Webcomics Confidential: Draw larger

Webcomics Confidential: Draw larger

I took a question on Twitter recently: "Would it be wrong to draw my comics on A4 paper? I find...
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November To-Do List

November To-Do List

It's time to get started on (*choke*) the penultimate month of 2024.If you plan to offer new merchandise for the...
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ComicLab Ep 359 — Should your readers be your writers?

ComicLab Ep 359 — Should your readers be your writers?

BlueSky is beginning to feel like Twitter did ten years ago! Engagement is up, conversations are genuine, and follower counts...
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Understanding social media

Understanding social media

Social media is among an independent artist's most frustrating elements. We struggle for engagement, wage constant battles with "The Algorithm,"...
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Writing humor

Writing humor

Writing comedy is a challenge that is made even more daunting by the fact that humor itself is completely subjective...
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CMYK vs RGB

CMYK vs RGB

If you're saving your comics in RGB mode, you may be making a potentially expensive mistake. The content you are...
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ComicLab Ep 358 — “Help! I’m not funny anymore!”

ComicLab Ep 358 — “Help! I’m not funny anymore!”

Cartoonists Dave and Brad share some thoughts with a young humor writer trying to find their Funny. Also: Is BlueSky...
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ISBN — a beginner’s guide

ISBN — a beginner’s guide

An ISBN is a 10- or 13-digit number used to identify a book from a specific publisher. Once your book...
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How to write a Halloween joke

How to write a Halloween joke

On Substack, a cartoonist was struggling with writing a Halloween joke. He was experiencing a common problem. He was stuck...
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Webcomics Confidential: Size doesn’t matter

Webcomics Confidential: Size doesn’t matter

when it comes to your audience, size doesn't matter. A small and engaged readership beats a huge, lukewarm audience every...
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Psst. Back up your Web site

You probably already know about the Great Website Outage of 2013. Blind Ferret hosting, which is the home to several fantastic comics (and Emerald City Comicon’s Web site) fell victim to hackers who deleted all of the Web sites on the Blind Ferret servers — as well as the back-ups that, evidently, were also hosted on the servers.

So let’s talk about backing up our Web sites.

As this case study shows us, it’s not enough to assume that your Web host couldn’t fall victim to this sort of thing, too. If your Web site is important to your livlihood, you’d better take a few moments every month and make sure you have your own back-up just in case.

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by on January 31, 2013
Posted In: Web site
└ Tags: , ,
14 Comments

Exercise for cartoonists

We cartoonists are a stagnant lot. We sit in front of our drawing boards/tablets and then we sit some more in front of our computers. I wanted to pass along a few thoughts on how we could mitigate the effect that’s having on our bodies.

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by on January 30, 2013
Posted In: Art
└ Tags: ,
16 Comments

Tone Deaf Convention set-up

Thank you to John Bogenschutz for sharing the process behind his convention set-up.

I’ve been doing the convention scene for a little over a year now (somewhat new at this so take it with a grain of salt), but already my booth has transformed a lot during that time. The biggest change was the fact that I started out with a 10′ x 10′ booth and now use a 10′ x 20′ booth size. Sure it’s double the cost but it is well worth it for what I have to offer to my customers.

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by on January 28, 2013
Posted In: Conventions
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4 Comments

Bonus post: Breaking the Q1 slump

As I mentioned in an earlier post, ad revenue tends to plummet in the first part of the year. Most businesses are reassessing their budgets in the first quarter, and most of them habitually cut back on spending until those budgets are cleared. It’s especially noticeable coming after November and December, when ad budgets are ablaze with holiday-shopping promotion. It’s a steep drop that puts me into an annual panic.

And right around now, you’re probably getting “helpful advice” from your ad networks, like this…

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by on January 25, 2013
Posted In: Advertising
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Halftone patterns: A process

Thank you to member Chris Hart for sharing his process on creating halftones. Click on the images to see them larger. Please note: These instructions are meant for producing halftome bitmaps for print. To create a halftone bitmap that’s going to look good on the Web, there are a few extra steps.

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by on January 24, 2013
Posted In: Image prep
└ Tags: , , , ,
4 Comments

When To Give Up

There’s a pretty level-headed piece from First Second Books making the rounds that discusses an important topic in comics: When to give up. It’s worth your time to read.

It’s written from very much the same standpoint as a site post I did here back in 2010 titled “If It All Falls Down.” From that post:

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by on January 23, 2013
Posted In: Creativity
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19 Comments

If it sounds too good to be true…

As happens from time to time in webcomics, we’re entering another period of time in which creators are being inundated with a lot of amazing claims. As you’ve seen in the forum, new webcomic aggregator sites (like this one and this one) seem to be on the rise. And my inbox is full of people who are trying to make sense of amazing claims of new business models and overnight success that they’re hearing from other sources.

So let’s take a moment to try to make sense of it all.

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by on January 22, 2013
Posted In: Business
└ Tags: , , , , ,
2 Comments

Open Call: Web Design Hot Seat

Time for another Hot Seat series. I’d like to focus on Web site design.

If you’d like to participate, please include the following in the Comments section below:

 

  • Your name
  • Comic’s Title
  • Comic’s URL

 

by on January 21, 2013
Posted In: Hot Seat critiques

Bonus post: Bill Day and “self-plagiarism”

There’s a lot going on right now! This is the third bonus post this week!

So, here’s the deal. Ordinarily, I’d post this kind of thing here as members-only content, but the truth of the matter is that I have a personal connection to the story. That personal connection was the reason I never posted about Bill Day’s historic IndieGoGo campaign here in the first place.

Please… keep that in mind the next time I have to moderate someone here on self-promotion. I hold myself to the same standard — heck, a stricter one. I could have easily rationalized posting about this fund-rasier here, saying that it held the potential to be the first time a political cartoonist used crowd-sourcing to fund his annual slary. But the fact of the matter is that Bill Day holds a special place in my esteem, and I wouldn’t have been able to convice me that the post wasn’t self-promotion-by-proxy.

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by on January 18, 2013
Posted In: Creativity
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18 Comments