Kishōtenketsu (起承転結, pronounced "kee-show-ten-ketsu") is a traditional plot structure in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature and poetry, derived from the...
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Should you create your own font?
Several software packages and websites offer to enable you to create a font based on your hand lettering. And it's...
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Writing ‘beat to beat’
I've been writing longform comics on the Web for ten years. Building and maintaining my audience requires a consistent posting...
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ComicLab Ep 383 — Paint the Wall Red
In a recent interview for the National Cartoonists Society, Greg Evans (the creator of the newspaper comic strip "Luanne") spoke...
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Inverted word-balloon tails
It's part of the comics lexicon familiar to manga and manhwa readers: an inverted word-balloon tail indicating that the speaker...
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Anatomy of a Kickstarter Campaign
On a recent episode of ComicLab, Dave Kellett shared the real numbers from the Kickstarter campaign for his latest book,...
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Plotting and pacing a comic
Plotting and pacing are crucial elements in creating a compelling comic. Plotting is simply deciding which story points are essential...
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ComicLab Ep 382 — Autobiohazard: Drawing the Line Between Fact and Fiction
Where's the line between an autobiographical comic and a semi-autobiographical one — between "based upon" and "inspired by"? And when...
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Using ‘house ads’ to improve your revenue
If you're like many of us, you've abandoned advertising long ago. But that space that used to be devoted to...
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Webcomics Weekly Episode 61: Productivity
The boys discuss what applications and tools they use to stay productive, all while savoring the irony of such a subject being attached to a podcast that updates so infrequently these days.
Preorders
You need to sell merchandise to make money. But getting the merchandise to sell costs money. Which you don’t have. Until you sell the merchandise. It’s a dilemma. The solution is a process called “preordering.” Offer the merchandise to your readers with the understanding that they are buying an item that has not been created yet (with the understanding that they will receive it shortly after it is). To execute a successful preorder, you have to do a little math.
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Monday warm-up
A few links to help you get warmed up as you start your week. The first is an interesting twist on last week’s discussion about quitting your day job…
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Taking a Leap…
Assuming the eventual (financial) goal of a webcomic artist is to support themselves, there seems to be a bit of a middle ground between “beer and pizza money” and “quit the day job”. It would seem to me that if you treat your webcomics income just as straight income, you’re never going to want to go from (day job + comic) to just (comic). Is this actually a concern? How did you handle the transition?
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Webcomics Fitness
You’re busy. I get that. You’re exercise-averse, too. I get that also. Exercise for the sake of exercise is a pretty challenging pitch. I’m a big fan of skiing, snowboarding, and biking, but each one of those is fun before it’s exercise. Going for a run is exercise before fun in my mind. And, it feels like I’m burning up precious time that could be used for making my webcomic better. So why would you make time during your busy day for fitness?
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Monday Blues? Not in Webcomicdom
One inspired blogger points out why the term Monday Blues doesn’t apply to webcomics readers… find out why.
Project Wonderful
Project Wonderful is a very useful tool for displaying ads on your webcomic site. Through this system, prospective advertisers bid on ad space on your site. The highest bidder wins the space. However, I think many webcartoonists are undermining their own best interests by not using PW to its fullest extent. Specifically, they’re not setting their minimum bids high enough and they’re misusing their “Your ad here” message
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Making a media kit
In this month’s To-Do list, it is suggested that you prepare a media kit for the summer convention season. What is a media kit, and why do you need one? A media kit is a folder that contains information about you and your comic, along with samples of your work, recent press releases and other promotional material. It is handed to a member of the media to enable (or encourge) them to cover your work in their publication. In short, a media kit is, as the name implies, the building blocks to the story that you want the world to know. In preparing the media kit, you are giving the journalist everything she needs to tell the story that you want to have told. Here are a few things you might like to consider including in yours:
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Submit an article or a question
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If you’d like to submit a piece for possible use on webcomics.com, feel free to e-mail it.
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