Rebellion In My Mind

In 2020, I published my first webcomic. It was for an English class at Stuyvesant High School called Writing to Make Change, where we studied a variety of genres, including personal essay, memoir, fiction, drama, op-eds, poetry, graphic novel, and the infographic, to learn how people generate writing for a public audience to make change. For the final project, where we were tasked to craft a piece for publication, I chose to create a webcomic to express my inner struggles with religion.

The Double Life

The decision to make a webcomic dealing with my religious beliefs was not spontaneous. It was motivated by years of personal experience caused by a fundamental change in my view of the world. At some point in 2018, I was no longer sure whether I believed in God anymore. This had profound implications on my life. I come from a Christian household; My family has been going to church ever since I can remember, my father is a pastor and missionary, and both my parents have majored in theology in school. As a result, I felt that I had no choice but to maintain a lie in front of my family when I stopped believing. I didn’t know how my parents would react if I told them, and so I kept it a secret from my family. I led a secret double life, on the internet, in front of my friends at school, and within my own mind, where I could freely express my thoughts. Since then, I have told my parents what I believe and, although they were reluctant to accept it at first and still encourage me to go to church, it wasn’t the opposition I expected.

I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when I began this double life, but I suspect it wasn’t long after May 6, 2018, when someone created a Facebook poll about religion. I commented something nonchalant, remarking on a grammatical error in the post because I was afraid to actually address the content of the post.

While on the internet it may be quite easy to avoid detection from my family, it is much more difficult in real life. If I were like most Christian kids and went to a local church, it would’ve been simple to skip sermons. But ever since 8th grade, my parents decided it was best to hold the Sunday church service at home, conducting a “family church” where they required me to play the piano for the hymns. Meanwhile, both my older and younger brothers were able to go to churches elsewhere, with their friends. I can’t help but suspect that my parents thought my faith wasn’t strong enough, so they felt the need to keep a close eye on me during service.

The Coronavirus pandemic had only exacerbated my disdain towards religion, however. My father used it as an opportunity to force us to do daily bible studies, which I had thought was a waste of time. I had to passively resist these as much as possible, waking up late and convincing him I had online classes so that I couldn’t do them. This backfired on me, as he had moved the studies to the morning, before all classes, but even so, I was able to successfully convince him to not do them on weekends.

My Artist Renaissance

My artistic inspiration for this piece came from the arts, both the musical and visual forms. I was a classically trained musician, receiving piano and flute lessons until I was in 8th grade. As a result, classical music was all I listened to. But when I visited my relatives in South Korea the summer before 9th grade, I discovered rock music when I heard Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen for the first time. It wasn’t until early 2018 when I discovered a musical genre known as progressive rock/metal, or prog, when I watched a YouTube video.

The guitar solo that Mike Kupris features in the video was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. All of the mainstream and indie rock I heard up to that point didn’t even compare. I realised how incredible this new genre was, and it has staunchly remained my favourite genre of music. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that my discovery of prog had changed my music taste forever.

My artistic inspiration for this piece came from my rapid growth in my drawing skills after I first decided to draw an anime girl’s face during English class my first semester during senior year in high school. Could I truly draw an anime girl? After all, I had spent 4 years prior consuming anime and manga. Well, lo and behold, my first go at an anime face didn’t go too well.

It is actually very interesting to revisit this moment. I knew about the disproportionately large anime eyes, but not about their placement or the head shape. And I was still accustomed to the “childish” way of drawing hair, drawing the individual strands. The very next drawing I drew underneath it was a cat (I have no clue why). The next three faces I drew degenerated into worser and worser iterations. Horrified, I spent the next few weeks practicing by drawing from references. After several weeks of casually doing sketches, I took to the tutorials on Youtube. I wouldn’t have sought them out if it weren’t for my friends on social media offering tips for improvement.

I gradually improved my art on pencil and paper, but it wasn’t until I got my first drawing tablet that I really started to see growth. I was inspired to get a drawing tablet when I installed my first drawing program, Krita, and was frustrated with how unresponsive my laptop’s screen was to my fingers. I knew professional artists used touch tablets designed for drawing that had pressure sensitivity, so about a week into the quarantine on March 21st, I ordered a cheap pen tablet: the Huion HS611 ($80 on amazon). It came much sooner than expected and I forced myself to use it every single day for the next month. This was perhaps the most valuable factor in my decision to go with the webcomic for the Writing to Make Change piece. During the month of April 2020, I became used to the pen tablet and exponentially improved my art skills. If it hadn’t been for the extra time I had because of the quarantine, I doubt I would have been confident enough to attempt the webcomic.

