Entry tags:
Author/artist commentary on "That Pervert" (Quodo comic)
A behind-the-scenes / commentary thing for my Quodo comic (n=5366).
The idea
Where did the idea for this comic come from? I detailed the origin of this idea in this Tumblr post, but basically, I read this fic, Guilty Pleasures by QueenIX, which was written for International Fanworks Day 2016, and as such it's themed around fanfiction and other fanworks and their significance, and features the DS9 cast reacting to an AO3-like fanfic archive centered around stories about them. It's poking a bit of fun at the phenomenon of fandom and fandom trends and how characters might react to the fanfic that gets written about them, which is always a fun concept. It's a Kira/Odo fanfic and while I'm not particularly a fan of the pairing (no hate to people who love it, though!), I did enjoy the dynamic in the fic where most of the characters are kind of horrified to be paired with Quark. ...But of course, came the thought, Quark would love to be paired with anyone and everyone, and that contrast amused me. It kind of reminds me of this bit from the DS9 Companion:
Like, yes, Armin Shimerman's reaction exactly matches how Quark would also react to hearing about people writing him in ships. And of course, this would be a reaction to fanfiction very at odds with Odo's censorious, squeamish, sex-negative tendencies. Anyway, I had the idea that Quark would probably be reading and/or writing explicit fiction centered around himself, and this combination of prurience and narcissism would of course Intensely Bother Odo. The main "gag" of the comic I came up with is that Odo would (of course) decide to pull a prank on Quark by writing an extremely embarrassing and humiliating smut fic about him, but then Quark would read it and enjoy it immensely, because Odo (in trying to make Quark in this fic super embarrassing) inadvertently put in like half a dozen humiliation kink tropes without realizing it. Anyway, the whole concept kind of tickled me because "writing porn about my nemesis... in order to PWN him" is just SUCH a Quodo energy plotline. It just goes along with the way that Odo in canon is entirely unaware about how his attitude toward Quark comes off to everyone else.
I had (and still have) too many Quodo WIPs, so I ended up putting this idea up for adoption because I figured I just don't have time to write it myself. But every so often, I would get an idea for a funny joke to include and would jot it down in my Quodo ideas file. The odd thing was that all my ideas kept coming to me in, like, "humorous manga" format, where there would be specific character expressions and textboxes pointing to characters and that sort of thing, which are storytelling elements that only make sense in a visual medium.
The fact that this plotbunny kept coming to me in comic form kind of reinforced that this is an idea I really liked but also it would just be SUPER impractical for me to tackle in the way I was envisioning it. Which brings us to...
Fandom Orienteer Challenge
And then --![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
slashmarks created a new event this year, ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomorienteerchallenge, which challenged people to write a long fic or do a long comic. Writing Quodo has already pushed me to do a LOT of long fics beyond what I find normally feasible so I didn't feel particularly drawn by the long fic option, but the comic option was really tempting... I usually avoid comics because they are a LOT of work, and I used to have a lot of comic ambitions when I was younger before realizing that I get tired after the first few pages and give up (so many abandoned comics in my files...). I've just never been able to complete a comic that wasn't, like, one page.
It was a bit of a questionable decision, deciding to commit to executing an idea I had already written off as Not Happening, in a medium I had already written off as Not Happening, but the structured event and the challenge appealed to me. If this idea was ever going to get done, it would need this kind of motivation.
(I also left some of my other "I don't have time for this but they're neat" plotbunnies over here if you're curious: https://fandomorienteerchallenge.dreamwidth.org/623.html?page=2)
Writing the script
Normally, I don't write out scripts for my comics, but this comic I had already written out scenes/snippets of dialogue whenever I got new ideas. Also, I figured that writing out my comic script was a good use of the month of April which was a sign-up month before the creation period officially started -- I felt that writing the comic script out made a good "prep" action that set me up for the drawing to happen in May - July.
I had some difficulty finishing up the script on time, though. I had a lot of other writing projects at the same time competing for my attention, and I also just got stuck. Most of the ideas for jokes I'd already come up with fit toward the end of the comic, and as I wrote more, the ending of the comic just naturally fell out of the snippets I'd come up with so far, so that wasn't a problem. By contrast, however, I still needed to figure out how to set up the basic premise (Odo writing porn of Quark). For a long time, my script was like:
1) Odo discovers the fic archive.
2) He somehow decides to write porn of Quark???
3) Odo finishes writing his Quark porn, and the rest of the comic was fully written from here.
It was hard figuring out where to open the story, how much time to spend on Odo discovering the archive, how does he come up with the idea of writing porn of Quark, who he is talking to when he decides to do this, how does that conversation go, etc. I also had a couple of gags that needed to be slotted in somewhere here, but was having difficulty figuring out how to incorporate them, or if they could even be incorporated or if I should drop or alter them, and I was also worried the pacing was too slow and I was using too many pages on this "opening exposition."
However, I designed my pages in such a way that I frequently knew where certain pages had to start and where other pages had to end (usually corresponding to the timing of a gag), so even if the early pages were still up in the air, it wouldn't affect later pages, and I could start drawing those later pages even though my script wasn't finalized.
However, this turned out to be a bad idea. Working on pages out of order was still a bit chaotic in terms of trying to assign a (temporary) page number, and it was difficult to do project management and planning when I didn't know how many total pages I would need for the comic! I kept on running into the issues over and over of trying to make goals and have a concrete sense of progress, but because I didn't know if my comic would end up being 20 pages or 25 pages, I couldn't make concrete progress bars and other things that help motivate me. It took me several months of struggling before I realized this, and finally in July I sat down and polished off my script, setting the number of pages in stone, which allowed me to make a concrete progress spreadsheet (see more on project management below).
All in the timing
One of the odd experiences working on the script was that, usually when I write fiction, I play some high-energy, inspiring, instrumental music in the background and this doesn't distract from my writing. But I quickly found out that when trying to write my comic script, I couldn't listen to music at the same time -- it was too distracting. In order to write a comic, I needed to be able to "hear" the dialogue "read" in my mind, and having some music playing with its own BPM that didn't match the speed at which someone's eyes would be moving over the page made it impossible for me to figure out the panels.
