How's Your Webcomic? #339

It's that time again.

Post your comic, link your site!
Ask for help if you're having trouble, help others out if you're REALLY having trouble
show Strong Bad why webcomics are the BEST thing with web- as the prefix.

Other urls found in this thread:

myscriptfont.com/
artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/
quickposes.com/pages/timed
senshistock.deviantart.com/gallery/
shutterstock.com/
pinterest.com/characterdesigh/
tumblr.com/theme/39018
pastebin.com/kNR2W5mV
docs.google.com/document/d/1uwfOSHXfrgvcf--PkPz9jXL6p5RqIsrYvXYwgQpgT3k/edit#
youtube.com/watch?v=5xPvvPTQaMI
courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse456/07su/administrative/invisible_ink_part_1.pdf
courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse456/07su/administrative/invisible_ink_part_2.pdf
courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse456/07su/administrative/invisible_ink_part_3.pdf
chrisoatley.com/category/podcasts/
web.archive.org/web/20140625035030/http://paperwingspodcast.com/
blambot.com/
cienciasecognicao.org/rotas/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Robert-McKee-Story.pdf
miss-melee.tumblr.com/post/143483233951/
mediafire.com/folder/9pf1nwwa92lbp/Comics_for_making_Comics
docs.google.com/document/d/1WZ11_srRS5fvNgM5lFSx1s9J3UivcqfYPS6GJLhl-vc/edit?usp=sharing
tapastic.com/series/Village-Problems
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Scrub Authors GOODIE Bag
Here’s a short list of sites that any new webcomic artist or writer will find handy:
>*-Struggling to find that perfect FONT? Create your own using this link;
myscriptfont.com/

>*-Don’t forget to brush up on that ANATOMY:
artists.pixelovely.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/
quickposes.com/pages/timed

>*-What’s a list without some reference STOCK IMAGES?
People: senshistock.deviantart.com/gallery/
Scenery: shutterstock.com/

>*-Here's a big fat compilation of CHARACTER DESIGN REFERENCE:
pinterest.com/characterdesigh/ (surprisingly not a typo)

>Links to get a rough WEBSITE started up:
Easy to use tumblr webcomic theme: tumblr.com/theme/39018
Do’s and Don’ts for starting a site: pastebin.com/kNR2W5mV
>Contact sheet if anyone wants to put information down, like their site and webcomic:
docs.google.com/document/d/1uwfOSHXfrgvcf--PkPz9jXL6p5RqIsrYvXYwgQpgT3k/edit#

>DISCORD CHAT going on,
Ask for an invite in the thread.

>Wise words from John Cleese:
youtube.com/watch?v=5xPvvPTQaMI

>Invisible Ink:
courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse456/07su/administrative/invisible_ink_part_1.pdf
courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse456/07su/administrative/invisible_ink_part_2.pdf
courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse456/07su/administrative/invisible_ink_part_3.pdf

>Paper Wings
chrisoatley.com/category/podcasts/
web.archive.org/web/20140625035030/http://paperwingspodcast.com/

>Fonts for your webcomic on Blambot:
blambot.com/

>Writing Resources:
cienciasecognicao.org/rotas/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Robert-McKee-Story.pdf

>Guide to promoting your comic:
miss-melee.tumblr.com/post/143483233951/

>Comics for makin' comics!
mediafire.com/folder/9pf1nwwa92lbp/Comics_for_making_Comics

Here's some discussion to get a start
what if you feel like drawing fight scenes that just go on and on, but you know it would slow your comic down too much. How do you pick what's most important or entertaining to include?

Context and dialogue. Shit talking is always entertaining so long as it's relevant.

that explains spider-man's popularity I suppose

And most manga

Could I get an invite to the Discord please?

Me too pls

I'd probably try to do some multi-page updates. Reading fight scenes in chunks feels so much better than just waiting for the next page, even if the updates are less frequent.
Additionally, plan it all out in advance. Don't include too many irrelevant scenes, as that can slow down the action too much and make the readers lose focus of why the action is even happening. (cough, Paranatural's hitball, cough) Action scenes already slow down the story, so try not to slow it down even further.

>multi-page updates
now that's an idea (or in my case I'd just do one really long page) but what about having a longer wait? is it worth that?
>Paranatural
ugh yeah. that was sad. it was funny enough but what the hell

Long fight scenes need layers, they're a story within the story.

What built up to the conflict? Why have it? What is the relationship of the characters in the conflict?Are they equals? is one superior to the other ?what is the relationship after the fight concludes? is the issue resolved or has the dynamic changed?

