Yeah, the home computer pretty much needs a rebuild. There goes my evenings and upcoming weekend. How are you?

• If there is any justice in this world I will win this — a Wondermarkish physical artifact, which has been given the Malki ! treatment (malkied? malkified?) not via Photoshop, but rather by careful use of an Xacto knife and wood joinery. It’s being given away by the good folks behind Hendrick’s Gin, which is beautifully, wonderfully tasty stuff, although it doesn’t look quite large enough to hold my bottle of Hendrick’s, I’m sure it has many uses.

  Please, whatever you do, do not go to the contest giveaway page and enter the drawing (US residents only), because doing so will only dilute my chances of winning, as is my due.

• Programming for NYCC is now posted, but it’s somewhat difficult to read — you can see lists of sessions by date (example: Thursday via text, Thursday via grid) or by track (example: comics, only available in grid form), but only the session titles and times show. In order to see descriptions or participants, you have to “drill down” (as the business meeting types say) by clicking on the title, which makes it difficult to scan for keywords of interest (like “webcomics”). As such, I was only able to find one session that is relevant to our weird little tribe:
  How the Webcomic Publishing Sausage Gets Made
  8:45 pm – 9:45 pm, Room 1A23
  Follow along on a webcomic’s long odyssey as it goes from its home on the internet to a publisher, a warehouse, and finally into the hands of its loving fans with expert tour guides Zach Weiner and representatives from Breadpig Publishing and Amplifier Fulfillment.

  There may well be others, but hell if I could find ’em.

• Received recently in the mail:
  

  Hopefully this isn’t too forward of me, but I’m sort of starting out as a web cartoonist (only about 60 pages into a story) and was wondering, since you guys know a fair bit about webcomics, if you’d mind taking a look and letting me know what you think. My goal is to put out a great comic, so any tips would be really appreciated! that is, if you want. Either way, thanks a lot for keeping up this blog, it’s a great resource for me.

  That’s from Lorena TL of LS-Zián Comics. Taking a quick glance, it’s got a loopy visual style that’s arranged into (so far) four story arcs, the most recent starting here. So far, so good. Here’s what I can give to Lorena (or anybody else asking similar questions)¹:

  1. The archive calendar shows an update history of 1 – 3 comics per week, randomly spaced. Yeah, yeah, RSS readers, everybody’s got ’em, don’t care. Pick a schedule, commit to it, readers will appreciate the regularity.
  2. If you’re going to be doing story arcs, every page has to both move the arc forward and stand on its own. Every page is likely to be somebody’s first (as this one was for me), and if I can’t get some sense of what’s going on in the overall story, I’m far less likely to dig back to a starting point and invest my time.

     If you’re a complete master, you can get away with single pages that don’t have a clear conclusion to them (cf: anything by Evan Dahm; the Overside stories simply must be read long-form, but he’s so visually interesting you’re willing to make that leap). And even complete masters will go out of their way to deliver a punchline, or story beat, or a big interesting speech.

  3. To paraphrase Brad Guigar, it should be impossible to get worse at something you’ve practiced thousands of times. But don’t just fail to get worse: get better, and better, and better.

  Here endeth the lesson.

_______________
¹ Bearing in mind that I’m not a creator — I’m a typical (if likely more widely-read than usual) representation of your audience.