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Wasn't A Softer World poetry superimposed over photographs? Not claiming to know their business model but it always seemed like a comic that did not come from a place of wanting to have a business model.
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May 27, 2015 22:17
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People get their backs up about worldbuilding because it's such a pitfall for amateurs, but obviously it's not impossible to do well. I do think you need to be able to stand outside yourself, and recognize where your worldbuilding is leading you to make choices that are unsatisfying to readers who lack context, and just mercilessly butcher whatever backstory you had in mind to make those bits read better. Which is really really difficult, especially when you're first learning to write and it feels like this one story will be the only one you'll ever tell. Kill 6 Billion Demons is constantly derailing its story for the sake of worldbuilding, and yet the exposition is so poetic and beautifully rendered that it becomes enjoyable for its own sake. That's something I really admire and try to learn from.
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Jun 2, 2015 13:14
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I have a full-time job and do a comic also! It's definitely a tough balance to keep up - I occasionally find myself stuck in rough patches where I'm staying up until 5 am twice per week - but you find ways to deal with it. Something I've learned to appreciate recently is the value of having a buffer, not as insurance against scheduling hiccups, but as a way to adapt your schedule to your actual energy levels. I.e., maybe you make it your goal to finish one comic between Monday & Friday, then do 1-2 more on the weekend when you're well-rested. Also, caffeine. (And getting up early to squeeze in an extra hour or two of drawing!)
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Jul 13, 2015 19:53
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thousandcranes posted:I've been listening to the Dirty Old Ladies podcast this week. It's Spike Trotman, Kel McDonaldand, and Amanda whose last name I'm not going to try to spell but she does Love Me Nice. If you are reading this thread it is probably relevant to your interests/super informative. Ahh thanks for sharing this! I used to be a big fan of Webcomics Weekly and Art and Story (both long defunct) and have been jonesing for some new comics shoptalk podcasts. Operation Juicebox posted:So I'm starting to build a website for my comic project now and I'm pretty sure I'm going for wordpress and I'm going to use either the Webcomic plugin or Comic Easel. Does anyone have any experience with these and could tell me a little bit about why they do/don't like them?
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Aug 7, 2015 18:56
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Let's say you're doing a regularly updated comic, and you hit a patch where keeping your schedule becomes impossible, either due to Life Stuff or just needing to play catchup. Do you guys think it's smarter to go on hiatus 'til you know you're in a good place again, or to go on an "irregular schedule" and just put up comics whenever you can get them out? I tend to go the hiatus route, because I think it's better for the quality of the work and kinder to readers in the long run. Maybe I'm wrong, though? It feels pretty lovely, leaving readers high and dry for a couple of weeks, and I don't know if it winds up alienating people.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:32
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Couldn't agree more. There's nothing more offputting than trying to read through a comic's archive and getting 5 doodles for every actual piece of content. But yeah, in general I guess like the best policy is just to honestly communicate with your readers/yourself about what you're capable of delivering. Also I know manga studio has built-in script writing tools. (I mostly just use Notepad.)
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Sep 5, 2015 03:52
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How crass and transparently exploitative would it be if I started uploading from the archives of my already-extant webcomic to a service like Tapastic? It seems like a reasonably low-effort way to get my work in front of some new people, but then there's a whole community of people who actually generate original content specifically for that format and I feel like they'd be 100% within their rights to think I'm an rear end in a top hat for capitalizing on their thing. ...also I think the text in my comics is barely legible on most phone screens. That's probably a more valid point to be concerned about.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:37
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Well okay, that makes me feel better. Kind of sensed that it was a silly thing to be worried about while I was typing it. It's easy to forget sometimes that the rest of the world is not as wrapped up in the integrity of your every minor career decision as you are!
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Sep 6, 2015 19:07
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Cephas posted:I've been getting this impression that like, drawing pictures of my living room probably won't help me learn how to draw a character very much.  Proko's anatomy videos are a fun way to pick up some tips for drawing people. In general it is just something you have to practice at, though.
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Nov 16, 2015 21:55
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DrSunshine posted:I actually read some articles that seemed to be claiming this a few weeks ago. Basically, the point that was made was that with the rise of mobile web and how a lot of peoples' only interactions or experiences with the web are through their mobile devices, webcomics are threatened as a medium because most just simply aren't formatted to be viewed on a mobile device. That, basically, webcomics are a relic of the desktop computer age and therefore doomed to obscurity after their brief heyday in the early 2000s. Thoughts? I think sometimes about going back through my archives and upscaling them somehow to look better on phones, either by manually enlarging all the text (which would be a pain in the rear end & would poo poo all over the art/composition), or by adding some kind of "zoom and drag" functionality (which I can't see be anything but annoying to use). Probably a better idea to cut my losses and focus on making new comics that look decent.
