Process Bytes Part 1
How Junebug Bites Back Came to Be (and Why I Built Process Bytes)
Junebug Bites Back is the first story in my collection Pulp Bytes Vol. 1.
You can grab the book right now from my site right here:
Buy Pulp Bytes Vol. 1 at pat-higgins.com
I’m also going to be using Junebug Bites Back as the main example when I break down how I actually write comics, step by step. Not theory. Not winging it. The real process I use to turn a weird, uncomfortable idea into a finished story that holds together.
Because the truth is, I was always an artist before I was a writer.
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Artist First, Writer by Necessity
I didn’t come up through creative writing programs. I never sat in a workshop dissecting short stories. I learned to draw. I learned to finish illustrations. Writing came later, and it came out of survival.
I had ideas.
A lot of them.
Dark ideas. Dumb ideas. Half-jokes. Things that would make someone laugh at a bar and then immediately say, “Jesus, dude…That’s messed up.”
Ideas alone don’t make stories though. And early on, I could feel when something almost worked, but I couldn’t always explain why it didn’t.
So I did what I’ve always done as an illustrator.
I built tools.
That’s where Process Bytes came from.
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The Spark: A Joke That Wouldn’t Go Away
The genesis of Junebug Bites Back started as a single scribble in one of my sketchbooks:
What if someone used a tapeworm to lose weight?
That’s it.
No plot. No characters. Just a gross, darkly funny idea.
I keep notebooks full of stuff like this using what I’ve jokingly called my barstool method. Loose thoughts, overheard conversations, half-baked jokes, things that make me laugh and feel uncomfortable at the same time. Most of them never go anywhere.
But sometimes an idea sticks in your head and refuses to leave.
This one did.
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“Who Would Actually Do That?”
That tapeworm idea wasn’t a story yet. The next question I always ask is:
Who would actually do something like this?
That’s when the story starts to emerge.
The answer, unfortunately, was pretty clear.
A pageant mom.
Sorry to the GOOD stage parents out there. I had to pick somebody. Someone needed to move the story along.
Once I had that answer, the idea stopped floating in abstraction and started anchoring itself to real behavior, real pressure, and real justification. That’s when I pulled out Process Bytes.
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Page One of Process Bytes: Brainstorming
The first page of Process Bytes is where I let myself be messy. No structure yet. Just associations radiating out from the spark.
For Junebug Bites Back, that word map looked something like this:
• Sparkles
• Tap dancing
• Honey Boo Boo
• Pageant mom
• Control
• Overbearing
• “For your own good”
• Values
• Inherited behavior
• Junebug
• Innocent
• Bug
• Parasite
• Tapeworm
• Body horror
• Worm in eyeball
• Worm is giant
• Obesity
• Weight loss
• Fake teeth
• Fake doctor
• Societal beauty standards
At this stage, I’m not writing scenes. I’m looking for pressure points. Where do these ideas rub against each other in uncomfortable ways? Where does humor start curdling into horror?
That’s where the real story engine revealed itself.
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The Moral Question (This Is the Story)
Once the word map starts clustering, I look for the moral question hiding underneath:
What if a child believed a parent’s toxic values so completely that she applied them back to the parent?
That’s the story.
Not the worm.
Not the pageant.
Not the gross-out moment.
That question dictates everything that comes next.
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Page Two of Process Bytes: Key Elements
Page two is where I stop being loose and start committing.
Genre
For this story, I landed on:
• Horror
• Psychological
• Body Horror
• Creature Feature
• Light Sci-Fi (in the EC Comics, “bad science idea” sense)
This isn’t a tech story. It’s a people story where biology and pseudoscience are misused, and the consequences come due.
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Mood & Atmosphere
I wanted the story to feel:
• Ominous – something is wrong long before it’s visible
• Disturbing – unsettling, not indulgent
• Foreboding – the ending should feel inevitable in hindsight
• Quirky – because the idea itself starts absurd
That dark humor is important. A lot of my horror starts with something that makes me laugh. If I lose that, the story usually collapses under its own seriousness.
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Conflict Types
This story doesn’t live in one neat category.
• Primary: Man vs. Self
The mother’s need for control and validation is the real antagonist.
• Secondary: Man vs. Man
Mother vs. child. Mother vs. doctors. Mother vs. anyone threatening her narrative.
• Tertiary: Man vs. Society
Pageant culture, diet culture, wellness scams, and beauty standards quietly enable everything.
• Symbolic: Man vs. Nature
The parasite is nature pushing back. Bodies don’t cooperate forever.
Writing this down early matters. Once I knew this was Man vs. Self at its core, the ending couldn’t be a rescue. It had to be a consequence.
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Why I Built Process Bytes
Process Bytes exists because I needed a way to mold weird ideas into cohesive stories without killing what made them weird in the first place.
It helps me:
• Find the story hiding inside a joke
• Catch weak ideas before I draw pages
• Make sure the ending is inevitable, not random
• Spend more time drawing and less time second-guessing
It’s the same reason illustrators thumbnail before committing to final art. You don’t skip that step and hope it works out later.
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What’s Next?
In the next post, I’ll keep breaking this down:
• How I move from Key Elements to structure
• How I decide where the midpoint lives
• How I land an ending that bites back
For now, I’ll be sharing:
• The Pulp Bytes Vol. 1 cover
• The first two pages of Process Bytes
• Small excerpts along the way
I’ll share the full story after the process is laid out. Understanding how the story was built makes the payoff hit harder.
More soon.
In the meantime, a little commerce: Need some art supplies? Head to Chartpak
Stock up on art supplies with my Chartpak Factory Store affiliate link! This is where I grab my go-to tools like Higgins Black Magic Ink, Grumbacher Goldenedge Watercolor Brushes, and Kuretake Zig Cartoonist Brush Pens. Whether you’re a professional or just love to create, you’ll find everything you need.
Use promo code PAT at checkout to save 15% on your order of $20 or more at chartpakstore.com/pat. Happy creating!