[Goals] My Why

I got asked over the holiday period "Why do you make comics?" by another webcomic artist. I don't think I have one answer anymore. So here's a rant instead.

First, the backstory

I have been making comics for a long time.Throughout high school, I made Team Zero, Dragon Earth and Quest For Eden - all comics that I drew by hand, pen and paper and created lots of lore for. A lot of that material eventually became The Tales Of Zeht, a sort of overarching lore.

When I left school and started attending artists alleys at conventions, I was invited to publish my first physical comic book - Necromechanic. It wasn't great. We made 100 copies.

Doing artists alleys nudged me towards doing more fanart, but the internet always reacted strongly to shocking content, so for a while I was drawing a lot of freaky Pokemon under the pen name The Cannibal Cartoonist. I was really just following what seemed to be working for me in the moment.

Xeno Tribe Kotamayu is still kind of my "big idea" - an epic space opera about a Sun God from a distant solar system, who comes to Earth and abducts the souls of 18 humans to become his new pantheon of Gods. It's a story about what the human soul becomes without the restraints of Earth. I could spend 5 hours explaining the plot to you and barely scratch the surface.

Steel Tribe is one that found an audience many years after I made it, and people are still desperate for me to continue it. I'd like to, but I have a lot of other things going on right now.

There was also Jack Of All Shades, about a painter living in the far future, when humans have gone fully digital art and he is learning traditional techniques from various aliens (including learning how to sculpt by aliens who can't see, and that sort of thing).

So I've always made things and I've always told stories.

The Bread Knight Rises

Swords was just a happy accident.

While I've always maintained that anyone can have a famous webcomic if they put in the work, so many things had to happen in unison for Swords to come about:

I posted it at midnight at the end of a New Zealand Sunday, during Daylight Savings, and if I had posted it any other time, it wouldn't have reached the front page which was the catalyst for me to make more.

Americans are picky and Reddit strongly punishes downvotes. You need to post just early enough that a post can quietly build an hour or two of momentum without any downvotes before hitting the top of the subreddit and therefore the front page. I think I've acquired too many haters over 8 years for this advice to work for me anymore - I don't really hit the front page at all anymore.

I woke up to 17k upvotes. At this point, I had a handful of deviantArt pictures that had passed 20k views. To me, this was a big deal. To me, this was a taste of virality after many years of making things with niche followings.

I got immediately to work. I drew 40 more pages in the next 40 days. I hurt my wrist. Only 3 or 4 of them got to the front page again.

My mother and brother had purchased me a Surface Pro 4 - before this, I'd always made comics by hand and coloured them digitally (see Steel Tribe). Suddenly I could work anywhere at any time without a bunch of extra tools. Medibang Studio was very tablet friendly. There was no excuse not to be making something on the couch every night.

A friend of mine had given me some tough love earlier that year : "If it was important to you, you'd do it." They were talking about other pursuits, but without that mantra I probably would have quit at some point. I repeated it to myself every day for the whole year to come.

In those first 40 days I had a lot of haters! "He'll run out of ideas in 20 episodes." That's why the 20th episode is about a kinky blacksmith who keeps making bad swords. Laughable now.

I already had a Patreon account earning $0, and so when people starting asking how to support Swords, I had an option available. I see a lot of artists think they have to earn the right in advance to start accepting support. Swords was suddenly making $160/month - never in my life was my art making $160/month.

That money honestly changed my life so much. I'd been working at JB Hi Fi for 5 years before that and had acquired so much gamer junk that I just couldn't bring myself to let go of for a low price - earning money off my art let me change my mindset. I became materially unburdened. I gave a bunch of that stuff away, or sold it for peanuts. I still have the free PS4 the Sony reps gave me though, haha.

I was working at PikPok at this point as a QA tester. I had a vague idea about how metrics and numbers worked, but that was all marketing fluff that didn't really interest me... until it did. I wouldn't say I got a lot of help, but definitely some strong advice here and there. PikPok showed me that creativity + strategy could become a livelihood. I don't think I could have gotten there working at JB Hi Fi, where people literally rolled their eyes at me when I talked about my art, and I was banned from going to artists alleys because they overlapped with bi-annual Stocktake too much.

