How we make the comic
Pens, paper, and a Wacom Cintiq with a screen scratched half to hell.
Wykkrwomb begins like any other humble creative endeavour: in shambles.
Though I tend to write out the bigger details in words, and little details on notes, the vast majority of the way I make Wykkrwomb is without orthodox script, where instead I simply line my notes up chronologically, and turn them into storyboards - then I take those, and endlessly edit and add to them until they develop into fleshed out scenes, if in tiny thumbnail (with tiny context/dialogue written underneath), storyboards.
I scan these, design page layouts for them, and then spend another hundred million years actually drawing the pages (woof). Doing it this way, my 'writing' takes essentially as long as my drawing state, but I think, with the end product, it's worth it. Writing is important to me.
In the picture above, I believe the 1st story arc/"book" (they're door stoppers, maybe 14 chapters - big for a comic - with some chapters having as many as 200+ pages - which is BIG for a comic) was nearly fully-storyboarded here.
The middle of the comic features (essentially) a mini-arch where the protagonist, Theiya, tries to swindle her heartache into running away with her beating him in a complex, Chess/Risk-like fictional board game with match (if he wins, of course, she agrees she'll give up this 'running-away' thing). Well, I realised early on that this was an a completely insane idea, and that I should have just had them play Go (Chinese board game), or something. Alas, I proceeded, and ended up having to not only make a prototype of the actual game board, but I was also forced to create essentially choreograph sheets for the entire "fight," because a stubborn part of my brain didn't want readers to simply glimpse at the board as the two characters played and realise it wasn't actually being happening. No, I want those two chapters to feel real; I want Ticonqui, the board game, to feel real. So I spent 3-5 months figuring out how the actual game, and "fight" takes place. How who wins, wins, or who loses, loses.
Interpreting these things is going to be a chore, but again, I just can't stand the idea of the alternative. Tolkien wanted to believe in his own world - so do I. Though I'm reworking some of chapter 1 right now if just to make it even better, the first major arc is basically storyboarded. I just have to translate them into comic page-format, and draw all the rest of the pages. Making art, or stories, isn't necessarily more difficult than making anything
else, but it does seem to be harder to accurately pin down a schedule for. A part of that is anxiety, a part of that is muse, or will/energy too, a part of that depends on level of skill, and a part of that depends on stubbornness-to-do-good-work, or perfectionism.
At the moment, the webcomic updates with four-to-six pages every last Wednesday of the month.