Just a simple, experimental story idea. Pick a date. Any date, really, but perhaps it would be easier if you pick a special date like Christmas Day or Thanksgiving or something.
Your entire webcomic will take place on this date.
… but not the same year.
If one strip or page finds place June 29, 1958, the next strip or page will find place June 29, 1959. Between these two strips, your characters will have aged one year, and many changes will have taken place in that year. You won’t be able to show all of these changes with one strip a year, but you should be able to refer to some of them in subtext. Some changes may not be obvious until they are referred to ten years after they happened. Others can be more easy to spot, for example if the character is suddenly talking to his wife, and he didn’t have a wife in the previous strip.
Do this correctly, and you will have a story about a life. Not an extraordinary life by any means, but life doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be fascinating.1 You will have a collection of moments from a man or woman’s life – moments that at first glance are just simple gags, but when all seen together shows the story of how everything that happened to this person throughout his or her life changed them.
This should be a pretty short run comic – if you start at the very beginning of life, you probably wouldn’t get to more than eighty or hundred strips before it’s time for that person to die. What to do after that is kind of up to you – you could show a different person’s life, or you could start over again with the first person, picking a different date. My recommendation would be to repeat the concept with another person, but a person who’s a secondary character in the first person’s story. For example, his wife. In that case we get to see her life before she met him, we get to see her perspective of things happening in the first story, and we get to see what happens to her after her husband dies (if she outlives him; or, if they divorce, we will get to see how they spend their time apart).
Again: This has the potential of becoming the world’s most boring story if you don’t tell it right; execution is everything.
83 down, 17 to go.
- Of course, if you’re a lousy storyteller, this could be a pretty boring story, too. [back]
Maybe an annual family meeting, following the lives of every person in the family at every meeting. That would probably need more than one strip, though. Maybe one chapter for each meeting.
I like it. Everybody comes home for Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever… Yeah, that works.