Since 2020 I've been drawing comics instead of creating animations in my spare time. I've been self publishing on Amazon and have completely changed my twitter settings to follow comics, comix and other cartoon styled stuff. After 5 years and I've published 6 comics and this is what I've learnt so far...
Design your pages in small thumbnails first. Then you don't take too long to draw them and the first 3 layouts you do will suck. If you're lucky enough to draw digitally use that to your advantage and really play with scale, positioning and panelling. Do not think the first thing you've drawn is the best it can ever be because comics is all about the 1,000 sketches you threw away to make a page work.
Write the story down first... This seems obvious but for one comic I was so sure what the story was (Tweeter and the Monkeyman Issue 71) I didn't bother and you pay for it later. For Game Boyz I scripted and storyboarded out the entire story apart from the end and then I just added and added to it when creating the final pages.
Try to make your comic more than 20 pages... This is really hard at first because you get to 12 or 15 pages and think f**k this I'm done. I need to see the birds, the sky and be with people but this passes... The more comics I've created my page count has gone up. When I went over 30 pages on Tweeter and the Monkeyman it almost killed me (exaggeration) but it was difficult to get to that level.
You won't make any money out of this immediately (or ever) so if that's your one goal I'd give up now. It's been great to self publish on Amazon even though it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some people hate Amazon, treading on the kindle or that bloke who runs it. Beznos, Bezzo or is it Bennett? Some shit like that! Anyways it doesn't matter... After a few years I offered my stuff for free on GlobalComix and even then not many people care. This isn't a recipe for success. These are just the musings of a bearded cartoonist who should really stop typing..?
And yet he didn't... So draw pages small, write the story down first, change your idea many many many times and don't even think about money. What else? As I said in the beginning I'd changed my Twitter feed so it's nothing but comics and cartoons. The odd advert slips in now and again but it's been an interesting world to immerse myself into. A blogging website called Bleeding Fool took an interest in my first comic (Mortimer) and wanted to write about it. I said ok, this was during 2020... we were all in lockdown. I was just drawing comics in between freelance graphics work so I had some time on my hands. The blogger then sent me a whole list of questions. Not tailored to my particular comic just general questions like, how many pages, what's the title and so on. He's featured all 5 of my comics and it's been the same questions every time. This leads me to my final conclusion, the internet is a waste of time. All this blogger wants is content! Content so we all keep reading it and they can sell advert space. The problem with this is it diminishes the content so it's just babble. I don't have anything against this sorta stuff but it occurs to me that there's a hell of a lot of noise out there.
It's also amusing how varied the comics community can be. Most of the people who draw for Marvel or DC look like live-with-there-mum-bikers. I tried to listen to a podcast about comics and two guys were talking about tits on some superhero. The other side is indie comic creators who are incredibly woke and so are their stories. I have nothing against any of this. I don't worry what people think about me but my comics do have a lot of guns. I am not a gun nut, I've never even fired a gun. I just really like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and there's loads of cartoon characters holding guns in that. I promise I will not make another gun crazy comic... (written in 2022)
Then of course there's RoboCock!!! As of Jan 2025 RoboCock is my most viewed comic of all time on GlobalComix with a whopping 2,000 reads/views. But I've only made 37 cents out of the whole thing but the important thing is people are reading it and reacting to it so... f**k a duck!