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.

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...

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.

Five Secrets of the Lazy Hacker

Most of us know what a hacker 'is', or at least think we do; the image of some sweaty nerd who is anything but a healthy weight banging away at the keyboard and doing God-knows-what to our computers. Really, it's just someone who is so damned determined to get Result A that they're willing to do Task B, even if it means voiding a warranty or rooting around in the binaries to find out how to do it. Since at least some of making a webcomic means controlling the webpage it's viewed on, learning to be a Lazy Hack can be quite useful:

Lazy Hacker Secret #1: Never code for yourself what someone else has already put out on the Internet.
We don't mean theft, either. If you want to find a way to put Twitter into an image so you can have it in your forum sigs, guess what: Someone at TwitterSig already did it for you, albeit you might not like the image. Likewise, using templates for MySpace, Blogger, and other paste-and-bakes is already quite possible, and so it shouldn't be an issue to find one (or better yet, find one you can customize).

If you can only find close-but-not-quite what you want...

Lazy Hacker Secret #2: Grok the Code that's already There.
You should know what clean, commented-out code looks like when you see it, because it actually makes SENSE to read it. If you're not working from code that's already pristine, make it pristine. Tabbing-in nested portions and spacing out your work isn't just nice to read, it's essential to learning anything. Lazy Coders don't make their code easy to read because they don't want you to read it, so it'll be up to you to figure out how to clean it up.

Of course, sometimes you just don't want to read about that damned stylesheet any more than you have to, so...

Lazy Hacker Secret #3: Compartmentalize Repeated Code.
You'll need to learn some php, but we're talking very minimal php, and this is talking about actually coding stuff. A fun thing to understand about PHP is that it not only allows for code execution, but it also allows for object-oriented coding, even when all you're doing is regurgitating HTML. Between the choice of designing a header that has to be copy-pasted across umpteen pages versus telling each page to retrieve from "header.php", and then only having to change one file versus umpteen whenever you want to create a change . . . well, that's not just Lazy, that's downright clever.

But now we've just asked you to learn a little trick to make your life easier! That's okay, because since you're trying to be Lazy, obviously you should...

Lazy Hacker Secret #4: Only Learn What You Need Right Then.
Just because it's not the way you were taught in school doesn't mean it still won't work. When it comes to HTML, CSS, PHP, and all the other Alphabet-soup languages, you should only seek out the parts that get the job done; you'll understand those bits easier, and even if it doesn't make sense, at least you know what works. Language references are just littered across the internet, and picking up the few bits you need from each one should be easy, right?

Once you've done this much legwork, and you're still stumped, it's time to use the last Tip...

Lazy Hacker Secret #5: Know Who to Ask.
When it comes to simple HTML questions, it makes sense to ask your peers first. If you feel you need more advice, forums for programmers and books on the stuff are meant to be used. As long as you sound like you've done at least a little research, most geeks will gladly either give you the next few steps, or soundly correct you (but give you the right answer anyway).

Caveat: Make sure the question is worth their time. You don't ask Linus Torvalds what the 'ls' command is, and trying to jump the hierarchy of expertise makes you look dumber for asking and also makes it less likely others will answer.

A little effort goes a long way with a Lazy Hacker, and while it won't make you a complete programming guru, at least it'll be enough to make what you've got look worthwhile.