YOU Hates Terfs

Describing some of my favorite cartoons to make them sound as weird and awful as possible:

Steven Universe: A teenage boy is his own mom and inherits her war crimes that he knows nothing about. Everyone sings.

The Dragon Prince: Some prince boys run away from home with the most terrible assassin ever. Everything changed when the Night Elves attacked, but I believe magical pets can save the world. Avatar: The Last Airbender Easter eggs everywhere.

Carmen Sandeigo (2019): Let’s commit crimes but we’re not the bad guys but we’re not gonna tell the good guys that we’re not bad guys. A teenage boy we’ve never met is responsible for everything. Good thing his parents let him sit in his room with computer screens 24/7. Let’s also learn geography!

Star vs. the Forces of Evil: A magical princess likes to fight monsters but oh no maybe the real monsters are the government

Miraculous Ladybug: Do you like people who clearly communicate to avoid unnecessary conflict and a plot that makes sense? This show is not for you. After twenty-something episodes, you might finally get an origin story. Santa Claus dabs in the musical Christmas special.

Gravity Falls: Some twins move to Oregon for the summer and everything is spooky. The series is full of mysteries not only for the characters to solve, but for the hardcore fandom to solve while looking absolutely insane to everyone else. The bad guy is the Illuminati.

Sofia the First: A peasant girl becomes a princess when her mom marries the king. To cope with her new life, she gets a magical amulet that gives her superpowers for every nice thing she does. She is a very nice person. She gains a lot of magical powers. By the end of the show, she might as well be a goddess. Also, let’s ride dragons with Rapunzel.

Trollhunters: Jim finds a magical amulet. But unlike Sofia the First, it only causes him suffering. Just your average high school superhero troupe; tryin’ to stop your history teacher from dating your mom/killing you/bringing about the end of the world. Pick up chicks by doing Shakespeare.

3Below: The town of Arcadia had’t gone through enough already. Trollhunters: aliens edition.

Voltron: Legendary Defender: The universe is in trouble so obviously we gotta depend on teenagers in giant robot lions. Queerbait and disappointment for everyone no matter what you were hoping for. If you make it to the end of the show, I‘m sorry.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: A bad guy finds a magical sword so she’s a good guy princess now. Defeat evil with the power of rainbows. Do not assume that anyone in this show is straight.

Tangled: the Series: Rapunzel is the first Disney princess to be partially responsible for one of her friend’s parent’s deaths, be possessed by a demon(?), and openly explicitly suffer from PTSD. Broadway stars sing original music from Alan Menkin while anime fight scenes go on. The plot is about rocks.

Ducktales: A cranky, immortal billionaire adopts some children. Everyone is a duck. Is mom dead or nah?

Luz may not know that Amity likes her, but she does know that she likes someone. And she seems curious about it, invested even, which makes sense given her love of romance novels. I can't imagine that this will go away any time soon.

I'm thinking that in the future, Luz might try to push Amity to confess to her crush, and assure her that they'd be lucky to have her, and Amity will be like "Is... is my crush shipping me with... herself??? Without realising it? IDK what to feel right now...".

The best romantic trope is mutual unrequited love. I don’t want any of that “Oh, I’m in love with them, I guess I’d better confess…” BS, that’s for fully functioning human beings. I want my disaster children to go through the flip flapping stages of grief crush style,

Denial: “no you don’t understand, these are platonic feelings of friendship”

Anger: “if they weren’t so hot all the time, I wouldn’t have this problem! Why dont they like me back? Why did my stupid friends introduce us?!”

Bargaining: “this is temporary, I’ll spend time apart, it’ll be fine, I can get rid of these feelings”

Depression: “shitshitshitshitshit this will ruin our friendship oh GODS WHAT AM I DOING?? I don’t deserve them! I’m useless at feelings!”

Acceptance: “okay. I have a crush. This is fine. I’ll be forever alone, and pine for my one true love, but I’ll be fine with their friendship.”

And they are brought together with some unforseen catalyst. It’s the height of romance.

Webcomic tips

In the conclusion for now, some things I’d really recommend doing if you’re seriously considering making a webcomic (or really a comic in general). Some of these don’t really apply to strips or gag-a-day type of comics, but I’m not talking about those here.

1. Write down ideas\sketch stuff, LEGIBLY. “I’m gonna remember it later” NEVER works. And if you scribble it somewhere on a piece of paper, you’d better scan it or retype in one doc later, because tiny notes always get lost among other doodles in my skethbooks.

