I Fear What I'll Have to Do to My Characters

The cast of Sami's Dojo has been around for a long time, 10 to 12 years or so. I created the characters as carbon copies of all my friends of the time as Naruto-style ninja. Over time, I've let the characters transform from simple copies of my friends' personalities to more complex people of their own. I really couldn't say that any one of the Sami's Dojo characters has anything to do with their originally associated person, anymore. They've grown and matured as I've grown and matured. In a way, these fictional characters my closest friends and I love each of them dearly.

I get a lot of my inspiration for my stories through music. My creative workflow is strongly influenced by film and animation, so I need music for my writing as much as Lord of the Rings needs its epic soundtrack. One of my favorite EDM artists, S3RL, recently released a song called Berserk, based on the anime/manga of the same name. It was while I was listening to this song that the concept for Sami's Dojo as it is now formed in my head. 

If you know anything about Berserk, you know that me gaining inspiration for my comic from S3RL's song is probably bad news. I've almost always loved dark tragedy stories and so what should I do with these characters that I love so much? Why, throw them into a dark tragedy, of course. I'm really not sure why I'm planning so many sad and horrible things to happen to my characters, but I know that writing it will probably make me cry. 

I hope that my writing will be good enough that you all will come to love the characters as much as I do and cry right along with me.

Free-form Writing with Outlines

When I decided to create Sami's Dojo, I sat down and spent a whole day writing up a series outline, the first episode's outline, character sheets, and the second episode outline. The first episode, The Lantern, I had already had in my head for a while and had actually already written a hard outline for it in 2017. Writing the storyboards for The Lantern wasn't too hard until the last two parts.

Before I can draw the storyboards for my panels, I have to be able to see the story and characters in motion. Ever since I was little, I've always imagined my stories as short movies in my head. I have to be able to see how the characters are going to move, where they'll be in relation to each other, and how the camera will track or pan. It can be hard to write an outline for my comic because I have to focus on plot points that I need to hit. Instead of seeing what happens organically, I have to decide what needs to happen and what will be important for that episode.

Drawing the first episode, The Lantern, wasn't too hard, because I had already gotten the outline, the imaginary movie, and the storyboards written. Now that I've started the second episode, The Sword, I have moved into completely uncharted territory. As I mentioned earlier, I have an over-arching outline for the series with important plot points that need to be hit. I also have 'movie' snippets in my head of scenes I want to include and a scattering of ideas that I want to incorporate. Having all this floating around in my head ends up being pretty confusing and overwhelming.

For The Sword, I wrote 2 rough outlines, versions 1 and 2. After reading through both of them and my notes for this episode earlier this week, I decided to try a third outline to really hone in on what I needed to happen in the story. Unfortunately, outline versions 1, 2, and 3 of The Sword just weren't creating the little movies in my head that I need to see before I can draw the storyboards.

As you may or may not know, I work full-time in tech and so create my comics over lunch and breaks. I wrote my 3rd outline at work, then tried to puzzle out how it would look on my drive home. As I planned out the comic's 'movie' in my head, I kept getting hung up on my outlines and what I thought I needed to do to follow the formula. After a few minutes of trying, I gave up and just let everything that I thought I knew about the episode go. And that's when the magic happened.

Pretty much as soon as I gave up on my outlines, the characters started the show in my mind. The movie started rolling and I could hardly draw the storyboards fast enough when I got home. I discovered that the several scenes I had been playing around with in my head got smoothly incorporated into The Sword.

I was kind of not looking forward to The Sword, since I thought it might drag on too long when I really wanted to get the Great Evil and Blood Magic introduced ASAP. Letting go of the outlines gave me the freedom I needed to write the story I need to tell, but having them gave me the base ideas that I wanted to incorporate into the episode. So, even though I didn't really need it, I'll keep writing outlines for my episodes, but I won't let them hold me back from the actual story.

Blood Magic: Creating a Hard Magic System

I've been doing some sketchy Google searches, recently. I'm worried that the FBI might have me on a watch list, now. As you may or may not know, depending on whether you've been watching my streams on Twitch or not, I'm developing a magic system for my comic. I'm developing what is known as a "hard magic" system. Think Full Metal Alchemist magic: there are strict boundaries and limits on what the alchemist/caster can do. A "soft magic" system would be more like The Force, where you can do pretty much anything with it and the limits aren't particularly clear.

