Bad webcomics

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UtopiaGuy said:
Is there any hope for webcomics? I took a peek at the webcomic world recently after having walked away five years or more ago, and it looks like it's all vertical scrolling bullshit today. No room for panel art or layout, and the only composition to speak of is just spacing in a vertical format. Obviously, some people are able to make that work, but I don't think I'd care for it. It just goes along with the dumbing down of society from social media and the like. Phones, phones, phones. I guess doomscrolling a comic is better than doomscrolling Facebook or Twitter, but seriously, what the hell? So much for the "endless canvas" they used to talk about.
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Despite having been very invested and involved, I nearly completely checked out around the mid-teens.

Part of this was a lot of the comics I'd followed ending or "ending" (artist stops updating). Or sometimes it should have but zombied on becoming more and more bloated. (I'm looking at you, SSDD.)
The other part was all the new comics were all about gays and catching the first swells of the Tranny Menace, and the like two that weren't were basically "Adulting is hard!" no-medies that were at best amusing.
This was also a few years post the 2009 advertising collapse, so a lot of people who were making side-hustle money quit and did other things.
Add to this the Crosby's also had stopped recruting new talent around this time. I have some opinions about the Crosby's and their invite-only Kool Kids Klub, but it was a curated list of curated comics and when it stopped becoming the 'spot for webomics' that did damage. I recall there was some mini-scandals that really ammounted to nothing but fractured the webcomic artists (i.e. Hiveworks and Project Wonderful).

The webcomic community was extremely incestuous so all the "big names" were singing from the same hymn book or you were ostracized and no one would publicly acknowledge someone with problematic opinions lest they have to get stuggle-sessioned. (
And we hadn't even hit TDS infecting all of "comedy" yet.)

And you have a further issue of....the internet isn't dial up anymore. Bandwidth and storage are cheap. You can't just make another corny gag comic because all those corny gags have been done and your audience can find them easily with a google.

Hardline Traditionalist said:
Is it even viable to draw webcomics anymore, if you're planning to do it as a career? The competition is fierce, not only from other webcomic artists, but also everything else that demands readers' attention on the web. Have there been any new webcomics that have become household names like XKCD or Cyanide & Happiness?
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Sort of. You have coomer bs like above Pizza Cake, but thanks to patreon you don't need to have wide reach, you just need to have a business model to get retards (or coomers) to send you $5 a month.
The other option is going the Webtoon "long strip" route, but this is for people with tiktok attention spans and you are competing with literal bugmen to get noticed.

Comics are also more often posted to Instragram or Xitter. Owning a website and forum are super boomer things now. This means these comics don't really have the dedicated fandoms around them anymore. Its discord now, but its not the same.

there is also.... So more Americans own horses now than owned horses in the 1880s. More people have rolexes after the commericalized availability of digital watches than before.
But they are no longer the dominant forces with the sway on daily lives that they used to.

So we'll never have another XKCD/Penny Arcade where a creator becomes a force in their own right. But webcomics will likely continue, and drawing silly pictures will still be a viable career. But its harder to get noticed now, and the business has changed. Its a bit like Mobile games where the name of the game isn't getting a bunch of eyeballs and selling, its about attracting a small number of whales and get them spam you with cash.
 
Yeah, having a standalone website for your comic, once a must, is now passe, since it's almost impossible to get the doomscrollers to click off to another site. They apparently just stay on Webtoon or Tapas and never want to leave. The standard advice is to get people to sign up to a mailing list in case the comic company goes tits up, then you can still interact with your fans. I dunno. Can't see making a doomscroll comic myself. You can get some donations, but there's no guarantee, and it doesn't sound like you'd make much even if your comic gets lots of views. Updates also have to be way more frequent from what I understand, if you want to keep the doomscrollers reading. That's a metric ton more wok, meaning you'll be killing yourself for pennies. Some turn their doomscroll comic into a regularly formatted book, but even that means doing more work on top of making the comic and trying to build an audience.
 
