New year, new page. The gladiator bot combat sequence goes on, and will for about four pages. Yes, maybe a bit too much. But, well, you learn from mistakes. Theoretically.

Because with Robomeks there’s been mistakes. Lots. And, who knows, maybe they’re here to stay. For a while, at least. But let’s start from the beginning. With the usual…

I have an (old) idea!

Back in August, when I was writing all the chapters you’ve read so far, there wasn’t a plan for Robomeks, just the need (urge?) to publish something about them in a way or another. The characters have been sitting in my desk (in a dusty folder hidden somewhere, to be precise) for more than ten years. I even had a short story, eight pages long, about them (which the first chapter published here is in fact an extended version). So, well, they were already designed and their personalities quite defined. I took those characters, worked on a treatment (which set the overall Robomeks story arch to eleven chapters) and started writing.

And because this project was about doing whatever floats my boat I wrote the first three chapters in a Word document using a movie script template, without thinking about the length of each one. I just wrote and wrote. It was fun.

It’s like– in the movies, you know!

You don’t know this, but I’ve never done a comic-book script that way. I’ve always done the script while drawing the story-board. It may sound a bit weird but I think this is the best way for me to script comic-books. Working with dialogs and scenes directly in a story-board gives you total control over the pace and length of every page. WYSIWYG, etc.  I use to have a separate paper with a list of what I need to tell in that given page, that’s all. So, writing them in a movie script format was something different and totally opposed to my usual work process. Good, it was refreshing and all that.

After writing three chapters I started to story-board them and, to my surprise, the first chapter had 25 pages, the second 23 and the third had 24, the amount of pages a comic-book usually has. I found that amusing. I was unconsciously writing a comic-book series (and as I’ve said, it could turned out to be 40 pages each for what I knew while writing). So I cut one page here, added a page there, and decided to keep this format from now on. And, because I felt bold, I wrote the fourth chapter directly in the story-board, as I’ve always done.

No, wait, it’s a comic-book series!

Robomeks had so far four scripts with their respective story-boards, each one 24 pages long. Good. But, how do I make this thing public? Do I try to publish it through an editor? No, thanks. This was about freedom and yadda yadda. And, anyway, who’d buy this idea? The only option was self-publishing it. Hmm, that Ka-Blam thing sounds interesting. But, wait, this isn’t 1996 anymore. There’s internet everywhere, you know. And, hey, there seems to be people creating now online comics that they call “webcomics” (yes, I know, but being in the internet AND away from anything related to comics leads to this kind of ignorance). I had experience in printed comic-books and also in internet stuff. It sounded like a perfect match. So, Robomeks would be published as a webcomic, which would allow me to have some feedback and, maybe, earn some cash from ads while I’m finishing the pages for the final printed version. Perfect.

Not by a long shot.