Olaf's comics blog

Just checked Gary Tyrrell’s Fleen for updates on what’s going on in Webcomics World, and in his latest update he mentions this blog. Awesome! But he also linked to a very interesting blog post by Howard Tayler (of Schlock Mercenary) about where ideas come from. The whole idea of his post is that asking where someone get their ideas is asking the wrong question:

Anytime people ask me where I get my ideas (and it happens all the time) I immediately jump up on a soapbox and explain to them that they’re asking the wrong question. My ideas, your ideas, and everybody’s ideas have no intrinsic value, so it doesn’t matter where I get them. They are not currency, they cannot be bought or sold, they are, in market terms, worthless.

Okay, on its own that quotation sounds pretty negative, read the whole post to see how it’s not.

My point is of course that I agree with what he’s writing. Where people get their ideas is a strange question, because ideas are very, very common. To repeat the comment I left over at Fleen’s:

My impression is that everybody get ideas all the time. When the bus is late, perhaps you’re thinking “Buses should go more often here, perhaps once a minute, so I didn’t have to wait so long”. When you’re cooking, perhaps you’re thinking “Okay, I’m all out of oregano, I wonder what this sauce will taste like if I use basil instead and perhaps add an extra pinch of salt”. When you’re waiting for your girlfriend to finish trying on the ten different outfits she wants to buy, perhaps you’re thinking “If I owned a mall, it would be designed especially for men, and there wouldn’t be a single clothing store there, only comic book shops and hardware shops and an all-you-can-eat pizzeria dominating most of the ground floor”. Congratulations, you just had three ideas. Ideas are cheap.

And it’s amazing how many of my favorite comics and stories are based on very ordinary ideas. For example, I still laugh at Scott Kurtz’ PvP. It’s a comic strip about a group of people and a troll running a magazine – not the most original idea. Or look at Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Awesome idea. Now, look at The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the movie. The exact same idea, but the end product is a turd. Having good ideas is great, but execution is everything.

If you’re one of my Norwegian readers, I’m sure you know about cartoonist Mads Eriksen‘s many replies to that question. Whenever somebody asks him where he gets his ideas from, he has a new answer: “They’re stuck between my teeth and I find a couple when I floss at night”, “I put a coin in a glass of water each night and wait for the idea fairy to swap it for an idea when I’m sleeping”, “I channel the kundalini energies around my heart chakra while listening to recordings of whale song and baby laugh”, “they come automatically when I hit myself in the head with a hammer while listening to Ravel’s Bolero“, “I spend a lot of time inhaling volcanic gases from a crack in the ground where I live while masses of skankily clad priestesses playing lyres dance around me”, “I buy them cheap from sweatshops in Asia along with my sneakers and T-shirts”… And that’s just the answers he’s given here and here.

Of course, coming up with ideas can be difficult. Or, not really, but coming up with the right kind of idea can be difficult sometimes (if I need a business idea, my musical ideas won’t help me much). But putting a good idea to use is the difficult part. And that’s the part you should try to copy in the people you admire.

Here’s a small pet peeve of mine, and if you know me you’ve probably heard me complain about this before, too. That’s because I think this is one of the most important things anyone working on creating creative works should know.

When you’re writing anything intended for a larger audience, proofread it. Typos, bad grammar and SMS language all looks very unprofessional. If you write in a language that’s not your native tongue, you look lazy. If you write in a language that is your native tongue, it just looks very, very embarrassing.

You want to be this guy.

Write something riddled with typos, and you’ll lose readers. I’m not making that up — here’s an example of it actually happening.

If you write a script for a big publishing house, chances are your text will pass through professional proofreaders before ever being published — at the very least, it will pass through an editor who will weed out the worst typos. But if you make webcomics, you don’t have that luxury.

Proofread your comic. Learn the language you’re writing in, and look over the text before you publish it to make sure it doesn’t have any typos or terrible grammar. If you don’t have the proofreading skills needed for taking such an action, get a friend to proofread it for you. It doesn’t take that much time, and it makes your comic look a lot more professional.

And don’t stop at proofreading the comic. If you have a blog right below your webcomic, proofread it. If you have a discussion board on your website and you’re active there yourself, proofread your posts. It makes you look a lot more professional, I promise.

And yes, I am fully aware that according to Muphry’s Law, this post is probably full of typos.

With the exception of one night aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean eight years ago with nothing better to do, I’ve never played tabletop role-playing games. While I vaguely recall some aspects of my character — a halfling paladin (or is the proper term “paladin halfling”?) — I don’t really remember anything from the experience, except that it somehow involved a dungeon.

So why is it that I like webcomics about tabletop role-playing games so much? There’s something about them which appeals to my nerdy genes, I guess.

I’ve been a fan of The Order of the Stick since Rich Burlew made a guest strip for PVP in April 2006. Go back to strip one and read it. The story is sheer awesomeness. The art… Well, you read xkcd, don’t you? The art is better than in xkcd. Basically, the concept is a fantasy world where the characters are characters in a game — or, they’re humans and halflings and dwarves and elves and so on, but they’re aware of things such as skill points and level updates. Strongly recommended.

