My Webcomic Journey: Merging Projects and Learning Along the Way

Hey, do you remember the last time I wrote a blog post when I was at a crossroads?

Yes, I'm talking about that one where I announced the end of Pepper&Carrot at episode 42 (in four episodes from now) and also the start of the Mini Fantasy Theater comic project.

That was months ago, and, oh dear... a lot of things didn't turn out the way I thought they would.

I wanted to give you an update on that, but I changed my mind so many times in the last few months that I felt too disoriented to even feel confident enough to write down a blog post about my webcomic journey.

Now I feel like I'm moving in a new direction, and it's one that's sticking with me. So let me explain.

Mini Fantasy Theater's success

I published 10 "Mini Fantasy Theater" comics weekly from April to July. They were a total joy to make and I was really happy to read the huge feedback they generated.

To give you an idea, the first episode "Morning Routine" has been shared more than 1269 times on the Fediverse. Episode 4 "Accessories" got over 31K reactions on the Facebook page. Later, Episode 8 "Carnivorous Plants" got 11.2K likes on Instagram.

I never got that kind of metric with my episodes of Pepper&Carrot or my illustrations on social media, ever. So I was excited that I had finally found a way to expand my reach to a new audience. It also felt rewarding to think that I was finally on the right track.

So I was, and still am, pretty happy and confident with this webcomic format:

• The format suited proprietary social media algorithms.
• Scenarios were easy to produce, I got a big package in advance.
• Episodes were fast enough to produce, once I was motivated with an idea I could start and be sure to publish it the next day. Amazing.
• The audience responded positively, the comments section was interactive, and Mastodon turned out to be my favorite place to publish first because I could quickly edit and hot-patch my little bugs.

Designing the website, translation system and infrastructure

In July, I decided to take a break from production after the release of the 10th episode of Mini Fantasy Theater. Ironically, episode 9 and 10 were about Art Block, see episode 9 and episode 10.

Still, I had 10 comics finished and I felt like I had a strong base to start designing the project's website.

But the website quickly grew bigger than I expected. I was somehow convinced - and with good reason - that I had to make it better than Pepper&Carrot from the ground up. Convinced that a better core system, a better way to share sources, and a better website would solve all the difficulties I have in maintaining Pepper&Carrot.

I had a lot of intense brainstorming and trial and error during July, but despite all my efforts I ended up designing a translation system that was pretty close to the Pepper&Carrot one. The attribution database? Pretty close to the Pepper&Carrot one. The project needs it's own font directory? No, let's just reuse the Pepper&Carrot one. And almost the same pattern for the "contributor documentation", the patronage system, the about page, etc... etc ... ... ...

Video: The Mini Fantasy Theater website (not finished)

The Turning Point Revelation

And then, I could finally see the obvious pattern: I was just making a clone of Pepper&Carrot from scratch.

It was different in appearance: a different format, a different name, a different release schedule, but at its core I was just reinventing the wheel and it was so similar to what I already had.

This revelation completely blocked me and I put immediately a pause on the Mini Fantasy Theater website.

I was looking for answers, and I knew I needed time to put words about why I was so bugged to make a duplicate of Pepper&Carrot.

Unraveling my thoughts

Luckily, summer was here, and the time of family visits and summer vacations gave me an easy excuse to put all that aside and forget a bit.

I just spent a lot of time drawing in my sketchbook and on my home DIY to-do list: I installed a stove, cut firewood, and built a shed for it. At least, I made huge progress on getting a warmer house for winter, less dependent on increasingly expensive electricity.

Thanks to this side-step, I was able to take distance and put better words on why I had this block on the Mini Fantasy Theater website.

I think now that Mini Fantasy Theater was just my way of getting away from Pepper&Carrot. Pepper&Carrot probably felt too big, too complex, and too hard to manage at one point, and too rigid to find any creative freedom in it.

With Mini Fantasy Theater, my hope was to create a webcomic project that would be free of all of that. But building the Mini Fantasy Theater website, the scripts, and the translation system only reminded me that I was just recreating the same structures, leading to the same difficulties.

