You’ve been working on that story for years–you’ve rewritten it, you’ve taken it to places for critique, you’ve rewritten it again. But something isn’t right. Maybe the people you asked for critique didn’t like it, or maybe you can’t figure out how to fill a particularly large plot-hole. Perhaps you’ve taken a step back and decided that your concept is all wrong or that your characters are unbelievable or unlikeable, or both, again. You feel like you’ve been working on this story forever, and yet you’re no closer to actually making it into a comic than you were on day one. So what can you do? The answer is simple:
Kill your baby. Or at least send it on a nice vacation.
When you work on a comic for a long time, you start to become attached. You love your characters like you’d love your children, and you become very set on the scenes, ideas and conflicts that you first imagined them in during character creation. The following statement may come as a shock, but, some of those initial ideas and scenes and conflicts will be bad. They will not work, no matter how hard you try and rework them, because as someone who is attached to their ‘baby,’ you can’t bear to cut something that you feel is the lifeblood of your character, or, if necessary, the character him/herself. You will almost always never even know it’s necessary, because the more attached you become, the less flaws look like flaws.
Often, when we find ourselves enthralled by a ‘baby’ project, there are plenty of signs that could but fail to alert us, because they don’t seem like signs. Here is a short list of some of the more common signs:
So what can you do? Well, you can change your scenery. Put that project on the back-burner, and work on something else. Change everything–change the genre, change the setting, new characters, new relationships, new everything. And start small–the last thing you want to do is end up enslaved to yet another baby project. Set deadlines for yourself, and get them done. If you can’t meet them, consider enlisting in a particularly motivated and like-minded friend who can keep you in check by working as your partner or editor.
And if you don’t? Welcome to Stagnationville, population: you and your baby.
The pinup. Pretty, interesting, usually higher quality than your actual comic and one of the first things that gets teasingly tossed around when discussing bad webcomics. Pinups have a time and a place–bonus art, gift art, your personal gallery, and even your professional portfolio, provided that your portfolio does not consist entirely of them.
It’s been a month since you started your comic, and your front page boasts that you update twice a week. Your story is long format, not panelled, so that’s a slightly taller order than one page a week. However, the 31st rolls around and all you have to show for your ’schedule’ is two character profiles, a cover, two actual pages, a fanart, a pinup and yet another pinup thanking your darling fans for a hundred page views. Something is wrong here.
If this scenario is at all familiar to you as a webcomic artist, especially in relation to your own works, then you may just have a problem. Here is a list of commonly seen variants of pinups, the places that you will commonly see them, and whether or not they are appropriate:
The Character Profile: You’re new to the webcomic scene, an you’ve just signed up on a free host. You decided to sign up before you had any pages because you didn’t want someone else to steal your comicname.freehost.com, and also you wanted to build up a little hype and get your site design done.
You don’t have any real pages that are done because designing an appropriate web page is hard, but you do want your potential readers to know that you are hard at work, and give them a little preview of what that work includes. So, you post up a few pages, with a picture of each of your main characters as well as information that you think your readers might be interested to know about them, like their favourite food and blood type.
How to Use: I am a firm believer in the idea that all character information should be presented on one page, set aside specifically to showcase your characters. A page that is separate from the rest of your comic. If you make changes to that page and add new characters, let your readers know in your author comments or RSS feed.
However, if you absolutely must, use them before you start your actual pages and the second that you have a real comic up there, relocate that information to a ‘characters‘ page.
How Not to Use: Do not post a new profile instead of a comic page, even if you’ve just introduced a brand new character. If you really feel you need to post a character page up with the rest of your comic instead of on your characters page, do so only between chapters or story arcs, so as not to disrupt the flow of your story. Disrupting your story is a no–it will annoy readers, especially during tense or cliffhanger scenes, and more fickle readers may just stop reading.
The Splash Page: You didn’t have time to draw a comic this week, but you don’t want to not post. Instead, you decide that your readers will be pleased of you toss up a pretty splash art instead, whilst apologizing and making excuses in your author comment.
How to Use: Again, I’d say never, but since there will always be exceptions, I personally believe that splash pages are acceptable on major holidays (Christmas, Hallowe’en, St. Patrick’s Day, etc.), but only if they are not replacing a regular update. Only post them as extras, and if you can help it, keep them separate from your comic–let people know about them in your news or author’s comics.
