Worn out by webcomics.

[McDuffies]

I thought that the scene of a little girl being fascianted by a dead body she found near the river was quite hooky, for people who like certain kind of comics.

[Bustertheclown]

So, about this whole issue on how to make a "serious" webcomic work. To recap, Mr. Joel Fagin has stated a few thoughts on the subjet, which have been expressed similarly by others on this thread. Mostly, these thoughts come down to "serious" webcomics having to change the way they tell a story, in order to fit in with the prevalent page-at-a-time update format that most webcomic have taken. The logic is that this format is the best for webcomics, because it keeps your audience coming back on a regular basis. (assuming that you can manage to keep a regular schedule) Other ways of updating, like batch uploading, are not going to bring in the audience because it doesn't provide the excuse for the reader to come back again regularly.

I think this is flawed logic, because, to my knowledge, apparently as well as the knowledge of everyone else who has participated in this discussion on Joel's article page, nobody has ever really given any other method a real try. I find it strange that when it comes to bringing an artform like the comic to a relatively new form of publishing like the web, one can simultaneously see conversations that speak of the untouched frontiers and out of the box thinking that such a form of publishing represents, as well as conversations eager to impose dogmas on how the artform should present itself. Personally, I'd rather err on the side of experimentation than impose rules on how I work which may not fit my methods, and would certainly change how my work comes across.

I'd rather not change my work. I've been fighting the system of how webcomics generally update for over half a decade now, and I've never really been able to get it right, no matter what I try to do to fit into it. So, is it a problem with me, or is it a problem with the system? I'm gonna go with the system on this one, as I've put forth some really valiant efforts with some terrible payoff. The system was created for gag strip comics. It was based upon the newspaper daily method. If a comic has a more sophisticated method of storytelling than four panels with a punchline, it stands to reason that updating a page at a time is not going to work for it. Yes, the problem can be handily solved by converting a serious comic into a more serial format to fit with the update. It is a proven, and it's hard to go against proven methods. However, I truly believe that if a comic wants to read as a graphic novel, it should be read as a graphic novel, and not as a daily serial.

So what if that means a reader might only come back once a month, or even once a year? Hell, as a reader, I don't even read gag strips one day at a time. I find reading that way to be very tedious, and I am unable to really give the emotional investment that the comic deserves when I'm spreading my reading time out over two minutes a day for days on end. Instead, I wait until a sizeable archive has accrued, and then spend a lazy afternoon reading the entire thing. Then, I leave it alone for several months before coming back and reading the archives again. Any other way of doing it, I've found, dilutes the experience.

I know that other readers out there are like me, even if we are going against the actions of the target audience. Still, plenty of people have described the joy they've felt in discovering a comic they like, and going through the complete archives all in one long sitting. It must not be too much of a stretch to believe that a graphic novel can be posted online, all at once, and still have the power to bring readers in to look at it.

One flaw in the prevailing logic that really catches me is in how creators treat their readership as if they're all fickle amnesiacs. Somehow, goes the fear, if you can't keep your work on the minds of the masses for more than 48 hours, they'll forget all about you forever, and you'll lose your audience. The term "instant gratification" was mentioned in the discussion following Joel's article. However, the term was taken to mean how a reader seeks from a webcomic. If that was true, I don't know that the current system would work at all. In plenty of instances, readers stay very loyal to a given comic, even though they are forced to wait long spells to receive a single page. That's not the behavior of people after instant gratification.

