Webcomic Basics

Introduction

More cinematic than a book, as accessable as a movie and engaging the imagination perhaps just a little less than a radio play, comics have all the subtlies and power of all three, along with a collection of subtlies and powers all of their own.

And on the web, there are no controls, no ratings, no syndicates. It's a purer free market where you can create as you please and have it succeed or fail on its own merits - with a little advertising so people know it actually exists, of course.

But there are some stumbling blocks, some important lessons learnt over and over again by beginners and then discussed, analysed and dissected once they're no longer beginners. The webcomic forums are a rich and dynamic source of basic webcomicing wisdom.

Except you don't often think of popping along to one of them until you've already started and probably stumbled.

Well, here they are in tutorial form. This is my writing but not my work. This advice is bandied around the webcomic community constantly, repeated, relearnt and refined over time.

So...

You want to make a webcomic?

Artwork

Can't draw? Oddly enough, it doesn't matter.

Webcomics are a hobby and generally a way of practicing and improving your artwork. As such, people typically understand if the artwork is not quite up to par. In fact, they usually understand if the artwork is absolutely terrible. A large number of extremely popular strips, such as College Roomies From Hell started out with very crude artwork indeed. There's even a good few comics with high quality professional artwork which are simply not popular because the story is a bit dull or because they simply don't bring anything new and interesting to the table.

Art is simply not as important as you might think. Indeed, most artists think of webcomics not as something you do if you can draw, but something to do so you can learn.

Ah, but what if you're just flat-out bad at art? What if you simply can't get any better?

In fact, that's not how it works. Drawing ability is a skill you learn rather than a talent you're born with. It's a hard thing to convince people of sometimes, but it's true and nowhere is there more evidence of this than in the archives of webcomics all over the internet. Ask any artist and they'll tell you the same thing: You want to learn to draw? Then draw.

And if you start drawing a comic, you should start to see improvement in your art very quickly. Most comic artists get to be decent artists in a year (depending how often they draw) and from then on will see a constant but more gradual refinement in their art.

It is important to challenge yourself, though. If your comic is mostly people talking, as my own first comic was, then by all means start out with faces in profile until you're comfortable with them, and then move on to faces in three quarter view, then more complex expressions, hand movements, then simple actions, backgrounds, then fighting... If you keep pushing yourself to draw new things, you'll learn faster, become more confident and be able to take your comic in new directions because of it.

However, when you first start on drawing something new, it can be slow and frustrating, so it could be worth starting to challenge yourself outside of the comic - for pin ups, wallpapers, fanart for other comics and so on. That way, there's no deadline and you can take the time and care to get it right until you find you can do it easily enough to start in your comic.

Or just do it straight in your comic and if you're okay with them looking a bit crude, that's fine. As I said, the readers generally won't mind a bit of bad artwork so it simply becomes a matter of if you do or not.

Colouring

Colour is a great way of getting people to give the comic a second glance. Black and white is generally a little boring - we get enough of that in books and newspapers, thanks - and don't forget that there's no cost to using colour on the web. No expensive inks or printing processes here.

However, colour takes extra time for you, the comic artist. It's also reasonably likely that you won't be very good at shading to start with. That's okay. It's like the artwork. As long as it isn't actually garish, people generally understand - and the more you do it, the better you'll get.

Writing

Unlike bad artwork, bad writing can kill a comic pretty quickly. That's not to say you have to write something deep and meaningful, with layered characters and an engaging plot. You just have to write something competently. It can be as shallow or as profound as you like, but it can't be stupid.

A gag comic is a good start for the amateur writer. You've read gag comics before, I'm sure, and you'd know how they work. They're quite easy to do and only need fairly simple artwork. Often a gag comic will mutate over time, becoming something with a bit more depth and story to it, and that's good. Starting with a pure gag comic allows you to gradually ease into story writing and you'll learn how to do it as you go. It's like drawing, really. You start off simple and both refine it and become more ambitious as you work at it.