How Not to Use: While some readers might say ‘awww, how cute, you made a pretty piece of art,’ a lot of them are going to be wondering why you had time to make a ‘pretty art’ and not an actual comic page. Make pages your priority. If you know you need to update Friday, make sure your page is the first piece of art you finish, and don’t sit down to do a full page, full colour picture until that promised page is done, scanned, uploaded and ready to go.
The Fan Art/Gift Art/Guest Comic: A fan sends you a neat piece of art and you decide that you’re feeling lazy this week and throw it up there instead of a regular update. You sweeten the deal by plugging their comic in the authors comments.
How to Use: Fan art and gift art shouldn’t be posted with your regular pages. Put them on their own sub-pages and show them off in your updates and authors notes. Again, anything that disrupts the flow of the comic could potentially lose you readers. Guest comics, on the other hand, are fine if you use them correctly. If you do a strip comic, inserting them into your updates is easy and not jarring, especially if you write a gag-a-day; nothing is being interrupted, and it isn’t as jarring for your audience. Guest comics are much harder to pull off with long format comics, because serial comics are often telling a story from update to update. Adding a guest comic disrupts the flow completely.
Example: A great example on how to properly use guest comics is Sinister Squid’s own Gibson Twist. Every time he finishes a graphic novel’s worth of pages (about 200 pages of dedicated, on time comic pages) for his comic, Pictures of You, he writes a bunch of neat side stories and has other artists draw them. He plans far in advance to the point where he can tell readers who might not be interested when the regular pages will be updating again, so that they can skip them if they want to. This gives him a chance to work on the next book and take a rest.
How Not to Use: Art–sparingly. Or never. Guest comic–don’t use these too often, and if you do use them, warn your readers in advance and let them know when regular comics will resume.
The News Item: You just hit a thousand page views and want the world to know! You make a a pinup with some of your characters and a bit block-letter ‘Thank you!’ message and post in in place of a comic. Or, you just put up a cool ‘donate’ button, and want people to notice it, so you draw a pinup with info on how your audience can help you and post it in place of a comic.
How to Use: Even if you don’t post these in place of a comic and treat them as extra, off schedule information, they look really tacky. Do not post up a splash page for anything that can be conveyed in a news post or author’s note. Use these only in times of emergency.
Example: I used to work on a comic called RAnSOM. I posted twice a week, and in November, a week from my 21st birthday, I got a call at work from my mother telling me that, that afternoon, I was getting my wisdom teeth out and that I’d got a last minute appointment before her insurance stopped covering me on my birthday. I had exactly one comic in my buffer, and ended up making a crude announcement image that everyone would see to let them know that I would be pumped full of Tylenol 3 and in no state to make a comic for the next little while.
How Not to Use: Do not use this to announce benchmarks like page views, donations, your position on top lists, new t-shirts in your store, etc.–again, it disrupts the flow of your comic and makes your readers annoyed and/or unhappy. It can also end up looking like you’re pandering. If it can be conveyed in your news posts and author’s notes, leave it alone.
What do you think about when you think of making a successful webcomic? For a lot of people, visions of t-shirts with their characters on them, web-donations—of one day holding a crisp, full-colour hard copy of their hours of work. Of having people at conventions know your face, or dressing up as your characters, because they love them.
Congratulations– you’re already on your way to the kind of mind-set you need to succeed. Welcome to your webcomic, the product.
But Ran, you ask, isn’t that selling out? Won’t I have to forget about what I want to do in order to please my audience? Am I selling my soul? The answer to those questions are fuzzy, because it’s all in how you do it. Sure, there are some webcomic authors out there who treat their comic as a secondary tool to their online store’s catalogue. They’re in it for the money, not the comic, and perhaps they are right to do this—more and more, especially with today’s economy, webcomics are becoming a viable way to make a living.
On the other hand, there are plenty of webcomic artists out there who do it because they love it, and sell t-shirts and books so that they can pay their bills and still devote time to the thing they love as a full time job. Heck, even if you don’t plan on making money with your comic, you should still be looking at everything; your layout, your update schedule, your advertising, etc., from a marketing point of view. It’s all in the intent, and no matter where you stand, it’s something you should be thinking about if you want your webcomic and the community surrounding it to expand and grow.