Use the these narrative layer to inform your choreography and fight layout, tease the reader with what they want or expect and take it away, set things up and pay them off etc.

It should never be just 2 guys hitting themselves pointlessly , or a situation where you interrupt the story for the obligatory fight.

Hmm that's interesting.
Honestly I was just watching this really well-choreographed bit of animation, and realizing that I'd love to put that much into my comic, but what would take 15 seconds of animation would be 10 pages of comic, whereas 5 minutes of talking could be put into one page.

i think you're allowed to drop some background detail if you put in more action panels though

Finished this page!

is it possible to have a good story in only twelve pages?
i'm trying to write one about an old man escorting a girl home through a dangerous neighborhood, only for the girl to rob the man at the end.
but i'm not sure if the story would end up feeling too rushed or not

Great page man! Love the use of lighting.

Sure, story sounds simple enough, and I've seen plenty of fine comics with 12 pages or less. Try making some thumbnail sketches of the whole story first, it shouldn't take too long. Once you've got that, you can figure out your pacing.

For a simple story like that you don't need a lot of pages. I can see it being done on 12, I think I would do it in even less than that, with a story as simple as that you have to be preocupied with it being too dragged out. After all, how big can this neighborhood be, and how much can happen from one side of the street to the other?

The important thing here is the twist, if you do a good job at showing potential danger, and you do a good job revealing the twist, it doesn't matter how many pages it takes.

miniseries are definitely different from full series, but theyre totally doable.
some of the best webcomics I've ever read have been intentionally set around 100 pages, that's my favorite selfcontained unit I think

I love it bro you finally fixed the text size like we've been asking, perfect!!!

Hah my ninja you have been studying the great ONE I see good on you mate!

Is it weird if I would use anime ace font in my comic? The comic is not really manga/anime styled but I just like the look and find it pleasing to the eyes.

It should be fine, there's not much of a difference between that font and most other fonts you see in western comic books. I doubt anyone will care.

that's a good general comic font. it works for comedy or seriousness.

Actually, It's a mix of me being inspired by ONE and Jojo.

is there a preferred size for comics? I've been using the US letter preset for comics, would A4 better? or does it not matter too much?

are you planning on printing?

not really but it wouldn't hurt making my comics the proper printing size if I do ever decide to print something. go with A4 then I'm guessing?

Excellent, my dude, you are almost to their level! Haha great stuff my man

These threads are shit

Thanks dude, It feels good to get compliments sometimes.

Does it feel good when coldfusion suky suky your diky

Nah, he probably doesn't like Jojo or ONE.

Not enough little girls :^)

you know that guy's just fucking with you, right?

Maybe, but I'll just give him the benefit of the doubt.

Finally decided on an outfit for the edgy golem/robot guy.

I want to redo the mouth but haven't had any ideas yet, so if you've got any suggestions that'd be groovy. As of now I'm thinking maybe some kind of mandibles that go flush with the face when closed.

How many layers of irony is that? I lost count.

sensible.
flush mandibles are okay, but I think your problem is that the mouth area is a little too large.. the way it goes up at the corners, making a rectangle? It's awkward. Better to just have the full skull-cheekbones (though I know you said you want to avoid those) or else take it all the way down to a proper mouth area

5 or 6 my man

So I drew the 200th Magic Forest today, I went and compiled them all onto this google doc-

docs.google.com/document/d/1WZ11_srRS5fvNgM5lFSx1s9J3UivcqfYPS6GJLhl-vc/edit?usp=sharing

I'm trying to pick a top 35 so gimmie the numbers of the ones you like/think are the funniest.

Looking back at the art work on the first ones makes me cringe desu.

grats!
that's all of them? I remember when you first posted it, and I remember starting from the beginning, and... I remember the first ones looking a lot rougher than that, but also having more 'being an animal' jokes.

Good stuff man, I think you can go more wild with the crazy lighting in the last panel to really emphasize the punches.

someone should make a webcomic about someone who gains the power to punch people in the face over the internet

New comic, took way too long.

do it yourself retard

Question, how many years after an apocalyptic event would it take for people to begin to forget about past societies?

Unrelated question: For those of you who have tumblrs and/or active comics, do you encourage asks? Have you gotten any and drawn a picture or strip as the response?

Getting some concept art done.

how much media did they lose? is the internet gone and did most of the books burn? are people having difficulty communicating with each other in general, really spread out?
if the books didn't burn it would take a while for them to rot if improperly-stored, bout 100 years depending on the paper quality.
it also depends on how super rough things are, like if everyone who wasn't really tough gets killed,then you could lose all the intellectuals in a few generations, and without those, the average schlubb knows diddly squat about the past. it'd become telephone-game really quickly.

i've always wanted one of those things. I figured I'd do one as soon as I got popular, but that's not happening anytime soon
hey this is cool-looking. are you new? i'm loving this style.