(i know it’s hard to keep everything clean and organized, but this mess is just not productive)

If your project is a collaboration, save your conversations. If you’re working alone, make a blog for your ramblings. You have no clue what tears of relief I cry when I open that blog and rememeber I don’t have to painstakingly look through my heaps of sketchbooks and folders for a tiny idea I’m not even sure I wrote down a few months ago.

2. Inspiration folders, or even better, inspo blog with tags also help with collecting and remembering ideas. Color schemes, landscapes, style inspirations, atmospheric stuff, maybe some photo references, all those neat things.

3. Basic tier: character design sheets. Top tier: common poses, expressions. God tier: outfits they wear throughout the comic. Holy cow tier: turnaround sheets for all those outfits.

(I’d die trying to find good pages for references without these)

4. If you haven’t finished detailing the plot, don’t even think about moving on to drawing the comic. You’re gonna regret it when you come up with a really cool plot element that can’t be incorporated anymore because you’ve already drawn all the parts you could’ve tweaked.

5. Don’t just define the plot, make a script. Writing down the lines and the brief description of the actions serves me fine:

(notice that I approximately divided the pages & the text that’d go to each panel on a page)

6. Hard mode: make thumbnails for all the pages, if possible. At least whenever a new chapter starts. 

7. If your story involves some convoluted chronology shenanigans, you’d better write down the events of your timeline in the chronological order.

8. Backgrounds. You can’t avoid them, bro. Like half of the comics are backgrounds, especially if your story involves a lot of adventuring and looking around. I know it hurts, but you’ll have to become friends with them. Read some tutorials, practice on photos, go out and sketch some streets, use 3d programs (like Google Sketch) to understand the perspective, use sites like houseplans to visualize your buildings better, I don’t know. Just be prepared for their imminent evil.  

9. If you’re drawing digitally, pick a brush size for the lines and stick with it. You don’t want your lines and detail levels to look all wonky and inconsistent in different panels. And I don’t mean the cool stylistic varying lines, I mean this:

Also, things on the background should have thinner and/or lighter lines to avoid distraction. Usually less details too, unless you’re making a busy background with a simple foreground to help it pop out. Or wanna draw the attention to an object on the bg.

10. Readable fonts. Even if you chose to ignore people with poor sight or dyslexia, the majority of your readers aren’t gonna be excited about struggling to decypher this:

Also, as much as I love my black speech bubbles, colorful text on black still kinda hurts the eyes. I wouldn’t recommend doing that for all the characters. Black speech bubbles are usually used for creepy, inhuman voices. And yes, having a colorful outline in this case helps.

11. Probably newsflash, but did you know that panels have their place, order and functions? They do! My favourite thing ever is how I used panels when I was like 12:

(comics ain’t rocket science, but this one is)

The composition of the panels and word balloons always serve for a better reading experience. They guide your eyes over the page, so that you never feel lost or confused. The images in the comic equal frames in a movie, so it’s pretty damn important in what order you look at things and how quickly you can understand what’s going on!

(Eric Shanower & Scottie Young’s Wizard of Oz)

12. One update a week is fine for testing waters. Don’t overestimate yourself, especially if you have a pretty busy life outside it. A stable comic that updates slowly, but regularly is better than an unpredictable erratic one. You can always pick up the pace later, if you feel confident enough.

13. Try to always have a buffer - a couple of pages in reserve. If you’re making the pages much faster than you’re updating, this shouldn’t be a problem. But if those paces are equally the same, it’s goddamn HARD. But on the other hand, if something happens and you skip an update, those come in handy.

If you’re looking at this list and thinking “wow that’s a LOT of work”, you’re totally right. And it’s okay to be intimidated at first! But that’s why it’s important to start with something small. Once you get the formula down, these things will be natural to you.

when i say i cried-

Attention!!!

As some of you already know The Dragon Prince on Netflix might get cancelled after it’s third season!!!!!!!!

For those of you who already watched it, rewatch it! And rewatch the upcoming season! And give it a thumbs up rating! Recommend it to friends and family!!!!

For those of you who haven’t watched it, please consider giving it a try. Yes the target age group is for children but it can be enjoyable for older age groups.

It’s from the creators of Avatar: the Last Airbender. It has amazing world building and human characters.

It properly displays sibling relationships and step parent/step child relationships.

The animation is brilliant! And DRAGONS!!!!

With all that said please consider watching it or recommending it to someone who you think will like it

✦ 🗡️