Webcomic Beacon

Webcomic Beacon #77: How NOT to Make a Webcomic (part 2)

Adam Smithee (Apple of Discord) joins Fes, Tanya, and Mark continue to discuss how not to make a webcomic.

[display_podcast]

Don’t forget to listen to PART ONE!

Milestones: Toilet Texting (100 strips), Ravilob (1 yr), Twisted Musing (2 yrs & 300 issues), Dungeon Legacy (100 pages).

This episode is brought to you by: Jayden and Crusader, The Apple of Discord and Yosh!

Thanks to George for recording the sites mentioned on the show:
The Webcomic List, Dog Pile Forum, Drunk Duck, Comic Genesis, Smack Jeeves, Net Mechanic, LEPUS (gone), Spreadshirt, Zazzle, Printfection, Quantcast, Rocket Llama, Abstract Gender, Aptitude Test, Speak no evil, Eisner vote, Theory of everything comics, GOD TM, Rosetta Stone, The Ten Doctors.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Facebook Twitter Email

Comments

Hah! We designers aren’t going to hate you for saying that things should be compatible with IE6. Oh we hate IE6 alright, but we know we still need to make adjustments for it.

One of the primary reasons I started doing the How NOT To comics (and now the lecture/panel/podcast) is that I’d be reading through the new comics section of TWCL and I’d hit upon a new comic that would be great… except… there’d be that one thing the person did that’s enough to drastically damage the comic’s potential for survivability.

And the worst part is – they may have meant to do it, but mostly they didn’t realize the impact of what they’d done… People tend to get these blinders on when thinking about certain things, be it the font they’re using or the type of comic they’re making or the compression ratio they’re presenting their comic at, or whether or not a majority of the people reading the comic can load the web-page.

It’s sort of hard to say any one thing can really mess you up, though… I mean, XKCD and Dinosaur Comics (God, ESPECIALLY Dinosaur Comics), are both formats unlikely to garner longevity, let alone profitability, and yet… well, they have.

I think there’s a lot of things a comic CAN do wrong, but not necessarily enough analysis of what a comic has done right to get to where they are (and why these results are hard to replicate), which seems more important to me. There’s some basics, sure, but there’s also a lot of things that successful comics seemingly do “wrong”… but tell THEM that!

Neil, I followed you on Twitter – follow me back and I’ll PM you. I’m afraid to say his – or her – name aloud in public, lest they descend from Valhala and strike me down where I stand with their mighty internets.

Leave a Reply