Although this change was announced by Twitter in May, social-media toolmaker Hootsuite is indicating that “soon” is upon us.
Here’s what’s in store…
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Call it nostalgia… call it the urge to try something different… but I want to do something on Webcomics.com that we don’t do very often — a special event to showcase members’ comics and cross-promote one another’s work.
Back in the day, Keenspot used to be known for their annual “HalloKeen” Halloween special. Heck, you can still access one that goes back as far as 2001! And there have been several others over the years.
So, what would you be up for? Standalone illustrations? Short stories? Stories that jump from comic to comic?
Webcomics.com will host the event, and use it to promote all of the participants.
Hit those comments and let’s start talking about what we’d like to do!
24-Hour Comics Day is in a few weeks — October 1, to be exact.
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This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
The Ames Lettering Guide is a little daunting when you begin to use it. For general use, I’m going to suggest ignoring the holes on the left-hand side of the tool as well as the metric measurements.
Before we get started, let’s cover some typography terms.
You can use the Ames tool to measure out Cap height, X-height and leading. It’s an ingenious little tool. Here’s how it works.
For cartoonists lettering in all-caps, that center row of dots is really useful. It allows you to measure out the Cap-height with an X-height that falls into dead center. Finally, it gives you leading that is exactly half the size of the Cap-height — which is also a typographical rule-of-thumb.
Even though you’re not using lowercase letters, that X-height rule is amazingly useful in helping you to place different components of uppercase letters, for example:
June was an excellent example of the tremendous value offered by a one-year subscription to Webcomics.com ($2.50 a month). My readers got early alerts on issues that would impact their businesses, helpful tutorials, insightful analysis, and meaningful feedback on their work.
If you’re curious about joining, we’ve made it easier than ever with a $5 trial membership. You’ll get full access to the site for thirty days so you can see what you’ve been missing. At the end of the trial, you can choose to re-subscribe ($30 for 12 months of access) or walk away with no strings attached. You will not be re-billed unless you choose to subscribe.
As we concluded our Lettering Hot Seat, we launched a new critique series. When you sign up, I visit your site on a random day and talk about what’s happening at that moment.
It’s no secret. I despise some of the default navigation buttons that are included with webcomic CMS packages. The ones (as seen on the right) that come with ComicsPress are especially high on this list.
Personal aesthetics aside, using the default buttons kinda makes your site look like every other webcomic. It labels you as generic. Making your navigation buttons fit the look of your Web site is the first step towards separating yourself from the pack.
Although these instructions are written with Comic Easel in mind, I’m assured that the instructions are directly transferable to ComicsPress users.
New Patreon featuresPatreon has announced another set of improvements to their interface, including content tagging, a reorganized content page, and post previews. Here’s a quick overview — and a helpful Pro Tip if you’re faced with a long list of posts to tag.
Of course, Webcomics.com readers were alerted to the upgrade almost a month earlier, along with a guide on how to use it when it was available…
The August Creator Newsletter from Patreon brought some terrific news for creators! Patreon is rolling out tags for its posts. It’s in beta right now, but the ability to group your posts by content is around the corner.
In other Patreon-related news, the crowdfunding giant became the revenue-stream-of-choice for Line Webtoons. For the better part of a year, Webcomics.com has been posting articles discussing the end of the ad-supported webcomic. Here’s a significant indication of what we’ve been talking about for the last twelve months: Line Webtoons is partnering with Patreon. From the Mary Sue:
Today, LINE Webtoon announced that Patreon has been integrated into their Discover platform, so that readers can directly support the writers and artists they love by becoming Patrons, without having to leave their Discover page. Even better, LINE Webtoon is willing to put their money where their mouth is. According to their press release, LINE Webtoon “will make a monthly pledge to creators who publish at least two updates per month on Discover and who have more than 3,000 subscribers and 5,000 monthly page views per chapter in the U.S.”
Mailbag: How do I find an artist for my comic?Q.: I’ve written a script, and people keep telling me I should make it into a graphic novel. However, I can’t draw. How do I find an artist for my graphic novel?
A.: You’ve reached the classic Catch-22 of comics:
You won’t get a high-quality artist without paying them upfront.
And you — most likely — won’t have money to pay anybody (including yourself) until the comic is produced.
So let’s talk about how to navigate that…
Once again, we have reports of rampant bootlegging at a major comic convention. Bleeding Cool was inundated with stories about alleged bootleggers at Wizard World Chicago — including the Carolina Ghostbusters, Fatal Planet, and Ginger Zap. It’s a perennial problem that poses a serious problem for conventioneers. After all, if you walk away from a convention only to find out that you were duped into buying a bootleg, are you going to be able to trust any future purchases at that convention?
But how does the garden-variety consumer know a bootlegger from the Real Deal?
To find the answer, let’s look to history…
CC BY Rafael Castillo If you’re marketing to other cartoonists, you’re missing the target.
You see it every day — especially if you’re a member of any webcomics-themed Facebook groups. It’s ubiquitous. It’s pointless. It’s almost entirely useless. But more importantly, it belies a huge lack of understanding about the nature of promotion.
It’s cartoonists promoting their work to other cartoonists.
Let’s discuss why it’s so bad — and more importantly, let’s identify some much more effective methods of promotion!
The final reason to stop hosting reader commentsIn February 2015, I published a post that asked if webcomic creators really needed to host a comments section on their sites. By May of that year, I reported that I had curtailed commenting — and it had numerous positive side-effects for me. This release from NPR.org made it even more clear…
NPR is making an announcement today that is sure to upset a loyal core of its audience, those who comment online at NPR.org (including those who comment on this blog). As of Aug. 23, online comments, a feature of the site since 2008, will be disabled.