So yeah, I always wrote my script with no music in the background. It kind of makes me think that I tend to draw jokey comics, and so they always end up having punchlines that need careful timing.
(See:
https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/651475590278430720/the-reason-why-kevin-and-charlotte-are-the-best
https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/659343003566161920/art-i-drew-as-a-followup-to-this-fic-this-is-what)
And this longer comic was no exception to that, being essentially a series of gags. So I think this is part of why I couldn't write the script while listening to music -- the delivery of jokes is so reliant on getting the timing right.
Of course, I think in general, comics, even non-humorous ones, are heavily reliant on paneling and use of space and dialogue to control the reader's reading speed and perception of the passage of time! So I think it is probably the case that it's hard to script comics with music playing in the background.
Practice sketches
Another prep task I decided to do during the sign-up month was to do some practice sketches in the hopes of coming up with a manga-style design for all the characters that I could use in the comic. From the script, I knew that basically all the main cast, minus Jake and Nog, plus Garak, appeared at some point in the comic, and many of those were characters I either haven't drawn before or haven't drawn much, so I needed to get my footing. Not only did I want to figure out how to draw the characters so they were recognizable, but I also wanted to try out "animefying" their designs to work with the kind of comic I was envisioning. I also had to figure out when in the series to set the comic as I knew all of the characters experienced changes to their hair/costumes and I didn't want there to be inconsistencies like Sisko's hair is from season 3 but Kira's uniform is from season 1 and things like that.
So the way I approached this is that I went through my DS9 Companion book season by season and looked at the various screencaps and promotional images featured there, and tried to draw at least one sketch of each character. I started in season 1 with full-body sketches of the cast. For season 2, I didn't see many differences in costume/appearances so I used the opportunity to practice more faces and try out different ways of depicting the characters. I also took the time to do more Garak sketches especially since I haven't drawn a Cardassian before(!) so I had no idea how the ridges worked.
Practice sketches
Please forgive/ignore how all the people have wonky heights and proportions in the first pic... Also, Quark isn't there because I ran out of horizontal space. Also, I've already drawn Quark and his first season outfit quite a lot (mostly for my in-progress KiSS doll) and I felt I kind of had a handle on drawing him.
With season 3, again, I think not many appearance changes happened except Odo's switch to a turtleneck (plus his brief flirtation with a belt), but I was also pretty used to drawing that outfit so didn't spend much time on it. As the sketch notes, the other major appearance change here was Jadzia's hair. I was kind of running out of time at this point and decided I wanted to set it in an earlier season (I guess because DS9 kind of gets more serious as war starts to dominate its plotlines; for a humorous comic, setting it early in the show felt appropriate), and if I went with the designs I'd practiced so far, I could freely set it in either season 1 or 2 without needing to change anyone's designs, so I decided to go with that. However, I still did some Worf practice sketches (drawn from season 4 images) because of my next preparatory activity...
Making a test page
The last prep task I did during the sign-up month was make a test page to try out all the technologies and resources I'd need to make comics. Things like: watching tutorials; applying tones; laying out text bubbles; typesetting text; all the patterns/brushes/fonts I'd need to do all that.
I had another (shorter) comic idea in my Quodo ideas file that was about Quark being Odo's "emotional support" criminal (after the meme), inspired by the way Odo reacts when outside security officers like Worf criticize Quark's continued operations on the station. This idea had also languished in my ideas doc for a long time (because comics are hard) but I felt it would make a perfect 1-page test comic.
From my initial conception of the "Odo writes porn of Quark" comic idea, I always wanted to make it manga-style because that was how I imagined the visual language and the style of humor. Plus, manga is typically in black and white rather than full color, which I thought was important for keeping the scope of this project manageable.
While I had done humorous 1-page comics before (see the examples above), I had not done them fully manga-style with actual pages of a specific, consistent size and with panels and so on. So the first thing I did was ask the BFE Art Discord if anyone had some tutorials or other resources for making manga-style comics in Krita (my art program, which is free and open-source).
I got quite a few suggestions from le_becc (![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Rebecca) and Dusty (TKodami), who were generally super helpful and supportive! Here's the list of resources that went into this test page:
Here's how the page turned out: https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/716237958935609344/star-trek-deep-space-nine-season-4-episode-4
This ended up being my most popular piece of art on Tumblr to date. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Odo somehow producing Quark out of thin air still kinda cracks me up, and I also love Quark's smug >:3 face. Quark is wearing his trans pride suit here, which I don't think I've drawn before in fanart, although it's hard to tell what he's wearing because he's so occluded. I actually forgot to note in the post that the intended reading direction of this one-page comic is right to left... But it makes sense if you read it left to right too since only two lines get reversed. You can tell there is a lot of copy-and-paste between the third and fourth panels!
Lessons learned from the test page
I completed the test page around 2 May, which means it bled into the work period for the main comic a bit. Also, it took me misleadingly short to complete -- I think I started it on a Saturday and finished it a couple of days later, so I thought "Oh, I can do one comic page in ~3 days." But actually, I spent most of the weekend working *only* on this comic, and it turns out I don't have unlimited stamina for doing art and need frequent breaks. Plus, I had other projects with deadlines I wanted to dedicate my limited weekend time to as well, so I couldn't pull the "dedicate a whole Saturday to drawing a comic page" thing regularly. In short, one page every three days was not a realistic expectation (it ended up more like one page every nine days on average).
Text
I struggled a lot with the text bubbles and the text. As mentioned above, for the test page I used premade text-bubbles, but they were hard to work with. Going forward, I decided to create a path layer in my Krita file and I drew all the text bubbles as Bezier curves (white fill with black stroke matching the typical thickness of my lineart).
Another issue I had both with the test page and the first pages of the main comic itself was laying out text. I had a bit of leeway here because I was making this comic "faux-manga-style," which meant using mostly tall-and-thin vertical bubbles rather than wide horizontal bubbles, and I figured people who translate manga must also have to struggle with fitting an appropriate line in each text bubble, and probably have to be pretty creative, so I was like, "It's okay if the text fits awkwardly!" However, it was kind of bothering me just how off my bubble sizes were. Like, sometimes I had difficulty fitting five mono-syllable words in a bubble while other times, there were several long sentences with too much whitespace! I just was very bad at predicting how lines of dialogue translated into bubble size.
