How to Decide if You Should Do a Webcomic

Let's face a few facts: Webcomics are new. A lot of people think webcomics suck. An enlightened subsection of those know better and assert that only the majority suck. This does not speak highly of the ones who actually want to get good at it. Granted, you could say the same things for a lot of internet groups, but let's assume you actually are looking to do something with webcomics, in spite of all this.

You SHOULD do a webcomic if:

• You have a story to tell (with some visual nature to it). If you find yourself cooing endlessly about the moons of the planet Mazz'zel'ta and the way they shine in the darkness, or other striking visual effects, go ahead and start drawing it.
• You want to expand your art portfolio. Know what's big in portfolios? Related Works. Pages in a story are as related as related works get, and are more likely to test your boundaries as an artist. As a bonus, it pretty much ensures that if someone on DeviantArt or elsewhere sees one page and likes it in the least, they'll probably read the other pages as well.
  
• You don't feel 'ready' to pitch your idea to the "Big Boys" yet. You'll probably never feel ready, but at least you can start working on it now and gaining fanbase instead of waiting for letters from them (rejection or otherwise).
• You want to start making money off of your art. It won't be much money, but if nothing else it should improve your work and expand your audience enough that you can eventually start taking commissions (and now people will actually want to buy them!).
• You feel there's a gap in the webcomics already out there. If an anime about baking bread can get taken seriously, anything can. As a bonus, think of all the new fans you'll get for covering a topic they care about. In the meantime, I'm just going to say this outright: I would LOVE to see a webcomic about crochet, or possibly knitting.
• People keep telling you to start a comic. Hey, you've already got a fanbase, why not? Motivated fans you can actually have a cup of coffee with are rare enough that even just one or two of them is reason enough to give it a try.
  
• You ever plan on doing a comic 'eventually'. Just start now. Seriously. Worst case scenario, you ditch working on it to start a new one.
  

You should NOT do a webcomic if:

• You expect to make LOTS of money off your art. It doesn't work that way. The only truly 'successful' comics I've seen have been at it for years, and when making just above the poverty line in donations alone is considered 'successful', that means you're probably not going to become a millionaire doing this.
  
• You think "I don't need ____! So-and-so did this, I can too!" Whoever you're holding in high regard did it better because they know what they're doing and how whatever rule they're breaking is meant to be broken. You don't. Don't try it until you do.
  
  • This goes double for people trying to imitate stick-figure comics. Yes, good writing can eclipse bad art. This, however, assumes good writing.
• The story you want to tell is fanfic. Come back when you have some originality and aren't a walking copyright violation. At the very least, tweak it until it passes the "I think _____ did it better" test.
  
• You plan on using Sprites / Screenshots / Other Game-Originating Material in Lieu of Art. No publisher will EVER touch these types of comics with a ten-foot pole. Besides, it's pretty limiting as far as visualizations go. If you insist on doing it, fine, but don't expect it to go beyond being a webcomic unless you can find a way to make the rest of the comic shine in comparison.
  
• You plan on hosting the comic at ComicGenesis, SmackJeeves, DrunkDuck, or any other "Webcomic Hosting Specialist" for the life of the comic. It screams "Ameteur wanted Free Space!" and is the webcomic equivalent of GeoCities. Starting out on free space isn't bad in and of itself, but the top Comic Repositories have bad enough reputations that you may be better off doing it yourself and avoiding the taint. For God's sake, if you're going to seriously start a comic, get a halfway decent webpage; if you have any readership at all, you can make the money from hosting back in ads alone. If you MUST be a cheapskate about it, go with ComicGenesis, as you have the most control there and the least-stupid name in the URL. Barring this, LiveJournal and Blogger work as well, provided you use an additional image host like Photobucket. DeviantArt and other Art repositories are also good.
  
• You're only making the comic to impress people. Don't. They're not. You probably won't become famous for doing this, and if you do, it'll be so many years from now that if this is the only reason you're doing it, you'll kill yourself before you ever get that far.
• You don't plan on drawing a comic for very long (and I mean in terms of updates, NOT time-per-page). Comics are a BIG time investment, and take years of updates and tons of strips to take off. If you don't have the time, do a short story, but starting a comic and then not being able to keep it up is terrible and pisses off whatever fans you've acquired.
  

There's other tutorials and tips for starting comics, but if you're still on the fence about this at all, look at this chart and figure out how many reasons from each list are your own reasons for wanting to do a comic, and decide if you lean more towards one list or the other. Having a few "Don't" reasons in your list isn't a bad thing, (delusions of grandeur can be useful for those rough spots) but if you're hitting all cylinders on the bad list and STILL think you should do a comic, you need to rethink your priorities.

