SIMON, the Magnus Opus

Up until recently, I've wanted to make a comic with cool characters people could relate to or either find solace in. Despite the series eventually becoming something of a Battle Odyssey and focusing less on the human aspect, I still wanted to tell a story of hardships and resilience. SIMON will be the ultimate Web Comic. I've had many iterations of the series fail due to my lacking art skills and storytelling at the time of its inception back in 2020. Now that I've had time to grow a bit, I feel I can make a product worth people's time.

Like I've already mentioned, it began in 2020. I was 23, didn't have a job, still lived with my mother, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but while I was under her roof, I had to abide by her rules, what little there where. I discovered Webtoon at the peak of Covid/lockdown. I was brainstorming a ton of ideas, using old characters, coming up with new ones, just trying to see what worked and scrapped what didn't. Then it just suddenly hit me. I had a character in my arsenal of OCs that I hadn't used since the 8th grade, about 10 years. At the time, his name was Rex, because "Original name is original."

Jokes aside, it was probably one of my most unique characters I've ever created. Back then, his personality was loosely based on Crash Bandicoot. He was supposed to be wacky, but endearing. But I never got around to actually applying those traits. So, I changed the name to SIMON, inspired by Simon Petrikov from Adventure Time. I gave him clothes, because he didn't wear clothes then, and I actually gave him a backstory which went through MANY, MANY changes over the next 3 years. Finally, I had settled on something. The problem, you may be wondering...I had no idea how to structure a Web Comic in such a small form factor. Back then, I used ovals and boxes, it looked pretty bad...actually, it looked awful. Because of this, my comic didn't necessarily get a low rating like a 2.5 or something, but it did drop from a 9.7 to a 7.3.

I knew I had to change up my game plan, so I did what any sensible person would do...delete the comic completely while having 15 subs and go back to the drawing board. Looking back now, I realized I didn't really need to delete the ENTIRE comic. I could've just deleted the episodes individually, and then worked from there. It's the past now though. What's written permanently cannot be changed. So, in comes the second iteration. I made the same mistakes as the 1st, and ended up deleting that with like 7 subs. This was back in late 2021. Spring of 2022 comes around, 3rd iteration. The Art's better, I reworked the story, although this wouldn't be the final revision, and there's a problem. Now, the comic isn't growing like I want. I made 7 episodes before just deleting the entire thing, again.

At this point in time, I started to work more on illustrations, both SFW and NSFW, and just put the comic on the back burner for the time being. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it for a LONG while, to be completely honest. I had an idea, but didn't know how to execute. So, like any person with common sense, I studied what others were doing, their art, techniques, how they structured their comic, and eventually applied that to what is essentially the 4th and hopefully final iteration of SIMON (Currently being worked on now). I started back in Fall of 2023, and scrapped it once more after falling into the "Info Dump" trap with my prologue. That's a no-no for anyone trying to make a comic.

I found a REALLY helpful video of the Do's and Don'ts of making a Web Comic by TheStarFishFace, I'll link it HERE if you're interested in making your own comic some day. By February, I had started the REAL 4th Iteration of SIMON, and so far, it's been such a blast to work on. This was what I envisioned all those years ago, but didn't know how to properly put it to paper, so to speak. It's taking a bit longer to finish the Prologue than I had anticipated though, but that's to be expected when you work with no team and have to do the Sketching, Cleaning, Coloring, Composition, basically everything by myself, for now at least.

To end off this Blog, I just want to say thanks in advance to everyone who reads SIMON when it officially comes out Spring of 2025, specifically on my 28th Birthday. This is a passion project for me. I don't expect to make money from it anytime soon, but it would be nice so that I can hire people for things like Coding a potential video game in the future, Merch, New Digital Novels, maybe an actual book release, possibly even an animated series down the line along with a Successor for when I get too old to work on the series, who knows. I have big things in store for SIMON in the next 10 or so years. So long as I'm healthy and able, and can pick up my little drawing tablet pen, the possibilities are pretty much endless.