I also became a better artist by having access to the working files at PikPok. I could just see how people did stuff. The art in Doomsday Clicker and Shadow Wars informed Swords art direction a tiny bit.

The CEO of PikPok was, at this moment in time, not particularly interested in the over-saturated Comedic Fantasy genre, so I felt pretty safe pursuing this without causing any conflicts of interest (and it opened the door for me to make Clusterduck, so in a roundabout way, I think everyone was happy in the end)

If the first episode had been called "Bread Knight" or "Knights" or anything else, it would have been a completely different series. Maybe one with absolutely no sticking power whatsoever. Swords are just such a universal symbol of the fantasy genre that there's an infinite amount of inspiration to draw from. Swords the Webcomic is ultimately about fantasy tropes and not necessarily about swords, which I know frustrates the HEMA crowd to no end. But the name "Swords" became the guiding light for everything to follow.

ALL OF IT. EVERY SINGLE BIT. is how Swords came to be. A single variable different and it would have collapsed or come out way different.

And so I worked hard. I made 200 episodes in the first 12 months, which is no small feat. Certainly the first time I made anything with 200 pages.

Older ideas became a part of Swords - The Blade Maiden, The Neverwarden, Necromancer and Druid, they all started as something else. A little self-indulgence, as a treat.

Pennomi offered to make me a website. He didn't have to do that - he just wanted to. And that led to us making a card game together.

Chris Hallbeck convinced me to rebrand all my socials from _mjwills to swordscomic, which I was a bit resistant to at first. It made a big difference.

Quest Sprout appeared, my audience tripled.

Expectations grew, weird things began to happen like: - Brands stealing my comics to make ads - Brands wanting to collab on new features for their platforms - I started making things with Makeship - Etc!

At the start of Season 5 of Swords, an Instagram rep told me I needed to be reliably posting 3 times a week if I wanted their help to grow. The format shifted a bit - I started polling here on Patreon for a theme each week, and then I did three episodes about Rapier Tapir, or Quest Sprout, or Krog the Caveman. The growth didn't come in the end - Instagram just wanted me to make reels. Chasing TikTok became their model. Their reps had no other advice for me. My growth on Instagram died in 2021 and it has never recovered.

I tried to pivot at this point and started Sickle's backstory - I thought I could teach myself more about swords at the same time as she was making wacky inventions and that could be a the format for a long time. Pressure from the HEMA crowd to be more accurate. I put that idea back on the shelf to do Swordtember and then moved on to Quest Sprouts story continuing.

I left PikPok to become a part of Pointy Bits. We made Swords: Cut The Deck. It was certainly challenging in a lot of ways! I was planning to take a solid break for Swords 5th Anniversary, but ended up kicking off Season 6 straight away to promote the Kickstarter. To my own credit, some of my favourite episodes came out of that period.

And so that's sort of it. I've been working on Swords for 8 years come March and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people now. I started running and haven't really had a chance to stop.

More Running (You've heard all this before)

Swords #1000.

More Cut The Deck content.

Sell this mountain of spare Everstabbed plushies.

I gotta do a stock take in time for tax season.

Print a limited run of the Patreon Swor'nament as a book.

Rearrange Seasons 2 and 3 into Chronological Order.

Redraw Bread Knight's gear-collecting adventure.

Print "The Rise Of Bread Knight" as nice a book and a deck of Cut The Deck cards, that I can be thoroughly proud of.

Decide if Sickle, Rapier Tapir, Quest Sprout and Choplet all get the same treatment. If I can do one every 6 months, I think that goes a long way to making the series more digestible for newcomers, raising the storytelling standard and overall quality. This is a longterm plan.

All while producing new episodes. Like Season 5, it will be a turning point for the format, but not an end point. I'm going to be asking a LOT of questions and I expect the community to weigh in heavily on the shape of what I will temporarily call Swords Beyond.

And So Again, My Why

Swords was never about seeking perfection. It's a fun sandbox to play around in, but it's not trying to be Shakespearsword. There are plenty of things I would like to do to make it better, but never perfect.

