The gang gets dragged out of retirement to discuss Tim Buckley and his ending of CAD.
Listen to the podcast, and the come back to join the dicsussion in the Private Forum already in progress.
When I asked about potential Hot Seat topics earier this year, one of the repeated requests was to focus on composition. Depending on the comic, we could be talking about page composition or panel composition. And I’m going to throw word-balloon use and backgrounds in there for good measure.
To participate, please give me:
Your name
Comic title
URL
Same rules as usual. I’ll leave the Open Call up for 24 hours, and then close it. I’ll review the participants and post them here and open the topic up for wider discussion.
Creative Bloq posted a very well-written introduction to color theory — in plain talk for people, like me, who could never quite grasp it.
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As hard as it may be to believe, we’re staring down the barrel of another holiday season. If you’re shipping holiday-themed merchandise such as greeting cards or calendars, you’re going to need to be aware of some shipping deadlines so your items can arrive in time. And even if you’re simply shipping books and other standard merchandise from your store, you have to assume the liklihood that the buyer might be intending to give the item to someone else as a gift.
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As you know, the Friday after Thanksgiving officially kicks off the holiday shopping season for brick-and-mortar retailers. The following Monday, “Cyber Monday,” is the official launch for online sellers.
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When Transcontinental discontinued its offer to give Webcomics.com members a 10% discount, it gave me an opportunity to rethink that feature of the site. I think that we can use the significant numbers of our membership to give vendors a good reason to offer discounts and purchase incentives. But when it comes to judging discounts on quotes for print, it becomes really difficult to judge the value of a discount. That’s because the quote for one book can vary vastly from printer to printer — and sometimes within the same company. Books are quoted based on paper size (and the availability of the size required), space on the press, press volume, assembly needs, etc. It’s actually possible to get two vastly different quotes from the same print company by talking to two different representatives — especially if that company has multiple printing plants.
So what’s the best way to use Webcomics.com to give members an edge when it comes to printing books?
I’ve decided the bast way is to open up competitive bidding. When you enter a quote, it will be forwarded to participating print vendors. They know that a quote from a Webcomics.com member means they are competing with several other vendors — and that means that is they want the job, they need to price their quote as low as possible.
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This is the final Hitch It / Ditch it critique for 2012. This has been one of the most popular hot seats on Webcomics.com. You know the drill. I review participating webcartoonists and list one thing I think they’re doing well and one thing I think needs improvement. Then I open up the topic for discussion among the members. Links to the comics being discussed are in the headers.
Hitch it: Although it’s extremely hard to read/navigate, I really appreciate that the site has a guide to the world that the creators are building.
Ditch It: We’ve got a littany of the usual faults here. The header is drab and hard to read. In fact, it recesses so much, the site seems to read as if the leaderboard is the title of the strip. The navigation buttons are hard to read, and the buttons above the comic are over the ad instead of the comic. The individual updates are impossible to understand without reading most or all of the backstory. And so on. But the art is so close to being really good I can’t resist pointing it out. And I’ve posted so often about paying attention to line weight that I feel like I’m beating a dead horse. Nonetheless.
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To my eye, that qualifies as a night-and-day difference. Just a little heaviness in the line where the shadows would be (and a little emphasis on making the outline of the foreground figure a little heavier) and those visuals just come to life. The foreground is clearly defined from the background. The character has life. The figures are a little more modeled in a three-dimensional sense. And it’s so freaking easy to do. Wanna make your comic look better overnight? Line weight.
Hitch it: Jeez. Do I need to say it? The art on this comic is phenomenal. It’s not good. It’s not great. It’s in a class by itself. I’m running out of superlatives to describe it. It’s beyond beyond.
Ditch It: There’s just no way you can uppdate this comic fast enough is you’re posting these as you’re doing them. In this case, I think you’d be much better off completing the project and then posting them on a regular schedule. I don’t care how freaking beautify this is… once a reader loses interest in a comic that doesn’t seem to be updating, they’re usually gone forever.
I learned about this essay on creativity and business by Linds Redding from David Malki’s Twitter feed. In it, Redding relates his experience of working in an ad agency pre-Internet. He describes a process that mirrors closely the advice we present here repeatedly. He calls it The Overnight Test. In short, he and his writing partners would perform a massive brain-dump on the topic — throwing every idea… every kernel of an idea… onto paper. Nothing was ruled out. Nothing was judged. And almost everything as posted on the wall by the end of the night. The next mroning, they’d come in and start sorting through the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. And they would critique one another — respectfully and honestly.
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