From my experience, the media to display comic panels/pages are just images in JPEGs or PNGs or something format along those lines. Nothing special is done inside them. I haven’t seen any good sites using PDFs for viewing content unless it is to access a full issue from a payment wall or something like that, and those don’t use any crazy things in the PDF b/c usually it will require a certain version of Reader and can be clunky.

For all the navigation and other magic, developers are using javascript (web) or Java / Objective-C (mobile apps). (I guess you could say Kotlin and Swift for mobile apps.)

In any case, using media types with built in features tend not to be optimal for comics from my experience and they usually require a certain level of adobe reader or something along those lines, and readers will usually leave instead of installing the latest version of Adobe Reader. :/

I randomly found some smaller comics podcasts that just review random comics and sometimes their creators as well. The trick would be figuring out which ones have a decent number of subscribers and hitting those up with an email saying “would you mind reviewing my comic? I would be happy to do an interview as well to go over what it’s like to to make a comic. I have a new kickstarter going…”. I have emailed some before and they were pretty nice.

The trick is finding decent sized subscriber base, and not a lot of sites/apps provide subscriber numbers. Doesn’t seem like iTunes shows numbers outside of ratings… you would have to individually click through each podcast in a search though which would take forever.

I noticed one of the more popular podcast apps on Android shows subscriber numbers (Podcast Addict). If you have Android, you could download that and browse through it.

They even show podcast popularity by category, but there isn’t a comic category.

However, you can search by “Comics” (which I did on the app) and it shows subscriber numbers in the results. You could scroll through and send an email to the ones with decent numbers. It might be hard to get on really popular ones, but you could at least hit the mid-tier ones.

For example, the “Deconstructing Comics” podcast does reviews of webcomics but doesn’t necessarily have interviews every time. He has 2500+ subscribers on the app (that would be a subset since it isn’t counting itunes, google play, etc.) but it gives you an idea.

There is another “Comics Experience Make Comics” podcast which have 3k+ subscribers. That is another one. You could just go through that list and see if any of them are interested in reviewing your comic and/or interviewing you about your experience making comics).

I hear you have to be a celebrity to get on the super popular, awesome podcast “Comic Lab”. ;-D

Anyway, let us know if that helps. I might do that when I get around to doing a kickstarter myself.

I use squarespace and it costs between $12-16 per month (based on if you pay yearly or monthly). It has lots of very modern, dynamic designs to choose from, so you don’t need to do any coding and website looks good on mobile and desktop.

I initially started using squarespace based on Clay Yount’s post on how to use squarespace for webcomics. However, that post is based on using the site with one comic page to one web page.

I did use that format for awhile based on Clay’s great tutorial, but I ultimately found (since ads shouldn’t really be used now with all the ad blockers) that I switched to a non-customized template from squarespace and just used the template out of the box. (Clay’s solution calls for a little custom coding.)

Anyway, long story… well… less long… I use squarespace out of the box (no custom coding) for my halfwing site and mirror it like webtoons (vertical scrolling one one page using their gallery widget). I really like the UI. 🙂

-Jeremy