That Worked Fast. Bonus Update Tommorow!

Apparently the old adage of having many interested fans vs. one dedicated fan just paid off.

Thanks to that, we've got two bonus updates to do. One goes up tomorrow, because this particular fan was eager for his fix, and the other goes up next Wednesday. At some point in-between the two we should have the usual Sunday update as well.

And at some point in all of that I'll be over here in the corner blinking in disbelief. Hoo Boy.

About the new Recharge Counter

So, you've 'probably' noticed the new battery counter on the front page asking for donations. Dun worry, I'm not suddenly showing my true colors or anything; there's been a donation counter on the page for a while, and my current hosting plan is based on how much I raise (and seeing how image-intensive hosting a comic can be, that's a fair amount of bandwidth).

Here's the deal: y'all are really starting to get into the comic, and truth be told it takes a fair chunk of my time to draw the pages (not to mention all the other little things I do, like picking up a domain name and other things). Ideally, y'all want to get the comic faster, and yet I'd still keep my buffer at a healthy size so I don't suddenly run out of comics right before I skip town for a weekend. This is a good way to test the waters and see just how much you guys are willing to put forward to advance the story, without me suddenly leaping to twice a week right when the semester's supposed to get difficult.

The Battery fills up every $50. I'll be keeping the battery counter around unless and until we need something a little more... accurate, like a monthly counter.

I'm not expecting this to actually launch me to twice weekly — More than likely it'll just give you guys a good bonus page every month or so. If I start getting into a habit (or suddenly speed up my drawing rate), the twice weekly thing might stick. But for now... hey, if you like the story and the art, donate.

Why you, Yes You, need to STFU and start Drawing a Webcomic Right Now.

Once upon a time there were two artists who wanted to be Big. They could both draw -- not much more than stick figures, perhaps, but at least the art teachers liked their drawings and every now and then friends would fawn over their sketchbooks. At the end of the school year, the art teachers managed to corner the two artists after class and asked them if they wanted to try this new 'webcomic' thing; it wasn't Big, or Glamorous, or even Profitable, but the art teachers wanted someone to try it so they could see if it was a Good Thing to do.

The first artist wrinkled his nose at the idea and turned the teachers down, saying that he didn't feel he was good enough to start a comic, because he knew other Big comics had much better art than he did. But in order to save face with his teachers, he told him to check back with him when school started to see if his art was good enough then.

The second artist, on the other hand, wanted to tell a story anyway, and (after getting the art teachers to give him some extra tools for the task) he started working on his comic.

The second artist quickly found out he sucked, but kept drawing (after leaving whichever websites left a bad taste in his mouth), and posting new work every couple of days. And he kept drawing. And kept drawing. And then he'd post again every couple more days.

Every couple of weeks or so he'd tell the art teachers he needed more money for a new reference book, which they bought for him, and then he'd read it, and go back to drawing with the new information he learned. Eventually he started drawing strips in advance, so he could take breaks every now and then but the art teachers wouldn't notice what days he was slacking off.

As he was posting all of this work online, eventually other people than his teachers started to notice his work, and soon his work was getting Bigger. And because he was learning as he went, his work started to get Better, and he was learning all sorts of things about typography and character design, as well as form and shading.

Towards the end of the summer he went back to the teachers, and saw the first artist standing there. The first artist showed his work to the teachers, and the teachers didn't think he'd improved much at all; in fact, compared to the second artist, he'd somehow started to look worse in comparison.

When the second artist showed the teachers his work, the first artist blinked, turned to his friend, and went, "What the hell?! When'd you get that good?"

"Hey, when you're turning out so many of these things a week, you have to improve at it sooner or later..."

Now, just in case you're the type that prefers lists:

• Everyone sucks when they start. Let's just admit it to ourselves and move on. No, I'm not going to tell you how you suck, but once you get at least ten pages under your belt, you'll look back at the first one and say "I suck!". It's a given.
  
• Everything has a learning curve. Learning to draw, use a certain program, or tell a story only works if you keep doing in constantly. You can struggle in certain programs for years before you find out about Multiply layers, or how to Transparency Lock a layer to prevent coloring outside the lines, or what methods give you the best results for what you want.
• The longer you're out here, the more people see your work. No, we can't really rush this unless you're That Damn Good. And heck, if you're not up for very long, you also don't have a lot to show.
• Each comic you add makes your work that much more alluring. The more pages, the more odds of having a story, and the more people can see your work evolve. If you have enough to show how much the art has advanced (among other details), suddenly you give people more reason to want to read your work from there on in.
  
• Even if you ditch it later on for a better idea, you'll start out that much better. Think of it as Artist's XP. You want to level up, you gotta draw.
  
• Just drawing things isn't the same as drawing comics. Comics force you to think about storylines and action, scenery and setting, and a whole host of other things you won't get a feel for if you're just drawing your Level 17 paladin in 'exciting' new poses.

It doesn't matter when you start, just start already. You don't even have to be consistent about it, but it helps, because having a crappy comic that will eventually get better beats having no comic at all.

Page 24: Yes, we have a pink... blonde... princess. Oh Dear.