Here’s an analysis of what that means to you…
Commissioned Sketches — Saying No to the DoodleHe stood in front of my table, after hearing my prices for convention sketches.
“No,” he said, “I don’t want a commission… I just want a doodle.”
Try telling a plumber that you don’t want your drain unclogged — instead, you’d like him to come over and just… tinker… with your pipes.
He’ll tell you to turn blue.
I think artists could learn a lot from plumbers.
I made a choice to charge for sketches at comic conventions a long time ago, and it was the right choice for me. For starters, I never had the hang-up that so many artists seem to face when it comes to accepting that their work has value. What I do takes a certain degree of skill — and I’ve worked for a long time to develop that skill — so it follows that it’s worth money. And then there’s the simple logistics. If I’m spending extra time doing free sketches, then I’m being prevented from the things that I came to the convention to do — selling and (secondarily) promoting.
So I set up a very simple commission fee structure.
last month, I alerted you to Blasty, an online tool that helps you thwart illegal downloading of your copyrighted content.
Although I have had an excellent experience with Blasty, I wanted to share with you the procedure for filing a DMCA takedown notice. DMCA refers to the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” passed by president Bill Clinton in 1998.
I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk with Ryan Friant of Nerdarchy a few weeks ago. We talked about my history in comics and the future of webcomics in general. There’s a lot of great discussion there.
CC BY-ND Brandi Redd
I’ve been writing for this site since 2009, and I see a lot of webcomics. I initiate critiques, I get asked to do portfolio reviews at conventions, and I do comic consulting. I do it because I like it. I love talking comics, and I like having the opportunity to pass along the things I’ve learned by doing this for so long. AND, as I often say — here and to my classes at Hussian School of Art — I’ve already made all the mistakes so you don’t have to.
In seeing all of those webcomics, I see a lot of the same mistakes pop up over and over again. So I want to isolate the top five — not in a “boy are you a loser” way. Rather, since many of these are so widespread, my hope is that we can take some big steps to eradicating these six.
Number one should be no big surprise…
Today is the first day of September, and the kids are headed back to school. If you’re a parent, that probably means that the time you’re able to devote to comics just tripled. Let’s talk about using it wisely.
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We’re opening up a new round of Hot Seat critiques. This one is an On the Spot critique. When you sign up, I visit your site on a random day and talk about what’s happening at that moment. If you’ve participated in a recent critique, I’m going to ask that you sit this one out so we have enough spaces for everyone to participate.
To sign up, hit the comments with your:
You don’t need a subscription to read today’s post!
This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
A special thank-you to Philip M. Hofer, “Frumph,” for walking me through this process.
It’s no secret. I despise some of the default navigation buttons that are included with webcomic CMS packages. The ones (as seen on the right) that come with ComicsPress are especially high on this list.
Personal aesthetics aside, using the default buttons kinda makes your site look like every other webcomic. It labels you as generic. Making your navigation buttons fit the look of your Web site is the first step towards separating yourself from the pack.
Although these instructions are written with Comic Easel in mind, I’m assured that the instructions are directly transferable to ComicsPress users.
To create your own set of navigation buttons, you may want to consider copying a current set. They are located in the /wp-content/plugins/comic-easel/images/nav/ directory. Drag a copy of one of the folders to your desktop. Open the image files inside the folder and redesign them to fit your site’s look. (But first, read the rest of these instructions!)
Along with the image files, each folder has its own navstyle.css file. This CSS file has all of the information inside of it which determines which graphics to use and how the buttons display on the screen.
Open one of the images and look at it. I’ll use the “previous” arrows from the Box button design as an example.
Note: this is a PNG file with a transparent background.
Notice that there are three different image “states” inside of a single image file.
The navstyle.css file takes this image file and moves it back and forth to display the portion of the image that corresponds to the state (active, hover or inactive). In our example, the button displays in a 44 x 44 pixel area. The image file is 132 pizels wide (and 44 pixels deep). Here’s the code that does it:
In the above navstyle.css, “.navi” is the element that contains the base information that is used in all of its states. This element contains the height and width along with other information on how the the button is displayed. The .navi-hover code moves the image 44 pixels to the left. The .navi-void and .navi-void hover code moves it 88 pixels.
Once you’re happy with your new buttons, you’ll want to upload them to your Child Theme folder — not the folder you originally got them from!
When customizing your own set of buttons, you can use whatever height and width you want for the buttons, but remembering to alter the code in the .navi portion of navstyle.css to reflect that change. The .navi-void and .navi:hover numbers will need to be changed as well. For example if your new buttons are 50 x 50 px, the image itself will need to be 150 x 50 px (width x height), then the .navi:hover will then need to be -50px instead of -44px, and .navi-void needs to move 2 states over so it needs to be -100px.
The comic navigation widget will only work inside one of the comic sidebars:
Patreon has announced another set of improvements to their interface, including content tagging, a reorganized content page, and post previews. Here’s a quick overview — and a helpful Pro Tip if you’re faces with a long list of posts to tag.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.
Q.: I’ve written a script, and people keep telling me I should make it into a graphic novel. However, I can’t draw. How do I find an artist for my graphic novel?
A.: You’ve reached the classic Catch-22 of comics:
You won’t get a high-quality artist without paying them upfront.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.
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