If, however, you want to write a proper story from the beginning, it really is a good idea to know the basics of creative writing first or the comic isn't likely to work well. There are creative writing courses around which will teach you how to write short stories and novels, and the same principles apply. I recommend them to anyone. I'd even recommend them to a lot of professional webcomic creators, in fact.

Professionalism

Odd that it may sound, but a professional finish to your webcomic counts for more than good artwork. And by this I mean that the image would be scanned cleanly, shouldn't have smudges, smears or pencil lines showing, and you should create speech bubbles, borders, text and so on in an art program rather than with a pencil. You should check your spelling and grammar, avoid internet abbreviations (LOLZ!!) and "leet" speak. Finally, the website doesn't have to be drop dead impressive but should be neat and tidy (more on this here).

Unlike good artwork - which is a matter of practice and forgivable if you don't have it yet - a professional finish to the comic and the website is simply a matter of care and is something anyone can do. You may need the help of a book or tutorial, or a week playing around to see what your art program can do for you, but a basic level of presentation isn't at all hard. You simply have to show some care and attention.

With computers as powerful, versatile and easy to use as they are now, there really is no excuse for an unprofessional comic. Oh, except for the price tag on Photoshop, but there are two free art programs roughly equivalent to Photoshop you can download off the internet if you need to. They're called "The Gimp" (don't ask) and Paint.NET.

Lettering

The choice of font for your lettering - speech, thoughts and narration in your comic - is quite important. Firstly, and most importantly, it must be readable. This isn't hard to check. You just have to bounce it off a friend and see what they think. Script fonts (running writing) should be avoided as they're generally pretty tangled and hard to read.

In fact, and this is the second point, the font should basically look like someone's neat printed writing. There are a lot of fonts like this out there, all with different feels, and you should choose one that suits the feel of your comic and of your art. Comic Sans - which I should warn you has a cadre of devoted enemies who believe it's overused - is rounded and child-like and would be ideal for a comic about a primary school. Technical is neat, precise and straight, hinting at blueprints and technical drawings, and may be more suited to a science fiction comic.

Thirdly, the font must be high contrast. This means that if the font is very dark, the background it's on should be very light and vice versa. It simply makes it easy to read. Of course, the usual solution here is to use a black font on a white background. Coloured fonts and backgrounds should be approached very carefully since even at high contrast, the colours can clash. Again, it's easiest just to check with a friend but I recommend sticking to black on white until you get more familiar with how colours work with each other.

Originality

Sorry, but there are a lot of gamer comics out there. There are plenty of fantasy manga, oodles of role playing game comics - both computer and tabletop - a reasonable heap of workplace comics, huge sweeps of people off on wacky adventures, lots of comics that break the fourth wall and a more than generous helping of college comics (often involving gamers, role playing games, wacky adventures and breaking the fourth wall).

Which isn't to say you shouldn't do them, but you should definitely think about it for a while first. No matter what you do, try and bring some originality to it. Sometimes it'll work with just a little in the right place and sometimes it'll need a lot more. It can be artistic style, setting, genre, the characters, plot... Pretty much anything as long as there's something to set you apart from the crowd.

Clichés from other sources - such as TV and movies - are largely untapped in webcomics. There's no buddy cop comic I'm aware of, few wartime comics, only a handful of science fiction, no medical dramas... These are all harder to draw, yes, but in the world of webcomics, they're also new and different. That's not to be underestimated.

Printing

A lot of people start out on webcomics with plans to release a printed collection later to sell or for promotion. If there's even a chance you'll eventually want to do this, it's best to plan for it before you ever put pencil to paper.

Professionally printed works need to be very high resolution - at least 300 dots per inch. You need to scan, copy, letter and colour the comics at that resolution right from the beginning. Only when the comic is finished, do you shrink it down to fit on the computer screen - and you keep the 300 DPI copy.

Then, when you come to make a printed copy, you have a high quality copy sitting there waiting. If you don't, then you'll have to re-scan, re-letter and re-colour the images. That can be a huge drain on your time if you have a hundred comics to do.

