How to create a webcomic

The Internet revolutionized many forms of media, and one of them is the comic strip medium. It was about time too! Comics printed in newspapers, many of them over 50 years old, have mostly become outdated franchises drawn by a team of hackers after the death of the original artist. The World Wide Web presented us with an exciting new world of talent. He poured new life into what was almost a dead medium. Adding a comic strip to your website can bring you many benefits. It can keep you in touch with a younger audience, attract traffic and ad revenue, serve as a platform to air your own point of view, and in some cases provide additional income through the sale of books, t-shirts, and other branded gear. . . Here are some tips to get started:

1. Select a topic. What will your comic be about? Imagine that you are presenting a movie idea to a Hollywood agent and simplify your concept into a sentence or two. Examples: “It is a strip of a haunted house told from the ghost’s point of view.” “It’s a parody of the Kung-Fu manga series that crashes into the fourth wall.” “It’s an epic series of kingdom and conquest set in outer space, with Objectivist rebels fighting a socialist empire.” Whatever your concept, simplify it to its core; then elaborate when creating it.
2. Choose a format. This can be a one-panel-a-day gag, or a full-page comic book style divided into ragged squares that develop drama, or a three-panel daily strip with some characters. You can always vary your style; for example, many four panel strips make a single large panel every Sunday.
3. Now comes the most important decision: choose your artistic medium! You don’t have to be a master artist here – many webcomics today are made with clip art, video game sprites, altered photographs, or simple stick figures. Remember that no one expects a masterpiece of art in a webcomic; there are many famous and successful strips where the characters are nothing more than circles and boxes. Whether you’re drawing your strip with a graphics program or hand-drawing and scanning every day, the production method you choose will weigh heavily on your next decision point:
4. Pick a posting schedule – AND LEAVE IT! Nothing loses readers faster than a webcomic that misses its publishing schedule and stops. This is where your art style can help or hinder your schedule – sure, you can draw beautiful 3D rendered landscapes, but are you ready to do it every day? You must choose a medium that allows you to remove several strips in a single session; That way, you can attack while your creativity flows and have a backing buffer of strips ready ahead of time for when you’re not so inspired. You can also decide to post only once a week, three times a week, or only on odd calendar days, whichever schedule you are comfortable keeping.
5. Choose a publishing method. You can create a free blog at Blogger.com, set up a WordPress blog on your own hosted site, or join a site like ComicGenesis.com, SmackJeeves.com, or WebComicsNation.com and have them host your comic. Whatever your chosen publishing strategy, you need to consider what features are important to include:
6. Add features. Most webcomics have a way of navigating back and forth through the archive so that visitors can read each strip. Many also have a single archive page with links to each comic, sorted by date or title. If your comic has many characters, you may want a cast page, with a small miniature bio of each of the main characters. If your comic has a lot of plot, you may want a timeline page so that new readers can get up to speed quickly. Many webcomic authors also like to include a feedback function; This can be anything from a “dialog box” to a comment forum, where readers can tell you how they like your work or discuss today’s strip with each other. Large, complex webcomic strips that have been running for a decade or more might even have their own Wiki.

Distinguish yourself from the mob. There are some final points to consider on how you will distinguish yourself as a webcomic artist:

1. Art style. Yes, you can get by with stick figures. XKCD is a famous example. However, artist Randall Munroe gets away with it because he is a programmer with a degree in physics; His pranks are not only hilarious, but outrageously wacky as well, drawing a huge audience of computer and science fans. A soft strip with recycled jokes and stick figures would not be as successful.
2. Topic in question. Try to find a unique niche that has not yet been exposed to death. There are a million funny cat strips out there; They can’t all be Heathcliff and Garfield. The comic strip based on video games is another genre that has been done to death; not all can be Ctrl + Alt + Del or Penny Arcade. And what about the children’s comic (Dennis the Menace, Peanuts, Family Circus)? Try to find something that others are not doing yet, preferably something that is related to your main business on the web, if the comic is intended to help promote your business.
3. Narrative style. The Internet has blessed us with millions of potential readers, yet most of them have a five-second attention span. If your comic is a big, dramatic, sweeping epic, it may gain consistent readership, but it can also intimidate new readers who don’t want to go through five years of archives to catch up on the story. Similarly, visual jokes work better than talking, laborious jokes that require large blocks of text.
4. Target audiences. Remember that the Internet is not an age-restricted medium, so decide in advance how old your readers should be and then stick to it. You can’t make a children’s comic and then all of a sudden make an X-rated joke and hope there isn’t a backlash. Some webcomics target a specific industry or lifestyle, with many inside jokes that the mainstream won’t understand, but the subculture will appreciate. Whatever your goal, you should aim to attract as wide an audience as possible.

And finally, have fun with it! As with any creative endeavor, the more fun you have producing it, the more fun it will be for your audience to experience it. Remember that not all comics have to last forever: Berkeley Breathed only produced Bloom County for nine years, and Bill Watterson only produced Calvin and Hobbes for ten years, but both strips are still popular today. If your webcomic starts to lose steam, just close it and announce you’re done, but leave the archive for visitors to rediscover for years to come. Enjoy your success!