How long does it take to make a story for your comic???
Averege in here is about 3 month but what about in other country???

I find the question interesting as it implies there is a finite amount of work put into any story.
I am constantly thinking about, rethinking and expanding the story behind Harkovast.
It is always turning over in my head in a continuous process that has no obvious beginning or end.

mamaya94
How long does it take to make a story for your comic???
Averege in here is about 3 month but what about in other country???

Do you mean writing the script for a planned comic or the completion of an issue? (I ask, because you said "make" rather than "write" or "draw," so it's a little ambiguous.)

If you are talking about just the writing, I usually work by bursts of inspiration (like catching a wave for surfing). If I am inspired enough, I can sit down and write a script all in one sitting in a day or two. I am constantly revising script, so it isn't really complete until the pages are drawn.

If it is the completion of an issue or a completed project (I assume it is, since you said "3 months" ), for amateurs (like the majority of people on DD), it varies widely from person to person. Most people here, because money doesn't fly out of their computers when they finish a page, have to keep jobs, which can really cut into time for making comics. ;) Most comics I follow on DD update once or twice a week, so if they don't miss any updates (which is rare), they can make around 30 pages in three months -- and that can be the length of one story, but in webcomics, a story could be many hundreds of pages or just a few, because webcomics are not limited by printing or time requirements.

Going from start to finish for one story arc is currently taking more than a year. Getting the basic plot outline down only takes a couple of weeks. I don't really work from scripts; I tried once and it just didn't feel right to me. Besides, this way I'm free to come up with new plot twists and characters, and I can expand the plot as much as I need to flesh out characters or scenes. I'm also free to re-write the entire plot any time I want if I find that I don't like where it's going anymore.

5 minutes to create a concept.

A hell lot of time to fine tune it.

And one last thing: The more my knowledge about the world expands, the stupider my own comic tends to look. The script of MAG-ISA was done in 2007. Now its 2010, my knowledge has expanded alot since then. Therefore, this comic needed a whole lot of revising.

Well for me, coming up with the concept can take anything from 5 minutes to months and months! It really depends on the idea :)

Coming up with the full plot can take anything from half an hour to months and months (again)

As for scripting it, that depends on how lengthy the plot is, and how into the writing I get. The Door was scripted in a couple of hours (being 54 pages), but Quest For Zanvadas took longer, not sure how long. I'm still scripting a comic called Misfits Among Monsters, but that's taken a very long time already.

So yeah, it depends :)

It takes me to: Having a very odd dream, Do whatever the F*CK I want to do, try to do it like a person I admire.

So about ten minutes.

But if you include the time it takes for me to come up with a real story instead of Pwnd Randomness (a real story meaning Nightmare-should start...soon...-and maybe a few more to come), then about a week. I always go over what I think before I do it unless I'm tired or I write and draw crap like this.

About a week, on average. Every story I make starts with a simple theme, and I go from there. Sometimes it's expanded upon during the writing, other times it's a straight read from the main idea without much added.

Wyrden is a comic based on a story and world I began to create at age 16, so since it's an ongoing vehicle for stories, comics, novels, novellas and the like I'd say 24 years has gone into it so far. I've still yet to flesh out all of the world to my satisfaction...even though I have a large world creation document to draw from.

The first draft of the script for Shades took something over six months to plan, write and revise. That was back in 2003/2004.

In the six years since then, I've been continually rewriting and revising it, right up until the script for the next chapter has to be submitted to the artist. In fact, now that I'm lettering it myself, minor rewrites still happen right up until the day a page appears on DD. So ... yeah. Something between six months and six years!

I'm also a man after DAJB's heart in that respect, I'll constantly revise something even as I'm putting it into the dialogue for the update. Sometimes I'll look at the flow and it requires another word or a change of tone.

The way I write my stories for my comics are by events and this goes especially for The Burnhams.

The story of The Burnhams is long and very complicated that I have to go for a lot of research and so many adjustments and I always write and think of so many chapters in advanced.

Since we're artists, we tend to change our minds towards the story. The best approach sometimes I take is my improvising. I mean, I can't be always faithful to the scripts I write so, I have to change things, at the last time.

Anyway, I always coming up with new ideas for stories and I'm hoping to have the time, in this world, to tell them all.

hmm... the current comic (being a collection of short stories)...
First chapter is based on a short story I wrote around 2000 or so. Second chapter will be based on an unfinished comic from 2007 (which was created rather spontaneously on the spot) and the third one was conceived and drawn straight away in 2002.

The fouth one will be based off a concept I came up with around 2008 I think (or early 2009?), whereas the one after that... I'm not sure yet what it'll be.

I have stories that have been started somewhere mid 90s and still need to be completed before I can draw them.

Well, I improvise a lot, I usually plan ahead only two pages. Keeps the comic flexible.

So, I'd say it's about 10 seconds.