It's even worth going higher than 300 DPI if you have a computer that will handle it. Occasionally people will pick out a single frame from a comic and say "Wow! I wish that was a poster or a T-shirt!" If you've scanned it in at 600 DPI, then you can double the size of the image - taking it up to a decent poster size - and halve the DPI to 300 (which is still good quality). Even better, if you've scanned the image at 2,400 DPI, you can multiply the image size by eight and still have a good quality 300 DPI image (2,400 ÷ 8 = 300).

However, the higher the DPI you work in, the faster your computer needs to be and the more memory it should have. It's a bit of a balancing act.

At least 300 DPI, though.

Backing Up

If you haven't done much creative work - stories, pictures, whatever - on your computer before, you probably wouldn't care too much if you're hard drive crashes. Shrug your shoulders, buy a new one and reinstall everything, right? Sure, it's annoying but it's not actually bad.

However, a comic is something to be proud of and represents a great deal of work once you've been doing it for a while. It would be devastating to lose your lovely 300 DPI copies and only be left with the smaller JPEGs on the website. Even professional webcomic writers have lost valuable originals forever.

Back it all up. Every hard drive in the world will crash some day. Every single one. Make a copy and put it somewhere safe. Otherwise, some day, it'll hurt.

Community

There are a lot of friendly, helpful people out in the webcomic world, scattered over a half-dozen or so main forums. They'll swap a plug for some fan art, critique your art, make helpful suggestions and happily discuss the art form into the wee small hours.

The Comic Genesis forums are the most active and most crowded - and they don't only cater to their own comics. Many regulars on the message boards have comics on Cornstalkers, Modern Tales, Keenspot and others.

Here are the main comic discussion forums...

Plugging and Critiques

No matter how impatient you are to announce your comic and get some readers and recognition for your hard work, you should wait until you have at least twenty comics before you start plugging it. If you have only one or two, your readers won't be able to make a judgement on whether they like it or not yet and they're just as likely to wander off again. Twenty comics is a good mouthful and more is even better.

And if you ask for a critique of your comic, perhaps on one of the comic forums around, be prepared for the truth. A lot of people use requests for critiques as a sly way of plugging their comic or to fish for compliments. The people who respond, though, think they're being asked for a critique and will happily mention what they see as problems in your comic and where you need to improve.

And criticism can be hurtful sometimes, even well meant criticism. Some critics might be blunt, some understanding, but I've never seen one who was deliberatly mean, so take the criticism as it was offered - as a helping hand.

Detritus

Voting buttons, donation buttons, forums and links to shops where you can buy mouse pads, coffee mugs and t-shirts are all common on the multitude of comic websites on the internet, but when they're scattered liberally over a website with only a half dozen comics in the archives they're mostly taking up space and can make you look desperate. Such things are best left for when you have built up a fan base that can support them, and preferably when the fans themselves ask for them.

Filler is another problem. Filler is usually a picture or sketch put on the website to tide your readers over until you can finish the latest comic. That's fine, but the things get left in the comic's archives, where they hang around looking unprofessional for those new readers starting at the beginning.

Best to move them elsewhere after they've served their purpose - An artwork page or something.

Why Write a Webcomic?

There are quite a few people who get into webcomics for the fame and the unfortunate bottom line here is that there isn't much to be had. You can get fans, sure, and appreciation, support, compliments, fan mail and people cursing you because you left them on a cliffhanger over the weekend and it's two days until they find out what's happened, but what most people think of as fame, though? Only a handful of comics on the entire web which are even reasonably famous.

And if you do a comic for the fame, the chances are you'll get tired of it and your work will suffer. No, you must write the comic for yourself. To practice, for fun, or because you have a story you want to tell. Write what you want to write, and not just the stories but the characters. Everything about the comic should be close to your heart. Create because you love it.

And we'll see you around.

Got any comments?

Feel free to buzz me. This document will be added to as new things occur to me but I'm always open to suggestions and criticism.