After struggling with this for a few pages, I ended up penciling in the text (in caps; trying to do it lowercase led to consistent underestimates of the space needed) in a text bubble sketch layer and then drawing a bubble around it. This was all done at the sketch stage so I could still adjust my lineart to take into account the amount of space I needed to dedicate to text bubbles. Then all I had to do was create a path tracing over the bubble, and then I laid out the text in Inkscape. (I prefer doing the text in Inkscape rather than Krita as Inkscape makes it much easier to make quick edits and tweaks to text. I did try to do it in Krita initially and just got too frustrated.)
Some text bubbles have written "side comments" (I don't know what you call this in manga) and there were some sound effects as well. Some of these were typeset while others I just wrote in. (Any of the more bubble-y sound effects were done using the font Engcomica.)
Deciding on tones
Another lesson from the test page was that I was not going to do much in the way of shading at all. In particular, having to tone and shade Odo in the test page was tedious (had to decide lighting direction, had to make the darker main panel of his shirt look lighter than his sleeves, etc.) and I didn't look forward to having to do that every page. So very early on, I decided that I would just not do any shading or toning on Odo. Odo was the main character of the comic and appeared on almost every page, so simplifying him meant a lot of gains in terms of time.
I also liked it because it set Odo off visually from the backgrounds and the other characters, which I kind of like from a thematic point of view -- despite the fact that Odo wishes he could integrate, he also stubbornly likes standing out. The fact that Odo always has no tones at all made for a visual gag on page 11, when he is shapeshifting as various things in order to observe the moment when Quark notices his fic, because in all of his alternate forms, he has no color and so always stands out from his surroundings. It's not a very effective disguise! XD
(Another easter egg: When Odo shifts in this comic, he always appears in his alternate form with a "henohenomohe" face on his body, which I thought was funny.)
Paneling...
The hardest part in this comic was paneling. Even having written a script which laid out how many panels were in each page and what was contained in them, I often found myself making alterations when it came time to actually draw the page. Often I would take two cracks at laying out a page (when thumbnailing) before choosing one. Basically, I get the feeling that if you give four artists a comic page script, you'll get four very different layouts (above that point, I think there will start being duplicates/similar layout choices).
Basically, I had to kind of get used to the fact that I could panel a page completely differently and maybe it would work better. But for the sake of time, I needed to just quickly decide on *something* and move on. But I did struggle a bit with panel layouts. Especially, I think I tended to overly rely on a three-row layout where the last row has three panels -- for example, the first three pages all have this layout, as does page 9 (which was one of the first pages I drew, actually, since I drew a bit out of order). I don't know why this layout tended to appeal to me (maybe it's just a good one? IDK) so I tried to purposely experiment with different ways of arranging panels so that things didn't get too monotonous.
That said, there was one case where I struggled with the page layout and eventually decided to redo it after the fact (after I had carried the page entirely to completion -- toning and full typesetting). I just decided that the reading order wasn't clear enough, nor did I like the space allocation I had given to various panels.
Original vs. edited panel layout
I tried to reuse as many assets from the original panel layout in the reworked layout to avoid having to redraw everything. The updated layout actually matches more closely my original conception of the page. I changed it to the left layout, however, because I thought my layouts were getting stale. But this "creative" layout ended up not working at all and I ended up needing to redo the page.
Project management
Throughout most of the creation period (May, June, and July), I kind of struggled with motivation and goal-setting and trying to manage my time. Part of this is that I just don't have the speed to do a 20-page comic in three months, so my goals in order to remain on-track were always over-ambitious and it was demoralizing not hitting them month after month.
Then finally, toward the end of July, I started tracking my time. I created a spreadsheet where I put in the day I started each page and when I finished it in order to get a feel of how much real-world time each page's creation took up -- essentially, as far as I could piece together from various file creation dates, up until now, I was spending 1-3 weeks on each page.
In addition to tracking start/end date, I also started tracking how much time I spent on each phase of the comic: (1) script-writing (I ended up not really needing this column), (2) finding visual references, (3) drawing a page thumbnail, (4) drawing the lineart sketch, (5) inking, (6) toning, (7) drawing text bubbles, and (8) typesetting text. I worked in 20-minute sessions (which is how I generally tend to do my work) and tried to be pretty precise (to the nearest five minutes) of how much of each session I spent on each task.
Screenshot of my tracking spreadsheet
This really helped me in addition to the start/end dates, because it helped me identify which pages were taking longer than normal. It also helped give me a sense of continual progress because even if I was stuck on the same page for several weeks or stuck on sketching or inking (the most time-consuming stages) across multiple drawing sessions, at the end of each drawing session, I could still note the additional time I had put into that page, and wanting to move on from one stage to the next pushed me to try to do my work quickly and efficiently. It also helped seeing the patterns here because sketching and inking took quite a long time, but after that, toning, text bubbles, and text were usually much shorter stages and so after getting over the sketching/inking "hump" I knew it was kind of smooth sailing from then on.
Before I did my detailed tracking, I was averaging about 2 pages a month. After I started tracking, I was doing 3-4 pages a month.
More detailed stats on my pages
I generally kept my thumbnails to a single 20-minute session. Sketching varied widely (from 30 to 115 mins) but was roughly 71 mins of work (3.5 work sessions) per page. Inking also varied widely (from 20 to 145 mins), but was generally the second-most time-consuming stage with 68 mins of work per page. Toning, creating text bubbles, and typesetting text were much less time-consuming, taking on average 22, 21, and 24 mins each (about 1 work session). Typesetting was the most variable of these as some pages had a lot of website "screenshot" where I had to do a lot of text and text effects, while others had very minimal text and dialogue.
The two most time-consuming pages (of the ones I kept time for) were pages 11 and 14, both of which took me 9 hours total to finish up.
The two most time-consuming pages.
These are both fairly complicated pages with a lot of backgrounds and panels. The first one in particular is the first page where Quark and Quark's bar appears, so a lot of work had to be done to find references.
