A Guide for the Novice Webcomic Artist
Recently there was a thread on the Keenspace forums about things to avoid when doing a webcomic. I created my own little guide for the beginning webcomic artist to offer my own advice. Now I may seem a little more acerbic if not downright mean in this guide but given the huge volume of absolutely horrible webcomics out there I felt this was not situation for kid-gloves. No this is a situation that calls for tough love. If you don't scare the bejeezuz out of them before they pick up a pencil you'll wind up with a lot of crappy-assed sprite comics about room mates. The world does not need anymore of them.


In anycase for the dozen or so people who know about my own secret rant space I thought I'd share my little guide with you. If you're thinking of ever doing a webcomic please heed my advice.





A Guide for the Novice Webcomic Artist

Things to Avoid for Plot.

Comics where a bunch of room mates sit around and make sarcastic quips should be avoided.

Comics where a bunch of room mates sit around and play videogames and make sarcastic quips should be avoided.

Comics where a bunch of room mates all go to the same school and sit around and make sarcastic quips should be avoided.

Comics where room mates all work at the same place and sit around and make sarcastic quips should be avoided.

Comics where room mates are magically transported to a fantasy dimension and sit around making sarcastic quips should be avoided.

Comics where the room mates are furries who sit around making sarcastic quips should be avoided.

Comics where room mates are furries who all go to the same school and work at the same place who are transported to a fantasy dimension where they sit around and play videogames and make sarcastic quips should be avoided.



The whole room mate thing started getting old around the time "Three's Company" got cancelled. There are better and more interesting ways to bring a diverse group of characters together than making them all room mates. There are already too many room mate comics. Judging from webcomics you'd think that nobody in the world has an apartment of their own.

Comics that are inspired (ie. ripped-off) from the plot of a popular anime/manga series should be avoided.

Hey, you know what? Love Hina was a pretty neat anime/manga series. That means you don't need to make a webcomic version of it. Hey you know what else? Dragon Ball Z was a pretty suck-ass anime/manga series. That means you really don't need to make a webcomic version of it.


Also, do not follow the "trend of the week". Fads come and go and if your comic has no substance to carry it beyond it's novelty value it will be forgotten when the fad bubble bursts. Do the comic you want to do, not the comic you think will be popular at the moment.

Things To Avoid For Production

Don't make a sprite comic. For one, you're blatantly violating copyright law and you never know when Nintendo of America (which is far more litigious than it's Japanese parent and tends to go on lawsuit sprees every now and then) will decide to lower the boom on you. Even if your comic becomes popular you can bet that no publisher will touch you with a 10 foot pole just on the copyright issues alone. Also, they just suck. The novelty value of Sprite comics wore off back in 2001 if not sooner. Sprite comics suck, okay? Don't do them.

Stick figure comics. Unless you're being ironic then avoid a stick figure comic. If you can't draw then either get someone who can draw to do it for you or better yet, learn to draw. Drawing is a skill. Anyone can learn to do it. All you need to do is learn the basic techniques and then practice. People will be forgiving of bad artwork as long as your writing is solid and doing a webcomic is a great way to improve your artistic talent. Most webcomic artists tend to hate their artwork more and more the farther they go back through their archives. This is a good thing. This shows they're improving. It's very interesting to watch someone else's art improve over the course of their comic's run, it's even more interesting when you watch your own art improve.

Cut and paste. There are times when you're pressed for time with a deadline coming up when you will want to use cut and paste. Do so very sparingly. Do not make an entire comic out of cut and paste. Like Sprite comics, this novelty form became old very fast. Unless you're the guy who does "Red Meat" don't do a cut and paste comic. Just don't.

Sprites, stick figures, cut and paste will all suck the life out of your comic strip pretty damned fast making it tedious and monotonous to read.

Comic Sans MS. It is widely agreed that this font sucks. Don't use it. Go to Blambot or one of the other services offering free fonts and get something better. Comic Sans MS just has no life to it at all.

Arial. Great font if you're making a webpage and you want a clear and readable text. Suck-ass font for a comic strip. This sucks the life out of your strip even faster than Comic Sans MS will.

Hand Lettering. Unless you're REALLY good at this, don't do it. If people can't read the writing on your comic they're not going to bother coming back.

Lined Paper. For the love of fucking god people! Don't use lined paper for your comic. I don't care if you were sitting bored in Math class and got this really great idea for a comic and so you sketched it out in your notebook. When you get back home draw it again on good paper. Unless you want your comic to look like it was done by a bored 10 year old, don't use lined paper. Infact, here's a tip about paper. A good quality paper will yield better results than computer printer paper. You can get pads of all sorts of quality paper from your local arts supply store. Some people like smooth paper, some people like rough. Experiment with different types of paper and find the type you like best. Personally I like my paper like I like my sex, thick and rough.

Pencils. This is what you draw with before you ink. Nothing says "I'm a Fred Gallagher Wannabe" like a shittily drawn manga-esque comic in pencils. Being able to create finished artwork in pencil is a real talent and it takes a long time to develope. Yes, I know pencil looks all cool and emotive and angsty, but unless you know what you're doing it also looks like pure shit. But if you are going to do your work in pencils here's some helpful advice.

