lkrecic asked: You had said that drawing a manga is one of the most unrewarding projects you can bring upon oneself. Could you elaborate more on why that is?

These are just my personal opinions which, as always when it comes to art, are subjective and not backed by known facts/education, so please don’t take the following too much to heart:

Creating a manga series takes a very very VERY long time unless it’s a one shot or a doujin, which in my eyes are like a snapshot rather than a story and a lot more fulfilling. Most of the work is in creating the story and not actual drawing. So much work is involved in making every facet of your world believable, even if you’re just taking after the real world. You have to be able to write a story for every single character you’ll ever introduce into your story, no matter how uneventful it is compared to your star protagonist. Everybody experiences change; You can’t just introduce an immortal and functional man who has apparently guarded the gates of hell for 500 years as a passerby character, and expect your readers to not wonder about the fact that not a single thought passed through his head about finding something better to do or being influenced by all the things he has seen. Not a single decision your characters make can be for plot convenience; even if they are, you have to stand in their place and find every other logical decision they could have made—ones that could have killed your story by making it a lot shorter and resolving a lot of conflicts a lot sooner—and figure out the reason why they were not chosen.

Once you have completed every circle, the only thing left to do is to draw it. At the pace of cooking one grain per day of your favourite food. You won’t ever get to that brilliant and satisfying scene you so desperately want to draw without spending 5 years of drawing the story to get there. You can’t rush because—convenient Chopin quote from leadingtone—”Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on”. Revealing your story because you can’t hold back telling your readers all about it means they will appreciate it a lot less because they weren’t really that curious about it in the first place. After you’ve done all these, after you’ve FINALLY finished your manga, if you’ve worked hard and diligently in making your story, you will know your work so well forwards and back that you can’t possibly have any feelings towards how good or bad it was unless you never look at it again for several years, forget it then look back. By that time your skill would have improved so much that the low quality of the work from years prior would be about the only thing you can notice, and redrawing the whole thing to match your new standards would be one of the top things in your mind.

By all means if anybody wants, they can skip all that work and still be able to create a series that most people will enjoy because most of the younger manga audience would never even consider half of the stuff above and would not complain if a series was just fancy battle scenes or cutesy couple shots every page with no story progression. Also I’m sure lots of manga artists enjoy drawing their mangas as much as I do after persevering through the painful first couple of years/books of development, but the amount of dedication needed for a careful production process for a series that is more than 2 or 3 books long is imo not something most starting manga artists are prepared for or aware of.

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   Read More shilin is so smart/wise >___< lol. her post here was written...scary way but i...

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   Read More This is really well put...describes my experience making

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    oneshots… although I’d love...full series but I

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    Read More OMG Shilin! This is too true! I know...all honesty, you are metaphorically...

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    Read More Everything said...state it like that. That was beautiful. “At

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    Read More Good advice

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43. kai-yan said: OMG ! So true !! Thinking about the world where they live and each character personalities takes a loooot of time T_T It’s been so long (how many years), and I’m still not plenty satisfied with the storyline… So I didn’t even start drawing T_T
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