It’s the comic’s birthday!
 
Hard to believe, I know, but it was on this day exactly one year ago that the first page of ‘(A) Display of Passion’ has been posted online. And, I just want to say, while not without (many, many, many) hitches and hiccups… It certainly has been a journey.
 
Would you like me to share some of it with you? =)
 
You would, huh? Neat.
 
Well then, first of all, while the above is true and the first page was definitely posted a year ago, the actual moment the comic was born happened way before that. To be slightly more precise, it was about year and a half back, when one fateful day I woke up, stared into the ceiling, and thought to myself: “Man, we should really start a comic already.” Now, for context, me and the artist were already good friends for quite a while at the point - doodling smut and writing silly stories together, each doing our own art thing in the free time, half-jokingly dreaming about starting a big serious webcomic one day, yada, yada - but never actually starting anything noteworthy. Every time we thought of it, life would get in the way, as it tends to do; we each had our own fill of problems to worry about and routine to busy ourselves with, and so the years simply went by without as much as a single page of horse porn done between us.
 
Horrifying, I know.
 
That’s why once we’ve finally decided to start it, we went at it as seriously as we ever could. Despite not having a first idea of how to make a comic, we decided right away that we won’t settle on just any regular ol’ smut comic; no, nooo, we wanted to make something at least a little bit extra, something special, something that could be called a full-fledged work of art, however depraved; something that would be an one-of-a-kind thing to be remembered by.
 
That was a huge mistake grand beginning!
 
Keep in mind, back then, not only we didn’t know anything about specifically comic-making, we were also pretty bad at our respective craft as well. I could barely two together put words potato, and wasn’t very good into engrish, either, and the artist guy had to spend weeks to draw anything half-decent, and months to scrap enough motivation to do so beforehand. Still, still, don’t get me wrong, the first week or so was pretty darn great - we’d talk about what and how we wanted to make for hours on end, share ideas and make plans, come up with cool scenes and key points for the story… Then we began actual work and everything went to crap.
 
Turns out there is a lot of stuff about comic-making that seems pretty obvious right up until you actually try to do it yourself. How many panels there should be on the page? What moments should be shown on them and from what angles? What’s important and what’s better to omit? What shape make the panels and how to arrange them on the page? Where to place speech balloons? Those and many other questions like those popped up one after another faster than we could answer them, as we tried to sketch our very first actual page. Let me just give you a perspective straight away: to make the very rough draft of a mock-up of a sketch of the intro (the first two pages), to just decide on approximately where and what should be… It took us more than two months. During that time we went through dozens of different options for the same ‘intro’ part, ranging anywhere between zero and like ten pages, and even more sub-options for each of them. There was an option to skip the intro completely and start straight with the juicy parts to grab people’s attention, with a possibility of flashbacking to it later; there was an option to start their story far away in the morning before they even meet, and spend a bunch of pages to flesh out the characters and the situation, to have a slow build-up with subtle hints and the like; and then there were all the options in-between. In the end we went with the option we decided was the best middle-ground between action and exposition.
 
Then we started actually drawing the more precise sketch of the first page and everything went to crap… again.
 
Proper human anatomy is hard. Drawing natural-looking poses from the required angle is hard. Making the characters look dynamic and moving on a 2d panel is hard. Faces are hard. God, faces are hard. Did I mention faces are hard? Because they are hard, so very, very, very hard. Almost hands-tier hard, only you need to draw faces like 20x more often than hands. Any non-standard expression, anything too subtle or too strong, anything that needed to convey a very specific emotion - back then, nearly every single face took us days, sometimes weeks to draw, each. Not even kidding. And the poses - remember that finger guns pose from the second page? Yes, yes, that misshapen parody of a cool guy. This thing alone took us nearly a week, that we spent repeatedly posing before one another with our arms placed this way and that, taking photos from different angles and trying to draw from them later and failing and posing some more. Honestly, it would be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating.
 
…Okay, it was still pretty funny.
 
In the end, struggling like that, it took us more than a month to finish just those two first pages, counting after their rough drafts were done, or more than three months total. It was… disheartening to say the least. We were expecting it’d be difficult for us, but we still hoped it wouldn’t take quite that much time and work. It was probably around back then that we first started to realize the caliber of what we tried to accomplish. But, as you can see, we were too dumb brave to let it stop us! After all, we understood very well that things are always very hard when you have no particular talent or experience in the field, so it’s not like we weren’t ready for the worst. We believed we’d get better with time, and so we carried on.
 
Next couple of months were spent roughly sketching the next 8 pages, for a total of 10. Later, those 8 would be heavily changed more than once as we’d be getting to them, with the new panels and whole pages being added on the fly, and the old removed or moved somewhere else, but back then we didn’t know anything about that. We thought that the full 10 pages of ‘finished‘ sketches would be a good enough ‘buffer’ to smooth up the timings in case anything goes wrong, and so it was a fitting moment to finally start posting the comic.
 
Yeeeaaah, you all know how well that went.
 
But anyway, let’s get back to the time before we started posting it - there are still many more mildly interesting moments I could reminisce about! For example, that ‘speech balloon into face’ idea from the second page felt like an utter stroke of genius back then, despite also taking several days to get right. Kinda feels bad we never got more chances to do stuff like that since, huh. Or hey - did you know I had to go through many, many different names for the comic before stopping on the current one - that I ended up liking greatly, despite having no idea whether or not that ‘a’ should be there? I actually still don’t, now that I think about it. Huh. Or, wait, no, here’s an even funnier one - I totally used to google every single line of dialogue I wrote, just to see if it was something commonly said or not, and wait nevermind I still do that now. Oh, oh, or I could tell you how we were so silly we’d spend like 80% of the time arguing and fighting about every little thing and yeah okay we still do that now too. Err, maybe then I could tell you how happy we were to reach our first 500$ on Patreon half a year back, while right now what we have there is a whooping yeah it’s still the same 500$ nevermind again.
 
Okay, you know what, enough with the nostalgia.
 
Enough with the negativity, too. Because, I mean, hey. In the end, regardless of how hard it was, or how much time it took; regardless of how painful it was too see all our hard work again and again resulting in something that could barely be called mediocre; regardless of how many, many times we wanted to just go ‘screw it’ and drop it all…
 
Regardless of it all, right now I can look back and see more than a year of hard work and dedication, that, one way or another, at some point started to bear fruit. Maybe not by very much, but we got better both at what we do, and at working together as a team. What took us weeks before, today we can make in days, or even hours, and at a higher quality at that. And while we can’t at this point change some of the less good points about the comic’s story and characters, the experience we gained will help us make our next thing better than that. Probably.
 
So yeah. Like I said, it’s been a journey, and one that, after all is said and done, we are glad we’ve started. And not any less than that we are glad that you guys have been there with us along the way =)
 
Still, that journey is not over! While I very much hope that the comic won’t see its second anniversary (as in, we’ll manage to finish it before that), there are still some ways to go, and butts to see. So let’s get to that, shall we? ;)