I have a webcomic... do you?

I guess one of the advices that we should take before doing the whole "page creation" is that we should always have an eraser document where we write all the tropes related and the description before throwing it to the eye of other tropers.

I should put that as well as there are other ideas such as:

• "Do your own archive binge, so you can see which tropes you have used"
• "Check the tropes on your favorite works, those works give you inspiration but also the tropes those works have used might be in use in your work"
• "Check the YKTTW every so often for new tropes in progress"
• "There are index tropes, use them to find the one you are using (or plan to use)"
• "Doing a Wiki Walk or two in the site will be your friend to find the tropes in the list"
• "Do frequent saves on the preliminary document in your hard drive/cloud before showing it to other tropers"
• "If you have problems with the English Language and you are near the end please use this topic: this one"

Hope that helps.

I have one. My Roommate Is An Elf. About this guy Harold who has an elven roommate, a troll neighbor, and lives in a science fantasy world. It's a reboot from what it once was, which was terrible.

Myroommateisanelf.comicdish.com

My problem is I don't have the comic made yet.

[Sorry, new accounts cannot post external links.]

I have... an experiment.

I just made and uploaded (finally) an index page for it today on my general writing website: http://www.senordwall.com/bricklayerindex.html

And here is the first page for anyone interested in starting from there: http://www.senordwall.com/bricklayer1.html

"Bricklayer" - a comic that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am touched in the head. It's not comedic, it's a drama comic, so it's a different kind of insane. It's just something I started because the idea got stuck in my head and wouldn't leave me alone and it wasn't content with being made into a text-story, which is what I do better at than comics...

Bricklayer is about a group of gravekeeper-artists who live in a city where they build a wall with the bones of the dead as is the city's tradition. They are looked down upon by their society as "unclean," however, and are the subject of curiosity for outsiders. The story starts with a journalist who has come to study them and to get to know them on their own terms.

It's... weird. I hope I'm not hated for it. Part of the premise of doing the comic is to experiment with style: My foregrounds/characters are monochrome while the backgrounds are different colors, different "skies" - and never blue.

You need far more background detail rather than that stupid weird texture colors in there. All it causes is "floating head syndrome" which only creates a sense of disconnect. I don't feel as interested in this place as I probably should. You're talking about people who build walls out of bones, you need to give us more details of that. It's good that you're giving us some of the design elements of the walls, but we need more of that. We need the rooms, the buildings these people live in, an actual freaking restaurant for those two to have sat in, which also could have used other random visitors to said restaurant to give the sense of an actual city. Etc.

Backgrounds that are nothing but a single color is often a sign of laziness. And it fails to make me feel like that's a real place, too. Which is not a good thing in a comic.

[Finally just deleting this... 9/17/2014]

edited 17th Sep '14 2:49:46 PM by Karmameter

Thanks. You've actually encouraged me to give up on it, to stop wasting my time. I was never very serious about it in the first place. The "people floating against weird backgrounds" was kind of the point - it was a stylistic experiment. I know there were a few people interested in it, but maybe if I have enough interest, I'll try making it a text-story.

I don't know. I kind of wanted to keep working on it, but I'm not sure now, especially when the whole visual style I was going for is apparently offensive.

—- Urk, I kind of read one comment and didn't see the other, ninja-posting? Or my mind just kind of blanked out there...

If the *entire* visual style isn't horrible... I do agree that some of my areas where I had grass cut-out against ground that was the same as the sky don't really work. I mean, I was experimenting with the whole cutout thing as a style and I never thought it looked right but put it up as a "I'm still playing around with this" thing.

The thing is, I really am not used to comics as a medium. I write and I do art, but it seems like whenever I try to combine the two, it ends in failure. I've tried comics before only to wind up annoyed at my own visual style or to have something in the story not go right. (This isn't as bad as something I did called "Paper Eagles" years and years ago in which the protagonist was a Hollywood Atheist of the worst kind, a literal Dead Little Sister ... and nothing I did really made any sense). I also tend to be more interested in settings than characters a lot of the time, especially when I try this medium. I don't know why.

