I started a toilet paper company that made comics, then I left.

I started a small comics studio maybe almost 2 years ago. I had no idea how to make a professional comic or how to run a company and for a long time we didnt even know what it was. But I’m also a person with a lot of “eh, we’ll figure it out”s in my pocket. This was my journey.

How we began

The idea for the company started out pretty grey in december 2024 when my founder lets call him Founder A decided to talk to me about making tech concepts easier for people to understand. We felt that technology was accelerating at a pace too fast for the general public to understand which can lead to a lot of problems, like distrust of such tech. We saw a business opportunity here and wanted to do something about it since both Founder A and I studied Cybersecurity together in polytechnic, and we wanted to make it interesting. At this point, we were chatting a lot about the problem but never defined a solution. But somehow, (i dont exactly remember how) we came up with the idea of using comics to translate these ideas and the company evolved from there.

v1.0

Slowly conversations turned into sketches and I decided that I wanted to plan and draw these comics. Which led me to this first draft of a 4-panel on menu design (which i found very interesting).

v1 comic that I drew on menu design

I also wanted our comics to be multi dimensional in its theme and narrative. I created a framework on how we would layer each comic but this didn’t solidify happen until much later. I was also really art blocked, and was still fuguring it how to overcome it, all while learning how to write a good narrative, pick and write a good tech concept, plan good backstories, and design a whole universe that could weave all of this together.

This was one of the toughest challenges of the whole studio that remained throughout. I wasn’t a professional my any means, I just liked creating characters and wanted them to come to life.

Motivations

I sometimes go asked: “why did u start this?” and my simple answer back then was “why not?” But my biggest reasons starting out was that I’ve always wanted to build a brand that people can recognise, which I think it a pretty selfish reason but we all start out with selfish reasons right? I followed a couple of pages and they were my greatest inspirations, I especially like diary comics like @eggsmcsqueezy

I love comics

My motivations gradually evolved over the course of time but wanting to own something that people can link to my futile existence was my single burning reason in the beginning.

Realisation

After my first draft I soon realised that I couldn’t, overnight, magically create professional quality comics like u could cram a midterm. Drafts, at most. So our project came to a standstill (because im stuck but also really stubborn) that Founder A decided that we were going to bring in real artists. That was what we continued doing but up before this point I wasted us a ton of time being stuck in that space where i could neither deliver or move. This was one of the flaws I noticed about myself, I was a bit too much of an idealistic perfectionist when it came to my art.

When we started bringing in professionals though, we realised that they couldn’t be paid with just the potential of the idea, and so that meant real money and real risk but by this point that hasn’t settled into me yet and for the first couple of months Founder A poured some savings for our initial investments. That was also when I realised my 2nd biggest flaw, that I was a wuss :(

Back to the Art…

The artists were the right move and in this period we were named POYO by Founder A. We focused on birds as our choice of animals so our characters were some sorta bird throughout. (Birds was just a personal preference of mine cus I felt that they were the easiest to draw and underused)

A slide where I felt like I had to justify why birds

Another thing we tried constantly was also constantly trying to rope in an artist to fill a founder role and we managed to work with some super awesome people but they never managed to stay since we were promising a lot of ownership with a lot of risk while a lot was just trying to make ends meets in their career. It was hard to find anyone that resonated with our mission and also to invest their time ans energy into something unpaid.

But during the many cycles of trying to find a founding artist, we managed to push out our very first draft, drawn by Emilie.

Our very first storyboard on the shazupan scam written and drawn by Emilie Krestianto

This was a breakthrough for us since we have spent so much time reaching this state we were finally seeing some progress. But shortly after emilie left the team to pursue better paid opportunities and the team was back to…square one.

v2.0

At this point, we almost gave up. It had been over 6 months of trying and it was Jun’25. Throughout this whole time I was doing my second semester in university and started my first summer break. I also started a new internship and it was really hard for me to juggle thus new job and for founder A with national service. I was so tired lol.

We were both doing this part time and juggling our hours trying to keep the dream alive. But hope was waning. 6 months in and we didn’t have much. Founder C that I met at a previous internship and became friends with was also roped in around this period from being a writer to a co-founder to help with raising funds.

But before all hope was gone, founder A again who if was a bug would be a cockroach and is probably one of the most persistent people I’ve ever met, found our saving grace of another artist: Jonyl. We poured more money into the company and paid Jonyl to help us start from the going up. She was extremely talented and could visualise my ideas extremely well.

Character Explorations with Jonyl

I would give her my sketches, vision and direction and with her skills she was able to draft out a couple of character ideas. IN between all that I threw out a sock puppet idea inspired by Professor Sock Puppet from Talking Tom and Friends before we finally landed on our our main characters, Jam and Pickle.

character sheet of Jam and Pickle

Jonyl brought Jam and Pickle to life and I was so inspired by her works that I decided to keep pushing. I also had grown to the idea of risking something real and started putting more than 50% of my internship salary into the business, with most of our costs going to operations. With our characters and a story on blockchains written by founder C we had our very first comic illustrated with our new characters. This marked another milestone for us, it was aug’25 and it took us a lot to reach this point.