I work backwards, I plan a really cool ending and work the rest of the comic up to it, but other than that I work it one chapter at a time (about a week or so)

I don't really put much time into any of my comics except for Apocalypse 2030. That is no doubt the most time I've spent working on a comic and I'm only up to Chapter Four. I began the comic when I was around thirteen and then spent the next three years working my way up to the perfect story, I pour hours into this comic, I have already worked out an ending and have to slowly make my way there through hundreds of chapters. This will no doubt be my largest comic to date. Four Chapters into this comic and already so much has happened in just 80 pages, and that's not nearly close to the end. I get anywhere, the shower, school and dreams, (that's actually how I came up with the ending, best damn dream ever). I spend so much time editing and re-editing to get it exactly to where I deem it perfect. And that will be enough bragging for now.

again, to give a proper answer I'd have to ask do you mean just the writing stage or the entire thing start to finish? Single issue or long-term project?
I myself have drawn thumbnails for two comic issue, (48 pages total,) over the course of four months. I'd like to have a finished issue by April, but I don't have a super-serious deadline.
Comic artists in the US do a pretty wide variety of comic styles in different sorts of environments so I'd be hard to set an average. On one hand it's pretty common for American cartoonists to attempt the 24-hour comic challenge, on the other there's Alec Longstreth who decided to write and illustrate an epic fantasy comic that's taken quite a long time. To give you an idea when Alec started the comic he shaved his face and his head completely bald and pledged to not cut his hair or shave his beard until his comic was finished. Last time I saw him he had a huge Father Time beard and hair past his shoulders.
So I guess the average would be anywhere from a few hours to a few years?

Well, to think up all the stuff in my comic(s), it took about 5 years @.@. Thinking up a storylines, the kinds of characters I wanted in them and how the stories will end on the other hand, probably took 2 days. The reason why it's taken so long to write the scripts is because I tend to change things every so often :3.

Mine is a little weird. I had planned the story originally as a very large campaign for Werewolf the Apocalypse and Changeling the Dreaming. Two separate games to be played with the same people and they would eventually merge for the complete story.

Sadly, my little gaming group scattered to the wind several years ago and I was left with a big story and nothing to do with it. So I decided, "Hell, why not write a short piece of fiction?" and it went over pretty well on Deviant Art two years ago. So I took the game plot, repopulated it with characters I have played over the years, and some I did not. I wrote a short outline for the entire plot and sort of flesh it out fully per each chapter.

Every Story arc takes me about five minutes to write it all down but I usually have to make changes at the last minute before I draw it all out. But the whole story line i've been working on for about two years, hopefully I'll pick a good way to end it soon.

For about a decade now I've been chopping and changing the characters and stories. I still am, but only the small details like panel layout. I'm hoping to get stuff up by April or May.

I've actually planned out AN ending. Whether it's to a story arc or the entire thing or just one of the two comics sharing that ending... I'm not sure.

If I do it right, It'll be "killer".

The average storyline in Air Raid Robertson runs from 13-15 pages. I update once every Thursday, so in the purest literal sense it takes 13-15 weeks for the story to finish.

I usually have a vague idea of where the story is heading in my mind. However, I usually don't have it planned out conretely. I try to take things on a strip by strip basis. Sometimes things move along a lot more quickly than I thought they were going to. Sometimes I have to break something I intended for one strip into two or more. And, sometimes, I feel the urge to take a detour that hadn't occured to me when I began the storyline.

I'm under the impression that my current arc will last about ten strips. But, well, if something comes up while I'm drafting pages...

A Loonatic's Tale has a six year backlog of stories. I never intended to make a comic about in the first place. My co-writer and I just wrote stories for fun for that universe. Eventually, I got bored in high school and just started making the comic. We've been making it ever since.

Now we just go back and edit what we wrote before and format them for a comic. Crossbones was made only because I said, "You know that one story with the airship and Malcolm's and Troy's backstory? That'd make a cool comic."

We still get new ideas for it and we even sit down and talk about new plots every few days and bounce off each other, but mostly we're going by what we wrote years ago and expanding on it.

Edit: If you mean scripting and plotting out the story, my co-writer and I will sit down and say what section needs what and the overall story, then we just kind of go about each part by sections. For example, I have one chunk of the story I just completed for a character and we're moving onto the next. So, we'll sit down, plot that entire part out with the other character, and I storyboard when I get to the page (I sometimes will storyboard ahead of time, but usually it's more fun to storyboard when I get to the page/we change something and I have to redo it anyways).

How I handle my comic has changed. I've started working on a script for the next arc so that I can eliminate any pointless bits before they get drawn. Yeah, I'm writing out the whole script, I'm even gonna rewrite/edit it at least once, but there's still a good chance that I won't stick to it completely. If a joke isn't working on the actual page, if I need larger panels to make a sequence work, or something of that nature occurs then I'll pretty much adlib.

Coming up with the beginning and the ending is pretty easy. The stuff in the middle is the hard part.

Depends on what I'm working on. Mastorism has a pretty vast writing schedule since it takes, y'know, years to execute the stories. I've used a couple methods for the various parts, but basically what I do is work out a framework for the larger story, which takes a lot of thinking, but very brief amount of writing, then I zero in and fine tune as I work on each, say chapter. This was a cool method cause I could take the story where I felt it needed to go, but still fit in the larger framework.

This new story I've changed it up a bit. I sat down and wrote out about two chapters of hard script, and I'm working on the third chapter right now-- I don't deviate or add too much as I go, except to refine things on the page. In both cases, before I start work on the page, I do layouts in my sketchbook with dialog.

Short stories, like the Explosion Proof stuff that I did, was pretty quick, I sat down for about an hour and just go straight to laying out the pages with dialog in my sketchbook...