In Defense of Giving your Work Away:

(a.k.a. "The edge Cartoonists have over the RIAA")

This post is a glorified response to an interview over at kottke with Cory Doctorow, who apparently has some fairly strong opinions about giving away your work. Naturally, there're a few hecklers in the comments who don't "get it". This would be a fine argument to sit on the fence of, except I know of at least one stable business model that basically thrives on 'Giving Work Away', and since I'm reposting my remarks (more or less), you can take a guess what I'm referring to: Comics, comics, and more comics.

For years, people only paid for their newspaper comics as an incidental part of the newspaper; to children and adults alike, such work was essentially 'free' for them, because newspapers were a given and the news content of the paper was what was truly 'paid for', and not the comics, except when they bought the books and merchandise. The system had hiccups, the way any general monopoly does, but for several decades this model worked out fairly well for cartoonists (at least the ones that "made it", anyway).

The internet equivalent is in webcomics, with several key differences; no editorial process, no risk of a risque strip being yanked, no pre-payment from newspapers to publish and carry the work. One would expect that, if comics worked the way books and music work, they would charge people just to see the pages.

Yet they don't. All their work is free to view, and in most cases, so are the archives, making it harder to justify book sales. And yet there are probably just as many (if not more) people profiting off of webcomics, even if these profits are not as big (yet) as the average person appearing in newspapers. These cartoonists are just as niche, just as specialized, have just as much to lose, and yet they thrive, even when the majority of their work is just 'given' away.

Why? Because cartoonists work constantly. There is always 'another day' to cover, another page in the story, another advancement of the tale, and thus each individual page is cheap and worthless without the rest of the story. That commitment to the work's creator (and NOT their work itself) is the most important vector for profit. Nobody 'cares' about DMFA; they like it, sure, maybe even love it, but they care about Amber far more. Schlock Mercenary is good, but Howard Tayler is better.

The comics are an elaborate lure designed to make you want more, and recognize the hand that feeds; the person behind the comics becomes center stage. And it's not just comics; the whole "2.0" revolution is based around this idea. Jonathan Coulton's songs and Hugh MacLeod's cartoons are proof that stable models can be built around people, and not just items. The work is worthless without the creator, and so giving away the work is exactly what they WANT to happen, because as long as people can follow the lure back to the hook, everyone gets what they want.

The way songs (and other media) are done now, though, there's no lure past the song itself; the song IS the hook, so to speak. So . . . perhaps the reason big, foreboding, faceless companies are afraid of giving away their work is because they know that there's no person behind the work, and so they're subconsciously afraid that once people have it, they won't want anything more from their 'creators'.

No wonder they're scared of file-sharing; it actually forces people to care about something other than material items for a change.

Wikipedia, Notability, and Webcomics

Those of you who follow more than just this comic may be familiar with the WikiDrama back in January where over 50 webcomics were deleted from wikipedia, with several more speedily deleted or otherwise nominated for deletion thanks to 'lack of notability', as determined by a few zealous mods.

It's about time someone told them what they accomplished. Namely, a lot of ill will from the people who SHOULD be making Wikipedia better. Since I can only edit the article itself so much, I wanted to post my opinions here.

Disclaimer: I create Last Resort, a weekly webcomic. You're probably reading this from the webcomic's page, but if you're someone random who's probably here because you have nothing better to do than argue with me about this, you might be coming here from the blog's permalink or just looking for an excuse to ignore everything I have to say past this point, so there it is.

If you think this makes my opinion invalid . . . you're part of the problem.

Wikipedia was intended as a site anyone can edit, with information on whatever people find appropriate. For the longest time, I even had my default search engine in Firefox set to Wikipedia, because whenever I googled anything for my classes I ended up going there anyway. But Wikipedia isn't for everyone anymore, Google's my default search engine again, and "Deletionist" drama like this is part of the reason why.

Creating articles is daunting, but adding edits to them is easy once started. Deleting them is apparently easier for mods and admins than editing, tagging it for cleanup and letting someone else do your work for you, or even, y'know, leaving it alone because it's probably fine as is. Then again, I suppose it's easier to just delete everything than to deal with the fact people have different opinions of what's worthwhile.

Yes, there are lots of webcomics out there, and quite frankly there are also a lot of bad webcomics too. By this same token, there are also lots of bad magazines, bad restaurants, bad small businesses, bad dot-coms . . . and not everyone is Mother Teresa when it comes to taking criticism either. We just happen to notice the drama surrounding webcomics more because it's all online and eventually if it gets bad enough it gets archived on Encyclopedia Dramatica for the non-involved to laugh at.