The Number One most helpful tip is... learn how to use your fucking scanner! Nothing will make your penciled artwork look shittier than if it's improperly scanned.

The Number Two most helpful tip is... learn how to use a fucking eraser! Just because you're not inking doesn't mean it's okay to leave all your rough guidelines and figures in place. Much like the inside of your rectum, nobody wants to see that shit. Erase it's ass!

The Number Three most helpful tip is... there are more pencils than just the fucking HB pencil! Seriously. You should have at least an H4 for your rough foundation pencils, an H2 for light shading, an HB for medium light shading, a B3 for medium dark shading, and a B6 for dark shading. This will make it much easier too when you go to scan your pencils.

Inking. Cheap paper sucks for inking. Ballpoint pens suck for inking. Tech pens are good for inking. Dip pens are even better for inking but they take a lot of work to become good with. Brushes are freaking awsome for inking but they're the hardest of all tools to ink with. If you use Tech pens to ink then get them in varying widths. Learn when to use wider lines in inking and when to use thinner lines. A good rule of thumb is, the closer an object is to the viewer, the thicker the line you use to ink it, the farther away, the thinner. Dip pens and brushes are great for inking because they let you vary the line width in a single stroke. To be honest, there's no reason you can't use all three to ink a panel if you want. Take your time when you ink. Inking is horribly tedious work but if you rush it will end up making your drawing look like shit.

Things to Avoid for Web Design

Nobody is going to keep reading your comic if the webpage it is on makes their eyes bleed.

Simple design is always best. Make sure the comic is the focus of your site. Make sure it is easy for readers to navigate through the archives. New readers are going to want to check out all your older comics if they liked the comic on the main page but they're not going to stick around if it's hard to get to them or hard to resume reading from where they last left off in the archives.

Broken images and missing links and missing pages. Fix them. They look like shit.

Rants. Everyone likes to pretend they're a celebrity just because they have a webcomic with more than a dozen readers, but if you must rant don't make the rant the focus of your comic. Keep your rants to your forum, or get a blog or make a special section on your comic for your rants. Chances are most people visiting your site couldn't give a shit about whatever it is your ranting at. They come for the comic. They don't care what your political views are on the subsidizing of the wheat industry or wether shark-fucking should become an olympic sport or why you joined PeTA just to get laid. You're a webcomic artist, give them the damned comic. Let them go to the rant if they want to.

Filler stuff and missed deadlines. Currently my comic has about 45,000 readers which puts me in the mid-popular level for comics. Not as many readers as Sluggy Freelance or Sexy Losers, but more readers than most comics have. Because of this I am always getting e-mails from hopeful new webcomic artists asking "How do you get such a large readership?".

Consistancy is the key to building a readership. Don't redesign your site every two days. Don't radically alter the look of your comic every week. Sure you can change and evolve and even shake things up once in awhile but don't keep your reader disoriented. The most important thing to be consistant about is your update schedule. Don't try to do a 7day a week comic if you know you can't realistically meet that schedule. If you do a three day a week comic then always update your comic on the same three days. If you update Mon-Wed-Fri then don't do Tue-Fri-Sat one week and Sun-Mon-Thur the next. If you can only do one comic a week then only do one comic a week and keep the update on the same day. If building a readership is important to you then don't take month long "hiatus" breaks all the time. People are going to get tired of playing the "is there a comic today?" game and they'll stop coming and they'll stop recommending your strip to their friends.

If you can't make a deadline then make sure there is something there for them when they show up on your update day. A filler sketch or guest strip or something but don't get lazy and over employ them or once again you'll start losing readers.

Now, once you've reached a certain level of readership you can afford to dick your readers around a bit more. You can put in more fillers or miss more deadlines and not affect your readership too much but if your readership is not on-par with Fred Gallagher's then you're not going to be able to get away with it as much.

Also, don't expect to suddenly have a huge readership. The truth is most webcomics probably never get more than 100 regular readers. If you've got 1000 regular readers then consider yourself to have reached a milestone that most webcomic readers will not reach. Don't let it get to your head though. No matter how big your readership is unless the name of your comic is "Penny Arcade" there's someone out there bigger than you.

Readership takes a long time to build up. I didn't start out with my current readership. I started with maybe about 300 readers. I've been doing my strip for about 2 1/2 years now, it's a slow and steady process to build a readership and a lot of it depends on how actively you promote your comic something which I've put a considerable amount of effort into doing.

Now a lot of artists say "I'm not concerned about readership, it's not important" and while that's a good attitude to have it's not neccessarily an honest one. If people didn't really want to share their work with an audience then they wouldn't publish it. Beyond the pure value of an ego-stroke there is a need for the artist to reach his audience. However, don't make the numbers your goal. Be more concerned about the "quality" or your audience than the "quantity" of it. You want to be reaching people who truly appreciate your work and not just like it because it's the current trend to like your work. It's better to only have 100 readers who really like your work and get it than it is to have 100,000 readers who only like your work because everyone else does. When your work is no longer in vogue then those 100 readers who really appreciate your work will still be there while the other 900,000 have moved on to the next trend. So yes, the number of readers you have shouldn't be important. What should be important is being able to reach the readers you do have.