Backgrounds
I don't know if it's super obvious but... I hate drawing backgrounds, and basically avoided drawing any kind of background wherever possible. The only times I drew a background was when (1) a location change had happened and it was important to convey where the scene was set, or (2) it was important to convey where characters were located in a space (e.g. Bashir and Garak's table in the replimat separate from Dax and Odo's; Dax noticing Odo sitting at the bar in the background, etc.).
The DS9 fiction archive and RPF
The comic opens with Odo discovering the DS9 Fiction Archive, which would be a form of real person fiction (RPF) within the setting, and bringing it to Commander Sisko. In universe, it must be the case that Sisko is by far the most popular subject on that archive, and I'm guessing there's a lot of explorations of religion featuring Sisko, and also quite a bit of Sisko/reader fic, his character appears in some wild AUs, and so on. I'm sure Sisko has Seen Some Things on that archive that he has done his best to delete entirely from his mind.
"HornySlut6969"
The credit for Quark's username and the gag where Odo censors it when saying it -- and no one can figure out how he's doing that -- goes to my partner. I think at some point (before I decided to make the comic), I was describing the overall idea of the comic and asked him for some help with figuring out a plot point, and then he just spontaneously used "HornySlut6969" as a stand-in for Quark's account, and came up with that joke of Odo censoring the username. I of course immediately added it to my list of gags. (We have weird conversations in our household.) (It always amuses me that Odo censors the number "69" too. XD)
Odo's username, by the way, is "nobody_in_particular." (This is my second time writing a story where Odo and Quark interact online and one or both of them is not aware of the other person's online handle, and both times I just made Odo's username a joke on being "nobody.")
Other AI-generated usernames
There were a couple of places where I needed a long list of usernames. At first (on page 3) I got away with making up a bunch of silly usernames and then blurring them out so that I didn't have to think too hard about them. But then later (on page 7), it became more important to have readable lists of usernames to make it clear that Quark's is or isn't among them.
I asked my partner to help me come up with some usernames that people in Star Trek world browsing a fiction site might have, and he said that that was the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good for. So I asked ChatGPT to make up some in-universe usernames.
Some of the stuff it came up with, I used directly like "WarpSpeedWanderer", "rikerbeardenthusiast", and "Gorn_Brawler." The rest I came up with myself, either by just brainstorming or taking one of the generated names and tweaking it to sound more natural.
Kira's reaction
Kira's reaction on page 9 to being told about Odo's Quark porn was inspired by the Rug Doctor ad woman often used as a reaction image.
Kira's reaction on page 9
Morn the Silent
It's a running joke in DS9 that Morn, the barfly who frequents Quark's bar, is supposedly very chatty and prone to talking people's ears off, but he doesn't actually have any lines, so you always come in at the end of a story, or people interrupt him before he can answer and that kind of thing. I was able to work in a joke like this when Quark is summarizing Morn's role in Odo's fic, but Odo interrupts him before Quark can enlighten the reader with what Morn actually said.
Morn interrupted on page 15
The ending and Quark vs. Odo
The ending for this comic kind of fell out naturally while I was writing. There are always these fun contrasts between Quark and Odo -- for example, I put a lot of my sex positivity into Quark when writing him and my sex negativity into Odo when writing him. Related to that, Quark here is someone who unabashedly likes and enjoys art, no matter how bad it is, while Odo is much more critical, perfectionistic, and puritanical. But also, they are both kind of terrible people and I liked playing with that as well. Quark is a bit of a sex pest and Odo is a censorious prig. That's the main source of humor and tension here. In the end, neither of them really learn any lessons, and both have a bit of a perverted side. (They were made for each other. ♥)
Credit and resources
Programs: Krita (drawing) and Inkscape (typesetting)
Fonts: Anime Ace 3 by BlamBot, Helvetica Neue LT (for most screen/website text), Engcomica by Marsnev, Sitka, VTC Letterer Pro, VTC Supermarket Sale, Mistral.
Tones and patterns: Some pixel pattern .pat files (I don't remember when I imported these into Krita or where I got them), Mojo MOO Ink Bundle for Krita by moo-kopilot for scratchy, tone, and flower patterns.
Special thanks to:slashmarks for running fandomorienteerchallenge; my partner for the help in writing, for laughing at ALL the jokes (including the one he wrote), and for arranging art sessions to help me get this done.
Conceptualization and prep work
The idea
Where did the idea for this comic come from? I detailed the origin of this idea in this Tumblr post, but basically, I read this fic, Guilty Pleasures by QueenIX, which was written for International Fanworks Day 2016, and as such it's themed around fanfiction and other fanworks and their significance, and features the DS9 cast reacting to an AO3-like fanfic archive centered around stories about them. It's poking a bit of fun at the phenomenon of fandom and fandom trends and how characters might react to the fanfic that gets written about them, which is always a fun concept. It's a Kira/Odo fanfic and while I'm not particularly a fan of the pairing (no hate to people who love it, though!), I did enjoy the dynamic in the fic where most of the characters are kind of horrified to be paired with Quark. ...But of course, came the thought, Quark would love to be paired with anyone and everyone, and that contrast amused me. It kind of reminds me of this bit from the DS9 Companion:
Quark's alter-ego, Armin Shimerman, was delighted to discover that Season 2 would establish him as quite "a ladies' man," with liaisons of one sort or another in "Rules of Acquisition" and "Profit and Loss" and numerous flirtations in between. "I believe Quark's had more relationships than anyone else on the show," Shimerman notes with pleasure (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, p. 72).
Like, yes, Armin Shimerman's reaction exactly matches how Quark would also react to hearing about people writing him in ships. And of course, this would be a reaction to fanfiction very at odds with Odo's censorious, squeamish, sex-negative tendencies. Anyway, I had the idea that Quark would probably be reading and/or writing explicit fiction centered around himself, and this combination of prurience and narcissism would of course Intensely Bother Odo. The main "gag" of the comic I came up with is that Odo would (of course) decide to pull a prank on Quark by writing an extremely embarrassing and humiliating smut fic about him, but then Quark would read it and enjoy it immensely, because Odo (in trying to make Quark in this fic super embarrassing) inadvertently put in like half a dozen humiliation kink tropes without realizing it. Anyway, the whole concept kind of tickled me because "writing porn about my nemesis... in order to PWN him" is just SUCH a Quodo energy plotline. It just goes along with the way that Odo in canon is entirely unaware about how his attitude toward Quark comes off to everyone else.