Execution Commentary

On April 8th, I expressed my idea to my WTMC group of attempting a simple comic for my Writing to Make Change piece. However, my original intention was to do a sort of religious deconstruction, similar to what Rhett did on the Earbiscuits Podcast, where I would describe my journey to becoming an atheist. But a few problems arose; my journey was difficult to recollect. I never wrote anything down, in fear of my family finding out. I couldn’t even recall a point when I stopped believing in God or what my reasons for it were, but that type of information is necessary for what I wanted to make. Therefore, I decided to create a narrative of the experiences I went through, told through the eyes of an anime girl. I want to point out that I am not gender questioning, as some people have asked. I chose to depict the protagonist as a girl for two reasons:

1. Anonymity. I didn’t plan on sharing my webcomic to my family, but even if they did end up finding it, it wouldn’t be obvious it was me since the protagonist is a girl.
2. Ease of Drawing. I have practised drawing girls way more than I did drawing boys when I first started out. I was worried about the potential loss of quality of the piece if I made my protagonist a boy.

When I finally decided to take on the monumental task of creating a webcomic, I knew I had to rigorously plan it or else I wouldn’t finish it by the deadline of the project. I had a vague idea that people who made manga planned out their stories beforehand. So I spent the days of April 21th and 22nd coming up with a general plot for my comic. I first started by jotting down the events I’ve experienced that I wanted to depict the protagonist going through. From there, I crafted the first draft of a complete story line. I originally planned to make it 20 pages, because that seemed to be the length of a typical manga chapter. But my first draft ended up being only 18 pages long, and by the end of the project it became 15 pages. After this, I was able to start drawing.

The first thing I did was go back and rewatch a video by a professional mangaka, Akihito Yoshitomi. In this video, he documents how he creates his serialised manga series through a rigorous self-imposed schedule. He always sketched the next day’s work in order to have an “ahead” state of mind, something I found very interesting. He had a little paper that kept track of his progress with coloured check marks and circles, so I decided to do the same for my comic.

Before I started drawing, I decided that I would split my webcomic creation into three distinct phases: a sketch phase, a lineart phase, and a shading phase. Here is a visualization of my workflow, using the 4th page of my webcomic as an example.

How To Create A Manga Page, in 5 Easy Steps!

1. First, put down the borders of the panels. This requires careful planning because you need to know how many panels to use and what sizes to make them. On this page, I decided to leave out the panel on the bottom to allow the character to fill the background.

   

2. Draw a sketch of the content with a different color ink, (I use dull blue-green), to make it contrast with the black lineart. Using a different color ink for the sketch was inspired by cartoonist and anime artist SrGrafo. I also copy and pasted sketches if the faces I used were the same but with different expressions. I made sure not to do this too often, but it was very convenient during certain scenes. For this particular page, I accidentally drew the middle girl in the top panel on the wrong layer so I went over her in gold ink to attach her to the correct layer.

   

3. Next, draw the lineart in black, including the final outlines of the characters and the speech bubbles. Having the sketch in the background makes it easy to draw decent looking lineart. I didn't do the sketch phase for a lot of the later pages (I went right into the lineart because of lack of time). For the speech bubbles, I ended up drawing them by hand.

   

4. Next, choose a font for the speech, come up with all of the text to go on the page, and type them into the correct locations. Sometimes I did this before starting the page, but I usually I came up with what they say as I typed them in. The method I used to input the text was very inefficient and buggy, but now that I have gone through this process, I know how to do it better. For manga-looking text, CC Wild Words works the best.

   

5. Lastly, color in the content and shade it in. I find it convenient to do this step in one sitting because you might want to use the exact same shade of grey for specific recurring things, like the main character's shirt and their hair. For stuff like the eye and the mouth, I didn't really spend too much time making sure it was the exact right shade of grey, I just estimated it with my eyes, choosing a grey that was "just dark enough", but this was due to time constraints. Making a webcomic in color would probably require a bit more care in the shades.

   

Tada, a completed page!

Inspirations and References

The protagonist was based off of Ema Yasuhara from the anime Shirobako. The first scene of the story, which detailed how the girl was late for school, never happened to me, but I was forced to recite the prayer everyday before I left for school. I did try to ignore my father, but I never dared to neglect reciting it.

The conversation between the girl and her friend never happened to me, but I did get similar reactions when the people I used to go to church with found out my dad was a pastor. The purpose of the girl talking about Opeth was to establish a connection between her and prog, allowing me to seamlessly insert the flashback scene and the song Ghost of Perdition by Opeth. In retrospect, her dialogue about her dad’s band not getting the signature seems a little cringy and out of place, but it was the best I could come up with. I admit, I’m not exactly the best storyteller.

The next scene with the girl walking home from school and listening to George Carlin did not happen to me, but I did listen to George Carlin for the first time several months ago and I found him to be very entertaining. The comedy bit I show in my webcomic was exactly what he says in one of his most famous specials. I had to change the title that appeared on the phone the girl was holding because I felt it would be a bit too vulgar. Also, the girl is walking home and not being driven home because her parents leave for work after she goes to school, much like my family.

