Full page or strips?

[Phinmagic]

I have polled this one before, bit it bears repeating.

Do you think it is better to post a full comic page, twice a week, or, post tiers of the page as a strip, on a daily schedule?

I was daily for quite a while, and noticed (Mainly at Drunk Duck), a great drop in my readership due to only updating twice a week.

I have been updating Mondays with extra background info and Wed and Fri with pages. I was toying with the idea of splitting my pages and posting them M-F or even M-S. I look to strips like Sluggy and AVP who go daily and have great readership.

I can't seem to get off the fence.

Thanks

Barry

[Warofwinds]

I polled my own audience about updating by panels (with 4-6 panels a page, that's an update around once a day.) I was startled to find 90% did not like the idea, citing that graphic novels do NOT read the same way when read as strips. I like the background extra updates though!

[VinnieD]

You shouldn't betray your art for readership. If you see a decline in traffic it doesn't mean a drop in readers, just that the same people are coming less often. It's still the same number of people.

Not to mention even story comics have a dramatic pacing that sort of leads to a form of punchline at the conclusion of the page. If you cut up a page you'll disrupt the dramatic flow.

[Paul Escobar]

Whether you make strips or whole pages, present them to your readers as they are. If a page is designed to have, say, three tiers with two panels per tier, don't split it up. Not anymore than you would split up a three-panel gag strip in three separate updates. It sabotages the reading experience. Too little content per update is far worse than having to wait a few days more for each update.

As for readership decline - did you count page views, or unique visitors? Like VinnieD said, most likely you still have the same number of readers, each of them just visits fewer times now.

[Yeahduff]

Am I right in assuming you have an adventure comic?

Pages.

[McDuffies]

If your strips are somewhat self-contained, then strips. Otherwise pages.

[Warren]

I would recommend pagefiles.

[Td501]

I debated initially if I should post three panels twice a week, or six panels once a week. Eventually decided three panels just wouldn't offer enough content for a post - six would provide the flow I wanted. I'd say only go daily if the feel/flow/quality of your comic won't suffer for it - and I expect it would.

[Ataraxia]

Designing a story as a series of strips is a different sort of thing than designing it as a series of pages, even if the strips themselves are designed to later be put together as a single page. It can work, as Hegre and numerous other cartoonists have shown:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... lvarez.jpg

The thing is, the page has to be designed that way from the ground up. Each strip severs as a beat leading to a larger punch at the end of the page. This is very different from how a normal comics page is put together- or, I guess I should say, it's much more restrictive than the way a normal comics page is put together.

I don't think that just cutting a regular page into strips would work, because it would throw off the composition and the pacing. However, I do think that an adventure can be done in strip format. I'm actually planning to experiment with this myself in some upcoming stories.