My Daughter Has Watched Zamora Take Longer to Finish Than She Has Been Alive
What fatherhood, procrastination, and finally publishing my graphic novel taught me about finishing personal work.
“You don't have to finish the whole thing today. You just have to give it another chance to exist tomorrow.”
Introduction
My daughter has watched Zamora take longer to finish than she has been alive.
That's probably the strangest way I can explain how long I've been working on this book.
When I started Zamora, I didn't have a finished graphic novel.
I had drawings.
Ideas.
Characters.
Pages that were half-finished.
Notes scattered everywhere.
And, if I'm being honest, a lot of enthusiasm that didn't always translate into actually finishing the thing.
Then life kept happening.
Client work happened.
Bills happened.
Deadlines happened.
Family happened.
And my daughter kept growing.
At some point, I realized she had spent practically her entire childhood watching me work on this strange little horror universe.
She'd see me drawing.
She'd see me at my computer.
She'd see pages lying around the house.
She'd occasionally ask about Zamora.
And I'd tell her I was still working on it.
Again.
And again.
And again.
There is something humbling about telling a child, "I'm still working on that," for years.
The Deep Dive: The Problem Wasn't Drawing
The funny thing is, I already knew how to make comics.
I've been drawing professionally for years.
I've worked on comics, animation, illustration, and commercial projects.
The difficult part wasn't knowing how to make a page.
The difficult part was finishing something that belonged entirely to me.
Client work has a very useful feature:
Someone is waiting for it.
There is a deadline.
There is a deliverable.
There is an invoice.
There is a person on the other end asking, "When will this be done?"
Your personal project doesn't do that.
Zamora never emailed me asking for an update.
It never sent me a late-payment notice.
It never complained when I disappeared for three weeks.
It was very patient.
Almost too patient.
And that patience became the problem.
I could always work on it tomorrow.
Tomorrow became next week.
Next week became next month.
Then another client project arrived.
Then another deadline.
Then another excuse.
And suddenly years had passed.
That's one of the traps artists fall into with personal work.
We imagine the problem is a lack of inspiration.
Sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes the problem is that the project is too big, too important, and too emotionally loaded to casually work on.
"Finish Zamora" is an intimidating task.
"Draw one panel" isn't.
That distinction changed the way I approached the book.
Instead of asking:
"How am I going to finish this entire graphic novel?"
I started asking:
"What can I finish today?"
One page.
One panel.
One background.
One conversation.
One small piece of the monster.
Then another.
Then another.
It isn't glamorous.
But neither is compound interest when you're putting a few pesos into an account.
The interesting part happens when you keep doing it.
The Artist's Compound Interest Principle
I've started thinking about this as the Artist's Compound Interest Principle.
One drawing doesn't change your career.
One page doesn't make you a successful comic creator.
One post probably won't build an audience.
One newsletter won't transform your business.
But one small action repeated for years can become something surprisingly large.
A sketch becomes a character.
Characters become a story.
Stories become pages.
Pages become chapters.
Chapters become a book.
The book becomes a product.
The product gives you something to show people.
And showing people gives you information.
That last part is important.
Because eventually, Zamora stopped being something I was only making.
I had to find out if anyone actually wanted it.
The Moment Zamora Became Real
That moment happened at Cagayanime.
I was sitting behind my table looking at the copies of Zamora Vol. 1.
Thirty copies.
That's it.
I had paid to have them printed myself.
No publisher had told me there was an audience.
No distributor had guaranteed anything.
No one had promised me those books would sell.
I had simply decided:
Let's print 30 and find out.
And there was a moment before people started buying when I looked at that stack and thought:
What if nobody buys this?
That question is brutal when you've spent years making something.
Because when you're drawing privately, you can always tell yourself people will like it someday.
The market can't disagree with you if you never show it the work.
But once you put a price on it and put it on a table, things become much more honest.
Then people started picking it up.
They asked questions.
They looked through the pages.
And eventually, people bought them.
By the end of the convention, 20 of the 30 copies were gone.
That was probably the moment Zamora stopped feeling like just my project.
It became something other people wanted to take home.
And that felt different.
A compliment is encouragement.
A purchase is evidence.
Why Fatherhood Made This Mean More
That's also why seeing the book at Cagayanime meant so much to me.
Because my daughter had been watching this process for years.
She had seen the unfinished version.
She had seen the delays.
She had seen me working on it while juggling client work and everything else that comes with being a father.
She had grown while I was making this book.
And eventually, the book existed.
Not in my hard drive.
Not in a folder called:
ZAMORA_FINAL_FINAL_2.psd
Not as another unfinished project I told myself I'd get back to.
A physical book.
Something I could put on a table.
Something someone else could hold.
Something that existed outside my head.
That was a big lesson for me.
Finishing a personal project isn't just about completing the artwork.
It's about giving the idea a chance to exist in the real world.
And once it exists, you can finally learn what happens next.
What I Would Tell Other Artists
If you're an artist sitting on a personal project you've been "meaning to finish," here's what my experience has taught me.
Don't make the goal "finish the project."
Make the goal embarrassingly small.
Ask:
What can I finish today?
One panel.
One sketch.
One paragraph.
One background.
One character design.
Then come back tomorrow.
Your job isn't to create a masterpiece every day.
Your job is to keep the project alive.
And when you've finished enough pieces, don't immediately start thinking about the next giant project.
Put the thing in front of people.
Print a small batch.
Publish a chapter.
Release a short.
Show ten people.
Ask someone to buy it.
You don't need to know if everyone wants your work.
You need to find out if someone does.
That's what the 30-copy experiment taught me.
I didn't need to prove that Zamora had a massive market.
I just needed enough evidence to keep going.
And Then I Had Another Question
Once people started buying Zamora, my question changed.
Before:
"Will anyone want this?"
After:
"How do I get this into the hands of more people who would enjoy it?"
That's a much better problem to have.
Because now we're no longer talking about whether the idea exists only in my imagination.
We're talking about readers.
Distribution.
Audience.
Collectors.
Other conventions.
Online sales.
Future volumes.
Maybe animation someday.
Maybe a game.
The project has somewhere to go.
But there's another question I think is even more important.
Who is Zamora actually for?
Because I've learned that you don't build an audience by trying to convince everybody to like your work.
You build one by finding the people who were already looking for something like it.
Who Is Zamora For?
Zamora is for you if you like Filipino mythology.
If you like horror.
If demons and monsters are your kind of thing.
If you enjoy cosmic horror and stories that make the world feel a little less safe after you've finished reading them.
If you like weird independent comics that don't feel like everything else on the shelf.
If you want to see Filipino creators build their own worlds instead of always waiting for someone else to tell us what stories are worth telling.
And maybe, most importantly:
Zamora is for you if you want to see a Filipino-made universe grow from one artist's weird idea into something bigger.
I'm not saying Zamora is for everyone.
It isn't.
It doesn't need to be.
That's one of the biggest lessons I've learned as an artist.
You don't need everyone.
You need the right people.
The people who see the monsters and want to know where they came from.
The people who recognize something familiar in the mythology.
The people who love horror.
The people who collect independent comics.
The people who simply want to support someone crazy enough to spend years building an original universe from scratch.
If that's you, maybe Zamora belongs on your shelf.
The Copywriting Lesson: Emotion First, Logic Second
There's another lesson here that applies far beyond comics.
People don't always buy because of specifications.
They buy because they care.
They might care about Filipino mythology.
They might care about horror.
They might care about supporting independent creators.
They might care about owning something physical.
They might care about collecting local art.
They might simply see the cover and think:
"That looks fucking cool."
The emotional reason often comes first.
The logical reason arrives afterward.
Emotion commits the crime. Logic does the cover-up.
And as artists, we sometimes make the mistake of explaining our work like we're submitting technical specifications.
We talk about page count.
Printing quality.
Paper stock.
Production process.
Software.
Tools.
All of that has its place.
But first, give people a reason to care.
Tell them why you made it.
Tell them what it means.
Tell them what kind of person will love it.
Give the work a name.
Give the experiment a name.
Give the reader a reason to see themselves inside the story.
That's much more powerful than simply saying:
"I made a comic. Please buy it."
Before and After
Before Zamora was finished, I thought my biggest problem was:
How do I finish this book?
Now I realize finishing was only the first problem.
The next one is:
How do I keep building this universe and find the people who want to come along for the ride?
Before:
Will anyone care?
After:
Who cares, and how do I reach more of them?
Before:
I need to finish Zamora.
After:
I need to keep Zamora moving.
Before:
I have an idea.
After:
I have something people can actually hold.
That's a completely different position to be in.
The Real Victory
I don't think the real victory was selling 20 copies.
It wasn't even finally finishing the book.
Those things matter.
But there's something else I'm taking away from this.
My daughter watched me spend years trying to make something that didn't exist yet.
Now she can see it.
She can pick it up.
She can see her dad's name on it.
And maybe someday she'll understand that the book wasn't created because I suddenly found a magical stretch of free time.
It was created because I kept coming back to it.
Even when it was slow.
Even when client work was busy.
Even when I procrastinated.
Even when I wondered whether anybody would care.
One page at a time.
One panel at a time.
One small experiment at a time.
That's probably the lesson I needed most.
You don't have to finish everything today.
You just have to keep giving the thing another chance to exist tomorrow.
And eventually, if you keep doing that long enough, someone else might pick it up and take it home.
Maybe that's why finally seeing the book at Cagayanime meant so much.
For years, Zamora lived mostly inside my head.
Now it lives somewhere else, too.
On somebody else's shelf.
And that's a pretty good place for a story to begin.
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