Writer's Blog - Issue 2 (Love at First Write - Nailing the Opening of your Webcomic)

Foreword: With so much happening behind the scenes, we ended up being a tad late, but it's here! This issue of Writer's Blog, written by main writer Ari, details the process of figuring out how to start telling the story of Mothorial - if you've been curious about that this month while we release the Prologue, this will be a fun one for you!

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They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but let’s not kid ourselves; we totally do. First impressions matter, whether we like it or not, especially when you’re trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. When I began writing the first volume of Mothorial, I knew the story wouldn’t open with Ava and Ackerley already on some rousing adventure. It’s not like Frodo and his hobbit friends were off on their way to Mordor in the first chapter of Lord of the Rings. You’ve got to establish a Shire before you can leave it behind.

But webcomics aren’t like novels. With a novel's omniscient narrator, you can draw the reader in with an intriguing bit of foreshadowing. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude does so famously with its opening line:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Well, jeez, okay. So, this poor dude’s gonna be facing a firing squad, and somehow, this event on the ice is the first thing on his mind. In a few words, the author leaves the reader curious about the potentially dark future of our protagonist, all while setting up the “distant afternoon” of a father and his son on the ice. Imagine if the first sentence had read:

“Years later, Aureliano Buendía could still recall that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Still interesting, but less so. Or, even less effectively:

“One afternoon, Aureliano Buendía’s father took him to discover ice.”

That’s not to say that this sentence could not possibly open a good novel, but it certainly wouldn’t do a very effective job of getting a reader invested. Mothorial has no narrator, at least for the majority of the story. Another issue is the release format: once you buy a novel, usually based on an intriguing blurb, summary, recommendation, or cover, you’ve got the whole work in your hands. Even if it’s a series, there’s the promise that the first book will at least take you on some kind of self-contained journey. With a webcomic, there is no immediate reward. If your story starts out in a calm setting to establish the characters, it could take months to get to the “bigger picture.”

One obvious solution is flashforwards, but that’s a risky venture. While Mothorial is pre-written and edited in a way most webcomics are not, there is still the possibility of big changes as the story is released page by page. In some respects, it’s more like fanfiction or a serial novel than a traditional novel, but even those aren’t released so slowly. In a way, releasing a webcomic feels a bit like running a race by crawling; you’re asking for a lot of patience and trust from your audience, but eventually you’ll end up at the finish line. I’d rather not promise something from years later, only to get there and realize that the flashforward doesn’t make sense anymore.

The decision to open with a prologue, basically exploring the lore of the world of Mothorial, was inspired by a couple of works. The most obvious one was the opening of the film The Fellowship of the Ring. The sense of scope and drama served to make the first glimpse of the protagonist, with Frodo under a tree reading a book, far more effective than if we’d started the film without all of that background. Another inspiration was the opening of the 2010 series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which was able to draw a pretty huge and unexpected fanbase with its pilot, which used a similar tactic. By showing the pain and darkness beneath the cheerful facade, you are able to make that facade intriguing without having to undercut it. A hobbit beneath a tree stops being a simple image of comfort and suddenly becomes an almost melancholic image of innocence untouched by painful reality.

Of course, opening with a prologue that doesn’t even feature either of the main protagonists is a bit risky for a webcomic. The idea of not even showing Ava and Ackerley until nearly three months into the comic’s release is potentially even less effective than just starting with them and drawing people in out of love for the characters. To avoid this, I made a conscious choice to not just show the backstory of the world of Mothorial, but to specifically tell a story that every child in the empire is told at a young age. My hope is that by telling the opening through the lens of a story, readers will gain a bit of insight into the culture, mindset, and priorities of Mothorial’s inhabitants. If they’re telling this tale to their children, what does that say about them, for better or for worse? This also allowed me to employ an omniscient narrator, which will (presumably) not be the case for the rest of the comic.

Of course, deciding to write a backstory is nearly as risky as writing foreshadowing; backstories change, and I had to make sure the fundamental rules of the world were completely grounded. This ended up proving beneficial, as it meant I had to truly understand the entire tale I was planning on telling, and the themes I was hoping to explore.

The Prologue was the first thing I wrote for Mothorial’s proper script three years ago, and while some of the language has been edited over time, the fundamental story has stayed the same. This opening is about a lot of things: it serves as a creation story and a cautionary tale to the hewani who read it, but at its core, it’s a story of a mother and her two children. This world might be a fantastical place of talking animals and magical monsters, but just like our own, it’s the relationship between people that truly draws us in. Releasing the first four pages of the comic on launch day probably helped a bit, too. There’s no cover art, and certainly no firing squad, but I hope this opening sequence delivers on my goal: to promise new Mothorial readers an epic, expansive adventure, starring a goofy bat and her anxious bird friend.

May the Elder guide your path, and the Mother warm your den.