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Okay, I guess this section is basically what goes into making a comic. Or something. Maybe it's just what goes into making this comic. @_@ The biggest problem I'm facing in writing this section is that we didn't write down any of our ideas while we were having them, thus leaving me without any reference to look back on as notes. Anyhoo...
Omake Omatsuri began as the sentance, "Wouldn't it be cool if we had a webcomic?" At the time, we were thouroughly engaged in reading... maybe five webcomics between the both of us. We were rookies. But we had the writing and artistic talent enough to want to do it. Next we needed a plot and stars. Well, why not us? I already knew what we looked like, and using our own apartment as a general setting would allow for direct access to setting models (seeing as how I'm no good at drawing backgrounds). But that still left us for plot. What would be amusing to others that we wouldn't feel stupid writing? Well, our friends found our own lives pretty funny, especially when we spiced it up with the LARP (Live Action Role Play) and chat RPs we did with them involving the anime charcters we love so much. I had fairly recently drawn my first comic ever, based on a dream Emiko had, and had suddenly discovered that I could do this!
Now, some things, like certain fanfics (and any fanfic writer out there will know what we're talking about) can be written first, and the title thought of later. Not so webcomics, unless you have a solid idea first. We began brainstorming on titles almost as soon as we decided to make this whim a reality. I'd like to claim that I have before me a laundry list of title suggestions we came up with as we were planning, but this is not so. The only unused title that can be remembered is Oh! My Omake. We knew we wanted the word omake in the title, because of the conotations that go along with it--humor, making fun of oneself, parodies of anime--and aliterative titles are fun. When Kellee found the word omatsuri in the Japanese/English dictionary, we knew that was what we wanted, since it was not only aliterative in English, it was aliterative in Japanese, as well.
From there, it was just a matter of deciding what was going to happen in the comic, both on a general scale and on a specific one. We needed to figure out which friends would appear in it (most of them), and what we'd do about online friends that we wanted to include. And then, we needed to decide which was the first anime realm we wanted to visit. Since we were both reading Self-Insert at the time, we wanted to avoid going to any of those lands right off the bat, in case that story arc was still fresh in SI's loyal readers' minds. (Needless to say, this no longer seems to be a problem.)
I began working on character sketches (most of which you can find in the gallery), and luckily for me, I'd been drawing myself and Kellee for years before then, so this wasn't a hard task. Next, I drew some comics that were ideas that had popped into my head to help her get a feel for it all. Then came the application to Keenspace. The form letter e-mail reply told me it would be four to eight weeks before they'd have available space, so I got working on comics, completing five before I was told our space was ready.
The first comic appeared on May 27, 2002, with the promise to update every Monday (with the occasional exception). And the rest, as they say, is history.
--Becky