I heard somewhere that if you want to make something good, make it for one person only, don't try to please a bunch of people - so I made “Witchlight” pretty much for myself. I don't think I got a lot of specific feedback, but also I tend to be very inwardly focused when I make things.

Did that serialization and the feedback you got affect the shape of the book or the choices you made as you worked? You were serializing chapters of the story. Some examples are “Balderdash!” by Victoria Elliott, “All Night” by Britt Sabo, “Witch Trade” by Isaac Robin, some of Carey Pietsch's short comics - and probably a lot of others which I'm forgetting! Some (like mine) are mainly print, some are webcomics, some go both routes! To me, though they often differ greatly in tone and setting, they all give me a feeling of support, inclusion, and taking familiar tropes and freshening them up a bit. I might be the only one who thinks of it as a community, but there are several comic creators I'm aware of making various kinds of witch comics. Wait, there’s a sub-community of witch comics? Tell me more about this! I had just experienced that phase of my life, and that crept in whether I realized it at the time or not. The story is also very much about being in your early 20s and not knowing what the heck you're doing, but also feeling very sure of what you're doing (but you're probably wrong).

At that time, I was also becoming familiar with the work of people like Victoria Elliott and Britt Sabo, and was discovering this tiny sub-community of witch comics, which felt very singular and special to me.

Witchlight jessi zabarsky