For example, I recently finished reading Our Bones Dust, an excellent 4 issue mini series by long-time Mike Mignola collaborator, Ben Stenbeck. In an interview with Comics Beat he was asked, after over a decade of working on professional comics, why Our Bones Dust was the right book for his first solo series:
“It’s funny, I never set out to make this like my big debut or anything like that. I have a project that’s ‘my big thing’ I want to get to someday. This felt like smaller stakes, like an exercise in getting my own book done and out there before attempting something bigger.”
Here we have a professional comic artist who knows how to finish comics. And even he did a simple project before doing his “big thing.”
For you and your project, keeping it simple could mean different things. It could mean removing characters, making the style less detailed and time intensive to draw or offloading part of the process like writing, lettering or colors to someone else.
Just the process of making comics is a lot of work, do yourself a favor in the beginning and keep it simple.
Obstacle 2: Frustration
What I mean by frustration is that feeling you get when there is a perceived gap between your art and what you had envisioned the final to look like in your head.
For me that frustration would always come at the penciling stage. I love designing characters and doing thumbnails. But when it came time to actually draw those characters in the environments and poses from the thumbnails I would start to feel frustrated. And it's when that feeling of frustration compounded, I would begin to think “I’m not good enough yet” and quit.
If you feel that, know it isn't true. You are good enough right now to draw comics. It might not look like what you see in your head, but that does not mean it doesn’t have value.
My tip for overcoming frustration is: Don’t care.
Tip 2: Don’t Care
If you want your comic to be perfect it's never going to get done. For me this comic was a nothing project. Daniel and I started this project just to prove we could finish something. Because I didn’t write the story, if the art was terrible and the comic failed, that didn’t matter, at least I finished it.
Of course, in the process of working on the comic, I started to care. But by then I had my first success and was able to go back to that whenever I started to feel frustrated and wanted to quit. When I would finish a page and think “Well this looks horrible” I would look at the page I was proud of and say “but this other page is great. So I know it's possible,” and move along.
So I’m serious, just don’t care. If you work enough on your comic, you will eventually create something you are proud of. It might be a single page, or a single panel or a single drawing in a panel. Whatever it is, it will be a success and when the frustration becomes too much you can go back and focus on the success. But to get to that point, you need to not care.
Obstacle 3: Avoiding the Hard Things
In the beginning of working on my comic I would meet once a week with a mentor. They’re a professional artist who has finished a bunch of graphic novels.
