I'm making a comic called Fatmage. In this post I will describe the events that led me from the first ideas to actually finishing the first chapter of the comic.
How it started
A very long time ago, I had an idea for a computer game featuring a fat mage, or let's say an overweight wizard. When I was still at university, my fellow students sometimes even asked me about the project, I must have been really excited! I made a blog post about it, in 2014. Tracing back my notes, the first concepts probably date back to as early as 2011. Below are some samples.
early Fatmage character art:
Fatmage minigame concepts:
cutscene story concept:
I seriously picked up the idea again around my 30th birthday, in 2017. This was the time my long-term girlfriend broke up with me. We had been growing apart, and I had already been thinking a lot about ending the relationship. It still came as a shock. I remember writing down Fatmage ideas in a paper notebook during the days leading up to this event. Below is a note excerpt from 2017, already showing the pig character, who eventually made it into the storyboard. Later I switched to a digital notebook on my phone, to write down little story fragments and gameplay ideas. Currently I use the open-source Nextcloud Notes App for taking notes.
notes from 2017; themes include eating disorders, self-abandonment, compulsive behavior, loss of control:
I was having a hard time to get the project off the ground. In theory it was very important to me, I really wanted to create something of my own. Game Jams are fun, and so is working on commercial video games (I still haven't blogged about that), but I wanted to do a solo project. I was still kind of hung up on making a video game because that's what I know best. Or maybe, a comic? I'm passionate about comics, too.
Comic strips
In primary school, I was drawing little cartoons in my school books. I was inspired by TV cartoons and Disney comics in these early days. I also remember my primary school teacher saying "you could become a comic artist, but please don't scribble in your school books".
some drawings I found in my exercise books from primary school:
In middle school, around the age of 13, I had had a very fulfilling creative experience drawing cartoons with my schoolfriend Paul. After switching schools, when missing my old friends, I often wanted to go back to these carefree days, drawing comics during boring history lessons. I even re-created some of the comics from that time when I could not find them anymore.
some panels from Max Metzel, one of Paul's comics I re-created after switching schools:
some panels from Ferdinand der Fisch and Fritz der Frosch, two comic strips I created around the age of 15:
Years later, Paul and I sort of reconnected when we were living in the same student's dorm. In 2010, I did a challenge where I created one cartoon every day from December 1st until December 24th. I remember showing my xmas cartoons to Paul and he even contributed some ideas. I'm still very proud of these cartoons.
some panels from the xmas cartoon I did on December 22nd, 2010:
In 2012, I had the opportunity to draw a comic for the final presentation of a university project. The other students in my team granted me complete creative freedom, because they were busy with the actual project. I had a lot of fun with the comic strip, and the professors must have liked it too: It ended up in a showcase in the lobby of the institute building, where it stayed for about a year.
some panels from the comic strip I did for the presentation at university in 2012:
Self-motivation
Fast forward to 2019, two years after picking up the idea again. I still hadn't worked on the video game thing. I had considered turning my ideas into a webcomic, however. It would not only be based on the simple premise of an overweight magician, but also on my personal experiences with love and loneliness. I also wanted to view the theme of obesity from a different angle. It should not only function as a humoristic device, I wanted to show the struggle with eating disorders, how some people, overweight or not, have an unhealthy image of their own body and the resulting feelings of shame, regret and isolation.
During that phase I started a private blog, a digital diary, where I detailed some of my fears, anxieties, experiences with women past or present. Sometimes I would also elaborate on random thoughts, ideas, even personal struggles of other people I knew, and how it could connect to either the Fatmage character, his backstory, or a possible video game adaptation.
I was still not very motivated to really start the project, so I went to the local library and borrowed some books on the topics of reaching personal goals, and self-motivation.
"Ich weiß nicht was ich wollen soll" by Bas Kast was a very interesting read. It explains why we are often feeling paralyzed when there are too many options, and how we then sometimes fail to make a decision at all.
