Four Wolves

In the summer of 2024, WolfBound was nearing completion, and I had started more in depth research into how to publish a graphic novel traditionally. I had learnt that it was better to build a readership first, a group of people who were interested in reading your comics, and would be interested in buying your graphic novel.

As I also knew commercial graphic novel shouldn’t be shared on the media, I hadnt shared any pages of WOlfBound on the internet, save for a couple of the prologue, and a few panels sharing updates. I knew I had to grow an audience interested in my comics somehow, so decided to create a webcomic.

Before this, I hadn’t known about the existence of “webcomics”, it was only when I was 16 that I learnt about them more. From 16, I had started to be active in social media such as Instagram, drawing wolves and posting my art. Although WolfBound is mostly about humans, I thought practising wolf anatomy was a good idea, and from there continued to post animal art, instead of humans. So therefore, when I came to create a webcomic to help gain a readership, I decided to create it solely focused on wolves. However, this was a bad idea.

I attempted to continue working on my webcomic for a few months, but in the end had to cut it off. There were many reasons why I choice to do this:

• prefer making GNs
• stress of doing it every week
• story and artstyle not consistent
• just gained an audience of people interested in wolves
• age group wasn’t correct
• didn’t focus on Wolf Bound, destroying the main point.

First up, making a webcomic was VERY different to making a graphic novel, and as being used to the graphic novel process, struggled a lot in the webcomic workflow. For one, webcomics are usually created in “episodes”, releasing a page every week. People also usually make the comic pages weekly, and share them as they are created. Some people have drawn out multiple comic pages in advance, but the main concept was that you almost “create the pages as you go”, only really planning a section ahead. This stressed me out a LOT, as I liked planning out the WHOLE story, page layouts, and doing it in general as a graphic novel, going one at a time (IE inking the whole GN at the time, then flatting the whole GN, before moving on to colouring and lettering etc).

Making the webcomic “a page at a time” meant I found it extremely difficult to remember scene colours, to have the text formatted right, and even to know where the story was going amongst all that. It made me feel like the story and artstyle wouldn’t be consistent too, as the story progressed, you would develop and improve as an artist and author. Doing it in stages prevents this as a graphic novel, as even if you improve in drawing by the time your colouring, the drawings will stay the same, as you can’t go back and redraw them all.

Additionally, I found that creating a webcomic based around wolves, meant that the audience I was building up loved wolves, but weren’t really interested in stories with humans, which defeated the whole point of building a readership for WolfBound. Additionally, the age group interested in this wasn’t correct for WolfBound. WolfBound targets middle grade readers, and there weren’t any 8 year olds on social media.

In the end, I also found that the stress of completing it one page a week, and not knowing if it would even help Wolfbound resulted in me not being able to continue to progress on wolfbound anyway, which defeated the whole point! By the end, I stopped Four Wolves, as I saw it wasn’t helping Wolfbound, and instead doing the opposite!

However, it was an interesting experience, and if anything, I’m glad it did it, as I now am even more sure that I want to pursue graphic novels, rather than webcomics.

If you’d like to read it, here is what I was able to create so far: