One of the harder parts of creating a webcomic is actually writing it.

Even comics that are exclusively joke-a-day, like ?, need to be written.

And if you’re doing anything even a little bit more involved than that, you need to create characters. And these characters need to be distinguishable from each other. And so you give them different haircuts (none of them anatomically possible) or different boob sizes (none of them realistic), and they wear different clothes (and never change their clothes).

And then, just because you’re so very very very clever and fun… you decide to give one of them an accent.

And because you’re just such an amazingly original writier, you decide to give this character a French accent. And now your new character says ‘Ze”, and “Mozair” and “non!” and “baguette” and “bagatelle” and “Voulez-vous coucher” …

But, really. You’re not very good at it. And your character is not nearly as cute as you think it is.

So, try again, please. And that character you have, who is always obnoxious to everyone? That guy isn’t funny either. And enough with the bad guys who always sssssss their essess.

And remember the lesson of Lucas, too. That accent you find so hilarious may actually be racist. Oy Vey!

It seems like almost every week, there is a new webcomics collective that is started or dies or is reborn…

All this activity leads an inquiring mind to, well, inquire. Or at least to wonder.

Why do artists form collectives and why do they join?

Most collectives seem to fall into one of the following broad categories

• Business collectives – collectives put together for the purpose of making money directly, usually using a subcription model. There aren’t as many of these as there used to be.
• Service collectives – collectives put together to provide information and artistic and technical support to members. There aren’t as many of these as there should be.
• Marketing collectives – collectives that provide a unifying brand to promote the works of the artists in the collective.
• Hosting collectives – collectives that provide hosting services for members.
• Community collectives – collectives in a more traditional sense of the word, to provide a gathering place for webcomic creators and fans.
• Artists collectives – collectives that provide an artistic umbrella for works of a certain style or quality

There’s a few more types of collectives, with fewer examples, like vanity collectives, but that’s not the topic under discussion.

All of the types of collectives listed above provide different reasons why artists might want to join a collective.

But I think there’s a simpler reason.

I think that the majority of webcomic artists are lonely geeks living in garrets and basements, and need all the friends they can scare up or pay for.

Or is that just me?

It seems that a number of different websites have recently taken to using new math to figure out something that might seem at first, important – comic strip “ratings”.

No, I guess I don’t mean ratings – I mean “rankings”. That is, some numerical value arrived at through a supposedly secure mechanism, and supposedly calculated properly, that will indicate in some manner the relative quality of a particular webcomic.

Example 1 of this phenomenon is Top WebComics.

The entire purpose of this website is provide rankings. But it seems that they overlooked a small little security flaw in their methodology. And it strikes me as unlikely that SketchBattle is going to be the only one poisoning the pigeons in this park.

Example 2 is Smack Jeeves.

In addition to “proudly” hosting 13,016 comics (as of current count), they provide a number of different views into their ranking system – Top comics of the month, Top Strips of the Week, Top All-Time Strips, and Top All-Time Comics.

The first time I looked at SmackJeeves was about two weeks ago. The Number #1 Comic of All Time was a really really crappy sprite comic that had a total of 4 Ratings. Yep. 4. The comic “artist” had either signed up 4 phony accounts, or gotten his one friend to sign up a couple of phony accounts as well, and given himself the highest ratings he could.

A reasonable method of calculating rankings of comics on a site – based on user feedback – would be to INCLUDE the total number of rankings in your calculation. Otherwise, why bother letting more than one person rate a comic anyway? And then something sensible would occur – a comic that had 300 people decide that it was a good comic would always be rated better than a comic that had 2 people think it was a good comic.

The huge drama factor that is associated with the SmackJeeves ratings system, in their community, is thus at least an order of magnitude (that’s 10 times bigger for the calculationally challenged among you) more humorous given the major flaws in it. Last I looked there were at least four separate threads devoted to “Someone ranked me badly! WAAAAAAAA”.

Math – it’s not just for getting your G.E.D anymore.

A quick follow-up to a previous post.

DrunkDuck is back live again. So pop in to their forum and say “Hi” or “Welcome Back”.

Update: It appears to be back live again, again. Shelley Winters has nothing on these guys.

The very first strip of RSteven‘s Diesel Sweeties introduces us to Maura and Clango, who are clearly madly in love. Maura is a porn star and Clango is a robot. But you knew that, because you’ve been paying at least a little bit of attention to this thing we call webcomics.

One thousand and eighty three strips later, Maura cheats on Clango. And they break up.

But today… Ah! Today, Rich decides to play with us.

Will the greatest lovers in webcomics get back together?

I’m glued to my screen.

No, really.

Where’s that acetone?

Apparently, T Campbell read the previous Fleen article and realized that his competitors were a step ahead of him again.

So he re-launched Clickwheel.

Now I’m going to have to try this out for myself and see how bad it is to watch cartoons or read comics on my iPod.

Once I get my less-than-a-month-old iPod working again. Hooray for AppleCare!

