- Brandon Chen is the author of webcomics such as “Just A Goblin” and the CEO of Inspired Productions.
- After college, he got a job at a Big 4 consulting firm, but his childhood dream was to create manga.
- He found success on platforms like Webtoon and eventually quit his finance job to write full-time.
This as told essay is based on a conversation with Brandon Chen, a 27-year-old webcomic author from New York City. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I was 7 or 8 when I discovered comics.
My mother bought me a manga from the library called ‘Dragon Ball’. It was the first time I read a series that wasn’t just words. The narrative concepts and beautiful drawings got me hooked and I started wanting to draw and do that kind of work myself.
In primary school I made a weekly manga magazine for myself and tried to sell it to kids on the playground for a quarter. No one actually bit, but it was just something I would do. That’s how I started getting into the manga world.
Writing and drawing require very different skills, and it is difficult to improve both at the same time. You do one or the other; there is an opportunity cost there. I felt I had to make a decision.
I was 14 and I thought, “I’m going to decide my future here and now, kind of like an anime protagonist, and bet everything on a coin.” If they’re headlines, I’m a writer; if they’re tails, I’m an artist. The coin landed on heads. I had an art Instagram at the time and I deleted the whole thing and got really into writing.
Brandon Chen at New York Comic Con. WEBTOON
I published my first novel when I was 17
I started writing my first novel when I was 14. It was quite heavily inspired by the manga series ‘Naruto’, which was a big thing around that time.
I was focusing on novels at that point, not manga, because I had stopped drawing. I didn’t understand how the whole comics world works and how to work with an artist until later in my career.
As a teenager I was chronically online, so I promoted my work on Wattpad. I got a lot of traffic from Instagram to my Wattpad and it got 100,000 reads, which was pretty good for me at the time. I thought, “Wow, I’m getting a lot of feedback.” I went ahead and finished that novel, packaged it and self-published it when I was 17.
I think the hardest thing about writing novels or doing any creative project is that the first time you do it, it’s super hard. The second you do it, you know all the pain points and the process: how to work with an editor, how to hire an illustrator, all that stuff.
From the age of seventeen to twenty, I published a project every year, whether it was comics or novels. I stopped publishing novels around 21 or 22 because I was moving back to visual stories.
I was studying economics and computer science at NYU at the time, and like many students, I felt like I had a lot of freedom. I was an okay student at times, but I was also the type of student – and I don’t encourage people to do this! – that would always be better learning outside the classroom.
I went to class a few times, then sometimes skipped class and used that time to write and study. Some people were probably partying more than me, but a lot of what I did in my spare time was writing.
When COVID hit, I kept writing
After graduating from NYU in 2019, I took a consulting job at KPMG, but I definitely entered my quarter-life crisis.
The first few months of not studying were tough for me because before COVID hit and we were all stuck indoors, I was working 60 to 70 hours a week in an office. You get home from work, the next thing you do is eat, maybe exercise, then sleep, then repeat. Your weekends are like, “Oh man, I just have to rot to cope with that tough week.”
It was actually COVID that allowed me to make this career change because I had more time for myself.
The free time I had from avoiding commuting and seeing my friends allowed me to start writing again. I would put in maybe a hundred hours a week in total: if I worked sixty hours that week, I would put another forty on paper.
I didn’t sleep that much, but I was grinding a lot trying to make the dream come true.
A panel from the Webtoon series “Just A Goblin.” WEBTOON
My comic ‘Icarus Rising’ was the one that kick-started everything in 2020.
The artist and I participated in Shōnen Jump Tezuka, a manga competition in Japan. I posted about my process on TikTok and many of those videos went viral. “Icarus Rising” also went viral, and it allowed me to get my first serialization deal for “God Game,” which is still running.
From then on, I was able to connect to Webtoon through my portfolio and get “Just A Goblin” off the ground. That was just the beginning of my collaboration with Webtoon. We have a few other series like “Samurai no Tora” and “Angel Wings” that we are working on right now.
I convinced my parents that my webcomic career was sustainable
In May 2021, I finally quit my finance job.
At some point I realized that writing part-time was making me the same, if not more, than my financial salary. But my parents are very traditionally Chinese – there was concern about “Hey, is this sustainable?”
I had to do the classic consulting work where I marketed, pitched, and basically built a PowerPoint deck to assure them, “Mom, Dad, here are the projections. If I don’t hit these projections in the next five years, I will do.” go back to my job that I promised I would do after college to recoup that tuition.”
I just convinced them that I wouldn’t run out of money and that everything would be fine. Once they saw the numbers, it wasn’t actually that hard to convince them. And it clearly worked.
The catalyst for all this, in quarter-life crisis mode, was definitely when the mangaka Kentaro Miura, who did ‘Berserk’, died in 2021. He was in his fifties. My thought was, “What if I turn 40 and I’m still doing this financial work, and I’ve never taken a risk on myself and then one day I die? What a tragedy. Why don’t I just take my risk now?” ” And then I took the plunge, and then I had to convince my parents.
All my life they have known that this is my calling. They see everything I do and my passion. The question for them was always, “When is he going to do it?”