One of my favorite questions I’ve seen asked on social media is “What advice do you have for someone starting out?” or “What’s the one piece of advice you wish you’d know when you were starting out?”
It’s simple. You will never feel ready.
I wasted years waiting until I felt like I was good enough to draw comics. I worked in the roleplaying game industry for about a decade, and the whole time, I thought I was warming up to draw comics. But you know what I never did during that warm-up period?
I didn’t draw a single comic page.
The whole time, I kept thinking that when I was “ready,” I’d start on comic samples. But I never felt ready. My level of craft improved, for sure. But I never had that epiphany where the heavens parted, I was bathed in sunlight, and a cherub appeared to me and welcomed me into comics.
How it really worked out was that one day I realized that I wasn’t waiting until I was ready, I was afraid of failing. I was afraid that instead of bursting out, fully-formed, with amazing, world-altering stuff, I’d create a mediocre page—or a terrible one.
But I also realized that nothing was going to happen until I started making comics, regardless of if I felt ready. So I started drawing samples. And they weren’t great.. But the more I did it, the better they got.
You’d think that this simple revelation would have clicked for me across multiple aspects of making comics, right? It didn’t. It took me another few years before I started writing. Same feelings and worry. Same “What is I fail?” BS.
So don’t wait until you feel ready. Give yourself permission to fail, permission to create garbage, permission to learn on the job. Diving into the process will help you develop your skills.
I’ll leave you with a quote from poet Samuel Beckett: “Try again, fail again. Fail better.”
I’ve included some work from this period (1997–1999): a couple of RPG illos (for Traveller and Shadowrun) and one of my first comic sample pages (a generic romance sample page). Be gentle when checking this stuff out!