Comics in general (and webcomics in particular) get a lot of bullshit from people, even other artists, because it's either "not an art form", "not profitable", or it's "for children". Naturally, they have irrefutable proof in the inescapable fact that Japan is a third-world country. It's a growing medium, especially in places like the United States where there seems to be a corporate monopoly on creative content, and as such has only taken off with the internet.

Ten years ago if you wanted to be anything that involved creating stuff people actually enjoyed looking at, you either had to go to New York, Hollywood, or Florida and hope you landed a creative gig of some kind, or else you languished in obscurity on page 27X of your local newspaper. Maybe you submitted letters to publishers, and if they weren't immediately tossed onto the slush pile, you'd get a nice form letter back that said absolutely nothing of value beyond "Sorry, Play Again". Of course, all of this is said with the assumption that you already were a United States citizen with enough disposable income to take such risks.

I have seen beautiful works from far-flung places of the globe I never would have found otherwise. I have found stories with huge fandoms, profitable enterprises, and more creative energy expended collectively than any single publisher in the world could manage. I have found piles of absolute shit, and side-stepped the shit to find tales and art to die for. I have found people willing to persue the American Dream doing what they love and telling the stories in their heads to anyone who'll listen, and for a few of 'em it's even worked.

I'm getting flowery here, but hell, we're talking about a revolution in the creative process like nothing seen before, where anyone and everyone who thinks people want to listen to them can give it a shot, and the cream rises to the top one way or another. A lot like Wikipedia, really, except in Wiki-land the admins and moderators seem to think they're better than other users, and somehow this means they have the right to quash their work. If Webcomics worked the way Wikipedia works, Scott Kurtz, Fred Gallagher, and R.K. Milholland would be banding together to nuke ComicGenesis's servers from orbit.

Webcomics seem to putter along just fine with anyone and everyone getting involved in the process. Why can't Wikipedia be the same?

About the new Recharge Counter

So, you've 'probably' noticed the new battery counter on the front page asking for donations. Dun worry, I'm not suddenly showing my true colors or anything; there's been a donation counter on the page for a while, and my current hosting plan is based on how much I raise (and seeing how image-intensive hosting a comic can be, that's a fair amount of bandwidth).

Here's the deal: y'all are really starting to get into the comic, and truth be told it takes a fair chunk of my time to draw the pages (not to mention all the other little things I do, like picking up a domain name and other things). Ideally, y'all want to get the comic faster, and yet I'd still keep my buffer at a healthy size so I don't suddenly run out of comics right before I skip town for a weekend. This is a good way to test the waters and see just how much you guys are willing to put forward to advance the story, without me suddenly leaping to twice a week right when the semester's supposed to get difficult.

The Battery fills up every $50. I'll be keeping the battery counter around unless and until we need something a little more... accurate, like a monthly counter.

I'm not expecting this to actually launch me to twice weekly — More than likely it'll just give you guys a good bonus page every month or so. If I start getting into a habit (or suddenly speed up my drawing rate), the twice weekly thing might stick. But for now... hey, if you like the story and the art, donate.

BarCamp Recap (and some Comic Pluggage!)

Just came back from BarCamp Atlanta, which is an overnight convention where you put a bunch of hackers, geeks, and otherwise smart people together, get 'em all to host panels on the fly talking about whatever it is they're interested in talking about, and hopefully you get enough folk that want to hear 'em talk too. No pressure, lots of fun, always something to do or see or nibble on . . .

. . . and apparently a good number of folk who had no idea about how big webcomics are. I ended up hosting a webcomics panel last night that went over really well; I'd say 8-10 people in the room, and a lot of 'em grabbed pins after I was done and were just really impressed in general at how much effort people go to in telling their stories and convincing people to just give 'em money. Even managed to get one of 'em to walk me though signing up for a proper domain name, so if you haven't already, check out lastres0rt.com (yes, the 'o' in resort is a zero).

Most of the panel actually ended up being about a bunch of the comics I frequent and what I happen to think are examples of good stuff in the field. What actually ended up happening through was that I gave a brief overview of the Morning Coffee Firefox Extension and as a result, I showed off the comics that I had listed for Friday's lineup. My apologies if your comic isn't in this list, as it's just a review of the ones I showed off (and a brief overview of what I said about 'em, if anything special) since a couple of the guys asked me to post a list of the ones I talked about. There's other goodies, but hey, I ran out of time as it was.

