It’s been about 2 months since I started posting my new adult fantasy comic MagicalMashup! online and I’ve been seeing quite a few comic anniversary posts. This got me thinking about what makes folks share their work on the day that they did. I don’t assume that everyone has a DaVinci Code reason for posting when they do, but maybe you do, shrugs.
I’ve been posting my art online ever since high school, but up until last year, I hadn’t posted a long-form comic, even though I had been working on a few in the past. I wanted to make one, but I didn’t have the drive at the time or know-how to do anything that required as much dedication and time as making long-form creative work does. Three years ago I got help with getting organized and was like, “I’m making this webcomic darnit and that’s that!” I really thought I’d have a comic ready to go a year later (lol). I mean I had been musing on the concept of a black plus-size upbeat gal with control over the elements and her standoffish wizard partner for almost a decade at that point, but musing on it and actually planning the comic are to very different things.
Once I got my flow going and all my preliminary setup done, I really wanted to release the comic at a time that would be easy for me to remember. 2020 is the start of a new decade so that helps me keep track of the years I’ve worked on it and then November because, well… because it was the end of the year and I needed to squeeze all the time I could get to wrap up finishing touches on Chapter One, but still counted as 2020 (heh).
So tell me, what made you decide the date you would release your novel or comic and why? If you haven’t yet, that’s ok. When you will post it is fine too!
TLDR: I started posting my comic in November of 2020 because 2020 is an easy year to count from and November is the end of the year without being the END of the year haha. When’s your content anniversary and why did you post when you did (or will if you’re still working)?
One of my release day banners I used to advertise my new adult fantasy comic featuring a plus size fat gal black lead with huge orange Afro puffs!
11.2.2020 will kick off my first Magicalmashup! Monday!! That’s when I’m going to do the thing and begin releasing my comic woot! I’m so excited to finally start posting it. Leading up to the date I’ll be posting some goodies on my social media sites to introduce the characters and maybe a bit of the world :).
If you want to be their for when the first pages drop jump up on this hype train and check out magicalmashup.com or follow on Tapas at https://m.tapas.io/series/MagicalMashup/info yay!
To see all the behind the scenes art, and previews, checkout Instagram.com/lady.t.musings or twitter.com/lady_toyano
Over the last (psha when was the last time I posted…hmmnn) year a ton has happened to the world we live in from a societal view. Things are and will be different due to this Pandemic. I find myself thinking how sci-fi this should seem, but it’s reality. I was out of work for 6 weeks and while at home the anxiety, nerves, fear and worry were a constant nag on my sanity (still are as we are still in the midst of the Pandemic as I write this), but I have been back at work since May 1st, so yeah… Staying sanatised, busy, and masked up.
During the whole 6 weeks away from work, I put a lot of my anxiety and nerves at ease by staying busy. It’s true I spent a ton of time playing video games like Death Stranding, Plants vs Zombies, Borderlands and ahhh that’s not important lol, I mean a gal needs to decompress and get lost in some fictional immersion when it’s at the point where hearing someone cough gets folks jumpy. That’s not all I did, I also spent a lot of time reading and researching about color, light, form, storytelling, and making comics in general AND making my CODEX for my comic. All things that I have been doing, but during this time at home, I really got the time to dive deep into these areas and make some good headway on all fronts.
My pent up energy flowed through my fingertips most afternoons (bc ya’ll know I slept in every day!) and into connecting the lore of my fantasy world Magos to the characters that reside in it. Having my darling as a sounding board, and asker of questions I never would have thought about (extremely helpful when trying to figure out character reactions and motivations fyi) made the days fly by. Finally my reference notes and musings on my Fantasy world, it’s customs, and people is done. Something I had been meaning to refine for years completed within the 6 weeks of staying home and trying to stay safe.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot easier for me to understand and see more clearly what I am trying to create in this New Adult Fantasy comic about a fat and black mage gal with a unique ability leaving her hidden home in Faiewood for the first time and making her way to the Institute of Magical, Mystical and Mythical Arts (IMMMA) where here story truly begins in the Heart of Lufiriya; a nation filled with a multitude of beings of magic and technology working and living side by side. It’s a lot to take in for Junah, our protagonist, but it’s also the start of an exciting new chapter in her life (One I look forward to sharing).
Though I don’t think this is something necessary to do for all comic creators or even story tellers, it defiantly is a helpful resource to have as reference if you are working in sci-fi or fantasy. This probably would have been more helpful to hear during the height of the stay at home business, but here I am now and this info still holds true for anyone who wishes to work on getting their story out their, but have idle hands and don’t know where to direct that energy. Gather your resources into a binder, book, word doc, whatever. Just get it together. It may not be what you think you should be doing but hey, starting somewhere is better than not starting at all.
Now that I am back to work and having to manage my time a lot more efficiently, I’m working to figure out the best approach to maximizing my creative output each day. I’ve started doing 1hr in the studio each weekday save Mondays, as Mondays are MagicalMashup! Mondays and is reserved specifically for working on the comic. I’m also breaking all my notebooks up because having all my notes and markings in one book is to confusing to refer back to late. This is working for me, but also means I have like 3 notebooks I carry around daily. Though I also carry a large purse so HA, I’m game.
Next post I would like to share some of the reading materials That I have found *super effective* and how I plan to use what I’ve picked up!
Stay safe.
A friend of mine that is an excellent photographer allowed me to use her work for ref. She takes excellent fantasy mood photos from real life. @freodywn on Instagram
Almost dying definitely put my life into perspective. That experience made me prioritize things that make me most happy in life and what I want to do with the time I have left. I went to college for art, but not the art I wanted to do. I wanted to make comics. I had pages of original characters and one-off neat pieces with cute stories in my head, but I rarely talked about them outside of my closest art friends and I knew that would have to change.