So, without further delay, here is the first part to a series of guides I will be writing about viewing your webcomic as a product:
Part I – The Idea
When starting a new comic, I have always felt that preparation and before-hand thought are what makes or breaks your project—the comics that last the longest are the ones whose author knows where the story is going. There are plenty of great habits that, if developed early on, will help you tough it out even if real life gets in the way or you are struck with the dreaded writers’ block.
Comics that have no clear subject matter or direction are easy to lose interest in, and likely to cause you to restart or revamp the comic over and over until your readers give up on you. That’s why I recommend sitting down with a notepad and a pencil before you do anything concrete like promoting your project before you even have pages, or even drawing pages with no real goals in mind. Since simplicity is best, you’re going to start off with these simple questions:
What do you want to do?
Why do you want to do it?
Where do you want to go with it?
How do you do it?
This question is a simple one. Acceptable answers can be as simple as ‘I want to write a short comic about monkeys, in space,’ or ‘I want to write a full length graphic novel with 40+ main characters in a high fantasy setting,’ or even ‘I want to make a hilarious gaming comic about me and my college buddies.’ The intent behind this exercise is to make you think about what you want your story to be about, as well as to sum it up in a couple of sentences. If you’re looking at your idea in the barest of terms, you put that idea under more scrutiny because it’s vague enough that any major clichés are very, very visible.
If you write down that you want to make an episodic series of short stories about a millionaire who flies around in a robotic suit of armour,and fights crime, you (and any potential readers) are probably going to notice that your idea sounds a lot like Ironman, and you’ll probably want to change that as soon as possible.
People want to make webcomics for a lot of reasons, including (but not limited to) the following list:
I want to sell t-shirts.
I want to be e-famous.
I want to tell a wonderful story.
I want to make people laugh.
I want to one day get published and use this as a springboard.
I want to have a fun little project with some friends.
If you can pinpoint exactly why you want to make your comic in a few short ‘I statements’, then figuring out how to market it to readers and achieve any goals you may have in regards to it is going to be much easier.
Before you even begin, you’re going to want to think about this project and how it’s going to fit into your life. How long is it going to be? Is it a serial comic with a beginning middle and end, or is it a gag-a-day? How often do you plan on updating? How much free time do you have to actually make the pages?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you begin the planning stages, and give you a rough idea of how much and what kind of planning you have to do. It will also help you decide how to present it, and let you start thinking about hosting sites or programs that will meet your needs.
This is where you make a game plan. In your notebook, write down the steps you’re going to take before you decide to put your idea live. For example, the current Game plan for METAL, a serial project being worked on my myself and Sinister Squid’s Cory Brown is as follows:
Write down basic concept, as well info on character in a proper pitch format.
Present pitch to a trusted comic forum to get critique so that I can make needed changes and get insight from someone else’s point of view,
Write down time line, beginning to end.
Get writer to begin scripting while I finalize character design.
Complete first chapter as buffer.
Set up website.
Post online.
Someone who is not making a serial comic and instead intends to make a gag-a-day gamer strip may make a list that looks something like this:
Make a list of friends I am going to base characters off of.
Design those characters and get feedback from the friends they represent, so as to not offend them if I accidentally exaggerate someone’s nose too much.
Make a list of fifty potential strip ideas and pick the best ten.
Do rough sketches for them and ask for critique on a forum, so that if I’m not getting the message across or they aren’t as funny as I think they are, I can learn from that.
Make final versions of the comic.
Set up website at a free host.
Start posting comic.
Advertise on gaming forums once I have ten pages up.
Having a simplistic checklist of your intentions is always a nice reminder if you start to stray from the trail. If it helps, write it on big paper is a large permanent marker and stick it over your work space or computer desk. Make the checklist realistic, too. Setting goals for yourself that you know you are likely to fail at is discouraging, even if you knew it from the beginning.
You’ll also want to decide what tools you’ll be using for your project. Remember to play at your strengths—if you usually do art with inks and markers, and you want to make a project where your art is as polished as possible, now is not the time to buy a $300 graphic tablet that you have no idea how to use properly. If you don’t have what you need on hand, make a shopping list and get them as soon as you can make time for it.
Once you have these questions answered, your idea will start to look more like an actual project! You’ll have written down some real food for thought, and you’re already realizing what you’re going to need to do to start this project and actually keep it going. This is great because now you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of how much work you have ahead of you, and whether or not you’ll need help getting it done.
That’s all for this part! The next part will be about format and will outline some key things to consider before putting pencil to paper or tablet to Photoshop!