I don't know if I should try to actually do something with this (if not a comic, then a text story?) or if I should just cut and run.

I actually thought people would be more offended by the bizarre story that deals with death than by the visual style.

edited 4th May '14 11:49:00 AM by Shadsie

Uh.... how did you get offensive out of my basically saying it wasn't working to give a sense of place? Because offensive is not what I was thinking when I read this. It's an interesting idea, certainly, but with so many of the background being textured colors or simply blank I can't even tell if they're inside or out. Simple things like that. And I want to see more of the walls when they're being shown off, because it looks it just ends and goes off into a void when you only have part of the wall and then nothing. It got interesting when we could see the details you wanted to show off. But there was just a whole bunch floating. (Shit, that's something I deal with extensively myself. I suck at backgrounds.)

I don't think it's offensive, I think it's just uncommunicative. I have to get ready to go to the grocery asap or I'd write more. Hope you feel alright.

I'm sorry if I was overdramatic.

I mean, this was a project that was occupying my mind for a while. You see, I don't have a job right now. I'm disabled - for being bipolar enough to need the help. "Doing something creative" is a need of mine like my body needs food and air, so I seem to be in need of some kind of running project at all times. Seeing as I just put one of my novels on Kindle (to dust and crickets and "where are all those people on my geek forums who said they couldn't wait to buy my book?") I am absolutely sick right now of making "editing my prior-penned novels" a project.

I do fan fiction - a lot. However, that only carries me so far because I know that I don't own anything by Nintendo or Sony...

So, a new story pops into my head and wants to be done a certain way... becomes my "project" for a while, and now I feel like I have to scrap it entirely, or completely re-tool the thing, and it annoys me.

If you / people in general think the story is worthy of merit, I'll get over it, and I'll likely try to find a way to make it work.

I was honestly more worried about the weirdness of the *story* than anything. I know I am able to peak interest in stuff involving death and bones on the Internet (the stuff I do with actual animal bones is somewhat popular on Deviant Art), but "Bricklayer" doesn't seem to be anything particularly marketable outside of niche-online. And even there, I've always kind of had this "looking over my shoulder" feeling, sure people think I'm weird or ghoulish for writing something like this.

One of my early concepts for the story was to have it be a "webcomic" in technicality - as in, to do the illustrations I've had in my head (like Page 15, which I've had a version of in my brain for a long time) and to have blocks of story as a text-narrative/like I'd write as a novel on the background.

I don't know. I just don't know.

I am 34 years old. I have a degree in graphic design (not often used, due to my life problems getting in the way of meaningful employment). The stuff I draw shouldn't look like it's the crap pulled by a 12 year old newbie.

And my brain needs a massive original project of merit to work on, dammit.

Personally what struck me as bizarre when reading it was that people had a problem with the bricklayers, but there actually is a historical precedent for it. I don't think most of the people who would find this content objectionable are web savvy enough to come across it. Personally I think you should just continue what you started whenever the motivation strikes. You may learn something valuable for future projects.

I also still recommend giving the Webcomic Underdogs community a try.

I looked in... I'm really way too shy. I mean, webcomics aren't a major thing with me. I like a few, but this isn't a "native art form" for me. As I've said, I'm more used to plain artwork and just writing and tend to have problems making them coherent when my brain demands I combine them.

The only reason I shared this here was because a few people on other foura (Deviant Art art and another place I go to) liked it and I thought "Hey, why not?" I feel a bit like I've been smacked on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. Like... yes, I am FINALLY getting some HONEST criticism, but... um... wow.

I'm not that good with self-promotion and sharing stuff (which is probably why my Kindle novel is gathering dust). On one end, I don't know how, on the other, I don't really believe in myself. I mean, aspects of my illness leave me feeling, sometimes, like my very existence is a burden upon humanity, let alone any of the stuff I try to *do.* So... when I share stuff like this, on forums I'm not too familiar with, it's "me being brave."

I think the only reasons I'm confident in my fan fiction life is the sheer fact that most fan fictions absolutely suck, so I know mine can't suck as hard. That and having a few pieces up on the Recommends here doesn't hurt. I still feel the need to apologize even for that stuff, though.