• Exterminatus Now - A good class act, loved the big battle scene at the top. One of the better-rendered works.
• Ugly Hill - Can only say so much about a comic when it's currently in guest strip mode.
• Schlock Mercenary - Nothin' but good stuff about this one. Good writing, good color, even told 'em about the buffer and how having a few comics in reserve is useful. I'm sure the barely-dressed Elf helped, considering I was one of the few women at this thing.
• MegaTokyo - Eh... I basically admitted that if I hadn't gotten hooked on it previously, I probably wouldn't be reading it now. Because of the erratic schedule Fred keeps, it's almost better to wait for the books than to try and keep up online. To say the least, not a glowing review.
• PvP - Same Chapter, different verse. At least Megatokyo's late because Fred knocks himself out on quality; I'm relatively certain that if Kurtz wasn't an early adopter, he wouldn't have near the same following.
  
• xkcd - Gloriousness. Come on, it was practically a geek con, what WASN'T I going to say about this one?
• DMFA - I ended up showing off more about how Amber collects donations than the comic itself, since at least part of the panel was showing how people made money off their webcomics. Specifically the Wallpaper Wars — or as one guy put it, "Choose your Own Adventure, but with money!" In hindsight, I wish I'd shown off the Abel vs. Regina war instead. Much more dynamic and a little easier to read when you've got to work with a projector.
• StarSlip Crisis - Much love. Mostly talked about how distinct the characters in this strip are, even for a highly stylized form like Straub's.
  
• Evil Inc. - Another generally great comic. They loved the general storyline too. ^_^
• The Devil's Panties - Made for a nice segue into places like ComicGenesis and Smackjeeves. And hey, who doesn't love a local artist?
• ps238 - Showed off where Aaron has his books for sale on the site elsewhere as well.
  

All in all, a pretty decent collection of comics, with a lot of examples of how comics differ based on their quality, style, and update schedule, along with a smattering of 'A-Listers'. (and yes, I showed off my own stuff as well, but only after the others — after all, this was meant as an introduction to comics, talking about donations and other ways to make money off a brand, some comparisons with blogging, and so on).

Which just goes to show that even when you're at a place where people are doing nothing BUT talking about how to shape the internet, they're still not always getting the whole picture. ;)

Why you, Yes You, need to STFU and start Drawing a Webcomic Right Now.

Once upon a time there were two artists who wanted to be Big. They could both draw -- not much more than stick figures, perhaps, but at least the art teachers liked their drawings and every now and then friends would fawn over their sketchbooks. At the end of the school year, the art teachers managed to corner the two artists after class and asked them if they wanted to try this new 'webcomic' thing; it wasn't Big, or Glamorous, or even Profitable, but the art teachers wanted someone to try it so they could see if it was a Good Thing to do.

The first artist wrinkled his nose at the idea and turned the teachers down, saying that he didn't feel he was good enough to start a comic, because he knew other Big comics had much better art than he did. But in order to save face with his teachers, he told him to check back with him when school started to see if his art was good enough then.

The second artist, on the other hand, wanted to tell a story anyway, and (after getting the art teachers to give him some extra tools for the task) he started working on his comic.

The second artist quickly found out he sucked, but kept drawing (after leaving whichever websites left a bad taste in his mouth), and posting new work every couple of days. And he kept drawing. And kept drawing. And then he'd post again every couple more days.

Every couple of weeks or so he'd tell the art teachers he needed more money for a new reference book, which they bought for him, and then he'd read it, and go back to drawing with the new information he learned. Eventually he started drawing strips in advance, so he could take breaks every now and then but the art teachers wouldn't notice what days he was slacking off.

As he was posting all of this work online, eventually other people than his teachers started to notice his work, and soon his work was getting Bigger. And because he was learning as he went, his work started to get Better, and he was learning all sorts of things about typography and character design, as well as form and shading.

Towards the end of the summer he went back to the teachers, and saw the first artist standing there. The first artist showed his work to the teachers, and the teachers didn't think he'd improved much at all; in fact, compared to the second artist, he'd somehow started to look worse in comparison.

When the second artist showed the teachers his work, the first artist blinked, turned to his friend, and went, "What the hell?! When'd you get that good?"

"Hey, when you're turning out so many of these things a week, you have to improve at it sooner or later..."

Now, just in case you're the type that prefers lists:

• Everyone sucks when they start. Let's just admit it to ourselves and move on. No, I'm not going to tell you how you suck, but once you get at least ten pages under your belt, you'll look back at the first one and say "I suck!". It's a given.
  
• Everything has a learning curve. Learning to draw, use a certain program, or tell a story only works if you keep doing in constantly. You can struggle in certain programs for years before you find out about Multiply layers, or how to Transparency Lock a layer to prevent coloring outside the lines, or what methods give you the best results for what you want.
• The longer you're out here, the more people see your work. No, we can't really rush this unless you're That Damn Good. And heck, if you're not up for very long, you also don't have a lot to show.
• Each comic you add makes your work that much more alluring. The more pages, the more odds of having a story, and the more people can see your work evolve. If you have enough to show how much the art has advanced (among other details), suddenly you give people more reason to want to read your work from there on in.
  