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Jan 14, 2016 16:00
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I'm just going to draw all my characters wearing DraftKings t-shirts and wait for a phone call. Actually, I remember reading that PVP was working Wizards of the Coasts references into stories as part of some sponsorship deal. So I guess it does happen.
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Jan 17, 2016 22:31
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For inspiration I would look at Cucumber Quest, which does an amazing job of taking the feel and aesthetic of the Paper Mario games and translating it into an original story that stands on its own. If you could pull off anything in that neighborhood with Super Mario RPG as a starting point then nobody would be more excited about it than me. My comic (!!!) is a video game pastiche with a lot of roots in the Mario games. I remember looking at the meteoric rise of stuff like Yale Stewart's JL8 and wondering if I wouldn't have been better off just making all my characters Goombas etc. for the cheap brand recognition. But there is something comforting and liberating about knowing that the thing you're working on is actually yours. e: also Star Wars is Hidden Fortress 
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Jan 21, 2016 15:49
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I would love to go to cons (I have so many ideas for fun things I could hand out!) but I feel like I'm probably not enough of an extrovert to get anything useful out of it. It doesn't help that every con within a reasonable distance is billed as a "pop culture expo", which I'm pretty sure means "place people visit to get Lou Ferrigno's signature".
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Feb 12, 2016 14:33
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I don't really know what's going on but it is beautifully rendered and really visually funny! Also I think the font looks fine, although I would reduce the space between lines.
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Feb 28, 2016 02:52
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nikochansan posted:
Nice! I always liked the stuff you posted in this thread with these lil' robot characters. (Some of that text is literally unreadable though, definitely gotta export at a higher resolution.)
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Mar 14, 2016 18:49
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itsthetie posted:hi! I'm new to this forum. My impulse is to say that it's a bit long-winded and meandering for a straightforward gag comic (brevity is the soul of wit, etc.). In particular I feel like you could chop off those last 4 panels and lose nothing - that pattern of "funny character says funny line, beat panel, straight man calls funny character an idiot" is something that I think betrays a lack of confidence in the actual joke.
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Apr 9, 2016 18:23
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Internet Janitor posted:I've been posting pages of this as they're drawn in the Daily Drawings and Doodles threads, but I finally got a domain name and a little website put together for it, so maybe this deserves dropping a link here. Beyond Loom is a lighthearted adventure story about a giant spider and a small flightless bird: Good stuff! Love the linework, love the ink wash coloring. The backgrounds are kinda rough and tend not to adhere to perspective, which is occasionally distracting - I also found the story a bit treacly (wouldn't a pacifist spider, y'know, starve to death) but I guess that's a matter of taste.
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May 3, 2016 17:33
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Kojiro posted:Hi I literally do webcomics for a living and Squidster is right, there's a fuckton of hustle involved. His post was pretty drat accurate to my own experiences. Are cons really a good marketing tool for smaller artists? Genuinely asking, I have no idea. I always hone in on the negative buzz surrounding cons and tell myself that you can only get something out of them if you've already got droves of fans (or if you draw lots of pictures of Spider-man and Pikachu), but it's entirely possible that I'm dragging my feet to avoid figuring out this whole new big scary part of being a comics-person.
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Dec 10, 2016 04:21
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If you can get away with starting in medias res with standalone stories you should absolutely do it, and consider letting your introduction exist as context that informs your writing (and maybe the occasional flashback). Always try to start at the most interesting part of your story if you can help it. Also yes buffers are liars & will destroy you if you rely on them
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Feb 20, 2017 21:33
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Fangz posted:Is stuff like Top Webcomics significant from a promotional point of view or is it mostly for bragging rights? I'm sure it works for some people but as far as I can tell it's not significant for either
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Jun 5, 2017 15:54
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You can do pretty much anything you could do with Flash via HTML5 and JS. I'm not sure how Platinum Grift worked but, again, sounds like something you could do with some simple JS knowledge (if that's within your comfort zone to learn)
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Sep 14, 2017 14:11
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Yeah, any script I write for my stuff winds up getting massively chopped up and reworked once I get to thumbnailing and actually have to think about where the words are going to live spatially on the page - often one page gets split into 2-3 pages, is reshuffled to flow better, etc. Still useful as a starting point.
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Dec 7, 2017 17:43
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