Worst of all, in a hypothetical world with Pepper&Carrot and Mini Fantasy Theater website and infrastructure side by side, I was on the verge of having to double my maintenance time budget: with almost all the mechanics under the hood being duplicated.

Finding a way

But a little time and distance did wonders, because I was finally able to study, identify and face those difficulties. I soon realized that I still had a lot of options open to me.

Also, many of the good ideas I had from Mini Fantasy Theater's infrastructure, creative freedom and release step were not lost, I could backport them to benefit Pepper&Carrot. All in all, this Mini Fantasy Theater experience was an eye-opener to see what is essential and what is not to protect my productivity and creative process.

I could just merge the Mini Fantasy Theater episodes into a section of the Pepper&Carrot website and keep everything on a single website, maybe just behind a new menu. And also the project could just use the same repositories as Pepper&Carrot without too many duplicates.

Facing up to the dragon difficulty

I then looked back at the big writing effort around the idea of making an 'ultimate ending' for Pepper&Carrot. I was in my 5th rewrite and it was taking shape, but it just felt "not in the spirit of Pepper&Carrot". It took me months and months and a lot of rewrite, which is why the 5th version...

I started to ask myself: why do I insist on writing a plot? Why make the story center around revenge? Why it always end like a Shōnen in a epic fight?

I probably did this because I felt a little trapped into making episodes that justified the "lore" the project had accumulated on our wiki. But I don't want to tell a "good versus evil" story. I don't want to have a plot or a conspiracy that my character has to unravel.

I just want to make fun of that through the character of Pepper and Carrot; both lost in a fantasy world that doesn't work as expected. I want to use this device to expose this false "good versus evil" dichotomy. I want to show that our usual training and enjoyment to read plot, conspiracy, and drama in fiction may not be the most useful way to exercise our brains in our recreational time.

So I took a big breath of creative freedom, a new white page and started a 6th rewrite from scratch and got something much more fun, original, upbeat and bright. This version was a complete departure from the 5th Shōnen's plot-driven ending with long fighting episodes against Wasabi. I could write a funnier Pepper, questioning her world and dealing with her fantasy of wanting to be in an epic story, while her reality is more or less as boring and complex as our reality.

This rewrite also has a consistent ending for book 5 and better reuse the new characters already introduced for this future book: the Phoenix of episode 37, Brasic, Fritz and Vinya of episode 38. All in all, it gives a more philosophical growth curve to Pepper.

A vision that lasts

I then traveled to the signing in Norway with this mindset, and it was a great experience because I kept the bright vision of Pepper&Carrot in all my signing sessions and got a lot of positive feedback.

This vision has stayed with me ever since!

So, Pepper&Carrot is still my dream project and I am grateful to have renewed my passion for the series. I don't need to refactor it deeply, I don't need to open a new series. Sure, having a short format at hand is now cool for sometime publishing quick comic strips. But that's all.

Future plan

I have deleted Pepper&Carrot episode 39 beta "The Bedtime Story" and closed the thread three month ago. This 11 page episode was pretty far along and had about 120 hours invested in it. But it was also confusing and very far from the spirit I have for Pepper&Carrot now.

So I'm going to start this episode 39 from scratch − again. But sacrificing some bad steps to keep the series high quality is worth the effort, I think. Even though it is heartbreaking to get zero income for all the work that has been done and is almost ready to be published... But quality comes first! In the upcoming production report on my blog, you will hopefuly read more about the making of this new version of episode 39.

As for Mini Fantasy Theater episodes, I'll take the time to merge them into the Pepper&Carrot site and create new ones from time to time. They'll be fully translatable and use the same repos and group as Pepper&Carrot for the technical part.

I may soon start refactoring both Mini Fantasy Theater and Pepper&Carrot to make the merge easier, porting the best technology I found recently, and de-duplicating the tools and libraries used in Backstage. These changes will probably come with an update of the Pepper&Carrot website, but all this will be an ongoing background task with a lower priority than getting back on track with the production of new episodes.

So that's my roadmap for the end of the year. I really want to participate in Inktober this year, but I know that with such a challenge, I might as well invest all the time I can into making this future plan a reality. So, no Inktober 2024 for me.

Thank you for reading and thank you to all my supporters for sticking with me despite the time this whole process takes.