On writing a comic strip
I believe most readers think that I’m coming up with all main parts of a new strip at once. That is that an idea pops up in my head and all I have to do after that is to think about some details in the background and to polish the dialog. And if I were a reader of Sandra and Woo instead of its writer, I would think the same.
But this notion is completely wrong! How not to Deal with the Devil was probably the only strip that didn’t require any kind of additional work after I had the basic idea. If you’re taking for example today’s strip High risk of infection, I was struggling for quite some time until I had an idea what Richard could actually say in the last panel. I thought that it would be funny if Sandra would change her clothes in record time after Richard has answered Cloud’s call, but I had no idea what Richard could say to Cloud until “Cooties!” popped up in my head.
Unrelated to this, but worth mentioning nonetheless, is the fact that I usually have no idea if the reaction to a new strip will be particularly positive or rather not. I was surprised several times about the positive feedback that some strips got which got nearly cancelled during the planning stage.
doesn’t hurt things at all to have that kind of high standards, you know 🙂