Backstory regarding the "Fruity Love" Comic

Hello guys! I wanted to give you guys a heads up on why I'm taking so long on the production on the comic.

Remember when I first mentioned the existance of the comic idea back in November 2020? It was a small "prototype" mock up picture on how the comic might look like in art style.

However I only came up with the idea at that time. It was a sudden idea I got in October when I woke up at 3am. I wrote down the rough summary so I wouldn't forget the idea. My friends convinced me to actually make a comic out of it. 

Afterwards it approximately took me almost a whole year to actually start on it (around end of Summer 2021), as I realised I cannot half-ass the story and write an actual script for myself. A lot of my time went into my apprenticeship as I only started it around that time (I'm still not done with it mind you, but I'm trying to manage my time schedule better). Another huge roadblock being, that my writing skills are actually not that great. Like honestly. Don't let me write a fanfic, it would turn into a disaster. Writing down everything about my AU down is already a mess. I've had a handful of friends beta-read the script for any plotholes and dialogue adjustments. Afterwards I started the thumbnails of all the planned pages. August 2021 was when I showed a first WIP of the comic. It was the first panel of the first page.

While I completed the rough thumbnails of the pages (I actually completed them within like the coming 4 months) I played around with the idea of actually printing this comic. It was always a dream of mine to get my own comic printed, whether it be SFW or NSFW. It took a lot of discussions with a friend to actually convince me to look into printing companies the first time. However I had to make sure that people were actually interested in buying something like this. I sort of forgot about the comic for a good while after that and it took several months to get to work on it, thanks to my apprenticeship.

I actually started panelling and adding speech bubbles here and there, when I had the time I made adjustments to the dialogue on my friends' behalf. I made a small silent comic (monday morning) in that time frame as a birthday gift to myself when I didn't work on the fruity love comic. 

Fast forward to end of April 2022, I've reached 10k on Twitter. What a huge milestone I never expected to reach. I couldn't come up with any good ideas to celebrate it. But instead, I decided to make a public announcement that I am indeed still working on the comic, despite the big radio silence on my part. You guys were so overwhelmingly nice to me when I revealed the cover page, that it enlighted my passion for the comic once more and actually gave me hope.

That's when I believed it would actually make sense now to look into printing. I made a poll asking for people who were interested in buying a physical copy, It was a surprising 74,1% voting for yes (by over 500 votes in total) that flattened me to the ground.

Now that I had actual support I asked myself "Now how do I get this printed? What requirements need to be met?" I informed myself about comic book printing and started to realise the format I've been using for my comic most likely wouldn't fit and needed to be made custom or rearrange the comic pages. I've had a lot of trouble figuring out what format I'd even want to use for the comic and knew I'd had to get actual templates to keep the editing as low as possible. I was looking for printing companies here an there, but the results were rather dissapointing.

It's not easy when you work on a porn parody of Sonic The Hedgehog as a Westener and want to get it "legally" printed. I've asked some artists for advice and therefore looked into furry printing companies. Makes sense to work with one of them, right?
Well, I was out of luck as they either didn't respond to me or charged a little too much for me to handle.

My saving grace was a recommendation of an artist I know. They told me about a printing company they've been working with. Turns out the company has no issue with the comic in itself, I'd just have to adapt my comic format. They offer custom prints, but I wanted to be safe and go with the templates they provided for all printing formats they offer.

With the templates they provided I could finally pick a format I want the comic to be printed in. So, what have I been doing since then? Easy, I had to redo ALL pages from the beginning. That means, I had to change the panel sizes, speech bubble placement and size and change some of my rough drafts to fit the panels.

Now I'm in the stage where I can properly get to work as I have officially edited all pages accordingly to the new format (except the cover page). Which means you'll get to see more frequent updates.