the interview rings truer to me. I felt like I’d been getting more discouraged and disillusioned with webcomics over the past few months, but hearing Onstad’s story about returning from hiatus and revitalizing Achewood and changing how he views his work/life balance has given me some of that same energy I thought I had lost.
Here’s a smart insight on writing I learned from a crazy nutjob.
“The biggest thing about bathrooms [in comics] is that there’s something transformative about them, too. They seem like places where people notice things about themselves… you go in and you come out different. I like to use this idea in my comics to a more metaphorical degree where a character will be changed somehow, or something in their life will be changed… I knew when I created Shadoweyes that there was no question that her first metamorphosis would be in the bathroom.”
On bathrooms, by Ross Campbell (@mooncalfe).
If you cannot take your giant space opera down to its basics—a noun, a verb, and a direct object—you have a problem. The problem is you don’t understand what your story is basically about. It has become so complex that you can’t tell what’s most important anymore: what’s really driving the story.
An excellent guide on basic story structure by Madeline Rupert, creator of Sakana.