Then there's the creator. We've all been indoctrinated into how to run a website. We all know that a website's success is measured by the Almighty Unique Visit. That's why hit counters exist; to let the site owner know exactly how many people come to their site, and where they're coming from, at all times. It seems to me that the page-at-a-time method has been more held to by the demands of hit hungry creators than by the audience. This feels especially true when considering that there are comics out there that just plain don't fit the upload model, yet hold onto it for dear life, forgoing a better experience for the reader, and a more comfortable way of doing things for the creator. (see Megatokyo, which grips tightly to the page update system, going so far as to have a page progress meter, although it has long since broken away from anything even resembling a gag strip, or even serialized drama, for more graphic novel type storytelling)

Let's face it; if something has been proven to work, it takes a lot less effort to dismiss other ways of doing things and keep going in the direction everyone else has, than to work at creating a new path. Perhaps I'm being iconoclastic here, but I'm at the point now where I'd rather do anything but upload a page at a time. The mode has not been kind to me, both as reader and creator. The current project I'm working on just will not read well a page at a time, even if uploaded on a daily basis. I feel asking too much of my audience to expect them to keep my work in their minds for even 24 hours, when I could give them the whole enchilada all at once, and let them digest it at their leisure. Frankly, the thought of changing the way my comic is read to fit a technology that's supposed to be so maleable sounds like a bad joke. There has to be other ways that work just as well, and we owe it to ourselves to exhaust the possibilities before we start conferring on what's "right" and what's "wrong" with a certain kind of comic on the web.

[Jim North]

I just kinda go with a "do as I like and let the readers sort it out on their own" approach.

[Bekka]

I'm only up to page 10 in this awesome thread but I'm already psyched about starting a random epic webcomic saga about me and elf Jesus and our crazy adventures in Japan.

Back to reading the remaining 4 pages before I write my pet peeves.

OK, done reading! Just as an aside, I've just read through all the archives of What Birds Say and I have to say THANK YOU to the author. It's so good! It's a beautiful gripping comic with great art and great script, I can't wait to read the rest. It's really one of the best webcomics that I've ever read. More! MORE!

OK, now back to the point of the thread, the pet peeves about comics. A thing that really irritates me is bad script. I don't care about bad art if the script is good, but jeez, sometimes I read stuff (before clicking hastily on the x in the right top corner) that makes me wonder how on earth the author ever thought that it was funny or interesting and that it deserved being drawn.

The sample horrible "gag" comic script usually would go something like this:
Scene 1 - two guys
Guy 1: I bought this pie but I don't like it!
Scene 2 - copy paste of 1
Guy 2: Then bake your own!
Scene 3 - copy paste of 1
Guy 1: Shut up!
Scene 4 - Guy 2 punches guy 1

OR

Scene 1 - two guys and a sofa
Guy 1: Where's Guy3?
Scene 2 - copy paste of 1
Guy 2: I don't know. He should be here.
Scene 3 - guy 3 jumps up from behind the sofa
Guy 3: TA DAH!
Scene 4 - Guy 3 stands behind the sofa while guy 1 and 2 look at him with a furious expression
(or for the daring shitty comic artist, an action scene where Guy 1 or 2 stabs Guy 3)

And so on and so forth for strip after strip of craptastic lack of any sense of humour.

And then the teeny romantic story. Oh how I hate those.
Girl/boy sees girl/boy she likes. Girl/boy blushes. Girl/boy fidgets. Girl/boy tries to talk but can't because she/he's all choked up. Girl/boy blushes more. Page after page after page. JEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ Let me jump 10 pages ahead to see if anything happened. Girl/boy fidgets and blushes. Oh, right.

[McDuffies]

I think this is flawed logic,

Um, no, it's not a flawed logic because it was never based on examples of other comics. The article was purely theoretical, theory that grows from nature of storytelling, and I don't see a flaw in theory there - that is why not thoroughly tested in reality doesn't make it flawed logic because that was not argument on which the logic was based anyway.

However, it is not that there aren't experiences that confirm it. People have been trying to post comic chapters in whole or even entire comics at once, and then there are comics that update once a month or so. Only comics that have a very strong fanbase like Sabrina Online were drawing traffic comparable to other comics. Also, account experiences of comics that update weekly compared to those who update daily, you get that belief that more often updates do draw more audience in general. (Of course, to satisfy every counterargument, you'd have to test and update exactly the same comic on two different schedules, and nobody ever tried that, of course).

