Finding a comic idea: A creative guide

Writing a webcomic doesn't have to be such a taxing process. I mean, look at 10 year old me, this is how he used to create comics; I'll give an example of a comic I managed to draw to 3 seasons of 6 episodes each.

I slept, had a dream about a boy travelling the world with his friends in a bid to fight some far away kingdom (The moon kingdom) that threatened the sovereignty of their home kingdom (The Sun Kingdom). And that is how "The Sun Warriors" was born. 30 minutes later, I was in the supermarket buying a drawing book, and even though the flow is all I had, I just started and season 1 ended with the fall of the Moon Kingdom.

Where did season 2 and 3 come from? Yeah, you guessed it, I don't know, I just drew the first face in the first panel and the story built itself as I drew it. Such is the beauty of creativity. But fast forward a couple years and good Lord, there's definitely better ways to do this because that method leaves a lot of dead unfinished comics the moment you realize you only had ideas for 3 episodes only.

So how do you come up with a comic idea now? Let's see.

Building on top of an existing idea

Usually most of us tend to have an already fleshed out story that we seek to bring to life. This is by far the easiest way to breath life long life to a comic, you take this idea and start exploring how you could escalate things further and further. In the case of Sun warriors season 2, I simply thought what if the love interest of my main character was the daughter of the king of the Moon kingdom and was kidnapped long ago during a war with the Sun kingdom and she's always felt like a misfit with the Suns, and here she was, seeing her biological father who apparently spent years searching for her, locked up as a prisoner of the side that stole and treated her like a nobody. Would she ignore and leave him be, or would she set free the biggest threat to the sun kingdom?

Generating an idea from a preexisting story.

The other way could potentially be stealing ideas from places like movies and animations that already exist. Maybe you saw this certain character who you really loved but they never got enough screentime, or the film had potential to explore a particular theme and they just didn't. Think; what would a world of superheroes REALLY look like? Would Superman be the noble hero he is or would he abuse his strength and power? And just like that, you have "The Boys". Building from an existing film or story is an excellent way to get ideas, just make sure you have a unique touch on it otherwise you'll seem like a copycat.

Generating an idea from scratch

This (to me) happens to be the hardest one yet, but ultimately the most exhilarating. You end up sitting back and looking at what your mind just spat out and for those 2 seconds you can't help but feel like you're smarter than Einstein.

From my years of coming up with original stories, the best method I've come to settle on is picking a theme and discussing about it from the point of view of my characters. Like right now, I'm working on a comic called Generations, that asks the question, "Can peace ever be attained in a world where people are not equal?"

From this question you get to understand that you need 2 or more sets of characters that are inherently unequal, in the case for Generations, Gods vs Humans.
How will we discuss this inequality? Gods are all powerful while humans are powerless? Well no, humans would have no way of contributing to the conversation, so humans also have power. But only some humans so that we can also see how humans treat each other with regards to powers. Are the most powerful the leaders or doesn't it matter? How did they get this power? Do they ever face the gods using these powers and if so how do they manage to face them?

It goes on and on until at the end, you have a story that sort of makes sense and most times, I really believe this is all you need, you can then go into the nitty grittys later on and flesh out most things but alas! At this point, you've just come up with an idea for your webcomic and can move to the next phase of creating a basic skeleton for it.