The first year year of making Run Freak Run was riddled with confusion, self doubt and too often pushing yourself over the edge to a free fall into burnout. So, I’d rather just be happy about having gotten mostly over the biggest hurdles of this project and for having a good rhythm going for me, instead of looking back at a harder phase of production.

Nonetheless, I was jolted back in time, when Silver dug up a stack of RFR pages. The pages. In our minds these were the infamous pages. The bittersweet ones. The ones that were our false start.

The horizontal ones.

 

 

Yes, we have 22 pages of RFR in horizontal format. I’ve always liked horizontal graphic novels and it felt like a better format to publish on the internet. We never got to try out that theory though, because we restarted the comic in vertical format after the first chapter was done.

We had given ourselves a year of preparation before we’d launch the webcomic. Out of those 12 months, only 6 were left at that point and we were in square one again.

Funnily enough I don’t remember switching to a regular format being a hard decision. We had reasons that fundamentally outweighed the “cool” factor of the horizontal pages. More affordable printing costs in the future being one of them.

The positive note in these kinds of situations is the knowledge you accumulate on the first try. Restarting something you’ve worked hard on will be demoralizing, but redoing the work will go faster than on the first try and dare I say, even better if you hunker down and just do it.

Silver got to rewrite some of the story, I got to streamline the techniques I wanted to use for drawing the pages. All in all it gave the comic a slightly better start and made our future production easier.
There’s no big morale to this story. As you already know, everything has ended well. Sometimes false starts just happen. And I guess you just have to know when to kill your darlings and restart.

 

Smiles,

Kaija