Olaf's comics blog

This Spring I finished my Master’s Thesis in documentation science, on the social dimension of webcomics. The thesis included a survey of almost 300 webcomic readers, and what I was trying to do, was to find answers to a couple of questions about webcomics from an user’s perspective. Questions like: What kinds of comics are popular, and why are they popular? What is the best way to make money from a webcomic? Are comics made especially for the screen better than the traditional easy-to-print webcomics? I spent a year searching for these answers, and now I can finally share them with all of you.

Here’s a link to the thesis. (Sorry, it’s in Norwegian only.)

As I wrote the thesis in Norwegian, I realize that many of you can’t read it. So here’s my plan: Starting tomorrow, I will translate this thesis to English and publish it in this blog, one chapter a day. I take the weekends off from the blog whenever I can, so that’s five chapters a week. I will also create a WordPress page containing links to all the chapters in the correct order, so that it’s easy to navigate in the thesis. Depending on how I split it up, there could be anything between twenty and forty-five parts to this series, so at the very latest, the entire thesis will be published here in English nine weeks from now. This is the biggest work I’ve ever done, so I want to share it with the world.

But, of course, if you read Norwegian, you can just click the link, download the PDF from the page you come to, and read the entire text right away.

Or you can choose not to. Just because I have a blog doesn’t mean I can make you do whatever I want. The Internet doesn’t work that way.¹

1. Yet. [back]

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• Norwegian webcomics in English
• Books on making webcomics
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• Pay-per-view in webcomics
• Webcomics on tracks?