I first started BeerMonster in January 2006 because I was bored, and making a webcomic looked like a fun idea. I'd recently discovered a whole host of other webcomics, and I thought I'd like to try it myself, so I did.
It soon became obvious that it was more work than it looked - especially for someone like me who can't really draw. As I had recently moved to London at the time, I was a bit limited in my facilities as well, so the production process went something like this:
Sketch in pencil
Much rubbing-out and re-drawing later, go over the lines in black biro
Take a picture with my digital camera, and transfer to the laptop
Use a Photoshop-clone to colour-balance the image, remove background gradients, and convert to monochrome
Edit, add speech and colour in paint, save as .bmp
Use antique graphics program to convert to .png and delete the bitmap
Update the page manually and upload
This was a lot of work, and so I ran the comic weekly, every Sunday (although I usually only got aroud to updating late in the evenings). The schedule soon started slipping, and became fortnightly, and eventually, due in part to lack of inspiration and partly due to Depression, I put BM on hiatus.
Three months later, BM was back, just short of a year since it first debuted. By now I had a scanner, so I simply scanned the sketch in instead of photographing it, and could ignore step 4. Again, I started weekly, which soon dropped to fortnightly - which was made worse by not being able to remember which weekends I was due to update on! I had an idea for a brief storyline, which got the schedule back to weekly, and I followed that up with a Robin Hood spoof, which helped keep it weekly.
By this time, I was up to about issue 80, and having trouble thinking of ideas, so back to fortnightly. Rather than being jokes and puns, the updates were becoming observations on my life, which wasn't what I wanted my webcomic to be. So, I took the decision, in the first week of March 2009, to end it at the next issue, which just happened to be #100.
I might start it up again at some point, but that is nowhere near guaranteed.
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