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?

Note: Whatever else this series may or may not have accomplished, it certainly got some feedback. Read through the comments for parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. If you haven’t done so previously, check out the work of Lucas TDS, Paul Southworth, Sylvan Migdal, Shaenon Garrity, Jeph Jacques, Christopher Livingston, Sam Logan, and Christopher B. Wright. That’s a lot of webcomics experience talking, and well worth listening to, especially when they agree with me. Okay, onto Part The Last!

Whew! And it all sounded so easy, didn’t it? Some paper, some pencils, a scanner, and a Webcomics Nation account was all that you needed. Hopefully, the past week has given you a few ideas to chew on, and it should be all downhill from here, right?

Right?

Well, sure. Once you figure out where to place word balloons and decide on hand-lettering or a typeface. Oh, and how you’re going to place panels. Plus, characters and story, they have to be interesting. There’s a zillion other things to figure out as you go along, including the part where you decide when to break every single one of these rules o’ readability to fit the story that you’re trying to tell.

And most of all, you have to practice. Let’s revisit the master again, shall we?

… my first instructor at Chouinard Art Institute … greeted his students with the following grim edict: “All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone.” This was not a discouraging statement to me, because I was already well into my third hundred thousand.
— Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck

Almost no matter what you do, you’re going to look back on early efforts and see stuff you would do differently. And with any luck, one hundred thousand drawings later you’ll find that you’re doing things are much, much better. You start drawing, and we’ll start reading. Deal?

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!

If you’re still with us, today is the long post; maybe you should get a refreshing beverage before you start reading.

It’s time to see if it’s easy to tell characters apart. Fortunately, this is probably where you’ll have the most leeway in a comic; your readers have had a lifetime of training that tells them down in their guts that “comics = a certain degree of looseness in anatomical representation”. Not that you should abandon anatomy entirely, mind (drag out Chuck Amuck again and flip to How to Make a Tennis Shoe for a Percheron), but within certain broad limits, you can exaggerate characters visually in whatever way you need or want to.

Even in a more realistic strip, there’s room for variation of height, build, hair, and suchlike. If you really want to see how different “real” people can look, check out Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. Yes, it’s a print comic, but go buy a copy of issue #78 anyway. Check out the variety of character designs he uses, especially the effectiveness of switching between illustrative and cartoony styles on pages 15 – 1 7. You can do that! That’s the really cool part: you don’t get to design just one look for your characters … you get to design a bunch. In addition to making things more or less cartoony, play around with posture, clothing, POV, and especially posing.
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It seems that Andy Bell is quite the bastard. Quick version of his perfidy:

Cyberspace was rocked today with the news that wretched man-child and Dumbrella associate Andrew Bell was seen extinguishing a cigarette on the arm of a five-year-old boy…. The boy, possibly a deaf-mute, apparently seemed unable or unwilling to communicate in any way…. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least,” admitted Dumbrella co-founder R Stevens. “You’ve seen the guy’s art, right?”

For shame, Mr Bell, for shame. Fleen urges all right-thinking folk to visit Mr Bell’s website and buy a shirt so that the man can afford the therapy he so desperately needs.

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.

One of the more interesting critiques of the new version of The Producers is that it’s shot like it’s on a proscenium stage. The camera is way back, we see the full-height figures, and the actors are projecting to reach the audience in the cheap seats at the back of the balcony. Frame your comic panel like a play, you’ll end up with little bitty characters that you can’t identify unless you make the panels huge. Leaving the Infinite Canvas argument for another day, try this: don’t stage a static play in every panel.

When you bring the camera in closer, all of a sudden you achieve two things: recognition of the characters (which opens up other options; come back tomorrow for more along those lines), and a sense of immediacy. Your readers aren’t looking at an action happening WAY OVER THERE; they’re in the room with the characters. They’re participants.
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If you noticed Jeff Rowland’s initial announcements at Overcompensating regarding changes in how you get your crack Wigu, you saw that there was a super-official announcement forthcoming.

Here it is. Short attention span version:

Jeffrey Rowland, the most talented, handsomest, and strongest member of the Dumbrella alliance has recently announced that his formerly daily comic strip “Wigu” will be updating soon in a monthly format. This American Manga is planned to be released in paper format on a monthly basis, with the online version released a few weeks after the paper version is firmly planted in the hands of its insatiable readers…. Rowland has yet to decide on a printer for this independently published work of mind-boggling genius, but insists that it will be released by February 1 even if he has to hand-print each copy with his own wretched blood on shreds of stolen toilet paper.

In support of Mr Rowland, Fleen will be accepting donations of both blood and toilet paper. Contact us for details on where to send both.

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?