• Even if you ditch it later on for a better idea, you'll start out that much better. Think of it as Artist's XP. You want to level up, you gotta draw.
  
• Just drawing things isn't the same as drawing comics. Comics force you to think about storylines and action, scenery and setting, and a whole host of other things you won't get a feel for if you're just drawing your Level 17 paladin in 'exciting' new poses.

It doesn't matter when you start, just start already. You don't even have to be consistent about it, but it helps, because having a crappy comic that will eventually get better beats having no comic at all.

4 Quick Ways to Make Drawing Comics Simpler

1. Silhouettes are your friend.
   Yes, they're a slight cop-out, but if enough of a figure is showing that we can still make them out, you're good to go. You still have to sketch enough to know where to add detail to the edges, but done right you can limit your lineart and avoid coloring more figures than necessary to get the point across.
2. Tell the Story.
   Stupid, but if you don't need to show off your character's Gucci Purse in every single panel, why do so when just her face will do? In fact, if you don't need to have all her face in a panel for that matter . . .
3. Pull your 'Mental Camera' in and out of the shot.
   Pulling either really tight in or very far out can send two different dramatic messages to the story, and both of them mean less work for you if you know your world well. Close-ups alert the reader to key emotions and other intimate details, allowing the reader to feel as if they're channeling a given character and experiencing the moment. Distant shots add drama and give us a bystander's view of the events at hand, as though we were watching in real life.
4. Don't make every panel the same size.
   Readers tend to look from top to bottom, left to right. Have your Panels reinforce this idea; using different sizes and widths simply keeps things interesting and tends to help the reader's eye maintain focus. Also, when you're drawing out expansive scenes that attempt to have a background, being able to use different sizes lets you devote more time and space to the 'showoff' panel.
   

Hey, if you're going for broke when you draw anyway, nobody ever said you had to break your hand while doing it...

Stay Away from the "Real Artists"

When I'd first started the blog, I had a huge diatribe written out about DeviantArt and how while the site had useful features, the DeviantArt community itself was poisonous and essentially the MySpace of art sites, with the exception that you have to pay good money to DeviantArt to properly assault people's eyeballs. I deleted it for (among other reasons) believing that I was being heavy-handed to blast the place just because they made it too easy for everyone to get a page there; after all, making things easier is something any person starting out in a new field wants to encourage.

After roughly a week's worth of sitting on this, I realized the problem wasn't Sturgeon's Law; it was the presence of the "Professional Internet Artist", which falls in the same vein as the "Internet Tough Guy" but with minimally more marketable drawing skills. They might be big people in a certain corner of the community, or they might actually be pretty decent artists, but the main distinction is that they either:

• Still hang out too much online in certain communities to be anything worthwhile, especially if they work in a digital medium. Yes, becoming known in communities is important to becoming well-known, but at the same time, if you're there too much it's an admission that you've got nothing better to do (which, if you're starting out, is at least partly true) or you're a lazy artist. Being a Lazy Hacker is cool; being a lazy artist isn't.
• Seem to think they know exactly what's wrong with your attitude and your work, but at the same time aren't willing to help you do anything about it. The reason is that they have no incentive to give you any advice other than "go away and come back when you're better", but we'll get to that in a moment.
  

While it'd be all too easy to say they're just assholes for the sake of being assholes, we'll have better luck actually getting to the heart of the difference why (at least if you're going into a niche part of the art market like comics) it's best to just avoid these folk. Most of the rationale can be traced back to a key difference between a 'Professional' Artist versus a 'Professional' Blogger (and let's face it, I keep saying your comic's a blog for a reason): Professional Artists work on individual commission. Professional Bloggers work on collective effort.

As to why this makes a difference, look up to where I mentioned "having no incentive" to be nice to you and give you appropriate criticism. Artists work for money just like everyone else, but they work for only one person's money at a time. Until the artist gets to a level where more people are willing to pay than he's willing to work for, he has to make himself stand out as above the 90% crap line; there's a lot of ways to do this, but the favored method seems to be making everyone else look like crap through criticism.

Criticism can be a subtle form of trolling, in that any sort of response to it tends to make you look like an asshole for questioning it (unless it's really obvious they've overstepped a boundary), while for the person giving the crticism it gives them twofold benefit in making them look better than you are and either forcing you to accept the insult (thus proving them right) or reject it (which gives them an opportunity to label you with a bad attitude, giving them the high road). This isn't to say all criticism is bad, but "You forgot to draw Sonic's ears in" is far less likely to get a bad response than "Your anatomy is awful, I'd never commission someone of such low skill."