Whenever I feel creatively stomped or frustrated I have art meetups with other art friends. During the time I was I got serious about making a comic, it was my buddy M who I would call on most days. M was also an awesome artist with her own style and tons of stories. We would spend so much time sharing our ideas with each other and it would always give me such a rush. It’s amazing to have someone you can bounce ideas off of who really just gets it.
I’m a visual person. So much so that I’d rather talk through pictures than use my words (Emoji’s were my language before they were a form of language). I know that sounds silly, but because of that (and the fact that my handwriting is really bad), I didn’t write many of my story ideas down. When I did, I would have a hard time deciphering them (sadly). Getting that old Acer laptop from my aunty was truly the bee’s knees. I could type over handwrite!
I started off by writing blurbs under my pictures to get myself comfortable with writing to some degree. Having folks engage with my characters and asking questions over the years really helped the boost confidence. It’s one thing to write a paper in school, but putting yourself out there to share something personal is a different animal. Writing blurbs helped, but to make the jump to comics, I would have to write a lot more than that.
Mixed media: alcohol markers and acrylic ink. More on their story on my Instagram!
Draw a story with your words and write a picture with lines.
I have a ton of artist and movements that isnpire me, but I want to go back to the artist who inspired the style into me. The beautiful Sophie Campbell!
Imagine a high school geeky, black, tall, not typically considered pretty, and a fat gal who had been drawing for around 8 +/- years at that point, but had never created a character that represented who she was. Lots of heroic figures, and wishful thinking, but none that actually showed any of the realness that she was in a setting that she dreamt of. Not because she didn’t want to, but because it just didn’t occur to her to do it.
Wild right!?
I had my gal Amanda Waller in Dc comics, and the old but good anime Crying Freeman gave me black women with black features being amazing badasses (and even a super-sized lady who I grew to love even though I didn’t at first due to her childish ways). And I’m sure if I squinted really hard and went deep into the recesses of the dial-up internet I could squeeze out a few more, but for me, that was about it…
I was in high school when I read Sophie Campbell’s the Abandoned, I became woke to what was missing in my geeky life. This woman was illustrating everything I wanted to see, and it blew my mind to finally see it. All the nitty gritty beauty of the bodies, the emotions, and just how raw her women were allowed to be. That sort of representation was so scarce for me.
It was a weird introspective moment that made me think about…well everything. I craved this representation, but because I never saw it, my subconscious had pretty much erased it from the realm of possibility. EVEN THOUGH I COULD DRAW IT! That’s some mad crazy Twilight Zone-ish to wake up to. Goes to show how easy it is to internalize things based on what you see or don’t see in the media you consume.
After that, I made a conscious effort to draw inspiration from the amazing women present in my daily life. It took an effort to change the way my pencil translated what I thought to what was drawn, since the urge to blend out, smooth out, and “fix” was so prominent, but the effort paid off! Now it’s second nature to draw rolls, afro-textured hair, muscles on women, and imperfectly perfect bodies.
I have a ton of other major influences on style, taste, and what inspires me… but this lady gets her own post for being the first to wake me up and represent the kind of people I wanted to see more of in the media I love.
Thanks <3
Alcohol marker testing on a chubby cheeked Avatar idea.
I have had the idea for MagcicalMashup! swimming around in my head for over a decade now, and whenever I would get folks asking me for more on the scoop behind Junah and Kaelen I was more than happy to talk about them. Hearing all the interest got me thinking about how cool it would be to make their story into a comic, so I started outlining it out.
Oh boi did I outline..er, more like script it out as the outline is 100+ pages (not even including supporting documents for world building). It’s easy to get stuck at this phase, and I did. For YEARS. It wasn’t until I received the ultimate push (more on that later) from an amazing friend of mine that I put my butt in gear and in the headspace that bringing this comic to life is totally doable.
“Take it in parts lady.” I repeat that often whenever I feel overwhelmed at the task at hand and it helps me see the smaller pieces that make the whole. I had the two leads and I knew magic would be involved. From there I started to flesh out everything else by writing down everything I liked about fantasy as a genre and the types of characters I liked until I got this:
MagicalMashup! is the story of Junah, an airy fat black gal with the power to compound elements to create new forms experiencing life outside of her secluded home in the enchanted FaieWoods and Kaelen a stoic wizard…of sorts that would rather hone his skills than socializie and how they work together as partners (and eventually more) in a world filled with magic, mysticism, and mythical beings.
It’s pretty much everything I have ever wanted to see in fantasy and it would be brought to life by my own hand!
The writing part started slowly at first but picked up to include word vomit on any and everything about this world that I could think of. Everything from the races, the landscapes, beliefs systems, world history, trees, and everything else I could remotely think of. So many details that I took the time to develop. Sounds great, but ultimately, it just made it that much harder to make a page 1.
So much pretense just made it seem always incomplete and I’ll be darned if I release something incomplete. Well, that’s what I thought. The beauty of making comics these days (specifically indie webcomics) is that all creative decisions are left to the creator. That also means it’s ready when I say it’s ready, completely scripted or not.
There is something refreshing about that. It has just taken a while for me to see that. Not having everything written in stone leaves room for growth, and the ability to watch your world grow organically. I still have my mega script, but I have learned to leave room for improvements and leave stuff open to interpretation. I’m learning to embrace this more, and I think in the end it will work for what I’m making instead of against it.
Junah
Kaelen
“Give it your best, keep at it, and know that you will get better as you keep creating!”
I want to document the steps I’m taking to bring my comic from my head-space to this place (well the internet that is). Hopefully, this will also help my behind with organization and maybe even provide some motivation.
Like bunnies making babies, so should your creative output. -Lady T.
