While I'm still looking forward to reading the "Thomas Beyond" comic series, I got 3 questions to ask, if that's okay with you.
1. What inspired you to make this series?
2. What are your biggest frustrations with making comics?
3. What motivates you to create?
No worries dude, ask away!
I always wanted a Thomas-themed comic as a kid. I love comic books and I loved Thomas. I’m honestly surprised the Thomas franchise has only ever done something in a standard comic format ONCE, that being the DC Comics X Thomas Minis tie-in comic, which I hardly think should count, lol. Around 2021/2022, I was right off the heels of the infamous “Trains With Faces”, my last attempt at a Thomas fan work (and one that I still hold a lot of embarrassment towards). It was needlessly vulgar, convoluted, and generally a great disrespect to the world and characters I grew up loving. I wanted to create a new story with the Thomas characters, one that was more faithful and in-line with the source material. I don’t see TOO many Thomas comics shared within the fandom (or at least, none to the scale of what I’m going for), so I thought it’d be a great idea to format my fanfic as a hypothetical, industry-standard Thomas comic! Plus, I get to show off so much of my art once it’s done! Good material for a portfolio.
Creating the interior art. This is my baby, I’m willingly choosing to do everything myself, and that unfortunately means it’ll take way more time than I anticipated it taking when I first began this project. It’s hard finding proper time to work on the art, and half the time I feel as if I’ve made a dent in a page or greater issue, despite spending hours of my day drawing or coloring. Aside from art, writing can sometimes be tricky. Though, I will admit it’s significantly less time-consuming than drawing. Often times I’ll have to go back to a plot thread, realizing it’s eventual direction won’t work or need to be reevaluated. It sucks to rewrite drafts or completely cut ideas/scenes you swore were good, but the needs of the story comes first. You will need to let some ideas go. You can’t get too attached to something, especially if you KNOW you can do better. Each script goes through several massive revisions and careful planning before reaching its finished state. Only then, I begin the process of drawing.
Sometimes it’s difficult to find motivation. Art block is a REAL thing and there are brief periods where I don’t work on the comic at all because of that. But finding that creative spark isn’t too difficult, ether. It can be as simple as going outside, observing nature, scribbling nonsense onto notepads, watching a good movie, reading an interesting book, learning about something, etc. A lot of my ideas for my stories in Beyond came from me learning about random things online and going down rabbit holes researching it for story potential. One time I was writing a character in the comic whose family breeds horses and runs a stable for a living. That led to a several week-long research phase on horse raising and breeding, and I even drove to several local ranches in my area for physical inspiration. I got enough motivation from that research session to write several story drafts with this character, and all I have to show for it right now are my abundance of weird horse facts. This all will tie back into Thomas the Tank Engine. I swear I’m not crazy.