Depending on collective effort, meanwhile, is a necessity for comic artists and bloggers alike because there is far more strength banding together for them then there is in standing apart the way freelance artists do. The reasons are obvious: Bloggers depend on collective authority and the connections of the internet to maintain their positions of power, and likewise, comic artists working together can leverage conventions and other money-making opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible singly.

Comic artists won't have nearly the same level of arrogance regarding their work because they realize that beyond the general skill involved in 'making art', comics require the ability to tell a story as well: this means skill in paneling, lettering, and other comic-specific traits that have to be balanced in along with the ability to make good artwork. Having 'great' artwork is now relative because it has to be balanced in with producing lots of it in a way that is interesting for the reader to follow, and of course, the more you work with other comic artists, the more likely they will draw new fans to you as well; some of the best artists work as parts of a comic collective that assist and support each other by association.

Ergo, comic artists have incentive to be as helpful as possible; a rising tide floats all boats, after all, and anyone who can get new readers into their comic can also bring new readers into everyone else's comic as well as their own. Since comic artists only require a little from everyone instead of depending on one person's commissions, working to get lots of new readers (of which a few will hopefully pay more to get something special!) is a key goal of their work.

So support your local comic artist. You'll be supporting everyone else's too.

7. Beware the Family Friendly Label (unless you're really REALLY good at it).

Howard Tayler is one of the heavyweights in webcomics, and he's pretty damn successful at it. He's managed to make a daily strip run for seven years (and the majority of the past four without fail), he's sold books, done cons, gets his stuff to go for hundreds to the right fans, and manages to do it well enough to support a sizable family on the profits. He clearly knows what he's doing when we works on this stuff.

He also, apparently, gets flustered at fake ads referencing Orgasms-Per-Hour and random mothers of young children giving him crap because of said ads. As much as I hate to inject myself into the obvious drama this has brought to his fanbase, I can't say that 'orgasm' is a dirty word most kids would even understand (as opposed to something they already recognize is a bad word, like 'cunt'), and quite frankly I'd rather have a young child looking at an ad and realizing it's aimed at older people (thus ignoring it), than the previous ad which was talking about creepy old men who can erase your memories and also happen to be driving schoolbuses. Apparently it's okay to scare the crap out of young children and make them afraid of schoolbus drivers, but not okay to let them see the word 'orgasm'.

But, as I said, Mr. Tayler knows what he's doing, and I know why it's got him in such a righteous snit: he insists on total control over which ads appear on his site, while BlogAds refused to give him that total control, and this makes sense that he would be upset with them over such a distinction along with their bait-and-switch tactics. He also insists on a family-safe label as well, however, which makes sense for him and his audience, but not necessarily with the same universal approval. Then again, he's also someone who's been running for the past seven years on a daily comic; that kind of longevity gives you the power to dictate your own terms pretty damned well, and he is more than entitled to maintain whatever standards he likes.

I bring up Mr. Tayler and his recent drama as a pair of examples; On the one hand, we have a man who is clearly both good at his job and successful by webcomic standards. On the other hand, he's also bound by a stricter set of guidelines than the average artist, and as a result he has less flexibility to do what he wants and has to maintain that extra sense of vigilance over ads he deems inappropriate. The message is in the method: If you try to make things safe, you're causing yourself extra work later on in order to maintain that illusion of safety.

Family-Friendliness isn't the 'natural state of the internet', so to speak, and without a certain sense of what's good and what isn't (or your own personal canary in the coal mine to let you know what's what), you run the risk of making things 'too safe' and the resulting material has no effect whatsoever. If you need a certain amount of color to your humor, there's not much point in trying to 'dilute' it to make it 'family friendly' when such a distinction kills the joke.

This statement ties back to a basic Comic Commandment: Know Thy Audience. It doesn't shock me that a father with several small children insists on having a comic meet these Family-Friendly standards. It shocks me significantly that a college graduate in his mid-20s aims for one too, especially as it's meant for a nostalgic audience. When you aim for a niche audience (which, let's face it, being kid-safe is a definite niche), you give up some of the affordances having a webcomic often gives you, and require the rest of your work to pick up the slack since you can't just "go to the well".

As for my own work? I freely admit Last Resort isn't meant for a children's audience. There's no real way a story about a bunch of condemned criminals walking into their deaths (and that's without adding in the vampire elements...) is going to BE family-friendly, either. I can swap out a few of the invectives I use in the comic and censor it down to a PG level, but quite frankly I'd rather leave them in as fair warning about the level of violence and plot therein.

