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.

The Webcomic Overlook (which, by the way, is a very interesting website that you should all check out) has published an interesting article about use of the term “webcomics”. Turns out it is a disputed word which some people don’t want to use.

It turns out there are many different reasons for not wanting to use this term:

• Mike Perridge believes that “[c]omics remain comics whether in print or online. Each medium presents it’s [sic] own opportunities and challenges but comics remained untouched at the centre.” I agree completely with that, but I don’t really see why that’s a reason not to use the word “webcomics” for “comics on the web”. Of course, the same comics can be webcomics in one instance and print comics in another. But when they are on the web, they are on the web. What’s so wrong about mentioning that? As El Santo [not The Webcomic Overlook guy's real name, but I can't find *that* anywhere, so El Santo it is] says — is there anything wrong in using a word like “audiobook”, too? The core product is still the same. By using the term “webcomic” for comics online, we use a term that describes both the documentation form (the comic) and the physical medium (the web). Of course, I don’t see anything wrong in calling it just “comics” either, but I still think “webcomics” should be a valid term (and I think the same thing about the term “print comics”).
• Some people feel that the term “webcomics” has earned a negative connotation, as anybody can make and publish their own webcomics, and thus webcomics is a medium where 97 % of everything published is awful. Could a change in terms remove that negative connotation? Possibly. Technically, there’s not that much of a difference between a “blog” and an “online newspaper”, but most people would think of the latter as far more serious. Also, some people seem to actually believe that there’s a difference between comics and graphic novels. However, negative connotations would probably sooner or later move on to whichever new term one chooses to settle upon. We need to improve the quality of the medium, not the word.
• Ben Gordon writes in a comment that “‘webcomics’ is ‘the scene’: juvenile, mediocre, micro-celebrity-driven, where leading people claim to be making a living from their work but rely on scams and hustles to get by, all while letting gullible fanboys kiss their ring. Those of us who have joined the exodus from the scene are a little touchy about being included in its midst because we’re making better, more professionally validated comics, and we are doing it as cartoonists, not as another online quagmire of logrolling and backscratching”. The comment is quite interesting, but it’s also difficult to agree to as it’s very based on personal experience (without revealing the details of these experiences) and thus it is impossible to understand without having such experiences. It’s clear that Gordon has a grudge against Scott Kurtz — however, as I have no idea what that grudge consists of (and I have no negative experiences with Kurtz myself — I know him only through his work and haven’t actually met him, but he still seems to be a pretty nice guy to me), I can’t really agree or disagree with this (and I have no intention of poking in that hornet’s nest until I really have to). However, when compared to a couple of arguments for the term “webcomics” (see below), I think “my comics are a lot better than webcomics” is a weak argument.

I think that “webcomics” is a good term. Why? Two reasons:

• “Webcomics” is an established term. Yeah. People call them webcomics. When looking up new online comics, “webcomics” is the word people will google.
• The web is what seperates webcomics from other comics. What fascinates me about webcomics isn’t that they are digital, it’s that they are on the web. While digital media has offered lots of new opportunities, the main fascinating opportunity to me is still the fact that these are comics that are delivered directly to my computer screen through the web and that I have such a vast amount of comics to choose from compared to the selection of print comics in local stores. Digital comics have existed since the birth of CD-ROM comics, and there’s a reason those never really catched on. The main advantage of webcomics isn’t that they can use the infinite canvas or that they can use animated transitions between panels. It is the accessibility. And that is directly linked to Internet distribution.

I’m sure that the word “webcomics” has many negative sides. I still think that the positive sides outweigh them, though. I’m not listing very many of them here, but check out The Webcomic Overlook’s original article on this (if you haven’t already). Of course, I often just call them “comics” myself, but that’s no reason to dismiss the technology-specific term “webcomics”. But of course, calling them “webcomics” doesn’t make them any less “comics”.

As for the term “comics”… that’s a big discussion, and this post is wordy enough already, so I’ll handle that topic in a later post.

Technically, webcomics = “comics on the web”. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? You can make comics, and put them online, and you have webcomics. Bam.

Nah. It’s not that easy. Despite Marvel apparently thinking so (by the way, that link goes to a must-read article if you’re going to San Diego Comic-Con). Different things work in different mediums. Scanning an old comic doesn’t necessarily make it a good webcomic. Also, there is a whole world of things to learn if you’re diving into webcomics, as everything from publishing formats to business models is completely different online than it is when making print comics.

But where does one start finding this information? Finding good books and articles on creating webcomics is difficult. Here are my best tips, though:

The best book I’ve seen on the topic of how to make webcomics is Brad Guigar, Dave Kellett, Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub‘s How to make Webcomics. They deal with tons of topics in a very professional way, and I *have* to write a decent review of that book here one day.