The origins of Pickle

More about the MCs

I put a lot of thought into planning out our 2 main characters, Jam and Pickle being the faces of our brand. They are so cute thanks to Jonyl but if read my comics before and was sharp their lore is slightly speckled throughout the comics and it hints at his character and challenges.

How Pickle and Jam were designed

Jam (the bird) was designed to be a simple hero’s protagonist with Pickle (the sock) as wise council. But in their universe which I call “Pigeonverse”, Pickle doesnt actually exist. Hes personified in our eyes because we view everything from Jam’s eyes. So to his colleagues at work Jam is just a strange new guy that wears this old fuzzy sock on his head. They think he’s a bit weird.

Another design decision of Jam is his collar and tie since he moved to Pigeonverse for his job he hasn’t diversified his closet yet so he’s just stuck in one attire.

I try to tie all these details of them throughout the narrative of the comic that is meant to be slowly revealed through the series. I explain more about how these layers work later on. But you could spot these information in the comics.

Some pages that had more unsaid backstory

In my scripts (I no longer have access to) I would get my writers to specifically weave in such details to hint at a larger idea

Things were looking up for us

Now that we had a product the team had more courage to go for incubations and grants that would buffer our runway given our operational spending. Some worked out for us eventually and some other things didn’t but I’ll continue on the art first.

From the start to the current timeline I have moved from an artist role to an editors. Most of my work was still planning the overarching themes, storylines that encompassed my content and picking on the details. I also set the stage for Jam and Pickles background and orchestrated how they would fall into one another.

I frequently worked with Founder A and C on pitch decks and also created our narrative framework (mainly for the pitches), chose our company’s name, had our characters created, and pushed our first comic out. I also handled a lot of our administrative workflows, things like our domains, website, socials, emails, file organizations and things were finally into place.

I learned ta lot abt emails: to send emails and not appear as spam u need to configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records (email security standards)

My founders handled the rest. We had a few bumps but overall, were on fire.

How our content was layered which birthed the name of the company. Everything in this company is layered in thirds

I planned for our comics to be released in 2 formats, short bite sized and long-form 3 part content that broke down our tech concept in 3 distinct areas: WHY WHAT HOW. The first 3 comics were on blockchains and this was how they were planned.

Pages from our 3 part comic on blockchain

1. WHY: Decentralization, main benefit of the blockchain
2. WHAT: Purpose Bound Money, a usage for day to day
3. HOW: A brief look into how blockchains work under the hood.

While each 3-part also had a narrative focus where the blockchain 3-part followed Jam and Pickles new move to the city, job and apartment searching. I was world building at this point.

Our journey to the 3 was also not instant, since Jonyl also had a full time job we decided to keep her as our concept artist and we roped in our main illustrators: Debbie (who became Founder D), Naveen, Beatrice and Levi.

A short comic on the statistics behind a coin flip

It was thanks to their love for Jam and pickle that eventually they came to live. I have so much love for them and will always be grateful for their patience with me and their works. From Aug’25 to Feb’26 we made great progress, eventually creating over 11 posts ranging from comics to shorts.

The finale

We were doing great for a couple of months after things got going, we obtained the Ngee Ann AGILE $10,000 grant and another $3,000. Our runway was looking a little better at this point. Since onboarding different artists I also saw the need to standardise the style used across our works so we also had other assets made like the standard each comic should follow.

A peek of our stylization bible that all artists on the comics follow made by Naveen

We even managed to work with organisations and create collaterals for their events and right before I left I got some stickers printed.

Stickers to be given out at events to promote our socials

I write this entry in past tense because our progress only lasted a couple of months. Overtime too many cracks showed up between us during this whole process that I eventually decided to spilt from the company for the sake of my mental health. It was hard to go and a very difficult choice I had to make, but I ultimately couldn’t see myself doing this for longer than the next 3 years and didn’t want to drag out my departure which would’ve made things worse. So in Apr’26 I decided to go.

My greatest inner challenges

The whole experience stretched me as a person and exposed a lot of my own flaws to myself along the way. When I first signed up for this journey I was very naive to the challenges ahead but I don’t regret starting it.

I think every entrepreneur starts out a bit naive and idealistic no? but also their stubbornness makes things work eventually. My risk appetite grew overtime while working on this and I also realised how afraid I was asking people for feedback and how scared I was about their opinions. I still was even as I left but I grew out of it more hereinafter.

The end?

I don’t know if I’ll go back to entrepreneurship honestly I think I gotta let this one soak for a while. But I think I might start my own comic series! One that doesn’t need to make money and I can draw anything and everything I want. Who knows if you’ll see it?

Thank you to everyone who supported 3PLY <3