Family-friendliness means people don't die on-screen. Family-friendliness means you keep a minimum amount of clothing on. Family-friendliness means you can't let your characters say whatever they feel like. Family-friendliness means you don't have references to 'satanic' creatures like vampires, apparently, but that's a whole other complaint about people confusing Family Values with Christian don't-rock-the-boat Values. Eventually you realize that the Family label is just like the Adult label: once you accept it, you start locking yourself in and squelching your creative energies.

Given the choice, I'd much rather define the label than let the label define me.

"Top 10 Ways to Make your Comic Successful"

... or more importantly, why such things are a crock of [insert favorite word for excrement here].

Yes, I will admit this is self-zinging, because I'm writing a blog on how to make your comic big and yet I'm insulting other people posting about . . . you guessed it, how to make your comic big. It's not that I'm trying to cut down on the competition (though I'd be a fool not to admit I'd like being ahead of the pack).

It's that I'm sick of reading poor excuses for "Do this and suddenly your comic will rock". We all tend to know, instinctively, which ways work and others don't; unless we're incredibly new and naive as to how advertising works, they don't often say anything you don't already know, have tried, and have chiseled at enough to know it's either taking a lot of work a certain way, or like enough to try elsewhere.

Here's a hint: The real tricks that work are the same ones that worked on you when it came to other people's comics.

Your audience, whether you want to admit it or not, is just as smart as (if not smarter than) you, and so anything less is insulting to them. If you notice a certain trick working on you, then you should emulate the same tricks that lured you into reading someone else's comic and adopt them for yourself. Fortunately, this has the advantage of making emulation not just easy, but also proven through your own experience.

The next reason I tend not to like the Laundry Lists of Making Comics Successful is that it assumes all comics are the same sort of material, aimed to the same sort of audience, with the same sort of skew. All other things being equal, it's asinine to think that by doing the exact same thing as everyone else is going to put you AHEAD of everyone else. You're just playing catch-up at this point.

Besides that, if the person giving the advice knew anything of what he was talking about, he wouldn't be telling it to you as a way to get more attention for himself, which (admittedly) most blogs about this sort of niche all have at the heart of things. At least in reading my work, I freely admit I have no clue what's going to make or break me, and by the time I get there, this blog will have already detailed the real tricks involved.

And when I say the 'Real Tricks', I mean I'm not going to tell you to go to site A and register yourself because it worked for me. Here's a quick stab at my own top 10:

1. Doing things the way everyone else does them only puts you as far ahead as everyone else.
2. There's thousands of webcomics. Make sure yours is different enough to get anywhere.
   
3. Leeching off of other comics' readerships will only get you so far, but at least it's a start.
   
4. Expect to be struggling at it for at least a year. Even on the Internet, cults take time.
   
5. If you can't be regular, neither can your readers.
   
6. Most of the people you're advertising to already read comics. There's far more people in the world who don't. Try advertising to them instead.
   
7. Beware the Family-Friendly label (unless you're really really good at it).
   
8. Your Comic doesn't have a blog. Your Comic IS a blog. Treat it like one.
9. Eventually, advertising comics is like advertising anything else.
10. You are vying for people's attention spans. Your competition, therefore, is everything else in the world. Start digging the trenches now.
    

Note the lack of "Go to these sites and fill out these forums." That's cause these are the keys themselves; once you realize why these statements are all true, you can start aiming your crosshairs better.

More to the point, once I realize why they're all true, I can stop ranting about everyone else's bad aim.

Five Tips for Selling Yourself First

Online, an artist is only as good (or as bad) as their reputation. Some key concepts:

1. People don't just want an artist anymore. They want a friend.
Make yourself available. Chill in other comics' forums. For the first few months of your comic's existance, resign yourself to the idea that you're going to be leaching off of other established artist's groups, because quite frankly if you know how to reach any other audience you'd be writing a blog like this one. It may seem counter-intuitive and vaguely insulting, but for what it's worth, it's a lot cheaper than most other advertising routes open to you.

Don't worry about spreading yourself thin; Even if all you do is make a few high-profile posts on a forum, it's probably gotten you some decent legwork done, and that's umpteen more people that know about the comic when they wouldn't have otherwise.

2. They want you to spend some time on them personally.
If you're too busy to talk, your would-be-fans are too enamoured with other people to pay attention to you. Also, let's face it; you're drawing a WEBCOMIC. You have time to burn.