I'm not particularly afraid of failure either. Other people in my life are. Very afraid. But it just manifests as them actively sabotaging me when I reach too far out of their comfort zone that they boxed me in.I fail all the time. And I learn from those failures and get better. But to some people it's an unbearable thing to watch. A toxic family member yelled at me for not getting rich and solving all his problems sooner, because I wasn't working hard enough. The reality is I work plenty hard - I'm just holding back on some big swings. The perception of success does strange things to people.

I have no great love of money. Having $5 or $5 million does nothing for my self-worth.There are people online who resent me for not having an Instagrammable lifestyle. They see my hard work and think without a fast car and photos in Paris I'm not "living my life". I think they get scared that hard work can leave you normal.Maybe there would be some value in showing up in the world fake. Maybe that would create some opportunities for me. But I think the cost of being fake is too high, personally.I'm not afraid of time. I have lots of time to do the things I want to do. Kotamayu is a little bit out of my reach right now, but I'd love to do it justice some day. Steel Tribe isn't exactly a priority but I'd like to fit it in somewhere along the way. I have no regrets spending 8 years making Swords.

I do place a little bit too much of my self-worth on vanity metrics. I really would have liked to reach 1 million Instagram followers, back when I thought that was in the cards for me. But those kind of numbers are more about creating stability for my brand. I could easily pay for those kind of numbers, but I don't want that for myself at all. It's about the underlying support structure, not projecting a false image. If 1% of my current Instagram audience was supporting me on Patreon, I'd be set for life.

It would be wonderful to be reaching the front page of Reddit again, but I'm unclear on the path forward. I'm not really sure where I stand with a lot of the /r/comics community after the whole "A Midjourney employee got me temporarily banned for saying AI sucks" thing.

I've been on a bit of a mental health journey since Covid. I was brute-forcing my way through a lot of my problems. I've learned that many of my "personality traits" are in fact "unhealthy coping mechanisms" that aren't quirky and are, in fact, very well catalogued, predictable and preventable. I'm not currently in any kind of therapy or taking any kind of medication, I'm just learning the language and becoming more self-aware day by day.With your help, I've actually already achieved my lifelong ambition in the last year - I make the New Zealand minimum wage off of my art. I make something worth people's time. Worth receiving my fair share (a very New Zealand mindset, to be fair). In terms of self-worth, self-actualization, that's really all I ever wanted.I need more coming in to reach further and make even more cool stuff, but that's not about my why. That's just the current circumstances working against me. I got to this point a little later than I should have - maybe by being cautious or maybe by being too trusting. Probably a mix of both. I've been burned by publishers a few times now - its a shortcut to lasting success but it can be risky.

I've been quite resistant to this "I am a part of the product" mentality. I 100% need to get a broken tooth pulled that is probably giving me a brain tumour, but I have so many other fires to fight right now. I'm just spread a bit thin.

I don't really see myself as a Company Making Products, I see myself as a Service Making Stories. That's why I don't really spend a lot of time designing shirts or publishing books and why I didn't remaster the earlier episodes to by print-worthy sooner. It's why I'm not cynically chasing the most marketable Makeship product every time and like to experiment with weirder stuff like Kargob (who turned out to be my favourite, actually). It's why when I talk about the future, it's about hiring more artists to lift more people up, and not about how my life would be improved with a yacht.

But I accept that being Product-second needs to change soon, because the series is getting harder for new people to tap into. Swords: Cut The Deck was a love letter to 5 years of stories, but some of the content doesn't make a lot of sense to a newcomer as part of a standalone product - there's lots of small wins I can make in the future by approaching these things from a different angle.

Swords reaching its 8th Anniversary, a number worthy of Kargob, is my next natural point to just take a breath, take stock of everything and move forward smarter. That's what I really want right now - to make a better product for you.

Overall, I will keep making things no matter what. Because making the things I want to is really my why and finding the stability to make what I want is the how. In a cave, in a mansion, when I'm young, when I'm old, with 5 followers or a quarter million... more comics are on the way. And if I have to reinvent myself again and start over to make it work some day, I will - but I think we can all agree I got really lucky to have all of you here and we've got a pretty good thing going at the moment.