When she gets home, she has an interaction with her older sister, similar to the one I had with my older brother. The day I discovered George Carlin, I wanted to tell my brother about it. He had previously introduced me to the comedian Dave Chapelle. But when I asked him if he’d heard of Carlin, ready to recommend a non-religious video of his, he said that he didn’t like Carlin and his takes on religion. He said Carlin was very misguided, and then he walked off. Also, ever since he was in middle school, he attended his church’s praise team practise every week, so the thing the older sister says in the comic was faithful to real life. And the expression that the sister makes when she finds out it’s Carlin was directly inspired by Senjougahara Hitagi in the Bakemonogatari manga.

I had trouble trying to figure out how the protagonist would browse the internet, but ultimately I decided on 3 posts she sees on “Jacebook”, a facebook knockoff for copyright reasons. Each post I include were things I have seen on the internet, the last one being something I came across on reddit in r/coolguides. I wanted to show how even when I was browsing social media I wasn’t safe and had to exercise caution. Also, the girl’s bedroom was inspired by my own room.

After this scene, I had a couple ideas of what I wanted to do next. In my first draft, I originally planned for her father to come into the room and tell her to come out to do bible study, where she initially refuses but her father raises her voice. Then the next scene would have been the bible study, filled with her thoughts during the activity and the prayers. But I decided to take the scene out because I realised the story would be way too long and felt that the scene would be too uncomfortable and personal to show. I considered replacing it with a dinner scene or a scene where she helps her little sister with homework, but those were also unnecessary. As a result, I was able to cut my story from 18 to 15 pages.

Instead, I chose to show the theater scene next, which I originally intended as the final scene. This scene in real life unfolded pretty much how I showed it in the story: my father told me that we were going to see a theater show of Jesus’s birth near Christmas, but I really didn’t want to go and told him I would be busy with college applications. He started to get really mad but my mother deescalated the situation by saying that they could invite church friends. And the part where the protagonist refuses to go was directly inspired by the famous JoJo Part 4 scene when Rohan Kishibe refuses to comply.

Finally, the last scene is perhaps the most powerful scene of the webcomic. Believe it or not, this entire scene is almost entirely based on reality. I was on the couch in the living room, listening to Oni-chan by Others by No One. I was introduced to them earlier that day when a facebook friend told me about them. It was my 3rd time listening to the song. My mother was sitting on the couch next to mine when she heard growl vocals from my phone. The rest of the story unfolded pretty much how it happened in the webcomic, except I didn’t do that dramatic “I’m going home” exit. I just tried to laugh it off but I was seriously spooked. I was actually able to receive the lead singer of Others by No One’s blessing to include them in the webcomic. Also, the panel where the mother was comparing the singer to the devil was directly inspired by Hayasaka Ai from Kaguya Sama: Love is war.

In order to make sure I finished the webcomic on time, I made sure to finish the lineart of at least one page every day. I managed to keep this up until page 14, the second to last page. I was having too much trouble trying to figure out the best way to end it, so I took a break from May 7 to 10, because of APs and for mental sanity. When I came back on May 11, I was able to finish the last page, and for the next 3 days I worked on shading the rest of the pages.

I also had to create a cover page for any website I would upload to, so I decided to go with an abstract image of the girl with various objects around her. I originally planned to have her tied up in chains, representing her lack of freedom, but I found out that chains are really hard to draw so I just drew some ribbons wrapped around her. Much easier to draw. I also created a timelapse of myself drawing it.

Spreading the Webcomic

My webcomic was now complete. It was 2020-05-21, exactly a month after I started, and all of the .kra files have been saved as .png files in a folder. All I needed to do was upload them. But was webtoons.com still the best fit for my webcomic? Well, after looking through a fair amount of webtoons on webtoons.com, I noticed all of them were in color and only had a single panel per width. I didn’t think my webcomic belonged in a place like this, so I did some more research and found tapas.io. Here, there were comics of all types, including the ones in my format. I also wanted this website to gain more recognition. I had to change the dimensions of the cover page, but other than that, the uploading process was straightforward.

My original intended audience was the religious parents who think indoctrinating their children into a religion is okay. Instead, my webcomic was able to reach the people who appreciate stories being told in this art medium, and people who have gone through similar struggles with religion. It has touched those who have known me in my life, as well as those who felt like they did while reading my webcomic. This experience has shown me that compassion can come from beyond religion, and that I am not alone in what I go through.

Conclusion

Looking back on this project, 2.5 years after I first published it, I think that this was a necessary step in my ideological growth. I really did struggle during the COVID pandemic because of the pressure and constraints religion caused me to endure, but perhaps there was a lot that was a bit overemphasized or unfairly biased to what I was going through, reading back at what I had wrote. I was able to close a chapter in my life, and I have since mellowed out from my initial, sometimes reactionary views of religion. I enjoy looking back at my work, and wonder at the potential I had if I had kept writing stories. Maybe one day, I’ll serialize a story, perhaps in hard sci-fi, and continue where I left off in my artistic journey.