Thank you dude, I'm glad you like it.
Yeah I'm new. Never ran my own webcomic before.

coolcool. what's it about, fighting? it looks like it's about fighting. and maybe psychic powers.

Fuckin' lol

this guy

tapastic.com/series/Village-Problems

didn't think of a comic name but chose this jut because

I need sprite to replenish my shitty artistic abilitys

I will prob update it soon enough, its about magic people, and weird shit maybe. if you're too lazy to click link i'll show in spoiler

He's taking a break from his hit webcomic to come and patronize us fuckin el

I'm doing a QnA for my comic right now since I just finished a chapter. I got a couple asks from one mirror, and I'm going to draw/post the answers to fill the hiatus between chapters.

>taking a break
Coldfusion is here all day. If anything, he takes a break from the threads to "work" on his garbage excuse for a comic.

This dude looks cool , what's your comic about buddy?

kinda interesting.. ima check this out, but what's with not capitalizing some people's names?

I'm a lazy guy but i do love my work, So i guess it just dawned on me, nice eye user

im letting friends also make pannels so the art direction might change from time to time also, and maybe i'll do some anime or some shite

Yeah this looks pretty lazy, especially that first page.. and I'm seeing a lot of other typos. I understand lazy, man. I'm glad you're having fun... I just hope you feel like getting serious someday

Oh yea serious, that's why it's taking 5+ days to make, trying to get everything good before dishing out 2 more. I follow ya' user

It's for d&d 5e, though I've considered making a comic for the game I'm in.

When there's no Batman/Donut Steel thread up I post my shit here instead to bump the thread/get suggestions since it's not worth making a whole new thread just for my one thing and there's not really anywhere appropriate for it on /tg/.

>How do you pick what's most important or entertaining to include?
I don't "pick" what's entertaining, I MAKE it entertaining from the start. Long fights aren't inherently bad. They feel much more epic when done properly, compared to simple little two-page brawls.

Why is Tapastic so popular? That's not rhetorical, I actually want to know. It seemed to spring up out of nowhere and completely overtake the webcomic hosting scene, yet the site is disgusting and doesn't offer any html/customization options to authors, every comic on the site is stuck with the same shitty format. It boggles my mind that it's so huge.

Preach

I think it's because it has mobile apps.

I think the key is to proportion the length and detail of the fight to its importance to the story. Unless the big selling point of your comic IS very detailed action scenes, then it's probably a good idea not to bog down your story with too many lengthy fight scenes that don't have a significant role in or impact on the story--save that epic fight scene for a dramatic point or at the climax of an arc, where it will carry the most weight.

It's very reader friendly. It has a mobile app, daily recommendations, and a new comic featured on the front page twice a week. It's a lot easier to find decent comics on Tapastic than SmackJeeves. Since it's easier for readers to use the site, there are more readers overall, which draws in webcomic artists looking for an audience.

I actually don't know why taptasic is getting hype, i just searched up and BAM it was there, i did hear about something else but my memory is shit so idk, i just went with taptasic

oh yeah
well I guess we appreciate the bumps anyway

>It's a lot easier to find decent comics on Tapastic than SmackJeeves.
Is that the precedent? I thought SmackJeeves was one of the more obscure webcomic hosts.

according to its inherents, it provides some kind of promotional service
nobody has satisfactorily laid this out for me

That would only make sense if webcomic readers were like food-eaters and wanted a variety of meals at different times, instead of perpetually keeping up on their favorites and reading them all the way through
the reccommendations would surely be meaningless
plus who the shit can read a comic on a phone?

It makes me bitter seeing how much attention Tapastic gives it's comics and creators compared to other hosts, but I can't bring myself to use it because it's so shitty actually reading comics on there.

I guess if it's OTHER people reading my comic and not be reading anything there I shouldn't worry about it, but it just annoys me. It's on the same tier as using Tumblr to host/read a webcomic.

er, adherents*

>plus who the shit can read a comic on a phone?
People who read shitty comics like Owlturd that use giant, simplistic pictures and giant simplistic text and like 4 panels.

Seriously, look it up, it's the most popular fucking comic on Tapastic. It's like it was made specifically for phones. It's awful.

Fuck those.

Autism. There are millions of web comic readers, and you can't fathom how some of them might have different consumption habits? Fucking idiot.

The main older webcomic hosts I can remember are Smackjeeves, Drunk Duck, and Comic Fury. Out of those three Smackjeeves always seemed the most active, and it had comics that were well known by people who didn't actively use Smackjeeves (Rare Candy Treatment, My Life With Fel.)