So... The magic system I'm developing uses blood as the main component for spells. Because of this and because I want fairly strict limits, I've been researching how much blood the human body has, what different levels of blood loss will do to a human, and how quickly a human can lose blood. In case you're wondering, a human can bleed to death in as little as 20 seconds. Pretty terrifying... But my research isn't purely for morbid curiosity! I've decided that, to cast a spell with "Blood Magic," one cup of blood must be expended, limiting a caster to 10 spells before they pass out/die. One big spell that I've settled on is a Blood Sword spell, where the caster uses their own blood to create a sword. The sword must continually get 1/2 a cup of blood every second to sustain it, meaning that you have 10 seconds of safe use time, 20 seconds if you're desperate.

The feature of my magic system that'll separate the good guys from the bad guys is where they get the blood from. Obviously (probably), a good guy isn't going to want to use someone else's blood to cast a spell. Bad guys, however, will probably avoid using their own blood and use blood that they've collected. I intend to depict this later on in the comic, but I'm going avoid being Berserk gory with it. Leave it up to your imagination more. I'm working to create a truly terrifying set of bad guys that'll make everyone super uncomfortable.

Well, wish me luck and thanks for reading!

Drawing the Panels Faster

Now that I'm employed again (I was unemployed for 12 weeks until now), I have less time to work on Sami's Dojo. Fortunately, though, drawing episodes with over 20 panels has taught me to work fast. I was drawing something like 2-3 panels in a hour before. Now, I'm able to sketch and ink 6 panels in an hour, while eating lunch. Making the decision to switch from graphite pencil for sketching to photo blue has taken away the erasing time that was eating up my time before. I think that was a good call.

I'm hoping that I can still create longer updates for my comic, even though I have a full-time job, now. This week's episode is something like 30+ panels long, so we'll see how I'll do. I might switch update days from Fridays to Saturdays. And although I can draw maybe 8 panels in a day over lunch time and my breaks, that still leaves the coloring time. After I finish The Lantern, I should be able to color faster, since I won't have to add shadows on top of the color.

Creating this comic, with an actual plot, has been a great learning and growing experience. Now that I'm getting used to sketching again, after the long break I took after graduating, I'm getting better at creating interesting and more dynamic poses for my characters in each panel. I won't claim that I'm excellent at it, but I've got Araki Hirohiko as my inspiration, so maybe soon.

Thanks for reading!

Sami's Dojo Official Release this Friday!

It's the countdown until the official release of Sami's Dojo on Friday! I will be publishing it on Webtoons, Tapas, Tublr, and on SamisDojo.blogspot.com.

So far, I've probably put 20 hours or more into Sami's Dojo. From fresh character designs, plot outlines, scripts, sketching, inking, and shading, I've done it all for the first three comics. As the special launch of Sami's Dojo, I will be release all three on Friday at midnight!

Until then, you can read the predecessor of Sami's Dojo here (warning: may or may not suck). Here are the character descriptions I've written for the comic:

Sami-sensei, short for Saeminoru

The unwilling Sensei of the Dojo, Sami was left temporarily in charge when her master left to fight a Great Evil. Many years later, Sami has become the permanent Sensei. As she waits patiently for her Master to return, she does her best to prepare her young pupils for combat.

Goropo

The second oldest of the Dojo, Goropo trains under Sami, but mostly unwillingly. If left to his own devices, he would be follow every whim and ignore the interactions of those around him. As disinterested as he is, however, he somehow manages to have solutions to difficult problems.

Pagi

Third oldest, Pagi would rather read than train. He is easily startled and flustered. While his is intelligent, he is the weakest of Sami's ninja.

Kita

Kita is the youngest of Sami's ninja. She looks up to Sami and constantly begs Sami for attention. She has a hard time focusing, but still a skilled ninja. Her best friend is Shichi.

Shichi

Shichi is the second youngest and best friend of Kita. She is competent, but as easily distractable as Kita. She constantly harasses Pagi and makes fun of his lack of skill. While always desiring Sami's attention, she bugs her less than Kita. Shichi loves dressing up and being pretty.

Sokara

Sokara is neither the youngest nor the oldest. She is not one of Sami's original ninja, but showed up to the Dojo a few years ago. Since then, Sami has taken her in as one of her own. Sokara seems to be haunted by the darkness of her past, as darkness seems to be the only thing she can talk about.

Assembling Comic 1

I recently discovered that I actually have a lot of applications available to me through my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom and Bridge being among them. So I tried to figure out how to use Bridge to get the scans of my first comic panel of of one computer on to my other computer into Photoshop.
Sadly, I couldn't figured it out. Fortunately, though, that didn't stop me from assembling the panels into pages and getting the shading added! I've decided to draw and ink the panels on paper, then scan them into Photoshop to do the page assembly and textures.
Here's a glimpse of one of my inked panels! I'm hoping to get the comic up and published by the end of next week.

Sneak Peek at Chapter 1

I'm still working on chapter 1 of Sami's Dojo, but until I finish it, here's a sneak peek of my script sketches: