Some years ago, maybe around 2003 I was told by someone who "made it in the biz" that fantasy was too hard to do for a one shot comic. You have to set up the land, lore, and of course the story will be too big for a one shot 24 page comic.

Well whatever. I never saw fantasy as what the mainstream will have you think it is. To me it's just another setting to tell stories about your characters in. Now for years I thought that person was right. Afterall everything fantasy is EPIC. You got massive armies, magic, and sacred artifacts. But you know what, it isn't. It's really just a White Board background.

What do I mean by White Board? Well let me indulge you with my insanity for a minute. Fantasy is really a world you make up on your own, and the best way to do this is to start with a White Board, have nothing from the get go. There are no rules on how to do this, and you can go nutshit on it. Don't want swords? Have guns. Don't want magic? Use technology. Don't want horses? Make some creature up. Castles are too generic? Make your own take on them.

You see Fantasy doesn't have to be run of the mill stuff. You can add, or take away what ever you want. You don't even have to make it EPIC, do one about romance, coming of age, or even a comedy.

The thing I'm trying to spell out is there are no rules. And when someone tells me that something is too hard, I want to prove them wrong. And there's nothing hard about making up your own world. I think this person got confused, and think Fantasy=Tolken and so there for everything must be based off of that.

Well that's just being ignorant. If everyone followed a narrow point of view like that then what would be the point of making anything. People would just be recycling ideas over and over again. Genre's would be be flooded with the same kind of characters and stories that really don't stand out.

I only wanted to post this because in my fantasy I already laid out whats going on in one page. ONE PAGE. Sure its 40% word balloons and 60% art, but I will make it up with an action scene that will take up most of the chapter. And not only that but it's deep enough to get a person the idea of what's going on, and not too deep to sound like a history lesson.

The thing is I'm rather proud of it, because I really didn't think I could describe what's going on in this world at all, let alone one page. But I did. And I sacrificed nothing. No one chapter devoted to the lore, no flashback's needed, just a simple conversation between two characters who are on the run.

So whenever someone tells you that you can't do something because it's impossible. Make it a challenge, show that you can do it. And when you do finally do it years later make a journal post about it and gloat about how it took you 6 years to figure out how to add it into your story.