Olaf's comics blog

There is one thing several webcartoonists have done throughout the years which annoys the frak out of me. I may be the only person who feels this way, but I doubt it.

Oops, you were supposed to have a new comic up in a few days, but your buffer is empty, and you can’t come up with an idea for a new comic! You have to put up something, or your fans will be angry. What can you do?

If your answer to this question is “draw a picture of your female protagonist naked / in her underwear / in a real slutty dress”, you have a lot in common with the kind of webcartoonists I’m angrily ranting about today.

Don’t do it. It ruins every hope your webcomic has of ever getting a shed of integrity.

For now, let’s break down your readers to two groups (there are of course readers who fit in both or neither of these groups, but let’s pretend there’s only black and white for now): Those who read your webcomic because they like the story and are fascinated with the lives of your characters, and those who read your comic only because they think you draw pretty hot women and they hope you’ll show these women with less clothes in the future.

Honestly, which one of these groups would you prefer to create your comic for? Every time you publish semi-erotic drawings of your characters, you cater to the second group. Those who don’t really care what your story is about as long as there are females there and your anatomy drawing skills are a wee bit better than Randall Munroe’s (and by “better anatomy drawing skills” I mean “bigger boobs”). Why on Earth would you even want readers like that, let alone encourage them?

And if you don’t care about what kind of readers you attract, think about this: Your characters are the cast of your series. Even though you do all the work, it’s them people want to see, because — if you do it right — they have lives of their own. They have well-defined personalities, and that’s what fascinates your readers about them. By letting your protagonist pose semi-nude to your readers, very often that will be a huge breach in their personalities.

Please don’t. You’re ruining your characters.

A comic I actually like is Andy Weir’s Casey and Andy. What really ruined that comic for me was Weir’s frequent fillers, designed not for intelligent readers, but for readers wanting to see more skin. He called these updates “cheesecakes”, and according to the C&A wiki, he’s had fifteen of them — in a run of 666 strips. Nudity. Legs. Lingerie and S/M. All of the above. Legs and cleavage. Uhm, this one is actually kind of tactful. Cleavage and legs. Cleavage, legs and bisexuality. Non-human cleavage and legs. Slutty cheerleaders. Almost nude. Legs / fetish. More fairy skin. Topless. Even more nudity.

If I told you that this comic had a pretty good plot, and you checked it out when one of these “cheesecakes” were on the frontpage, would you believe me?

Oh, and did you notice that exactly zero of these fifteen scantily clad images featured males? Funny coincidence, eh?

I like the story, but the experience as a whole gets kind of ruined when the cartoonist has to break into the middle of a storyline to say “since the strip’s most popular character is not in this storyline, here’s a picture of her topless to make up for it”. Fortunately I was reading most of that comic strip pretty late in the strip’s run, so I could just skip over these cheesecakes in the archives. I feel sorry for the readers who had to wait several days for the real updates to come because the cartoonist wanted to draw some flesh.

And some cartoonists see no problem in doing this even though their characters are underage. There’s a special kind of hell for cartoonists like that.

Personally I don’t like fan service in comics, either: If your plot is designed especially to be able to show your females with as little clothing as possible, I bet it’s a really bad plot. I’m not criticizing nudity in general, of course, if the situation requires your character to be in an undressed state, that’s okay with me as long as that situation isn’t created solely to undress the character. There’s nothing wrong with nudity as long as it suits the story. For instance, if you have a great storyline idea which involves your characters going to the beach, it is okay to draw them in bikinis. But don’t sit down and struggle to find a way to put your characters on the beach just because you want to show your characters in bikinis. I have no problem at all with strips like this QC page, as it feels like part of the story.

And if your buffer is empty and you have no ideas: Draw a filler, or miss the update (or get a guest comic). But don’t use cheesecakes. They ruin your comic. Even Jeph Jacques’ Indietits fillers are better. Preferrably: Get an idea, and make the comic. A well-done filler can sometimes take just as long as making a comic, so why waste time on fillers?

(Obviously, these rules do not apply to erotic comics. If Menage a 3 started posting fillers with the characters in the nude, it wouldn’t act as an insult to the readers at all, since the comic is all about sex and nudity anyway.)

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.