>plus who the shit can read a comic on a phone?

A lot of people, apparently, especially Koreans. Scrolling-format comics are getting popular nowadays precisely because of phones.

What I can't fathom is how suddenly a massive chunk of them have different consumption habits from all previous webcomic readers who ever existed prior, overnight.
I don't get why the host matters. when I read a comic, I don't go to the main page of that host, ever. I'm not ever like "hey let's see what's on drunkduck.com!", and I can't imagine what kind of tard actually would. even less if they're using phones, you can barely access the URL bar on those let alone use it

>Out of those three Smackjeeves always seemed the most active
It never felt like it, but I guess that's just how hard all three of them pale in comparison to the shitty new hosts popping up. Wish SJ's Admin would put more effort into putting together a team to help him build up the site's popularity.
Instead he tries to do everything himself and even giving the site a nice facelift he seems to break every other feature and has been damage-controlling it for a week. The dude can't even put together a decent group pic that was all hyped up recently even though there are probably a dozen people he can ask to help with it.

>I don't get why the host matters.
This discussion popped up the other day, but they matter because ones like Tapastic can bring in tons of free publicity that sites like SJ don't give a shit about.
That site only cares about promoting the same shitty popular comics that have always been there, no effort to actually spread awareness of great lesser-known comics that get buried in the sea of sprite trash and weeb porn.

>That site only cares about etc. etc.
And by that site I mean SJ, not Tapastic. Tapastic's site layout is trash but it at least seems to care about it's comics and giving authors more exposure.

Maybe I'm old but I feel like you're asking for a lot. Back in my day we didn't care if your comic was on tripod, geocities, or angelfire. they were interchangeable, and all we asked them was to give us a certain amount of free hosting space... which wasn't enough, really, but hosting was more expensive back then I guess

>Maybe I'm old
Maybe you are.

When a new service does incredible things it sets a new standard. A new bar. Understandably it can take competitors some time to catch up, but when it comes to this kind of thing those that can't catch up should be left in the dust. SJ, Comic Fury, Drunk Duck, they're old. They're dated. They're archaic, and they're doing nothing to match what sites like Tapastic are doing, and if it stays this way they deserve to be deserted and left to die.

If Tapastic's shitty forced layout wasn't so bad I would've jumped ship to post there ages ago.

okay but what incentive do they provide to go to their main website? that's the part I still don't get
because if it's just ads, i mean, other comics do that. comicgenesis ads are often for other comicgenesis comics, if they pay for that ad space

>okay but what incentive do they provide to go to their main website?
What the fuck are you talking about?

where all this reccommendation shit is that you mentioned, all that stuff that promotes other comics. it's not on the individual comic sites

Sometimes readers just get curious and go to the main site to find more comics. The promoted comics are all on the front page, one featured at the top of the page, and several beneath the trending comics in the staff picks.

Alright, got the map of West Tree all set in stone now.

Next Saga in West Tree is going to heavily focus on the neighborhood.

That doesn't seem like it would accomplish much, just waiting for people to 'get curious and go to the main site' when they could just rely on their old pal google to find comics, or to find websites that archive comics, and know they had a much greater pool to choose from, maybe even with tags for genres and content.

this is fucking garbage, how can you look at this and think in any way or form that this is good or even good enough?

He has the mental capacity of a 3rd grader. His shit is all derivative garbage copied from whatever recent media he's exposed to. He probably saw a neat map somewhere and was "inspired".

Well, obviously this is not final art, it's merely just the bare bones so I know where everything is.

Threads dying a bit, so might as well post some renders of characters I'm planning on using later
I try my best to have a nice looking render of every character I plan on using.

How do they look?

>a few hundred regular readers
>never get any comments
Why? Is my comic not interesting enough to talk about?
Is it because I use my host's proprietary comment system? It allows guest comments but is it still enough to put people off from commenting?
Would Disqus make people more inclined to comment? Or am I just unlucky and have a very quiet fanbase?

They look like they are from a flash animation. If it's just a comic, couldn't you give them a bit more details?

I don't think you're doing anything wrong, most people just don't quite care enough to type out something, even if it takes only a couple seconds. Its like grouping in an MMO, you go in, get what you want, and get out. If they don't have to type something out and talk with a bunch of strangers then why would they?

Details are a thing you need if the characters themselves can't be distinguished by the silhouette alone. At least that's how I feel when it comes to my style.

Honestly though, my comic already started with this simplistic style because I love drawing like this, so making characters with too much detail would make them really out of place compared to the rest of the characters.