The book "Werde Verrückt" by Veit Lindau is more practical and teaches the reader how to identify and reach their personal goals. At first I was not really convinced, but I gave it a shot and after trying some of the techniques detailed in the book, I managed to get into a work routine that ultimately resulted in me working on the comic when all what I had managed before was just thinking about working on it. The approach I got from that book is, identify what you really want, set a realistic goal, then build a habit of working toward it.
I decided I wanted to make a comic about the Fatmage character. I already had some unfinished digital drawings of a possible Fatmage comic. I had lost motivation at some point. So I set a clear goal this time: Draw a 32-page storyboard. Then, I used a technique from the book where each day you perform at least three actions that potentially bring you closer to your goal. It also said I should keep a diary about that. This was very hard at first, but I tried my best. The actions I came up with were very simple ones, read about overweight people, talk to a friend about comics, print inspirational photos of comic artists I like, tape the photos on my livingroom wall, write a new entry in my private blog. It was almost impossible to keep up with three things per day, I had to settle for one or two. While most actions did not lead me toward the storyboard initially, they manifested a habit, and after a certain point I could not forget about the Fatmage storyboard, it was always in the back of my mind. Just like the self-help book said.
Getting started
In November 2019, I made a breakthrough. I remember sitting in my friend Gustav's apartment, alone, doing him a favor. People were checking for gas leaks and I had to let them in because Gustav couldn't be there that day. I had brought a notebook with completely white paper, no lines, and decided to have another go at the storyboard. It felt terrible. I knew what I wanted to draw, but was very insecure, not sure if I could do a good enough job. I ended up with about two pages of storyboard, and while the drawings were not as good as my previous, digital attempts, I decided they were good enough, and from that day on, I tried working on the actual storyboard as part of the daily routine.
Life got in the way still, it was just too time-consuming and also emotionally exhausting to work on the storyboard on a daily basis. The "three things a day" rule was not doing me a favor anymore. But I was already in too deep to quit.
I came up with a new personal goal: Work on the storyboard at least once a week, for at least one hour at a time, until it is finished. Still not easy, but more manageable. More often than not, I did my work on Sunday evening, at the last minute so to speak, because I had not gotten anything done during the week. Sunday eventually became my "Fatmage day". I had written all my storyboard ideas on little post-it notes and had taped these to a wall in my bedroom. These "idea snippets" were vague enough to leave creative freedom. Previous attempts of writing up a traditional panel-by-panel script in text form had failed. The scripts were just not very inspired and I hated drawing them. I really needed drawing the characters in action while coming up with the texts. My limited drawing abilities also influenced what I could or couldn't do with the story. For example, drawing a character sitting or kneeling was always a challenge, so I sometimes just changed the poses, or environments, and made up the details of the story as I went along.
Working on the storyboard was a slow and painful process, but I made it a habit. When I did not feel like it, I still forced myself to sit down with my unfinished storyboard on a Sunday evening. Sometimes I would stare at it for half an hour, or flip through the panels I had drawn previously, before I felt like continuing. And I always felt like it, eventually. I think there was not a single week where I did not get anything done. Even on days where I was not very motivated to begin with, and only made a small progress, I was still proud of it and did not regret spending the time.
I was finished with the storyboard by March 2021, after working on it every week for more than one year. I had exceeded my goal of 32 pages and ended up with more than 40. I had bought a document scanner and a drawing tablet for the next step: I wanted to finalize the panels, ink and color, on my computer. The drawing tablet came with a commercial software for drawing manga, but I soon switched over to GIMP, setting up custom tools for inking and color filling.
By August 2021, I had finished the first "chapter" of the story in digital form. I bought the domain fatmage.com, designed a simple website for the project and put it online. The first chapter covers 14 pages of the storyboard, about a third.
This is where I am now. So far I have shown the finished first chapter only to a few close friends. My friend Matt helped me translating the first chapter to English, and took care of the English lettering.
three panels from Fatmage chapter 1, English translation:
I'm now working on the second chapter, week after week.