Making a comic for webtoon, where to start ?

Bonjour! As stated in my previous post, since Inkotber is coming to an end, I am going to talk more about my other projects. And the main project right now is my comic Radiant. I want to take you with me on I prepared and I am making a comic for Webtoon and digital formats.

What is Webtoon?

You might have heard me talking about it already. Webtoon is an online platform that allows you to post and share you comic for free. You can check out my short comics here and my old comic Day Dream that are already available to read there. There is other platforms like that and another one I use is Tapastic. It is quite the same as Webtoon except Webtoon is Korean and Tapastic is American. But ont the way they work it’s basically the same.

The comics are posted as episodes, and are usually made for vertical scrolling. This way it is very easy to read on tablets and phones. I read mostly from Webtoon on my phone and I must say this format is very very confortable.

Mockup psd created by rawpixel.com – www.freepik.com

How to start a comic?

What a difficult question! And it will actually be really hard to answer. So I will only talk about my experience and the one I have with Radiant.

Radiant has been in the making for a very long time. The early writings of it are from 2011, but I think I really started writing it it around 2014~2015. Writing is my first step, I like to take my time in writing the story and scenario.

Finding the comic’s story.

The base of Radiant was a collection of dreams I had made around 2011 (do you write your dreams? because I do it’s an amazing source of inspiration!). I arranged two or three dreams to make a full story. Then I first started by making a list of events and writing the beginning and the ending. I like to write the ending very early on so I can know where to go.

The rest is a mix of developing the story and knowing my characters. Knowing your characters better helps to know how they would react to such situations. Scenes are depending on the character reactions. This development part takes the most time and some event from the list can change place or just be deleted. It really depends on what you want.

For Radiant I did get spend a lot of time in writing. I feel like this preparation even before doing the comic is essential. I did drew a few sketches while writing because I already had an idea of what the characters looked like. The proper character design was not made until the story was almost done.

Finding the characters

Since Radiant story originated from dreams. I had a very good idea of what the character looked like, since I had already seen them. And I didn’t spend much time on designing them. Also I had a wish for Radiant to have this simple, clean look. It is something I also tried to think about while creating the landscape, buildings and even the overall style and color.

I have recently done again the character sheets for the comic. Since there is a 2 years gap between the original pages and the new one I am working on these days. I feel like it is quite important to have such kind of character sheet so you can know exactly how the character look. You can go back to it often and be sure that you are drawing the character correctly.

To resume how to start a comic for Webtoon:

• Find your story.
• Write the main plot point.
• Develop your story.
• Create your character.
• Create your universe style.

I will talk another time about creating an actual comic page and the steps of creation. For now it should already be food for thoughts.

I hope you enjoyed this little insight and that you are ready for more comic content. This weekend is the 25 hour of comic challenge! And I of course will be doing that. I’ll talk about it in a future article if I survive the challenge.

Have the best weekend ever! (or at least a decent cosy one)