Self-Publishing and Webcomics, or “Haven’t We Been Here Before?”

[ursulav]

Sometimes you sit with your fingers over the keyboard, and you KNOW somebody’s gonna get mad at you.

Ideas are like potatoes. No matter how many ways you turn your idea around, looking for the best possible angle, it’s got lumps and somebody out there wanted cauliflower.

I’m gonna talk about self-publishing for a bit. And webcomics. Because, as my

Comments

[brooksmoses]

As a tangent -- because I totally agree with most of the post -- I found it interesting how much the "your art had to not suck and your writing REALLY had to not suck" equation favored writing. You've seen the art in the first six months of Schlock Mercenary, right?

On the other hand, I think the key there is that Howard got better, and as the strip started getting a real following -- and, for that matter, as there started to be more competition; he was in the game really early -- the art started getting passably good, and then it kept getting better.

It is also interesting what shapes "your art has to not suck" takes. XKCD actually does remarkably good stick figures, if you pay attention. Real Life in the earlier days was basically the same Illustrator shape repeated over and over. Basic Instructions is traced photographs -- often the same traced photographs. And so on. But the thing is, they have all gotten good at doing what they do, and they are also all good at laying out a readable comic.

[derakon]

Put it simply, people can recognize when you do good work with a (possibly intentionally) limited toolset vs. when you're just being lazy. And the general webcomic-reading public's tolerance for laziness has dropped off steadily with time. As a reader, if I'm not enjoying myself then there's plenty of quality content out there (for free!) that I can read instead; it's up to the author/artist to make me care, to get me to notice, to get me to be invested. And that takes a lot of effort!

(On a similar note, if I'm 50 pages into a book and don't really care about what's going on, I feel perfectly free to put the book down and walk away. There will always be more books to read)

[dragonsong]

I couldn't make myself put down a book until I got a Nook and started hitting B&N's free book fridays. The official free book was usually good, but a lot of the other books that get linked are self-published drek. Not all, but most. It's gotten to the point that I flat won't download anything from Smashwords, I've been burned so many times.

It's actually been pretty freeing.

[jeliza]

XKCD has the most expressive stick figures ever. To get so much emotion out of a 5 lines and a circle is just amazing.

[ursulav]

Oh, seriously! And not just anybody could do that, either!

[orv]

Yeah, the artist who does XKCD is obviously making a deliberate choice to draw with such a minimalist style. You can see this when he occasionally busts out something really detailed or or with complicated perspective. Plus his art is simple, but it's not sloppy or unappealing.

[kevinbunny]

You forgot Dinosaur Comics, which has been making witty, insightful, and funny cartoons USING THE SAME EXACT IMAGE for years...

[gardenwaltz]

What frightens me is that someone had to actually point out to me that it was the same image. I only saw the occasional strip and had just never noticed.

[blaisepascal]

I look at most of the seriously long-running web comics I read (S*P, QC, Schlock, Kevin&Kell, etc), and they give me hope: If I simply draw 1000s of comic strips, I too can advance from not being able to draw to being a decent comic artist. The improvement in skill is amazing over the years.

[mizkit]

I started reading Questionable Content because somebody linked to one of them years ago, and I went back to look at the first ones to see how much the art had developed since then, and...yeah. Four years later... :)

[jessicamariek]

The Order of the Stick is basically stick figures with hair and backgrounds (which vary from very very simple to... somewhat less simple). I've read entire SERIES of books that have been less gripping than that comic, where nobody has a nose and limbs are represented by a single black line.

Art is bonus, but story is king.

[skellington1]

"Art is bonus, but BELKAR is king, having earned his throne made of the bodies of whomever happened to be around at the time, and Mr Scruffy is his loyal companion."

The end.

[jessicamariek]

*nods* We all bow to the sexy shoeless god of war. (I need that line on a bumper sticker or something.)

[skellington1]

I know, right? Best line from the the whole thing.

I'm also quite fond of him in the Roc Feather Pimp Hat.

[orv]

I'd say a good rule of thumb is that at good art can carry poor writing, and good writing can carry poor art, but you have to have one of them going for you. And neither can be *distractingly* bad unless its badness is the whole point.

[derakon]

Good writing can carry bad art a hell of a lot better than good art can carry bad writing. The bottom line is that you're telling a story, and your writing informs how well that story is told far more than the art does. Unless it's a wordless strip, I guess. Even then, the "writing" (in terms of what is going on and how the characters react) is very important; it's just that the art needs to step up much more to convey all that.