Would you read this if I tried more of a "story with illustrations" format? Because I just feel like I suck at the medium, in general, and "the experiment has failed."

Yes.

EDIT: And honestly I was harsher than I would have been if I hadn't read Ace's comment first. I ended up being about as harsh as I would have been if it were my own work, which is unheard of for me. What you've made has a lot of charm.

edited 4th May '14 3:40:44 PM by KarmaMeter

I wound up scrapping it. It's gone from the Internet, at least if Go Daddy and Deviant Art did their jobs when I hit "delete."

It's something I may come back to at a later date, with a different approach.

I'm tentatively posting this. I know it has some art faults, but the more I go at it, the more I think I improve. As I am new and cannot post links, I'll PM it to any who is interested.

(Edit: It finaly let me post the dang link)

http://shadowgatestudio.com/index.html

edited 24th May '14 1:53:39 PM by Shadowgate

Although I am now embarrassed of my above "review," I am interested.

EDIT: Really sorry that it's gonna be awhile before I can look at that. When you first made the above post I was on a road trip and I knew I wasn't going to be very well equipped to help you from my phone. When I got back home my computer had an error message. I rebooted it and made this post. Then it started getting really slow and I rebooted it again and it's been unable to boot properly ever since. Time will tell whether I'm able to get my computer fixed at all.

edited 26th May '14 4:19:01 PM by KarmaMeter

I hope you get your computer fixed soon. You're go into trope withdrawal.

Figures I'd share this video, since it has some interesting insights into creating a webcomic from an artist of one. (It also has major spoilers for the artist's comic, so be warned.)

Cool. I'll watch this later.

Soooo, I guess I have enough content to post here now? Last month I started a Pokemon comic based loosely on a monotype run I did through FireRed using only bug pokemon. I started the comic in the first place mainly as an art exercise to try and improve with my tablet, as well as in meeting deadlines by trying to keep up with three updates a week. Aside from taking last week off, I've at least succeeded in the latter.

So, I'm currently tinkering with a really complex narrative that will likely take the form of a graphic hypernovel—that is, a long-form sequential art-based story with multiple stories told in parallel connected through hypertext links and other nifty stuff with lots of relevant ephemera. I had a college professor who I made the pitch to describe it as like Marshall Mc Luhan meets HP Lovecraft, and that's not totally inaccurate.

As it stands, I'm writing it out as a novel rather than a script, because I would prefer to work with someone willing to interpret and collaborate with me directly rather than just, y'know, draw exactly what I have on paper. Plus, scripting is exhausting, kind of boring, and doesn't really get across what I want to do in a given scene; to whit, some of it is going to remain text, but that's a whole different question.

The problem is, I'm nervous as hell about seeking out an illustrator. Less because I'm a control freak than because I'm terrified of being laughed out of a room for pitching something weird and slightly silly.

I am making a webcomic, and am about ten pages into it! It's titled Death's My Bitch, a workplace comedy about Grim Reapers.

For the record, my computer is finally able to boot (as of yesterday). I'm not too interested in helping with people's comics now though.

edited 9th Aug '14 8:52:48 AM by Karmameter

Oh, hey, look! There's actually a thread for this!

Well, so long as there is, I suppose I might as well post what I've been up to. I recently started a comic called "Beat Stuff Up Man", which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's about as High Concept as you can get, being about a guy who beats stuff up. I'm mostly doing it for my own kicks and giggles in order to have a more immediate gratification project while I work on my longer-term book project. Which also means I'm doing new pages "Whenever I get to it."

Presently, I've been posting the comics to both Deviant Art and Tumblr, but I'm planning on moving future comics to a dedicated webcomic site after I'm finished with the current 'story'.

At present, I have two completed stories, "Beat Stuff Up Man vs A Badgerine" (Tumblr Link) and "Beat Stuff Up Man vs Some Kind of Weird Shark Thingies" (Tumblr Link), with a third that's currently in the works, "Beat Stuff Up Man vs Cultists" (Tumblr Link.)

edited 9th Aug '14 9:32:51 AM by TheSpaceJawa