The Second Week

[Joseph Hewitt]

I caught this cold last week and it's still not gone. I was feeling better on Thursday, but yesterday I got a fever again and was feeling miserable. Also, the cold has now spread to most of the other teachers and a considerable portion of the students. And my wife just started sneezing. I feel vaguely responsible.

My sister went to Denmark, had her presentation, was interviewed by a local TV station and is now on her way home. My father complained that there was nothing to eat in Denmark other than cheese and bread, they had problems with B&B where they were staying, and Sandi had her blistex confiscated at the airport. Overall, though, I think they enjoyed it. Sandi has already recieved several offers to speak at other places.

I fixed some bugs in GH1 and added a new quest to GH2. I want to make some new portraits and learn how to use GIMP so I can do decent coloring on them.

Recently I've been thinking about ways to market myself. My mother, my wife, and even my boss have been encouraging me to find ways to make money from my creative output. My boss has reccomended that I write some children's books featuring my Lucy & Bing characters; his wife has some friends in the Korean publishing industry. I've also been collecting recipes for a book about how to cook like a Canadian in Korea; I don't know if there's much of a market for such a thing, but it could probably be aimed for both Koreans who want to try "real" western food and foreigners who miss the food from home.

Another idea is to start a weekly Lucy and Bing strip, then try to license this to someone else- possibly a newspaper or an ESL website. A new story started on Ataraxia Theatre today; from this point forward I plan to hold my art to higher standards, and try harder to improve. Incidentally I plan to apply this to my work on GearHead illustrations as well.

Other ideas include setting up a webstore for GearHead/Ataraxia Theatre using a print on demand service, like http://www.lulu.com or http://www.cafepress.com.  Of course that would require having products to sell.

I don't know if I'm talented enough to make any of this happen... but then again, talent isn't nessecarily the biggest part of the equation. The important thing is to have the bloody badger-headedness to keep working on something until it bears fruit. Or until you die of a brain aneurism.

Now that my sister has been invited to multiple international conferences, the stakes have been raised. I must keep up! I must!

I think my best bet is to work on the Lucy and Bing children's book, continue to promote + develop GearHead and my other projects, then maybe someday hire a local illustration student to draw professional-looking pictures of a woman cosplaying as a Zerosaiko for use on t-shirts and mousepads.

[Sabin Stargem]

It wouldn't be the first time an small-time webcomic artist begins making some money through the Internet.  Fan donations, books, original comic strips, and other goods can be sources of income, and the site itself can have ads for further income.  However, the most important thing you must accomplish is to make your comic superior in some way to other comics that people would be interested.  If you don't pull it off, it would be a big waste.  No point in setting up a store if you are not popular, basically.

I recommend that you check out several different kinds of webcomics, see what they do to get people to read them, and what elements are best to incorporate into your own works.  I am not talking about stealing actual characters or such, but rather I believe that the best comics share trends.  Constant updates, so that people come back every day, good humor, and so on.

I will list some comics that I think you may be interested in checking out, though I am not entirely sure if you would.  Still, even if you don't want to study them, maybe they can be for fun too.  It makes me wonder though...do Koreans and Westerners have different tastes concerning comics and other media?

Anyways, a short list of comics.

Count your Sheep:  Children's comic, and an tendency towards a soft-color blue.  It seems fairly successful.
URL

Get Medival:  Aliens land on medieval-era Earth, and become stranded.  Good humor and fairly diverse cast without being out of control.  Has fairly basic yet nice art, and the author has been selling books and original comic strips.  An good example to follow for the basic webcomic author.
URL

8-Bit Theatre:  Videogame sprites from Final Fantasy are given substance.  Humourous substance.  It also happens to be one of the bigger webcomics in the west, and I think it deserves it.
URL

[Joseph Hewitt]

Quoting: Sabin Stargem

I recommend that you check out several different kinds of webcomics, see what they do to get people to read them, and what elements are best to incorporate into your own works.

Well, I've been doing comics for about ten years now, and I think I have my own style. I'm not really sure from this comment whether you think my comics are too bland (I think that too sometimes) or if you're just offering it as general advice. Right now I get about 50 visits a day to my site, after starting a number of promotions at the beginning of the month.

The quality of my work tends to fluctuate a lot. I think the Darcy Generic strips are quite good, but the GearHead comics I've done so far have been terrible. Sometimes I have good ideas but flawed execution- I often feel that way about GearHead the game. The dialogue there is very unpolished and I should have probably worked harder at it.

I never thought my comics were particularly commercial, but Lucy and Bing has proven to be very popular with children in both Canada and Korea, so maybe I was just targeting the wrong demographic.

Quoting: Sabin Stargem

do Koreans and Westerners have different tastes concerning comics and other media?

Definitely.

Some of the webcomics I read regularly are:

Tile: The minimalistic adventures of a stick figure. This series is very different; the artist has a good way of playing with the comics medium.
http://tile.comicgenesis.com/

Doctor McNinja: A ninja who is also a doctor.
http://www.drmcninja.com/

[Epsilon]

Dr. McNinja is also Irish. An Irish ninja.