But I don't think that expecting that reader will more likely read a comic if updated are spreaded over time means neccesarily underestimating him. Well, I myself, if I have to wait for several months for something, I cool off and when the next issue is out, it needs to grab me back again. I don't think that it neccesarily means that I'm a fickle amnesiac, I think that it means that the media air is so filled with information and entertainment, that those informations (and entertainments) have to fight each others for prevalation. Simply said, if a reader has to choose between so many comics (presumably equally good) he'll rather choose comics that give him guarantee of their quality. With daily comics, there's a daily chance to reassure in that quality.
Well, that doesn't mean I reject any idea of updating finished comics at once. I mean, I've done it myself, updating finished stories up to 20 pages long instead of splitting them to pages. If I did that, I'd have to reject weekly updated comics, asking them to split their pages and update panel-by-panel daily. I just think that there is strong ground in believing that daily comics draw more readership and have more promotional power, and that the person who decides on a different schedule has to know that he's willingly giving up some traffic-related benefits. Of course, that doesn't need to mean anything if you're set to making a comic in a certain way, but it does help keep your expectations (and expectations you have of readers) realistic.

I want to suggest that these daily and weekly updates didn't only grow from daily newspaper comics, but that there is some logic in accepting them online so wide. First, you can think of other kinds of sites on web and realise that any site that is updated more often, will get more traffic. Forums, sites updated on practically second bases, are among the most visited.
When I think of myself as a reader: I don't read comics day by day either. But I find that with comics that update regularly, whenever I wish to go and read them again, I will find a new material. Such comics leave to make a schedule of reading them. But if a comic really sucks me in, I will start to read it daily, and I'm able to be there in the morning, wait for update, refresh refresh refresh, just to see what happens next.
Also: benefits for an author; And I know this will tickle you because you've previously complained that you can't get a project finished. Updating on a certain schedule gives you more motivation to go on. Specially when you start getting feedback, it gives you more energy to continue.
I've experienced it, and I know that many people here did too, the additional drive that you get for drawing when you've set yourself a schedule, when you know that you have to finish the page at that time or else your procrastinating gets public. And I think that if it wasn't for positive feedback, I'd probably quit "mcDuffies" a year before I did.

But I said elsewhere that I think that comic pages generally work like little unities inside a larger. They always have some kind of micro-drama-flow inside them. Of course, there are bland pages that tell nothing, that are full of useless storytelling that doesn't add to anything and doesn't provoke a reader in any way, but stack a few such pages next to each other and you get an awful comic, regardless of whether it's posted page by page or all at once.

[Noise Monkey]

The main reasoning behind hating batch updates, for me, is that there are a couple comics I'm "currently" reading that update in batches. One updates a couple pages at a time twice a week on assigned days. This is great for me as a reader, but judging by the time it must take the author to do that many pages, its gotta be extremely limiting as to what they can do outside of work/school/comic. I wouldn't do it. I can't be a full-time slave to my comic. The other updates in batches of about ten pages, but there are months and months between updates. If I'd known this, I wouldn't have read the entire archive to get up to the end of the comic only to have it end around the time I die of old age. This sucks as a reader. I resent the author for not updating anything for huge spans, but I've gone too far to give it up now. Is there a happy medium somewhere in there where the reader and the author get the pay-off. Almost certainly. But unless the updates are still on some sort of schedule, albeit a more extended one than the usual MWF or once a week sets, and they either vary in size or become formulaic with how the story is accomplished in each update, there's no guarantee for anyone that the reader is going to see the update at all. There are more than a few comics that I don't read anymore for this reason because I stepped away from them to give them time to update and forgot about them entirely.

[KODAMA]

Pet peeves, anyone?

All cap fonts. Can't read them to save my life.
And comics with nothing but near primary colors. Oww. and eww.