The reason I write this is that yesterday, I stumbled across a link to Darths & Droids. by Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick and Steven Irrgang. Perhaps I should be ashamed to never have seen it before, but now I’ve skimmed through the archives (they’re not that big, it can be done in a matter of hours), and I’m awed by the brilliance of this story. I’ve bookmarked it and added it to the “Webcomics I read” list. The concept is basically that a group of players is making up the entire plot of all six Star Wars movies through a campaign — illustrated by screenshots from the movies. This could have been a really bad idea — however, the cartoonists really make it work. Check it out! (That’s where the title of this blog post is taken from. I’m gonna scream “Summon Bigger Fish” whenever I find a difficult problem the next week.)

So I now have two webcomics I really like that focus on tabletop games. Of course, there are also comics on tabletop gaming which I don’t like that much. Darths and Droids is inspired by a comic which does the exact same thing, except that instead of Star Wars it uses Lord of the Rings as a source for inspiration. I’ve looked at that too, and didn’t really like it that much. And there’s, of course, Erfworld — which, while not necessarily bad, never quite captured my interest.

Clearly, tabletop games are huge in the world of webcomics (not as huge as videogames, but hey).

Making comics is not just a matter of writing and drawing the perfect sequential art. If you can’t get people to read your comic, it doesn’t matter if it’s Eisner Award material or garbage. And while there are many really expensive ways of promoting your comic, I strongly suggest that you check out the free ones as well. It may be because of my education, but it seems that a recurring topic on this blog will be recommending the use of social media.

Let’s break it down and look at one big channel at a time. Today: Twitter.

This Friday, I wrote the following tweet:

I should really start to follow more people in my own timezone. All the good tweets occur while I’m sleeping. (Okay, ALMOST all.)

But after writing that, one thing has occured to me: Out of the 46 people I follow, 22 are Norwegian. And I also follow Swedes and Danes. So why do I sometimes get the impression that everybody I follow are Americans?

Well, to be obnoxiously rude and arrogant: Because they are better tweeters. Not just because they tweet more, but they tweet in a way that makes me care. I want to follow them on twitter because it feels as if they have a lot to say. I doubt that their lives and their comics are extremely more interesting than their Norwegian counterparts. But they manage to make me care anyway.

I’m by no means an expert, and this blog post is solely based on what I personally like and dislike. But here are six things you should think about when setting up and using your Twitter account.

Link to your website/webcomic from your profile. It may seem like a trivial tip, but this is very important. Not because you’ll get tons of visits that way (I don’t know if that’s the case), but because it is a great way of letting people get to know you right away. Twitter nicks are often hard to decipher, and if your name is a common one, people will use your homepage link to figure out who you are. And if you put up a link to your webcomic here, your fans will go “HOLY CRAP THIS IS THE JOHN DOE, THE CREATOR OF ‘FRANK DOORKNOB’!”, and people who have never heard about you will have a look at your webcomic to figure out what impression they should have of you.

Tweet frequently. This one is hard, because it involves figuring out which parts of your life is worth tweeting about. Well, check out what the cartoonists you love tweet about. Read the tweets of Scott Kurtz, Jeph Jacques, Kate Beaton, Gabe, Tycho… Check out their Twitter feeds. I don’t know why, but these people manage to tweet frequently without boring me. Most likely, many of the people you follow do the same thing.

Twitter is not RSS. There has been situations where I’ve considered following someone on Twitter, and decided not to because *all* their Twitter updates were information about new blog posts. As I was already subscribing to that person’s (or in this case, institution’s) RSS feed, the tweeting didn’t give me anything I didn’t already know. Don’t let your Twitter account be an exact copy of your RSS feed. And don’t update only when you have a new comic out or a new shirt in the store. You should let your followers know, of course, but let them know what’s going on at other times, too. Check out the tweets of Jeph Jacques — he tweets every time he has a new comic up, but he also lets his followers know about the process that’s leading up to the finished comic. If the comic is late, he’ll tell us why. And when he’s not working on his comic, he’s tweeting about other things he’s doing. Don’t make your Twitter feed an RSS feed.

Twitter is not your personal diary. And by that I don’t just mean that you shouldn’t write your credit card number or post erotic photos there. What I mean, is that you should do your best to keep your tweets interesting. Do you love your girlfriend? That’s sweet. Do you love Jesus Christ? Okay. But I’m not interested in hearing that ten times a day. The people I follow on Twitter rarely mention their spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends, and they never tweet about their religion. Sure, there’s nothing wrong in mentioning how much you love your wife every now and then, but she’ll probably appreciate it more if you tell her to her face.

Follow people. Follow other webcomics creators. Search for your favorite cartoonists on Twitter, or find them through their websites. And try finding not-very-famous webcartoonists, too. I’ve experienced that people have started following me, I have checked out their website, and bookmarked that website because the comic made me laugh (that’s you, @EQComics). I still have no clue how he found me, but he did, and he got himself a new reader that way.

Link to your Twitter account from your website. Twitter has widgets that lets you keep your readers updated on what you tweet about. Get your existing readers to follow you on Twitter by giving them your Twitter link. You’ve put a lot of effort into making each of these readers to find you. By getting them to follow a frequently updated Twitter account, you make sure that they don’t *forget* you.

These aren’t the top six tips to using Twitter. I don’t even know if all of them are that great. But all social media have two rules in common: Use them, and use them right. That goes for Twitter, too. I’m still trying to figure out the hows myself, so I’m not the very best of help here, but I’m trying. And you’re doing yourself a great favour if you do the same thing. Twitter won’t make you famous overnight, but it will help you promote your comics when you learn how to use it.