Olaf's comics blog

Do you make comics that often has a lot to do with current events? Whether it’s celebrities or politics, there may be a lot to win if you start treating your webcomic as if it was a blog.

Of course, a webcomic can rarely be called a blog. Your webcomic is, in most cases, an illustrated story taking place in a fictional story universe. So why should you even consider treating it like a blog?

Because the society has many advantages for blogs that will work just as well for webcomics.

I’m sure all of my Norwegian readers are aware of Twingly. I have no idea if anything like this exists in America, so if you’re one of the many North American readers I got after being linked to from Webcomic Overlook or Journalista in the last couple of days (thanks, by the way!), here’s the short introduction:

Twingly is a blog search which offers blog trackbacks to major news sources. Which means: If I write a blog post where I link to a news article from one of the main online newspapers in Norway/Sweden (and some in eight other countries), I then notify Twingly about it,¹ and that newspaper article will get a link back to my blog. I’ve used this with partial success in this blog — for instance here. Scroll down in this article, and you’ll find a link back to my blog. I don’t do this very often, but when I do I tend to get more readers. And if this had been a celebrity blog or a political blog or a movie blog or a blog about anything vaguely more popular than comics, I would do it a lot more often.

Can’t we do the same with our webcomics?

Seriously. Do your characters often stand around talking about the latest adventures of Barack Obama and Miley Cyrus? Or do they talk a lot about new CDs, or the latest videogames, or what they intend to vote for? And doesn’t the website where you update your comic have a field where you can write a short comment to today’s comic? Write a short comment, and include links to relevant articles in Twingly-associated newspapers. Then, ping your webcomic, and they will give you trackbacks. And you will get new readers. It’s that easy!

Of course, often it takes a long time to make a comic strip. If you use five days to draw a strip in response to a news article, it won’t exactly be hot news any more, and the number of people checking it for blog links won’t be as high any more. Still, even if you need your time to make comics, there will be some articles you can predict pretty easily. For instance, I predict that in the time around 14 September, Norwegian newspapers will write a lot about the election. I predict that around 19 November 2010, they will write a lot about Harry Potter. And, of course: If your comic strip is about “[insert name of political party here] does a lot of stupid things”, you can just finish your strip and then sit back and wait for them to do their next stupid thing. It’s bound to happen.

Here’s that link to Twingly partners again, in case you missed it.

I don’t know if anything like Twingly exists in North America, if it does I hope one of you will post a link in the comments. But even if it doesn’t: Take a look at your webcomic, and figure out if there is anything at all to gain from treating it as if it was a blog. There are very many possibilities marketed for blogs that are just as available to webcomics if we just think about it.

1. I can do so manually, but it’s also easy to tell WordPress blogs to do it automatically — which I do [back]

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