Webcomics 101: Laying Your Foundation
You can’t build a house without a foundation. Well, you can, but eventually it’s going fall over or sink into the ground. The same goes for webcomics – you need to be building your webcomic on a solid foundation. What do I mean by this? You need to go into this knowing how you want to do it.
Do you want to do gag-a-day strips or a serial story? Do you want to be a single panel comic, a traditional newspaper strip, or a graphic novel page comic? Color or black and white? Original recipe or extra tasty crispy?
Okay, okay, let’s slow down a bit. I’m guessing that if you’ve decided to do a webcomic, you probably at least have an inkling of what you want to do. Now it’s a matter of what you’re capable of doing. So how do you figure that out? Do some practice runs. Can you write thirty four-panel strips, each with a punch line? Can you create thirty one-panel gag comics? Can you keep continuity going – and interesting – for thirty pages? Thirty isn’t an official benchmark or anything, but it’s a good test of your abilities.
If punch lines aren’t your bag, you might want to stick with telling a story. If you can’t keep a story going, you’ll probably want to stick with gag-a-day comics. If you can do both, try shaking both into the mix. There’s no set formula here; it all boils down to what you’re comfortable with.
There are also some technical issues to consider that will affect you in the long run. First is being able to put together a strip or page in a timely manner. I understand that there are a good number of successful comics that update on a sporadic and even unpredictable basis, but my personal conviction is that you should have a set schedule. Even if it’s only one page a month, you should be able to guarantee your readers something. However, if you say you’re going to do three days a week, make sure that the format you choose can be done three days a week. Can you come up with three punch lines per week on time? Can you color your full-page layouts and stick to your schedule? This is where doing practice runs comes in handy again. Set yourself a test schedule and act is if you’re officially updating a webcomic. If you can’t do it, you can at least find out where the problem is and fix it before you go live.
Another technical issue to think about is putting your strips into a print collection someday. Yes, you’re a long way off, but it’s happening more and more so you may as well prepare ahead of time. Some readers like to have a hard copy of the comic on their bookshelves, and you may even be able to make some decent cash off of the venture. However, if you have an unwieldy or unconventional strip format, a print collection may be difficult or even impossible to put together. So try to keep your format simple and, above all, consistent.
Make sure that the format you choose will be good for you and for your readers. One of the easiest ways to lose your readership is frequent hiatuses and missed updates. You want to keep your readers happy. But on the same token, you don’t want to make yourself go insane trying to keep up with a schedule that doesn’t work with the format you chose.
You didn’t think this much preparation went into a webcomic, did you? And we haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet!
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webcomictalk) wrote,
calm
