here’s an idea that’ll make someone, somewhere rich: a comic made with ps1-style low poly models, with rpg text boxes instead of speech bubbles
This reminds me, when I bought an actual comic a few 7 years back for the first time in forever uh Batman Detective Comics #35 (2014) because it had John Paul Leon art, the paper was so high quality and slick and glossy it was just ridiculous–like, why are we paying for this Rolls Royce paper? The comic was $4 which seemed like a lot and you know maybe it could have been cheaper if it had just used pulpy paper with faded colors like they had in the '80s and everybody was okay with, they felt nice and didn’t blind you with glare or neon colors when you tried to read them. : P
/oldmanrant
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One of the comics I saw in an issue of Heavy Metal was literally photographs of posed barbies and action figures. Anything is possible! Hell, gmod comics were a big thing for a while. Sprite comics too.
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It’s like you guys are just discovering web comics
yeah i noticed while each comic didn’t look identical, they all seemed to have a very similar “style” if that can be anything. I think they go for this style because it’s clearly “high grade comics” vs “graphic novels” which have more flexibility.
ohhh how I wish it were like the old days where you were on a web-ring or whatever. I tried joining one (hiveworks) but they have a totally brutal entry process that requires vetting/voting and you have to have regular updates and meet a certain quality bar. I feel like everything has been app-ified too. You can get on several webcomic “platforms” and follow other comics but because you’re right against these slickly produced hyper popular webcomics you feel, as an artist, completely outclassed by. I pretty much have to settle for 10 people reading my webcomic and I’m kind of fine with that, because anything more requires a shit ton of hustle I don’t have
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Oh, webcomics are a whole other disaster. They’ve joined the gig economy. Kids working themselves to death for pennies of ad revenue. No, speak to me not of webcomics.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. Not going near those platforms.
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I depend on my webcomic for income and it’s mostly via Patreon, which was not available when I started back in 2009, and comicartfans.com, which well maybe it was around back then, not sure, but it took me years to realize I could sell my comic art through it. But back then or maybe a few years later there was projectwonderful for cheap advertising and more comic sites–that weren’t all this Korean vertical thing that’s all the rage now–where you could work on drumming up an audience; then again maybe tumblr and twitter are a little more effective for it now than they were then. Back then there were more mega-webcomics whose authors dominated the news and they seemed impossible to compete against. Then Kickstarter came along and sort of killed that version of webcomics because more people found they made more money self-publishing graphic novels instead of webcomics. Anyway, now some things are better, some things are worse.
Slickness is a style, and not the only one that can succeed. What you have to be able to do is make something good, and that takes a lot of time and work. I think. For instance I just switched to taking two days per page instead of just one, and suddenly I’m getting way more comic art collectors bidding on my stuff.
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I did not know you had a webcomic! this is funny, because when me and a friend were both talking about our webcomics, we were each unaware that we both had a webcomic, despite us both presumably promoting it regularly.
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I had a fairly well-known webcomic in the 00s and started a follow-up in 2012 which I quit in 2015 and started back up earlier this year with the intention of finishing it by next April. Just trying to get it done so I can get a put together a book for my shelf.
So I just came back after a 6 year hiatus and wow does this landscape make me concerned. I really do not like it when people get in-between young enthusiastic creators and their audiences and collect rent in exactly the space that is supposed to be the most democratic. And I really do not like what all this clout chasing is doing to these people’s self-esteem.
Sorry, ranting. This has just been on my mind of late.
Speaking of of gmod, isn’t one of the big software packages’ features is that you can pose 3D models within a frame to trace over?
Clip Studio Paint lets you do this, I’ve tried to use it but i find the posing to be really awkward.
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Hm well it always seemed to me that furry comics are pretty much a slam-dunk for at least a certain not-insignificant audience, but you gotta present it to that audience. Have you put it on tumblr? Twitter? It doesn’t look like you have it listed on https://new.belfrycomics.net/, which is pretty much the most obvious–at least to an outsider like me–key index especially for furry comics, so I’m kind of baffled by your comic not being on it, which is just legwork you have to do yourself. And then I’m just gonna guess there are a good deal more furry-comic-oriented sites and forums and stuff where you could put it.
You could also mirror it on yes those popular Korean-style vertical sites (Line Webcomics and Tapas being maybe the two largest I dunno I’ve stopped keeping track), also there’s still duckwebcomics.com and comicfury.com for old-style regular comic mirrors; I don’t do mirrors anymore because it is a few extra minutes of work per page to post them up, but in the beginning at least it’s a way to get more eyes on it. If all you do is post your comic to your own site and maybe link to it here every now and then, that’s not gonna get you very far.
thats because i didn’t know about it until now! I will have to try and see about adding myself to it.
What are you referring to specifically?
I don’t know where you’re at but if you have a forward thinking comic shop with a zine rack even having a couple issues on consignment with your website listed might catch some eyes.
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You gotta look around, man. You gotta look at everything. People aren’t gonna tell you about everything that’s out there, you gotta search. You have to creep and trawl around and find everything that’s out there related to what you’re trying to do, because it’s hard and not knowing all you can about it is just going to make it harder.
Oh, if I’m perfectly honest I don’t know what I’m talking about. Too much twitter. My concern is based on the pressure that, for instance, webtoon artists feel to deliver regular huge updates and kind of despair that they seem to be expressing all the time about their enormous follower counts. If anybody is making money off that dynamic (apart from the creators themselves) I find that pretty distasteful.
But I’m being irresponsible talking about this. I don’t have any experience in this space and I don’t even really belong in it. It could be for the best.
I really miss Zanadu in downtown Seattle. They had a pretty long couple of shelves with local or super indie stuff and genuinely cared about small creators. I don’t think I’ve read any comics since it closed.
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I mean the reason I hadn’t done so in the first place was because I was generally unaware, and hustling isn’t exactly what I had in mind. People who follow or make webcomics in the circles I’m in are usually into the big platforms or certain web forums with webcomics threads. It’s hard to know where to look because google/web search is completely fucked, and I’m searching for how to promote something, a subject rife with grifters and hucksters.
I did have my webcomic on tapas but the extra effort was not worth the page views it was still getting (zero?) and then they changed up their terms of service a bunch around intellectual property which made me take it off.
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