[Rcmonroe]

The most important thing, I think, is the characters, not epic storylines. If you define the characters well enough and make people care for them, then it matters less what kind of adventure they're on, it's going to be good either way …

…We tried to do the opposite, which made for a very slow start, but I think is more rewarding in the long run.

All this talk of great big adventures to hook you in...

The first adventure I feature is simply getting off the school bus...how's that for mundane reality?

When I started my strip, I consciously set a few writing challenges for myself—one of them was to create characters that were compelling enough that it wouldn't matter if the situations they were in were interesting. I figured if people liked/were interested in the characters, they either wouldn't notice or wouldn't care that hardly anything happens in the strip.

Whether or not I've succeeded with this is subjective, but I will say that you can count me in amongst the folks who think that good writing and well developed characters make for a great comic, and fantastic adventures, while fun, don't make up for a deficiency in the aforementioned qualities.

Harvey Pekar, a great comic writer, writes about mundane events like picking up a loaf of bread at the corner store, and his comics (especially when he's teamed with the right artist) are always compelling.

[Fortunesfools]

Also: benefits for an author; And I know this will tickle you because you've previously complained that you can't get a project finished. Updating on a certain schedule gives you more motivation to go on. Specially when you start getting feedback, it gives you more energy to continue.
I've experienced it, and I know that many people here did too, the additional drive that you get for drawing when you've set yourself a schedule, when you know that you have to finish the page at that time or else your procrastinating gets public.

This is very true. I think the deadline effect is really is an under-rated boost to productivity. I don't think that Fortune's Fools would be as far along without it. In fact, I seriously doubt it.

Now, I wouldn't classify us as being 'serious', per se, but all that has come before certainly applies to anything that is designed more in a comic book style than the daily strip. Inexperience, I believe, leads to some initially slow scripting (and I'll not be excluding myself). But that's more Mr. Fagin's subject.

[...]If I did that, I'd have to reject weekly updated comics, asking them to split their pages and update panel-by-panel daily. I just think that there is strong ground in believing that daily comics draw more readership and have more promotional power, and that the person who decides on a different schedule has to know that he's willingly giving up some traffic-related benefits.

There probably is a measure of opportunity cost. You know, added sanity in some cases for lost traffic.

But I agree that a daily (or at least fairly frequent) update lends itself to higher traffic. Checking daily would lead to it becoming more ingrained as a habit.

As for the panel-by-panel comment, it makes me think of Platinum Grit's presentation style. Now, that is a case where we get a large update, but I think something in that vein would be an interesting experiment (and probably has been done, already?). At the same time, do you think it might face the same scripting issues, only magnified because each panel is presented for scrutiny? Or would it get away with more?

(I've been enjoying this thread. And not just because of a clichéd barbarian and having the word epic on the front page.)

[Komiyan]

I remembered another thing that grates me. It's that so many comics try to advertise with sex, though most of them aren't about sex, and are actually rather benign.
Suppose you have one female character in entire comic, and your comic isn't sexual in nature, but you dress that character into revealing clothes (even though she doesn't wear them in the comic) and but her on all banners and everywhere.
What irritates me even more is when artists actually realise how lame that is, so they try to do it tongue-in-cheek, overblowing, yelling things like "HEY WE GOT HOT CHICKS IN THIS COMIC" from banners and blurbs. It has the same effect of characters in a comic complaining about how the comic sucks: If you know it's bad, then don't do it!

To follow on from this- I hate when there's a character who can be summed up as 'the girl'. It's about these wacky gamer guys! And a girl sometimes! She probably plays games too and is very affirmative about it. She has no other personality apart from slightly violent, and being 'the girl'. Check her out on this banner ad, she's in panties! She's THE GIRL!

[Noise Monkey]

...sounds like an infomercial product.

[Fortunesfools]

I hate when there's a character who can be summed up as 'the girl'. It's about these wacky gamer guys! And a girl sometimes! She probably plays games too and is very affirmative about it. She has no other personality apart from slightly violent, and being 'the girl'. Check her out on this banner ad, she's in panties! She's THE GIRL!

