Has anyone else ever tried this?

Okay, so, I want to write a comic/webcomic that takes place in another world. Since I was having some trouble with world building and plot design, last week I've started writing a reference book for myself with illustrations and descriptions for characters and things. So far I've completed entries for the three main characters and the main villains, and have planed out the page arrangements. Has anyone else ever tried this?

I think most, if not all story-writers eventually end up creating pages of notes about character details, setting details, plots, and whatnot. Regardless of how the contents of those notes came about, it's relatively standard practice to have a way to keep all of those details straight. It's normal for comic artists to amass collections of pictures to use as drawing references.

I'll admit that I'm not entirely sure what your concern is.

If you mean world-building then yes, that's fairly normal. Many an author do it.

Niven and Pournelle's notes on World Building for the book A Mote in God's Eye apparently were larger than the book itself.

This is the sort of exercise for which the likes of yWriter, Storybook (and its Open Source variant, oStorybook), WriteItNow and many others were written.

Personally, I use KeyNote NF as I'm too fucking tight to pay for another copy of MicroSoft OneNote and my notes for my current work in progress is now running to a vast number of nodes containing web links, typed notes, pictures and copy-pasted information (so I don't have to wait for a page to load just to read up on information I've already researched).

I supplement that with spreadsheets (OpenOffice because I'm too tight to buy MS Office], text and RTF documents and various other media.

I find it necessary to keep track of all the ideas, research, notes etc so I don't forget or make inconsistencies. If I didn't use those things I'd have to fall back on paper files etc because there's no way I could personally hold anything as complex as the building of an entire world in my head. I'm sure most of those who're developing alien worlds have some form of documentation of their creation to ensure consistency and that salient points are not forgotten.

Glad you got what I mean, I just wanted to open up conversation. I just use my sketchbook, draw a character or thing and then write notes to explain what's going on.

Bullet journal method might help.

Middle Earth is basically the novelisation of Tolkein's notes.

Notes are REALLY important in writing. I tend to accumulate 10-20 pages of worldbuilding per story, and THEN there's all my maps.

The trick is not to get stuck in note-taking so much that your actual story stops getting written.

Stephen King would disagree...

No worries, I'm an advocate of "write what you want" most of the time. It's just that this person specifically asked about taking notes, and EVERYONE takes notes even if it's just brainstorming.

I'm still trying to figure out my own balance between "need to keep notes so everything makes sense" and "Writing by the Seat of Your Pants." Apparently I'm one of the people who goes to town on building societies and locations—I was looking at some of my other stories and HOLY SHIT, 10-20 pages is the low end of my notes.

But when it comes to the actual plot, I really only have the beginning, important details, and the ending.

Fair enough. I like notes personally, but apparently some people find them a bit of a distraction, so whatever works.

For me, my notes usually become pretty outdated anyway, because having a backdrop helps me get started but once I get going I tend to think up new ideas I prefer.

I tend to jot down ideas as they come up so I don't forget them later - scenes, snippets of interaction etc - they tended to wind up in lengthy files and then I'd spend my time looking through those files trying to find something I knew I'd written somewhere.

One of the things I liked about WriteItNow and Storybook was the "one click bright idea" button that would bring up a notepad that I could jot a note into and save it. Later I could mark it as "Complete" or "Abandoned" as required.

That kept notes relevant to the project all in one easy to find place with minimal fuss and in small bite-sized bits rather than a five-page document. Now I've set up part of the tree structure in KeyNote so I can create notes as nodes under "Not Started" and can drag them to "Completed" or "Abandoned" as I desire.

I personally find that if I don't jot them down I forget them and then kick myself afterwards for knowing I had an idea that I can no longer recall - because I always imagine that they were one of my most brilliant ideas when I've got no evidence to the contrary...

I tend to start a notepad .txt with basic info, then use that to start the story. As my characters tend to fit the situation rather than the other way around, that .txt becomes a set of notes that I use for consistency rather than what I plan for them in future sentences.