Scott McCloud looks among other things at webcomics in his must-read book Making Comics — and it is also worth checking out McCloud’s Reinventing Comics — while Reinventing Comics can be said to speculate about one possible future for webcomics which hasn’t really happened yet, it’s a must-read if you want a whole new perspective on how much it is possible to do with comics online.

For insight on the pure business aspects of webcomics, check out Todd Allen‘s The Economics of Web Comics.

If you’ve tried searching for “webcomics” on Amazon, I’m sure you’ve also noticed Steve Horton and Sam Romero’s Webcomics 2.0. I hate being negative, but I would strongly recommend you to not buy that one. The book promises more than it can keep (it has nothing to do with web 2.0 at all), it is very clearly biased (the example that stuck with me was in a paragraph about webcomic portals where you can upload your own comics — veterans ComicGenesis and DrunkDuck are picked apart while the one truly recommended place to upload your comics is a MySpace clone which at the time of writing the book wasn’t even open yet!), some of the tips you get are in my opinion pretty bad (remember to send out a press release every time you pick your nose!), you occasionally feel that the authors don’t know what they’re talking about (Maus is called a soap opera, the name of the creator of XKCD is X) and a lot of the book is spent showcasing the creators’ own work (32 pages of reprinted comics, all by Romero).

The one other book I’ve found on making webcomics is Steven Withrow and John Barber’s Webcomics: Tools and Techniques for Digital Cartooning, but I haven’t read enough of it to have an opinion on whether it’s a good book or not yet.

If you read Norwegian, I would of course also recommend you to check out my Master’s thesis — I’m still waiting for the University Library to publish it online (I’d expected them to do so weeks ago), but I promise to add a link here when they do.

Also, don’t forget to check out Webcomics.com regularly!

One last tip: While webcomics is a medium of its own, it has similarities with all other kinds of communication online. Check out books on blogging — it seems to be pretty easy nowadays to find information on how to promote your blog, how to write texts for the web, how to make money online… Of course, your webcomic is not a blog (unless you decide to make it a blog in webcomic format), but there are some similarities. It’s all about communication on the Internet.

Okay, here’s a dilemma for the day:

Say that you get what you think could be a great idea for a comic. There’s just one problem, though: The idea has strong similarities with another, relatively famous, comic, TV series or movie.

What do you do? Scrap the idea? Or make it anyway, and get tons of “plagiarism!” comments every time you open your e-mail?

Here’s my best tip: Focus on the differences.

The How to make webcomics guys (I think it was Dave Kellett, but I could be wrong) used Get Fuzzy as an example. A comic about an evil lazy cat and a really stupid dog and their owner — that’s the elevator pitch for Garfield! Arne Bye took it even further: When people criticized his Holger og Hagbart for ripping off Frode Øverli’s Pondus (he wasn’t — a few readers just saw a couple of similarities), he replied with posting pictures of Garfield and Hobbes with the comment “Gasp! Two orange cats! Plagiarism!”.

And there’s this video, of course:

Of course, having similar ideas doesn’t equal plagiarism. But it can dangerously approach plagiarism if you decide to let the previous work influence you. As shown in the Get Fuzzy example, a concept can be played out in very different ways. Don’t be afraid to make a comic about a group of children just because Charles Schulz already did it. But if you read too much Peanuts and you’re not aware of it, you may end up making a carbon copy of Schulz’s comic. And that’s clearly a no-no.

So therefore, my suggestion is that you try to figure out what’s different from the previous work, and focus on that in your comic. For instance, say that you get a comic book idea which focuses on a high school girl who has been chosen to secretly fight demons. If you don’t watch out, you’re looking at a Buffy copy here. So look through your ideas: What is the difference between Buffy and your character? Does your character have a completely different personality, like being a big geek or a snob? Great, focus on that! Is the source to her powers purely in her blood, or are her powers magnified by a magical bracelet she always wears? Focus on the bracelet, let your protagonist show it off on a cover, perhaps write a storyline where it gets stolen. Are her enemies only vampires and demons, or does she also fight, say, aliens? Let the aliens attack town in the very first storyline. And of course, you have to give her a visual design vastly different from Buffy’s — I’m no expert on visuals, but it’s amazing what a different haircolor, the right pair of glasses, and a few freckles, or piercings, or tattoos, can do. People will still compare it to Buffy, but they can pick up a copy of your “Jenny Darkness: Demon Hunter” and still feel as if they’re getting something original, something they can’t get elsewhere.

Use your own ideas — but there’s nothing wrong with having ideas that are similar to existing concepts, as long as you focus on the differences.

(Obviously, this tip doesn’t apply to parodies.)