...sounds like an infomercial product.

Announcer: Are you lonely? Sad? Are those Wii jokes not satisfying you the way they used to?

Guy on Couch: Totally.

Announcer: Then you need "The Girl" (tm)!

Guy: Yeah! ... but, I'm intimidated by girls.

Announcer: Don't worry! Her two-dimensional hour-glass figure is there to be your T&A. No deep conversation. No hard work. Just pure sex-doll fantasy fulfillment.

Guy: Cool!

Announcer: Use for sex jokes, double entendres, or for falling in love with that main character everyone knows is really you. Check out the words from this review. "...she's in panties", "slightly violent", "She's THE GIRL!"

Guy: Where can I get one?

Announcer: Just call this number on the screen and she'll be rushed immediately to your page. Act now and gain the added functionality of using The Girl(tm) on advertising to increase your traffic.

Guy: I can totally feel it rising! I'm calling now! ... or maybe in five minutes.

Announcer: For twelve easy payments of 29.99 all this can be yours. Finally, a guy like you CAN get The Girl.

[Noise Monkey]

If only Phil Hartman were still alive to narrate that....

[Legendary]

The sample horrible "gag" comic script usually would go something like this:
Scene 1 - two guys
Guy 1: I bought this pie but I don't like it!
Scene 2 - copy paste of 1
Guy 2: Then bake your own!
Scene 3 - copy paste of 1
Guy 1: Shut up!
Scene 4 - Guy 2 punches guy 1

OR

Scene 1 - two guys and a sofa
Guy 1: Where's Guy3?
Scene 2 - copy paste of 1
Guy 2: I don't know. He should be here.
Scene 3 - guy 3 jumps up from behind the sofa
Guy 3: TA DAH!
Scene 4 - Guy 3 stands behind the sofa while guy 1 and 2 look at him with a furious expression
(or for the daring shitty comic artist, an action scene where Guy 1 or 2 stabs Guy 3)

Scene 1 - THE GIRL™ is at a bar or some other such place.
Random Guy 1 (Not a main character): Hey, is it hot in here, or is it just you?

Scene 2 - THE GIRL™ (with angry face™): OH MY GOD I cannot believe you hit on me so inappropriately!

Scene 3 - THE GIRL™ violently attacks RG1. Off-panel, of course.
Random Guy 1: MY SPLEEN! (Why do people always use spleen as the "funny" organ? Gall bladder is so much better.)

Scene 4 - Guy 1 and Guy 2 observe the scene from a distance.
Guy 1: Remind me to never pick on THE GIRL™

[Komiyan]

Don't forget the bit where she beats them at Halo! It's funny cause girls play video games sometimes! Be sure that she has 'l33t g4m3r ch1ck' on her shirt, so you can pretend you're reading something while looking at her breasts.

[LibertyCabbage]

Scene 1 - THE GIRL™ is at a bar or some other such place.
Random Guy 1 (Not a main character): Hey, is it hot in here, or is it just you?

Scene 2 - THE GIRL™ (with angry face™): OH MY GOD I cannot believe you hit on me so inappropriately!

Scene 3 - THE GIRL™ violently attacks RG1. Off-panel, of course.
Random Guy 1: MY SPLEEN! (Why do people always use spleen as the "funny" organ? Gall bladder is so much better.)

Scene 4 - Guy 1 and Guy 2 observe the scene from a distance.
Guy 1: Remind me to never pick on THE GIRL™

I'd say there's about a 50% chance that any webcomic I read will have this exact sequence played out.

BECAUSE GURLS HURTING GUYZ IS FUNNY

[Bustertheclown]

I think this is flawed logic,

Um, no, it's not a flawed logic because it was never based on examples of other comics. The article was purely theoretical, theory that grows from nature of storytelling, and I don't see a flaw in theory there - that is why not thoroughly tested in reality doesn't make it flawed logic because that was not argument on which the logic was based anyway.