There's a few ways to accomplish this, and either it involves some "Author's Notes/Blog" type comics where you speak directly to the readers using the strip, or you keep a separate blog/LJ as a supplement to the comic. My personal favorite toy in this regard is using Twitter: It encourages you to write very tiny posts, so you can not only keep off-topic-ness to a minimum, but you can write LOTS of them in a day and nobody minds. Heck, that's what it's best used for. It still keeps an archive of everything, and it's accessible from so many places (Facebook comes to mind as the most recent 'new frontier'), so your fans can't help but keep up.

3. They want you to draw not just for their entertainment, but for THEM.
We're talking commissions, guest strips, fanservice, and other little things that give in to a reader's desires. If you're lucky a few of them coincide with each other and someone's commission of your character in a cheesecake pose can be used for merchandise later, effectively allowing you to be paid twice and get some good mileage out of the work. If you decide to do some sexy pinups for the hell of it anyway, don't think "I should be working on the comic instead of this"; think "I can use this as a wallpaper for a donation incentive"!

Unfortunately for you and your wallet, commissions are an outreach of reputation, so your reputation will affect the number of fans, which in turn affect the prices you can charge. The general translation is to wait a little while until people start asking you for art, then offer to charge. If nobody offers, start doing art for your friends, call them 'commissions' (even if they're technically freebies), and see if that gets more people to bite once they realize you're not above drawing their characters.

4. Keeping your readers informed on your life helps them care for you as a person.
Keeping a good comic is Internet Karma: Be good to the net, the net is good to you. Even if you're doing just fine without people's help, you'll still want them to donate, because money is a great incentive (especially to other people who wonder why you're wasting your time!). The more you can convince your readers you're an all-around awesome person and you can use the cash wisely, the more they'll give you what you need.

When you DO fall on hard times, you'll want the press to keep you afloat and your fans to keep looking out for you; you can't very well do it when you're laid up, so you may as well earn the karma now while you're healthy.

5. Be aware of the 'content flow'. More importantly, make sure it's consistent.
People like an artist they can keep their watches to, if only because it means they stand half a chance of keeping up with their work. Reading the archives of a webcomic can be daunting, especially if the comic in question is old. The best solution available is to make sure that users don't fall behind any more than they have to, which typically means update schedules for everyone's sanity.

How to decide on an update schedule: Figure out how many strips a week you can do when you're at your absolute goddamn worst and there's three finals to study for. Set the schedule accordingly; we want to aim for your minimum amount you can accomplish in a week, so you don't kill yourself trying to update too quickly. As a bonus, it also gives you a chance to work ahead and save future strips (known as a buffer or a backlog) so when cool stuff comes up, like conventions, trips, or just plain "I-don't-feel-like-it"-itis, you still have stuff waiting to go.

Don't worry about ever having 'too much' backlog, either; Howard Tayler keeps around 30-50 strips in his buffer fairly constantly, and I'm sitting on sixteen weeks of strips as of writing this post. Of course, we have different reasons for keeping them; Howard uses an automatic updater and being paranoid about his ability to produce the strip later always works in his favor, so keeping the buffer huge is a big advantage for him, while I'm building my buffer during the summer months so I can update at college with very little stress involved, or possibly speed up my update rate if it becomes insane to manage.

If you ever do have to do without a strip, at least put up something so your fans know something's up. Get Guest Strips and Fan Art to fill the void while you're out. You can accelerate the schedule or supplement it (like I'm doing with this blog), but slowing it down tends to leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Respect the update schedule, you respect the fans.

Respect the fans, and they respect you.

Not with a Bang or a Whimper

So how does a webcomic become successful, anyway?

. . . the truth of the matter is that I don't have a clue any more than the people who have successful webcomics. The people who don't have successful ones don't have much of a clue either, but the point is in seeking that part out, writing it down so other people can take advantage of it, and making both of us more informed (as readers and as a potential artists), and possibly convincing you that I know what I'm talking about.

A lot of what I'm going to say will involve thinking NOT about webcomics, but about how various tricks and techniques from other fields can be applied to webcomics and how they can make you better at what you do. We are, after all, talking about a medium that is still in the 'gooey, sticky mess' phase of its inception; a lot about what makes one comic great and another comic fail isn't always clear, and by the same token, what made a great webcomic five years ago isn't necessarily what makes a great comic now.

This is expected, after all; this is the internet, where sites come and go, people get burnt out, new artists take their place, and fortunes are made in ways that make the old content models cringe. Unfortunately, thanks to that same structure that allows a brand new artist to break out and become an overnight sensation, there's also a lot more 'slush' that needs to be waded through because it's also been made just as easy for everyone else to try and do the same. The goal of anyone trying to make it is now no longer impressing just a few (carefully chosen people), but finding ways to stand out and become the next big thing.

Simply put, that involves a little education.