A manga project 20 years in the making.
In 2002, I was a student doing the International Baccalaureate Diploma program, which had a requirement for 50 hours each in creative, service and action work.
At the same time, I had just received my very first Wacom digitiser tablet as a birthday gift and discovered modern digital art. It was a revelation for a passionate hobbyist artist such as myself.
Then it hit me. For the IB program's creative work requirement, I could draw a digital, multimedia comic book!
After much more than 50 hours of drawing, animating and thorough enjoyment, I completed that project and revelled in the definitely amateur, yet distinctly captivating final product that filled me with one of the most potent senses of achievement and satisfaction I have ever had.
In the same period, my friend suggested we learn HTML to make a website for a school charity group as part of the service requirement. I found another passion ignited in this. Programming filled me with a sense of order, satisfaction and control that my teenage OCD suffering self would not realise was a core tool to quell my noisy mind until much, much later.
The IB is an amazing educational program and I will always credit it as one of the most pivotal things in my life. It is life changing because of both the amount as well as vast spectrum of learning, philosophy and activity you are exposed to over such a short period of time.
I was learning so many things within the subjects I was studying, such as biology, psychology, literature, epistomology and more. As well as other subjects that I was exposed to through it's other requirements and through conversations with my fellow students in other subjects. In particular, physics became a subject of great interest to me.
I started to realise that fiction was an important psychological tool, because it allows us to process and explore very complex and difficult ideas and topics of morality, ethics and our own psychology, within a safe, controlled environment inside our minds. I had always loved the entertainment factor of fiction, but now was discovering how it could help me navigate the real world.
Manga had quickly become an art form I admired and stood in awe of. Animé, along with western comics, extended that admiration, but manga, a format that is monochrome, binary, and able to focus stories that have no parallel in any other media, steeped in history of the culture it originated from and executed with such beauty, mesmerised me. It made me want to draw in that style. Just for the love of it. For the sense of achievement and beauty that came with it.
It was at some point towards the end of the IB program in 2003, that all this crystalised into a fully formed idea and realisation:
A story was forming in my mind, born out of the questions being raised from all the things I was learning, and...
With digital art and the rapidly advancing internet, I too, could make my own manga and publish it digitally.
I set out to figure out how to do this. I started conceptualising my characters, delved into the subjects involved, learned about how to draw the manga style, bought books on programming, started to learn web design and more. I got hold of all the software I could legally get to figure out how I would draw manga digitally. I also tried traditional art supplies to see if the traditional method, or a hybrid of traditional and digital, would suit me better
I was now out of school and the real world was starting to set in. I needed to get a job. But my life direction had changed drastically, and what I had studied was now no longer relevant.
I wanted to code. This I knew was what I wanted to do for a living. Other than the manga itself, code was basically all I wanted to think about.
As time went on, I became more and more stressed by the manga, not because I didn't want it anymore, but because the more I wanted it, the more I needed it to be perfect, and I couldn't make it perfect. The story, the art, the digital publishing. I couldn't figure it out.
At the same time, my OCD, anxiety and depression was changing, evolving. In many ways worsening, but I wouldn't realise that for more than a decade. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.
I spent the rest of 2003 and 2004 conceptualising it all, creating characters and the world, it's culture and mythology. I attemped a start in 2005... and scrapped it, it wasn't good enough, my story, or my art. Then I started to doubt it all. I restarted the story and redesigned characters so many times I lost count. Then in 2016 I attempted to start it again, with more determination this time... and once again, scrapped it.
I had almost given up.
For a long time, this project would sit on the backburner of my life. Life had other priorities to give me. This project remained a distant dream I was so convinced I would acheive someday, yet I could never find the time or energy to put the work into it, despite it always being this core element of my life and hopes.
Then, after the peak of my mental health problems, months on antidepressants and therapy, I started to get clarity.
In 2022, I walked into a Forbidden Planet store and there, I met a kid (relatively speaking) with a stall, promoting her original comic book. I was so excited for her, I was proud of this absolute stranger, because I saw a kindred spirit who was actually making it happen, doing what I was dreaming of doing for so, so long... and that's when it hit me... it was coming up to 20 years since I started this... and I still hadn't actually started.
It was a slap in the face. A wake up call. And that day, I thought about it, and I was resolved. I was doing this now. There was no more waiting. The time had come. I had everything I needed, the story, the characters, the knowledge of how, and even though no where near the professional level I aspire to, I have sufficient art skills.
I had to accept I was never going to get it perfect. I am not a professional manga-ka, but I'm not trying to be. I know my art will not be at a professional standard, and it never will be. But therapy had taught me that I don't need to be perfect. I'm doing this for the love of it. And that is all.
The key was to actually get it done.
So I committed to it. I sorted through all the iterations and noise about it in my mind, and in what felt like one fell swoop, I was decided. Everything came into focus as to what I wanted and how I was doing it.
In those 20 years, a path had been formed for me. It's just I couldn't see it with all the perceived obstacles I had put in front of myself. Once I realised that, I was able to look past it all and see that actually, I was ready. But more importantly, my love for it had not diminished one bit. If anything, it had grown.
© Nazeerudeen Ruhomutally