However, it is not that there aren't experiences that confirm it. People have been trying to post comic chapters in whole or even entire comics at once, and then there are comics that update once a month or so. Only comics that have a very strong fanbase like Sabrina Online were drawing traffic comparable to other comics. Also, account experiences of comics that update weekly compared to those who update daily, you get that belief that more often updates do draw more audience in general. (Of course, to satisfy every counterargument, you'd have to test and update exactly the same comic on two different schedules, and nobody ever tried that, of course).

But I don't think that expecting that reader will more likely read a comic if updated are spreaded over time means neccesarily underestimating him. Well, I myself, if I have to wait for several months for something, I cool off and when the next issue is out, it needs to grab me back again. I don't think that it neccesarily means that I'm a fickle amnesiac, I think that it means that the media air is so filled with information and entertainment, that those informations (and entertainments) have to fight each others for prevalation. Simply said, if a reader has to choose between so many comics (presumably equally good) he'll rather choose comics that give him guarantee of their quality. With daily comics, there's a daily chance to reassure in that quality.
Well, that doesn't mean I reject any idea of updating finished comics at once. I mean, I've done it myself, updating finished stories up to 20 pages long instead of splitting them to pages. If I did that, I'd have to reject weekly updated comics, asking them to split their pages and update panel-by-panel daily. I just think that there is strong ground in believing that daily comics draw more readership and have more promotional power, and that the person who decides on a different schedule has to know that he's willingly giving up some traffic-related benefits. Of course, that doesn't need to mean anything if you're set to making a comic in a certain way, but it does help keep your expectations (and expectations you have of readers) realistic.

I want to suggest that these daily and weekly updates didn't only grow from daily newspaper comics, but that there is some logic in accepting them online so wide. First, you can think of other kinds of sites on web and realise that any site that is updated more often, will get more traffic. Forums, sites updated on practically second bases, are among the most visited.
When I think of myself as a reader: I don't read comics day by day either. But I find that with comics that update regularly, whenever I wish to go and read them again, I will find a new material. Such comics leave to make a schedule of reading them. But if a comic really sucks me in, I will start to read it daily, and I'm able to be there in the morning, wait for update, refresh refresh refresh, just to see what happens next.
Also: benefits for an author; And I know this will tickle you because you've previously complained that you can't get a project finished. Updating on a certain schedule gives you more motivation to go on. Specially when you start getting feedback, it gives you more energy to continue.
I've experienced it, and I know that many people here did too, the additional drive that you get for drawing when you've set yourself a schedule, when you know that you have to finish the page at that time or else your procrastinating gets public. And I think that if it wasn't for positive feedback, I'd probably quit "mcDuffies" a year before I did.

But I said elsewhere that I think that comic pages generally work like little unities inside a larger. They always have some kind of micro-drama-flow inside them. Of course, there are bland pages that tell nothing, that are full of useless storytelling that doesn't add to anything and doesn't provoke a reader in any way, but stack a few such pages next to each other and you get an awful comic, regardless of whether it's posted page by page or all at once.

The reason why I referred to it as flawed logic is because people keep stating this opinion as if it's known fact, but when pressed for evidence that other methods have worked or failed, they come up short on examples. It's flawed logic to maintain that only one way is the best way of doing things, without knowing for sure that it is. As far as I can tell from the conversations that I've read recently on the subject, as well as the fact that the vast majority of webcomics do it that way, the idea that the page-at-a-time system is the very best system to use for webcomics is held by a majority of webcomic creators. So, theory though it may be, it's a theory that has enough weight behind it that most people are willing to do it that way, whether they should be or not, and people who do things differently are seen more as radical anomalies.

I want to make clear that I'm not trying to dispute that the page-at-a-time system works. Absolutely it works! However, as webcomics have grown more sophisticated in their storytelling methods than four panels will allow, it's quite evident that this poses a problem for creators whose work obviously don't fit the current paradigm. This problem is only going to grow, as both graphic novel formats and webcomic publishing gain in popularity. So, if more comics are going to be made which don't fit the method, why not take it as an opportunity to find methods that these comics do fit, and work to make these new methods work?

