Find the heart of your story. That’s what people should remember after reading it.

Sure you can spend one week pencilling one page, you can even spend one week pencilling one panel. You can reference everything, you can draw the whole structure perfectly in perspective, you can render each and every detail realistically. It could be a masterpiece. But at the end of the week you’ll have one perfect panel. You’ll need 4 more maybe to do a page, and at least 22 pages to do an issue, 100 to do a complete graphic novel or miniseries. Are you going to spend 500 weeks to draw a perfect comic?

All artists can draw well taking their time.
Good artists draw well and fast.

Always entertain!

Don’t kill your darlings. Reuse them in another story, or keep them ready for a possible sequel.

On the shelves (in a shop or in digital form) all comics stand equal. Nobody is going to care how much time and how much effort you put in your book. Or that the art is not so good because you’re a one man team doing it on the side. Or that you were under so much pressure when you finished it. Or that you really need to make some money with it. People will only buy it because of its appeal next to a Batman or a Spiderman comic. They’ll compare it to any other available comic at the moment. That means you have to be better than all those titles ending in ‘Man’, you have to do something that they don’t do. And you have to do it really well.

If you don’t really want to read your own story or stare at your own art for hours, you’re not doing the right thing.

If you want to do a vampire story or a zombie story you’re going to have to be creative. Like telling the story of a zombie vampire hybrid, who maybe is also a superhero. Or not. What about instead telling a story about something you truly like?

If you really want to follow rules do it in the production phase not in the conception phase. Don’t make your ideas small and contrived just to follow rules.

Don’t start small if you’re thinking big. Just start as big as you possibly can.

What’s your endgame? Change the world? Entertain? Connect with that one perfect reader? Know what you want to achieve and focus on that.