I had (and still have) too many Quodo WIPs, so I ended up putting this idea up for adoption because I figured I just don't have time to write it myself. But every so often, I would get an idea for a funny joke to include and would jot it down in my Quodo ideas file. The odd thing was that all my ideas kept coming to me in, like, "humorous manga" format, where there would be specific character expressions and textboxes pointing to characters and that sort of thing, which are storytelling elements that only make sense in a visual medium.
The fact that this plotbunny kept coming to me in comic form kind of reinforced that this is an idea I really liked but also it would just be SUPER impractical for me to tackle in the way I was envisioning it. Which brings us to...
Fandom Orienteer Challenge
And then --
slashmarks created a new event this year, fandomorienteerchallenge, which challenged people to write a long fic or do a long comic. Writing Quodo has already pushed me to do a LOT of long fics beyond what I find normally feasible so I didn't feel particularly drawn by the long fic option, but the comic option was really tempting... I usually avoid comics because they are a LOT of work, and I used to have a lot of comic ambitions when I was younger before realizing that I get tired after the first few pages and give up (so many abandoned comics in my files...). I've just never been able to complete a comic that wasn't, like, one page.It was a bit of a questionable decision, deciding to commit to executing an idea I had already written off as Not Happening, in a medium I had already written off as Not Happening, but the structured event and the challenge appealed to me. If this idea was ever going to get done, it would need this kind of motivation.
(I also left some of my other "I don't have time for this but they're neat" plotbunnies over here if you're curious: https://fandomorienteerchallenge.dreamwidth.org/623.html?page=2)
Writing the script
Normally, I don't write out scripts for my comics, but this comic I had already written out scenes/snippets of dialogue whenever I got new ideas. Also, I figured that writing out my comic script was a good use of the month of April which was a sign-up month before the creation period officially started -- I felt that writing the comic script out made a good "prep" action that set me up for the drawing to happen in May - July.
I had some difficulty finishing up the script on time, though. I had a lot of other writing projects at the same time competing for my attention, and I also just got stuck. Most of the ideas for jokes I'd already come up with fit toward the end of the comic, and as I wrote more, the ending of the comic just naturally fell out of the snippets I'd come up with so far, so that wasn't a problem. By contrast, however, I still needed to figure out how to set up the basic premise (Odo writing porn of Quark). For a long time, my script was like:
1) Odo discovers the fic archive.
2) He somehow decides to write porn of Quark???
3) Odo finishes writing his Quark porn, and the rest of the comic was fully written from here.
It was hard figuring out where to open the story, how much time to spend on Odo discovering the archive, how does he come up with the idea of writing porn of Quark, who he is talking to when he decides to do this, how does that conversation go, etc. I also had a couple of gags that needed to be slotted in somewhere here, but was having difficulty figuring out how to incorporate them, or if they could even be incorporated or if I should drop or alter them, and I was also worried the pacing was too slow and I was using too many pages on this "opening exposition."
However, I designed my pages in such a way that I frequently knew where certain pages had to start and where other pages had to end (usually corresponding to the timing of a gag), so even if the early pages were still up in the air, it wouldn't affect later pages, and I could start drawing those later pages even though my script wasn't finalized.
However, this turned out to be a bad idea. Working on pages out of order was still a bit chaotic in terms of trying to assign a (temporary) page number, and it was difficult to do project management and planning when I didn't know how many total pages I would need for the comic! I kept on running into the issues over and over of trying to make goals and have a concrete sense of progress, but because I didn't know if my comic would end up being 20 pages or 25 pages, I couldn't make concrete progress bars and other things that help motivate me. It took me several months of struggling before I realized this, and finally in July I sat down and polished off my script, setting the number of pages in stone, which allowed me to make a concrete progress spreadsheet (see more on project management below).
All in the timing
One of the odd experiences working on the script was that, usually when I write fiction, I play some high-energy, inspiring, instrumental music in the background and this doesn't distract from my writing. But I quickly found out that when trying to write my comic script, I couldn't listen to music at the same time -- it was too distracting. In order to write a comic, I needed to be able to "hear" the dialogue "read" in my mind, and having some music playing with its own BPM that didn't match the speed at which someone's eyes would be moving over the page made it impossible for me to figure out the panels.
So yeah, I always wrote my script with no music in the background. It kind of makes me think that I tend to draw jokey comics, and so they always end up having punchlines that need careful timing.
(See:
https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/651475590278430720/the-reason-why-kevin-and-charlotte-are-the-best
https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/659343003566161920/art-i-drew-as-a-followup-to-this-fic-this-is-what)
And this longer comic was no exception to that, being essentially a series of gags. So I think this is part of why I couldn't write the script while listening to music -- the delivery of jokes is so reliant on getting the timing right.
Of course, I think in general, comics, even non-humorous ones, are heavily reliant on paneling and use of space and dialogue to control the reader's reading speed and perception of the passage of time! So I think it is probably the case that it's hard to script comics with music playing in the background.
Practice sketches
Another prep task I decided to do during the sign-up month was to do some practice sketches in the hopes of coming up with a manga-style design for all the characters that I could use in the comic. From the script, I knew that basically all the main cast, minus Jake and Nog, plus Garak, appeared at some point in the comic, and many of those were characters I either haven't drawn before or haven't drawn much, so I needed to get my footing. Not only did I want to figure out how to draw the characters so they were recognizable, but I also wanted to try out "animefying" their designs to work with the kind of comic I was envisioning. I also had to figure out when in the series to set the comic as I knew all of the characters experienced changes to their hair/costumes and I didn't want there to be inconsistencies like Sisko's hair is from season 3 but Kira's uniform is from season 1 and things like that.
So the way I approached this is that I went through my DS9 Companion book season by season and looked at the various screencaps and promotional images featured there, and tried to draw at least one sketch of each character. I started in season 1 with full-body sketches of the cast. For season 2, I didn't see many differences in costume/appearances so I used the opportunity to practice more faces and try out different ways of depicting the characters. I also took the time to do more Garak sketches especially since I haven't drawn a Cardassian before(!) so I had no idea how the ridges worked.