Bobby Shaftoe knows a thing or two about infrastructure. In Neal‘s little book, he reminisces about various types of saws that he had worked with, and describes in detail a lumber mill’s bandsaw. The main difference between all of the saws that he worked with was the infrastructure that they came with. A hand saw had only as much power as the person using it. A power saw could cut more things and cut faster – but a hand held power saw could only cut some things and on larger or tougher materials it would slow down or heat up or jam. But the lumber mill saw would cut anything and it would never ever slow down or jam or get noticably hotter – because of the supporting infrastructure.

Some webcomics out there really need a lot of infrastructure. With tens of thousands of visitors out there, they need redundant systems with a very high speed connection and lots and lots of bandwidth capacity from their host. They need backup systems and might even need disaster recovery scenarios. Unique page-views directly ties into profitablility. And you simply can’t sustain large viewership without deriving revenue from them.

Most webcomics don’t need that (yet). But there is a bare minimum of infrastructure you need if you want to keep any visitors that you get from whatever forms of shameless self-promotion you do (and shameless self-promotion is about the only way to be heard above the crowd. There are thousands of webcomics being produced currently.)

The following items are absolutely required if you want to have regular readers:

1. A complete set of all of your comics, navigable by Next and Previous buttons.

It’s a short list. Don’t publish without it.

The following items are very very helpful.

• First and Last navigation buttons
• An archive or calender view of some sort
• A daily comment or news blurb section
• A message forum or a blog that readers can comment on

Note the first place that “blog” shows up. And note what it’s used for – reader comments and feedback.

LiveJournal is not the place to publish your comic if you expect anyone to take you seriously. Neither is MySpace or any other “social networking” or “personal journaling” tool.

There are lots of websites out there that are happy to provide you with the basics of webcomic infrastructure. Some of them will even do it for free. If your comic is good enough or you are persuasive or persistant enough, you can join a collective and make use of their infrastructure. Or you can start your own collective and use your combined might to browbeat a geek into building some infrastructure for you.

Everyone knows that newspaper comics have been shrinking in size for years.

And pretty much this is half the reason they suck so much. The focus has moved away from complex artwork and complex dialog (because it can’t be reproduced… there’s that legibility thing again!) to simpler artwork and shorter “quippier” dialog. The change in visible real estate has had a huge impact on the art style and art direction of comics made these days. If newspapers were still printed the size they used to be, and comics were still given full widths, do you think the characters in The Boondocks would have such big heads?

So why, really, why?

Why would you want to view comics on a 2.5″ iPod screen? Even animated comics?

Once you’ve mastered the art of Legibility that my cohort is illustrating for you (at great length, no less), you can start to hope to reach the act of sheer magic that is Jenn Manley Lee‘s Dicebox.

The artwork in Dicebox is simply exquisite, and it’s no wonder. Her process could only be described as insane did it not produce such amazing works. Notice that she casually mentions printing bluelines on Bristol. She goes from sketchbook to computer back to paper and then back to computer again! And then takes the time to create customized color palettes for each of her characters and it still on average only takes her 14 hours or so to create a page! No wonder Dicebox was nominated for an Ignatz Award, but it’s really too bad she didn’t win.

The artwork is only half of what makes Dicebox so very very well done. The other half of the story, if you’ll forgive me, is the way she tells the story itself. Each chapter seemingly illustrates only the middle part of the events that take place. Most chapters picks up several days or more after the end of the last chapter. Granted, some of this is merely a device to skip endless pages of sitting in a spaceship travelling around. But there’s still the sense that important moments in the lives of and in the relationship between Griffen and Molly have occurred. These are real people, with real lives that go on whether you’re watching or not. They eat, and bleed and fight and have sex. (so, yeah. Not safe for work.)

This is a comic that could survive on just the artwork or just the story. But together, they are just sublime.

One of the more interesting works of journalism being produced these days is the Arcata Eye Cop Log. It’s always a good read, and it produces at least one chuckle every week. But when you purchase the books, and read them in one big sitting… the schadenfreude and sheer volume of human stupidity just piles up and exponentiates and you find yourself laughing at almost everything – even stuff like “2:27 p.m. Child Welfare Services relayed toxicology tests on a newborn baby to APD. Methamphetamine was detected in the infant’s urine.”. It’s tragic – but in situ it becomes hilarious.

Stephen Heintz‘s Acid Zen Wonder Paint is much the same way. Taken individually, you might only laugh at one or two panels. But as you start to work your way through the archives, you build up to a state of hysteria. The jokes are inane, absent, juvenile and sometimes bizarrely cruel. Did I mention juvenile?

But as you read through the comics and as you read the comments, it starts to melt your brain and you remember what it was like to wander out of your dorm room at 3 am after finishing that paper you should have started three weeks ago and finding a couple of guys in the tv lounge who had spent the whole night smoking pot and you start having the funniest conversation of your life.

Since AZWP is really only worth reading in batches, it’s probably good news that he’s going to update twice a day – at least for this first week of the new year.