One of my favorite webcomics is Schlock Mercenary. It really does the whole semi-serious, semi-humorous thing well. Schlocktoberfest is coming up, it's a month where the comic gets rather dark and someone usually dies. Messily. Lots of space-opera stuff, VERY sci-fi.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/index.html

[Anticheese]

Oh yes, Schlock is very good. I thoroughly reccomend it.

The Order of the Stick is also very good, alot of the humour is based around D&D but most people should be able to get the jokes.

www.giantitp.com

[Joseph Hewitt]

I never really got into Schlock Mercenary myself. I don't know why- there's just something about it that doesn't appeal to me.

Many people say that a consistant release schedule is a big part of building a webcomic. I'll try that for a while and see how it goes. I've gotten a lot of new visitors this month, and I have reason to believe that a fair number of them aren't even blood relatives of mine!

I've started on some practice art for an upcoming GearHead comic strip, and I've been thinking a lot about what I did wrong in the previous ones. First off I need to pick up the pace; the Road to Gyori was five pages of setting and exposition with no action or plot whatever. Five pages is far too long for that sort of thing when there are giant robots around.

Second, I need to make the characters more dramatic. The heroes and villains need to be cool; the action should be directed their coolness. Test Flight started with a fight scene but since we didn't know who any of the characters were it didn't matter. Also, in space there is no wanton destruction, since there's nothing to blow up. That's a problem.

Third, I should try to mark my own style upon the stories. Both Test Flight and the Road to Gyori were bland because, in both cases, I was just kind of showing things without any real direction. My regular style is humorous, somewhat strange, occasionally threatening. I think this feeling exists in the GearHead computer game, so I should try to make it evident in the stories as well.

Fourth, I need to either improve the art, or replace all human characters with penguins. Fifth, the mecha need more emphasis.

Anyhow that's my plan. Let me know what you think.

[Aquillion]

From what I've heard, the most important thing with a webcomic isn't talent or anything like that; it's updating regularly for a long time.

I think it was Tycho of Penny Arcade who gave this advice to aspiring webcomic artists:  "Start in 1998."

[ARKARY]

Yeah I have to agree, a good plan and regular updates are the two biggest things for a webcomic (aside from a decent story and characters, of course).

I've always wanted to do a webcomic or something myself, I just never got around to it and I don't know if I could keep the regular schedule going.

[Joseph Hewitt]

One of the tricks to keeping a regular schedule is to always have comics done up until some arbitrary point in the future. Right now I have about 3 weeks worth of comics done at 3 updates a week; I've heard that a two month buffer of fresh comics is reccomended. ^^;

The next scripts I have in the hopper are Voles of the Dusk (current story; adventures of a philosophically many rodent in a post-apocalyptic wasteland), Two Years of Romance (the continuation of Allison), and then either The Naked Flasher (continuation of Western University) or an as-yet unnamed GearHead comic detailing the aftermath of the Typhon Incident. Somewhere in there may also be a series of single-page gag strips.

[Drakeson]

There's lots of stuff to blow up in space, asteroids, ships, people, plannets, suns, gerbils... and you can have massive concussion waves which for some reason only appear in 2d???

I'm not a massive comic fan but I know you have talent, how could you have made GH otherwise? I agree that your comics are unpolished (high schoolish?) but that's only because they are not so much a publication as an exploration of your own ideas. Even if you do cgi comics as long as the action keeps pumping then the reader will keep turning the page. Don't underestemate character development though, two people having a chat in the control room of a massive destruction machine while idly stomping on buildings makes you care for them, if you don't care you wont read.

As far as self doubt goes, you have no reason to have any yet, come back after it all comes to nothing and then we will doubt you, not before.

[Anonymous]

Personally, and I've said this before, I like his art style.
Voles of the Dusk sounds vaguely "After the Bomb"-ish. I'm actually running an AtB game with my Palladium group, so I'll have to look at that. However, I'd much rather see what happens after the Typhon incident.

[macksting]

Ack. Happened again. Too many smilies anyway.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Thanks for the vote of confidence. Don't take my self-doubt too seriously- it's the fuel that drives my creative process and pushes me to try new things. If you check the GearHead_Dev yahoo group I'm sure you can find numerous examples of me doubting my programming and game design skills.

This week my cold is finally feeling better, but all the other teachers here are in the same state I was in two weeks ago. My wife didn't end up catching it but several of the other teachers at her school did. I feel like a force of nature... or a champion of Nurgle, take your pick.

This week I'll be finishing up some new quests and I hope to finally get started on adding computers. I've also been thinking about altering the way faction relationships are maintained, but that idea really deserves its own thread.

[Epsilon]

As an FYI about the schedule thing, it IS very important. I'm rather disliking a rather good comic ATM because the writer/artist for it often dissapears randomly without any notice. Went almost 3 months without a strip or news.

[Anonymous]

Wanna know what's worse? Disappearing for a year, coming back, advancing the plot to a cliffhanger, and then walking away from the project without telling anybody for another two years.