Practice sketches
Please forgive/ignore how all the people have wonky heights and proportions in the first pic... Also, Quark isn't there because I ran out of horizontal space. Also, I've already drawn Quark and his first season outfit quite a lot (mostly for my in-progress KiSS doll) and I felt I kind of had a handle on drawing him.
With season 3, again, I think not many appearance changes happened except Odo's switch to a turtleneck (plus his brief flirtation with a belt), but I was also pretty used to drawing that outfit so didn't spend much time on it. As the sketch notes, the other major appearance change here was Jadzia's hair. I was kind of running out of time at this point and decided I wanted to set it in an earlier season (I guess because DS9 kind of gets more serious as war starts to dominate its plotlines; for a humorous comic, setting it early in the show felt appropriate), and if I went with the designs I'd practiced so far, I could freely set it in either season 1 or 2 without needing to change anyone's designs, so I decided to go with that. However, I still did some Worf practice sketches (drawn from season 4 images) because of my next preparatory activity...
Making a test page
The last prep task I did during the sign-up month was make a test page to try out all the technologies and resources I'd need to make comics. Things like: watching tutorials; applying tones; laying out text bubbles; typesetting text; all the patterns/brushes/fonts I'd need to do all that.
I had another (shorter) comic idea in my Quodo ideas file that was about Quark being Odo's "emotional support" criminal (after the meme), inspired by the way Odo reacts when outside security officers like Worf criticize Quark's continued operations on the station. This idea had also languished in my ideas doc for a long time (because comics are hard) but I felt it would make a perfect 1-page test comic.
From my initial conception of the "Odo writes porn of Quark" comic idea, I always wanted to make it manga-style because that was how I imagined the visual language and the style of humor. Plus, manga is typically in black and white rather than full color, which I thought was important for keeping the scope of this project manageable.
While I had done humorous 1-page comics before (see the examples above), I had not done them fully manga-style with actual pages of a specific, consistent size and with panels and so on. So the first thing I did was ask the BFE Art Discord if anyone had some tutorials or other resources for making manga-style comics in Krita (my art program, which is free and open-source).
I got quite a few suggestions from le_becc (
Tutorials used to make this:
- Krita Tutorial 4.1+: Creating Comic Panels! by JustCallMeInsane - For understanding Krita's comic page templates and the neat things you can do with them.
- Krita 4.1+ Tutorial: NEW Using the Comics Manager Docker and System by JustCallMeInsane - For Krita's Comics Manager tool.
- Tutorial: a Comic page from A to Z with Krita by David Revoy - Many stages of the comic process, from scripting to adding text.
- Perspective in Krita. 2021. Vanishing point and more by Krita - For explaining how to use Krita's Artist Assistants. I was confused how these worked, but this tutorial was really helpful.
Resources:
- Some pixel pattern .pat files. Used for the tones but I don't remember when I imported these into Krita and where I got them...
- Mojo MOO Ink Bundle for Krita by moo-kopilot - I downloaded these but I didn't end up using them because I couldn't figure out how to make brushes work with my workflow (as opposed to patterns). But I think I missed a huge swathe of brushes here that would give me more options than the above, so I'll see if I can get brushes to work next time because I'd like to try them out.
- Manga Style Speech Bubble V2.0 - Vector Library by kaichi1342 - I used these in the above comic but I think I might try drawing my own speech bubbles next time (maybe in Inkscape? not sure). It was hard to control these in a fine-grained manner.
- Anime Ace 3 by BlamBot - Free comic font for the text. (It's really hard to fit text into these bubbles though?? Are my bubbles too small, my font too big, or my script too wordy...)
Here's how the page turned out: https://denahi.tumblr.com/post/716237958935609344/star-trek-deep-space-nine-season-4-episode-4
This ended up being my most popular piece of art on Tumblr to date. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Odo somehow producing Quark out of thin air still kinda cracks me up, and I also love Quark's smug >:3 face. Quark is wearing his trans pride suit here, which I don't think I've drawn before in fanart, although it's hard to tell what he's wearing because he's so occluded. I actually forgot to note in the post that the intended reading direction of this one-page comic is right to left... But it makes sense if you read it left to right too since only two lines get reversed. You can tell there is a lot of copy-and-paste between the third and fourth panels!
Drawing the comic
Lessons learned from the test page
I completed the test page around 2 May, which means it bled into the work period for the main comic a bit. Also, it took me misleadingly short to complete -- I think I started it on a Saturday and finished it a couple of days later, so I thought "Oh, I can do one comic page in ~3 days." But actually, I spent most of the weekend working *only* on this comic, and it turns out I don't have unlimited stamina for doing art and need frequent breaks. Plus, I had other projects with deadlines I wanted to dedicate my limited weekend time to as well, so I couldn't pull the "dedicate a whole Saturday to drawing a comic page" thing regularly. In short, one page every three days was not a realistic expectation (it ended up more like one page every nine days on average).
Text
I struggled a lot with the text bubbles and the text. As mentioned above, for the test page I used premade text-bubbles, but they were hard to work with. Going forward, I decided to create a path layer in my Krita file and I drew all the text bubbles as Bezier curves (white fill with black stroke matching the typical thickness of my lineart).
Another issue I had both with the test page and the first pages of the main comic itself was laying out text. I had a bit of leeway here because I was making this comic "faux-manga-style," which meant using mostly tall-and-thin vertical bubbles rather than wide horizontal bubbles, and I figured people who translate manga must also have to struggle with fitting an appropriate line in each text bubble, and probably have to be pretty creative, so I was like, "It's okay if the text fits awkwardly!" However, it was kind of bothering me just how off my bubble sizes were. Like, sometimes I had difficulty fitting five mono-syllable words in a bubble while other times, there were several long sentences with too much whitespace! I just was very bad at predicting how lines of dialogue translated into bubble size.
