If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’d be familiar with how I’ve followed the typical webcomic release schedule in the past, which is 1-3 new pages every week. Releasing in this manner is very important for webcomics because remaining relevant (relevancy in terms of web analytics, that is) is extremely important in growing and maintaining a readership. You need people not only visiting your comic, but doing so often and regularly. Webcomics that fail to do this suffer from lack of reader engagement and sharing, but also depreciation in search results. It is a fire, and you need to keep adding kindling. Neglect to do so for even a moment, and that fire goes out and you need to essentially start over from scratch.
I started publishing my comics online in 2005, over 15 years ago as I write this; as you can imagine, the landscape of webcomics has changed in that time. The modern webcomic reader does not often visit the websites of artists, following link chains and so on. Most readers consume comics through social media and sites like reddit where the benefit for the artist changes considerably. They lose the compensation that comes from adds hosted on their site, engagement with fans becomes decentralized, and the rights of the works hosted on these sites become murky. That isn’t even getting into how easy it is for people to pass off the works of other people as their own. If social media had been the dominant platform for comics when I first became interested in publishing them, I don’t think I would have followed through.
When I first started making comics I didn’t have much else to spend time on besides school. I used to spend 5 hours a night working on comics, not batting an eye at that level of commitment. I’d regularly work past 3AM every night, until my vision was blurry, my hands were wracked in pain, and I had left myself only a few hours of sleep before I had to get up for work the next day. My wife recognized how unhealthy that was immediately, and got me to cut that back to 1AM, but the process had become so routine that I didn’t find it unusual.
In 2020 a website that I had been hosting comics on announced a contest. The host provided a platform specifically for viewing comics on a mobile device, which was the best solution I could find for addressing the modern webcomic issues I addressed earlier. I wrote a comic specifically for this contest, so the comic would be optimized specifically for this platform. When I view a contest, especially those long survival contests on reality television, I often find myself dividing the grand prize against the time that the winner invested in the campaign in order to assess whether or not their struggle was worth it (it usually isn’t, you’d be surprised how often people put themselves through hell for less than minimum wage), and I did the same for this once I planned everything and had an idea of how much time I’d be investing.
I would be sacrificing time from my family, time I could be investing in my own well being and health for a chance at earning less than $7 an hour.
I know how controversial it is to use money to measure the value of art, but the same applies for the measure of our time. Our artistic aspirations are often being manipulated in order to have use burn ourselves out in order to provide free content to drive consumers to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and so on. I saw the game being played, and didn’t want to go on any further. I’ve left the carnival that webcomics have become.
I spent 2020 and a good deal of 2021 assessing my process, what I want to achieve, and how I could do so in a more productive and healthier manner. I focused on a few observations in particular.
- I am not a full time artist, and I have a full time job and a family. My output should not be expected to be comparable with full time cartoonists.
- Webcomics prioritizes frequency of output, and this forces one to compromise quality or take shortcuts in order to satisfy. Focusing on quality instead is a great justification for adopting a more relaxed schedule.
- My ultimate objective with comics is to make something great and that I can be proud of. That isn’t necessarily something that is going to be popular, thus, the modern webcomic metrics and social media engagement are not good ways to assess how I’m progressing towards this goal.
So, I took some drastic steps. I owned my previous website for about 12 year, but let the domain expire and started completely from scratch with a new website. My old website was crafted like many webcomic websites, highlighting new comics and hosting an archive. My current website is designed instead like a portfolio. I’m not so much concerned with people visiting all that often.
New projects will be on a “It’s done when it’s done” schedule. I’m writing them more thoroughly, and taking my time drawing and inking them. I’ve decided to keep finished elements offline to minimize the temptation to fall back into old habits, only posting work as they are finished on Patreon which in its present form allows for a much more direct dialogue between me and my readers, allowing for real time feedback with people engaged with the projects. Online publishing is still planned, but only once projects are completed.
My current methodology revolves around the comics rather than the platform. I’m hopeful that we’ll see great results from this as a result. If you’re an artist that can relate to what I’ve been talking about, or you know someone who has, I hope this little blog has been helpful in giving you some ideas as to how to improve your own work routine.
Here’s to the future of StudioSR3!