If you want to make comics, you just have to make them. They’ll probably suck at first, but that’s inevitable. The simple fact is, you’ll never get better by waiting around, overthinking, or being scared to fail. You only get better by doing.
I learned this the hard way.
When I was in the fourth grade, I held my first comic in my hands: Punisher War Journal #13. I had no idea who The Punisher was, or who Jim Lee was, but I couldn’t stop staring at the artwork. I immediately tried to copy every line.
Not long after, my dad looked at one of my Wolverine sketches and asked a question that changed my life: “Why don’t you create your own characters?”
My brain exploded. Why hadn’t I thought of that? From then on, I spent years daydreaming, sketching, and building terrible superhero knock-offs. I dreamed of being a comic book artist. I drew constantly. I also stalled constantly. Fear, dysfunction at home, and the weight of “not being good enough” kept me from finishing anything—or even starting at all.
Even as the internet made webcomics a real possibility, I obsessed over concepts but never pulled the trigger. I kept talking about ideas instead of executing them. And when life got hard, I stopped drawing altogether.
Decades passed like this—lots of dreaming, very little doing. Then, one day, it finally clicked: if I wanted to make comics, I just had to make fucking comics.
So I did.
I started small, with a composition notebook—four panels per page on lined paper, no pressure. The drawings weren’t good, but that didn’t matter. For the first time, I was actually making comics. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.
I posted them on Instagram, even though I knew nobody would care about rough ink on notebook paper. I cranked out dozens of strips, then bought an iPad, launched my own website, and started publishing webcomics digitally.
The night I put my first comic online, I cried. I had finally done what I’d been talking about since I was a kid. People on Reddit told me my work sucked—and they weren’t wrong—but I didn’t care. They were better than my first attempts, and they’ll continue to improve as long as I keep working on them.
That’s the secret. Not talent. Not a perfect idea. Not waiting until life magically clears the way. Just doing the fucking thing.
So if you’ve got a dream of making comics, don’t waste another second. Don’t let fear, anxiety, or “not being good enough” hold you back. Start ugly. Start small. But start.
Because the only way to get better at making comics is to make them.