As more and more of the pages go up one at a time (and I consequently get further ahead in the story), it becomes harder to love certain pages for one sort of experimentation done in them or another. This is one of those pages where I sorta feel I overdid the background shading, because it looks like we're watching a game of Super Paper Last Resort. I will admit I'm pretty damn proud of Nathan's fishnet gloves though. Those were a real feat to pull off.

Wanting to criticize my earlier comics is probably just an inevitable consequence of keeping the backlog, and while I know I'm saving myself work down the road, it's also difficult to keep holding the other work back and only leaking bits and pieces of it, through some of the ads I've been making for the site and otherwise.

Sooner or later I'll figure out an awesome use for them. For now, I art.

Five Tips for Selling Yourself First

Online, an artist is only as good (or as bad) as their reputation. Some key concepts:

1. People don't just want an artist anymore. They want a friend.
Make yourself available. Chill in other comics' forums. For the first few months of your comic's existance, resign yourself to the idea that you're going to be leaching off of other established artist's groups, because quite frankly if you know how to reach any other audience you'd be writing a blog like this one. It may seem counter-intuitive and vaguely insulting, but for what it's worth, it's a lot cheaper than most other advertising routes open to you.

Don't worry about spreading yourself thin; Even if all you do is make a few high-profile posts on a forum, it's probably gotten you some decent legwork done, and that's umpteen more people that know about the comic when they wouldn't have otherwise.

2. They want you to spend some time on them personally.
If you're too busy to talk, your would-be-fans are too enamoured with other people to pay attention to you. Also, let's face it; you're drawing a WEBCOMIC. You have time to burn.

There's a few ways to accomplish this, and either it involves some "Author's Notes/Blog" type comics where you speak directly to the readers using the strip, or you keep a separate blog/LJ as a supplement to the comic. My personal favorite toy in this regard is using Twitter: It encourages you to write very tiny posts, so you can not only keep off-topic-ness to a minimum, but you can write LOTS of them in a day and nobody minds. Heck, that's what it's best used for. It still keeps an archive of everything, and it's accessible from so many places (Facebook comes to mind as the most recent 'new frontier'), so your fans can't help but keep up.

3. They want you to draw not just for their entertainment, but for THEM.
We're talking commissions, guest strips, fanservice, and other little things that give in to a reader's desires. If you're lucky a few of them coincide with each other and someone's commission of your character in a cheesecake pose can be used for merchandise later, effectively allowing you to be paid twice and get some good mileage out of the work. If you decide to do some sexy pinups for the hell of it anyway, don't think "I should be working on the comic instead of this"; think "I can use this as a wallpaper for a donation incentive"!

Unfortunately for you and your wallet, commissions are an outreach of reputation, so your reputation will affect the number of fans, which in turn affect the prices you can charge. The general translation is to wait a little while until people start asking you for art, then offer to charge. If nobody offers, start doing art for your friends, call them 'commissions' (even if they're technically freebies), and see if that gets more people to bite once they realize you're not above drawing their characters.

4. Keeping your readers informed on your life helps them care for you as a person.
Keeping a good comic is Internet Karma: Be good to the net, the net is good to you. Even if you're doing just fine without people's help, you'll still want them to donate, because money is a great incentive (especially to other people who wonder why you're wasting your time!). The more you can convince your readers you're an all-around awesome person and you can use the cash wisely, the more they'll give you what you need.

When you DO fall on hard times, you'll want the press to keep you afloat and your fans to keep looking out for you; you can't very well do it when you're laid up, so you may as well earn the karma now while you're healthy.

5. Be aware of the 'content flow'. More importantly, make sure it's consistent.
People like an artist they can keep their watches to, if only because it means they stand half a chance of keeping up with their work. Reading the archives of a webcomic can be daunting, especially if the comic in question is old. The best solution available is to make sure that users don't fall behind any more than they have to, which typically means update schedules for everyone's sanity.

How to decide on an update schedule: Figure out how many strips a week you can do when you're at your absolute goddamn worst and there's three finals to study for. Set the schedule accordingly; we want to aim for your minimum amount you can accomplish in a week, so you don't kill yourself trying to update too quickly. As a bonus, it also gives you a chance to work ahead and save future strips (known as a buffer or a backlog) so when cool stuff comes up, like conventions, trips, or just plain "I-don't-feel-like-it"-itis, you still have stuff waiting to go.

Don't worry about ever having 'too much' backlog, either; Howard Tayler keeps around 30-50 strips in his buffer fairly constantly, and I'm sitting on sixteen weeks of strips as of writing this post. Of course, we have different reasons for keeping them; Howard uses an automatic updater and being paranoid about his ability to produce the strip later always works in his favor, so keeping the buffer huge is a big advantage for him, while I'm building my buffer during the summer months so I can update at college with very little stress involved, or possibly speed up my update rate if it becomes insane to manage.

If you ever do have to do without a strip, at least put up something so your fans know something's up. Get Guest Strips and Fan Art to fill the void while you're out. You can accelerate the schedule or supplement it (like I'm doing with this blog), but slowing it down tends to leave a bad taste in people's mouths. Respect the update schedule, you respect the fans.

Respect the fans, and they respect you.