After struggling with this for a few pages, I ended up penciling in the text (in caps; trying to do it lowercase led to consistent underestimates of the space needed) in a text bubble sketch layer and then drawing a bubble around it. This was all done at the sketch stage so I could still adjust my lineart to take into account the amount of space I needed to dedicate to text bubbles. Then all I had to do was create a path tracing over the bubble, and then I laid out the text in Inkscape. (I prefer doing the text in Inkscape rather than Krita as Inkscape makes it much easier to make quick edits and tweaks to text. I did try to do it in Krita initially and just got too frustrated.)
Some text bubbles have written "side comments" (I don't know what you call this in manga) and there were some sound effects as well. Some of these were typeset while others I just wrote in. (Any of the more bubble-y sound effects were done using the font Engcomica.)
Deciding on tones
Another lesson from the test page was that I was not going to do much in the way of shading at all. In particular, having to tone and shade Odo in the test page was tedious (had to decide lighting direction, had to make the darker main panel of his shirt look lighter than his sleeves, etc.) and I didn't look forward to having to do that every page. So very early on, I decided that I would just not do any shading or toning on Odo. Odo was the main character of the comic and appeared on almost every page, so simplifying him meant a lot of gains in terms of time.
I also liked it because it set Odo off visually from the backgrounds and the other characters, which I kind of like from a thematic point of view -- despite the fact that Odo wishes he could integrate, he also stubbornly likes standing out. The fact that Odo always has no tones at all made for a visual gag on page 11, when he is shapeshifting as various things in order to observe the moment when Quark notices his fic, because in all of his alternate forms, he has no color and so always stands out from his surroundings. It's not a very effective disguise! XD
(Another easter egg: When Odo shifts in this comic, he always appears in his alternate form with a "henohenomohe" face on his body, which I thought was funny.)
Paneling...
The hardest part in this comic was paneling. Even having written a script which laid out how many panels were in each page and what was contained in them, I often found myself making alterations when it came time to actually draw the page. Often I would take two cracks at laying out a page (when thumbnailing) before choosing one. Basically, I get the feeling that if you give four artists a comic page script, you'll get four very different layouts (above that point, I think there will start being duplicates/similar layout choices).
Basically, I had to kind of get used to the fact that I could panel a page completely differently and maybe it would work better. But for the sake of time, I needed to just quickly decide on *something* and move on. But I did struggle a bit with panel layouts. Especially, I think I tended to overly rely on a three-row layout where the last row has three panels -- for example, the first three pages all have this layout, as does page 9 (which was one of the first pages I drew, actually, since I drew a bit out of order). I don't know why this layout tended to appeal to me (maybe it's just a good one? IDK) so I tried to purposely experiment with different ways of arranging panels so that things didn't get too monotonous.
That said, there was one case where I struggled with the page layout and eventually decided to redo it after the fact (after I had carried the page entirely to completion -- toning and full typesetting). I just decided that the reading order wasn't clear enough, nor did I like the space allocation I had given to various panels.
Original vs. edited panel layout
I tried to reuse as many assets from the original panel layout in the reworked layout to avoid having to redraw everything. The updated layout actually matches more closely my original conception of the page. I changed it to the left layout, however, because I thought my layouts were getting stale. But this "creative" layout ended up not working at all and I ended up needing to redo the page.
Project management
Throughout most of the creation period (May, June, and July), I kind of struggled with motivation and goal-setting and trying to manage my time. Part of this is that I just don't have the speed to do a 20-page comic in three months, so my goals in order to remain on-track were always over-ambitious and it was demoralizing not hitting them month after month.
Then finally, toward the end of July, I started tracking my time. I created a spreadsheet where I put in the day I started each page and when I finished it in order to get a feel of how much real-world time each page's creation took up -- essentially, as far as I could piece together from various file creation dates, up until now, I was spending 1-3 weeks on each page.
In addition to tracking start/end date, I also started tracking how much time I spent on each phase of the comic: (1) script-writing (I ended up not really needing this column), (2) finding visual references, (3) drawing a page thumbnail, (4) drawing the lineart sketch, (5) inking, (6) toning, (7) drawing text bubbles, and (8) typesetting text. I worked in 20-minute sessions (which is how I generally tend to do my work) and tried to be pretty precise (to the nearest five minutes) of how much of each session I spent on each task.
Screenshot of my tracking spreadsheet
This really helped me in addition to the start/end dates, because it helped me identify which pages were taking longer than normal. It also helped give me a sense of continual progress because even if I was stuck on the same page for several weeks or stuck on sketching or inking (the most time-consuming stages) across multiple drawing sessions, at the end of each drawing session, I could still note the additional time I had put into that page, and wanting to move on from one stage to the next pushed me to try to do my work quickly and efficiently. It also helped seeing the patterns here because sketching and inking took quite a long time, but after that, toning, text bubbles, and text were usually much shorter stages and so after getting over the sketching/inking "hump" I knew it was kind of smooth sailing from then on.
Before I did my detailed tracking, I was averaging about 2 pages a month. After I started tracking, I was doing 3-4 pages a month.
More detailed stats on my pages
I generally kept my thumbnails to a single 20-minute session. Sketching varied widely (from 30 to 115 mins) but was roughly 71 mins of work (3.5 work sessions) per page. Inking also varied widely (from 20 to 145 mins), but was generally the second-most time-consuming stage with 68 mins of work per page. Toning, creating text bubbles, and typesetting text were much less time-consuming, taking on average 22, 21, and 24 mins each (about 1 work session). Typesetting was the most variable of these as some pages had a lot of website "screenshot" where I had to do a lot of text and text effects, while others had very minimal text and dialogue.
The two most time-consuming pages (of the ones I kept time for) were pages 11 and 14, both of which took me 9 hours total to finish up.
The two most time-consuming pages.
These are both fairly complicated pages with a lot of backgrounds and panels. The first one in particular is the first page where Quark and Quark's bar appears, so a lot of work had to be done to find references.
Backgrounds
I don't know if it's super obvious but... I hate drawing backgrounds, and basically avoided drawing any kind of background wherever possible. The only times I drew a background was when (1) a location change had happened and it was important to convey where the scene was set, or (2) it was important to convey where characters were located in a space (e.g. Bashir and Garak's table in the replimat separate from Dax and Odo's; Dax noticing Odo sitting at the bar in the background, etc.).
