Design Meme

The talented Mr. Coffman mentioned that Keenspot, one of the more popular webcomic sites, has recently lost a lot of it’s artists as they decided to branch out on their own. I spent a lot of time working behind the scenes for a startup webcomic company last year, and I can understand some of the reasons they might have had for wanting go in their own direction.

There are a lot of people putting comics on the web, but I don’t have quite the same sense of a “webcomics industry” that some of my colleagues have. I guess it’s because there are so many different reasons for people’s involvement in that particular publishing niche. Someone wanting to sell online comic subscriptions will (or should) take a very different approach from someone wanting to build their portfolio.

For anyone considering publishing comics online, or at a cross-roads where they’re thinking about changing their approach, my advice is to spend some time reflecting on what you’re hoping to accomplish. WHY are you putting comics online? Like all projects, if you clearly understand what you’re trying to achieve it will help you choose the best approach to take, and avoid wasting time with things that aren’t really that important.

Do you hope to work in the comic industry? Do you think a webcomic is a stepping-stone to another field, like TV or Film? Do you want to have a very popular website where you can sell advertising, T-Shirts or plush toys? Is the message in your comic more important than the artwork or writing? Or do you just love making comics and hope to share them with whoever might enjoy reading them?

If you publish on a site with other artists, make sure your goals are compatible. If you’re considering joining a comic collective, be sure the other people involved have compatible reasons for publishing their comics. For example, if your goal is to get your comic syndicated in daily newspapers, you probably don’t want to share a website with someone who’s goal is to use comics to express radical political or religious messages. Jim Davis probably wouldn’t want to publish his comics on the same website as Jack Chick.

If you want a really popular website, writing and drawing a great comic probably isn’t enough—you might need to spend as much time promoting your work as you do creating it! That means choosing a good domain name, ensuring you have a well designed website, submitting your site to search engines, and being an active part of online discussions about comics.

Some of the more popular webcomics owe their success at least in part to their blogs, discussion boards, or interviews at comic news sites. Great comics can become popular without a lot of extras or promotion, but it will usually takes a lot longer—and might not happen at all. Consider whether starting a blog to go along with your comic will help.

[On the other hand, if it’s a site you’re sending to a prospective employer along with your resume, you might want to refrain from blogging about your increasing mental instability, disturbing rants about the hackers terrorizing you, or the bad luck with your love life. You might also think twice about the weird, creepy, pervy art you’ve got on your site unless it’s a weird, creepy, pervy job you’re applying for…]

The downside to having a popular comic website can be the large bandwidth bill that accompanies it. This is one reason many artists hope to join a comics collective. However, if your comics are just something for fun or your portfolio, you might consider a services like Deviant Art or Flickr which lets you setup an online gallery for free. These sites have the added benefit of making it easier for the large number of other people using the service to find your work.

If you choose to publish your comics on your own website, make it easy for people to read your comics by allowing them to easily click forward and backward through your archive, and possibly to jump to specific points whenever they want.

Since manually creating new pages for each comic can be time consuming, and coding dynamic comic gallery scripts can be challenging for most people, I’m going to make the comic gallery script I developed for PV Comics available later this week. This will be a free download to help you setup your own comic website… after you think about whether that’s the best approach for you.

More details on the free comic gallery script soon!