Cameron Davis
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I’ve posted this on the old site, but here’s what I learned after five years of doing FunnyWebComic.com on a daily basis:
1) Do not call your webcomic “Funny Webcomic”. Good lord, how arrogant that sounds.
2) Pick a theme and stick to it. Seriously. Nobody is interested in a comic about ‘random stuff that changes all the time as the mood takes me’
3) Stop telling people how bad your art is and how you suck at writing. There’s plenty of people out there that will do it for you!
4) Do a comic about something you’re actually passionate about. I did 200+ strips about a morning radio crew before realising I couldn’t give a rat’s fart about morning radio crews and no amount of extra effort will change that.
5) If you’re working in a day job that requires you to be creative, it WILL have a negative impact on the quality of your comic. Taking a day job that is absolutely zero percent creative has been the best thing for Blow The Cartridge ever.Hope that helps anyone 🙂
Edit: Oh! Forgot this real slap-my-forehead one from when I first started making webcomics almost ten years ago. Just because the comic on the website is 800 pixels wide, does not mean you draw your original comics at 800 pixels wide. Draw bigger then scale down, stupid! 🙂 Can’t believe I did my first 100 strips like that 😛
Oh yeah Kris Straub would make a great guest. So would Dave Kellett, maybe both at the same time, maybe that would work 😉
Listened to Episode 2 on the way home from work last night and had a bit of a worry about my own work.
See, I’ve done a comic with Princess Daphne in it too and it got me wondering if I’m wasting my time making Blow The Cartridge because of these rights issues.
I’ve always thought that the comics I make fall under fair use – it’s a work of parody after all, like MAD Magazine. I’m under no illusion that I own the characters or games I make fun of. I’m not making T-shirts of these characters, because they’re not mine. I know that. But I would like to continue to make the comics and print collections of the comics…
And it’s not like I can’t do original characters – I’ve got five years of strips to prove it – but BTC is by far the most popular comic I’ve made and I absolutely love making it. Heck, in my day job I’ve helped make video games that feature characters I don’t own. I get it. But I always thought what I do with Blow The Cartridge was OK because they’re one-off jokes about a different game every update. After listening to the show I’m not so sure anymore.
So please be assured I am very much looking forward to the next episode with Katie Lane to hopefully get some clarity on this matter! 🙂
Wow, thanks very much for the replies, folks!
I’ve gone and paid for MarketPress and spent a bit of time fiddling around with it and it seems really nice and easy.
There was a CSS issue I had where the backgrounds for the product pages weren’t displaying, but I managed to figure out that adding “.type-product,” to the CSS rule where the backgrounds are defined for regular posts fixed that.
Here’s hoping I can get a store up and running in the next week!
Yeah, it’s kinda bizarre, really. I feel like I discovered and backed it by accident! The first episode was really good and I’m looking forward to more.
I’d love an episode about saying no to people asking you to do free work. It’s something I’m getting more comfortable with, but I’d love to hear the guys talk about this.
Another topic I would loooooooove to hear about is knowing when you can quit the day job. There’s no magic formula or number to this, of course, but I’d love to hear some thoughts on getting through the period where your creative work is bringing in money, but also consuming every waking minute you’re not at the day job.
Oh the font itself is fine, just consider making it bigger.
And as long as you don’t start getting into Claremont-level angst, you should be OK 🙂
I can follow the storyline just fine, so that’s good. Two things that immediately come to mind:
There’s a lot of text in each strip. So much so I feel like you could easily split each strip into two or even make each one double the number of panels, becaus ethe number of words per panel is pretty high.
Related to that, the font appears quite small and the kerning appears to be quite generous in some strips – just something to keep an eye out for.
I’ve been using Surpass Hosting, WordPress and Comic Press for as long as I can remember, and have only great things to say about them all.