Notes and various easter eggs
The DS9 fiction archive and RPF
The comic opens with Odo discovering the DS9 Fiction Archive, which would be a form of real person fiction (RPF) within the setting, and bringing it to Commander Sisko. In universe, it must be the case that Sisko is by far the most popular subject on that archive, and I'm guessing there's a lot of explorations of religion featuring Sisko, and also quite a bit of Sisko/reader fic, his character appears in some wild AUs, and so on. I'm sure Sisko has Seen Some Things on that archive that he has done his best to delete entirely from his mind.
"HornySlut6969"
The credit for Quark's username and the gag where Odo censors it when saying it -- and no one can figure out how he's doing that -- goes to my partner. I think at some point (before I decided to make the comic), I was describing the overall idea of the comic and asked him for some help with figuring out a plot point, and then he just spontaneously used "HornySlut6969" as a stand-in for Quark's account, and came up with that joke of Odo censoring the username. I of course immediately added it to my list of gags. (We have weird conversations in our household.) (It always amuses me that Odo censors the number "69" too. XD)
Odo's username, by the way, is "nobody_in_particular." (This is my second time writing a story where Odo and Quark interact online and one or both of them is not aware of the other person's online handle, and both times I just made Odo's username a joke on being "nobody.")
Other AI-generated usernames
There were a couple of places where I needed a long list of usernames. At first (on page 3) I got away with making up a bunch of silly usernames and then blurring them out so that I didn't have to think too hard about them. But then later (on page 7), it became more important to have readable lists of usernames to make it clear that Quark's is or isn't among them.
I asked my partner to help me come up with some usernames that people in Star Trek world browsing a fiction site might have, and he said that that was the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good for. So I asked ChatGPT to make up some in-universe usernames.
Some of the stuff it came up with, I used directly like "WarpSpeedWanderer", "rikerbeardenthusiast", and "Gorn_Brawler." The rest I came up with myself, either by just brainstorming or taking one of the generated names and tweaking it to sound more natural.
Kira's reaction
Kira's reaction on page 9 to being told about Odo's Quark porn was inspired by the Rug Doctor ad woman often used as a reaction image.
Kira's reaction on page 9
Morn the Silent
It's a running joke in DS9 that Morn, the barfly who frequents Quark's bar, is supposedly very chatty and prone to talking people's ears off, but he doesn't actually have any lines, so you always come in at the end of a story, or people interrupt him before he can answer and that kind of thing. I was able to work in a joke like this when Quark is summarizing Morn's role in Odo's fic, but Odo interrupts him before Quark can enlighten the reader with what Morn actually said.
Morn interrupted on page 15
The ending and Quark vs. Odo
The ending for this comic kind of fell out naturally while I was writing. There are always these fun contrasts between Quark and Odo -- for example, I put a lot of my sex positivity into Quark when writing him and my sex negativity into Odo when writing him. Related to that, Quark here is someone who unabashedly likes and enjoys art, no matter how bad it is, while Odo is much more critical, perfectionistic, and puritanical. But also, they are both kind of terrible people and I liked playing with that as well. Quark is a bit of a sex pest and Odo is a censorious prig. That's the main source of humor and tension here. In the end, neither of them really learn any lessons, and both have a bit of a perverted side. (They were made for each other. ♥)
Credit and resources
Programs: Krita (drawing) and Inkscape (typesetting)
Fonts: Anime Ace 3 by BlamBot, Helvetica Neue LT (for most screen/website text), Engcomica by Marsnev, Sitka, VTC Letterer Pro, VTC Supermarket Sale, Mistral.
Tones and patterns: Some pixel pattern .pat files (I don't remember when I imported these into Krita or where I got them), Mojo MOO Ink Bundle for Krita by moo-kopilot for scratchy, tone, and flower patterns.
Special thanks to:
slashmarks for running fandomorienteerchallenge; my partner for the help in writing, for laughing at ALL the jokes (including the one he wrote), and for arranging art sessions to help me get this done.
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I feel your pain. Bubbles never are the size you want. You can use a photoshop brush to create bubbles and they're wrong. You can draw the bubbles in by hand and they're wrong. No matter how much planning goes into them, they always find a way to be wrong!
Also congratulations on being a big enough masochist to attempt more than 8 panels on a single page. Usually any more than 5-6 panels results in some unfortunate derp faces or QUALITY on my end. And you had the nerve to try not going entirely for close ups. Kudos on the challenge, it is not easy.
"I don't know if it's super obvious but... I hate drawing backgrounds, and basically avoided drawing any kind of background wherever possible. The only times I drew a background was when (1) a location change had happened and it was important to convey where the scene was set, or (2) it was important to convey where characters were located in a space (e.g. Bashir and Garak's table in the replimat separate from Dax and Odo's; Dax noticing Odo sitting at the bar in the background, etc.)"
Backgrounds can be useful in the storytelling process but it is possible to successfully avoid them almost entirely in a comic. If you're a gag artist then backgrounds provide opportunities for all sorts of silliness but if you're being serious or focusing on the foreground then often they're detrimental rather than beneficial. I used to think that I needed every panel to be a work of art, then I remembered how much I'd skim through a manga. Action, action, action, be economical with words. Comics is a heartbreaking medium XD
Congratulations again, it's no small feat to make a comic, especially that many pages.
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Yeah, it was difficult drawing that small. It was an interesting exercise, though, trying to simplify the details enough that what you're trying to draw is still clear even though most of the details are missing. There were a couple of places where I had to practice drawing a little Quark face until it was recognizable as Quark just by the silhouette, basically, because I didn't have room to put in much more detail than that.
I used to think that I needed every panel to be a work of art, then I remembered how much I'd skim through a manga. Action, action, action, be economical with words. Comics is a heartbreaking medium XD
Haha yeah. While I was drawing this comic, though, whenever I came across manga pages, I would study how they did action scenes and the like and I was always like, this is so much more detailed than my pages?? I was always kind of wowed by how many panels have backgrounds, even if it's just like a few lines indicating the floor and wall, and how much linework/crosshatching there was. These were pros, though -- maybe with some assistants too. But yeah, if I weren't drawing a comic, would I have even noticed all that detail?
Thank you!