The main reasoning behind hating batch updates, for me, is that there are a couple comics I'm "currently" reading that update in batches. One updates a couple pages at a time twice a week on assigned days. This is great for me as a reader, but judging by the time it must take the author to do that many pages, its gotta be extremely limiting as to what they can do outside of work/school/comic. I wouldn't do it. I can't be a full-time slave to my comic. The other updates in batches of about ten pages, but there are months and months between updates. If I'd known this, I wouldn't have read the entire archive to get up to the end of the comic only to have it end around the time I die of old age. This sucks as a reader. I resent the author for not updating anything for huge spans, but I've gone too far to give it up now. Is there a happy medium somewhere in there where the reader and the author get the pay-off. Almost certainly. But unless the updates are still on some sort of schedule, albeit a more extended one than the usual MWF or once a week sets, and they either vary in size or become formulaic with how the story is accomplished in each update, there's no guarantee for anyone that the reader is going to see the update at all. There are more than a few comics that I don't read anymore for this reason because I stepped away from them to give them time to update and forgot about them entirely.

I've been thinking a lot about how to make a scheme work that has longer times between updates, and the update are done with a lot of material all at once. I think that it could work, but it would take a lot of behind the scenes work to get it done. One thing that doesn't escape my notice about how webcomics work, and a fundamental reason why, I think, the page-at-a-time system is held to so strongly, is that webcomic sites really seem to be an on the fly operation. The sites usually start out very plain, and evolve over time to include more features and material, as the creator gets more into the projet. The very act of uploading a comic one page at a time, usually the day that you finish the page, has a very piecemeal feel about it.

So, I've been wondering how successful a comic would be if it were treated with more of a print approach, getting all of the elements and materials together before you publish it, even if that means you go a very long time working on a project before it makes it to the web. I know this is not how things are generally done, especially by hobbyists, but just think of how nice it would be to come to a site on day one, and find that it looks good, has a lot of comic pages to go through, along with a lot of other material to keep you busy until the next update.

I don't know, this is still in a fetal stage in my brain, so I don't have all the kinks worked out. What I do know is that the project I'm currently working on won't see the light of computer screens until I have a fifty-page backlog, and a lot of interactive site elements to distract people until I update again. I'm hoping the pre-planned approach works better for me and for long form storylines than the puzzle it through publicly approach has.

[Dracomax]

Actually, since you know that in general, you are going to have, say, 12-15 pages uploaded every 30 days.
Instead of batch uploads, you could set up a system like auto keen where they update throughout the month while you work on the next set. wouldn't help readability much, but it would allow you to work on the composition as a whole rather than page by page...

[Joel Fagin]

I should point out that I've found a third option for serious comics that does not require changing the story style or updating with many pages.

And it's this. That's the archives, but it's how I read this particular comic. With all the comics on the same page, you have all the context you need at a glance. You can have one update a week, but still present the comic in batches of strips. Best of both worlds.

Slows the loading time, of course, but omelettes and eggs you know.

- Joel Fagin

[McDuffies]

To follow on from this- I hate when there's a character who can be summed up as 'the girl'. It's about these wacky gamer guys! And a girl sometimes! She probably plays games too and is very affirmative about it. She has no other personality apart from slightly violent, and being 'the girl'. Check her out on this banner ad, she's in panties! She's THE GIRL!

Yeah... how many comics have you where characters can be defined as: 1. Sane one 2. Insane one and 3. The girl.

Don't forget the bit where she beats them at Halo! It's funny cause girls play video games sometimes! Be sure that she has 'l33t g4m3r ch1ck' on her shirt, so you can pretend you're reading something while looking at her breasts.

Yep. Cause gamers like to imagine that they have hot gurlfriendz who also like games.