UtopiaGuy said:
Yeah, having a standalone website for your comic, once a must, is now passe, since it's almost impossible to get the doomscrollers to click off to another site. They apparently just stay on Webtoon or Tapas and never want to leave. The standard advice is to get people to sign up to a mailing list in case the comic company goes tits up, then you can still interact with your fans. I dunno. Can't see making a doomscroll comic myself. You can get some donations, but there's no guarantee, and it doesn't sound like you'd make much even if your comic gets lots of views. Updates also have to be way more frequent from what I understand, if you want to keep the doomscrollers reading. That's a metric ton more wok, meaning you'll be killing yourself for pennies. Some turn their doomscroll comic into a regularly formatted book, but even that means doing more work on top of making the comic and trying to build an audience.
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You don't make money on Webtoon. You get views who subscribe to your patreon/Fanbox/furaffinity/nonce commissary account whatever.

Dresden Codak & Diez's "Oh jeeze its just character models that are really details with lots of lineword around the breast why are you getting worked up" was simply 10 years to early.
 
Hardline Traditionalist said:
Is it even viable to draw webcomics anymore, if you're planning to do it as a career? The competition is fierce, not only from other webcomic artists, but also everything else that demands readers' attention on the web. Have there been any new webcomics that have become household names like XKCD or Cyanide & Happiness?
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Considering that the only comics I see people still talk about are the long runners from like 20 years ago (And Kill Six Billion demons, but you know, it's getting up there since its been 11 years), I'd say no.
 
Ghostse said:
Now that is patently untrue front to back and you know it.

Yes, nearly every arc gets a call back but tons of pages/ink is wasted teasing mysteries. (though unlike a certain Mystery-Box obsessed hack director, there's a plan to deliver on them. But when you are archive binging (or combing through for a comic) there is a lot of blah blah blah between the important parts.

Stuff happens, but it happens glacially. Its a bit like (though not as bad as ) Dragon Ball Z where you could cliff notes the comic down to 1/2 or 1/4 by just removing the future references. This is very frog-boily when you are reading, but archive binges... good god son is there a lot of faffing about.

Plus it is a very wordy comic. And as mentioned, lots of stuff gets callbacks or referenced later so you can't really just skim.

At least when Abrams does this in Sluggy now he includes links to the referenced comics/events.
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Eh, could be worse. I find it pretty easy and fast to read, and while pacing is kinda slow, it's not really filler since much gets callbacks. I think it's all kinda nearing its end.
 
Hardline Traditionalist said:
Is it even viable to draw webcomics anymore, if you're planning to do it as a career? The competition is fierce, not only from other webcomic artists, but also everything else that demands readers' attention on the web. Have there been any new webcomics that have become household names like XKCD or Cyanide & Happiness?
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It stopped being viable more than a decade ago. Most webcomic people these days are either creators from the old days who managed to maintain a dedicated audience, or have a main job that actually pays the bills and the webcomic thing is a side hustle. Even many mainstays from the old days have abandoned webcomics.

I feel like the only way it would work now is if you printed the comic first, say a graphic novel style series like Gunnerkrigg or Order of the Stick, and put it in stores and up on Amazon. A month later, you start putting pages up and let everyone know that the series will soon be available to read for free entirely, but if they want to find out what happens ahead of time, they can buy the book. It was my plan for my Lightbringer comic, which never happened. However, the fact that no one really did this probably means it wouldn't work, print and web comics tend to have two very different audiences and markets.
 
Cave Fisher said:
Considering that the only comics I see people still talk about are the long runners from like 20 years ago (And Kill Six Billion demons, but you know, it's getting up there since its been 11 years), I'd say no.
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What I'd consider the other big creatives like Unsounded still do print runs on occasion.

The guy from Scarygoround went into graphic novels, I think.
 
Begemot said:
The guy from Scarygoround went into graphic novels, I think.
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John Allison nearly dropped from webcomics entirely because he's an entire cottage media industry and running that left him without reliable time to make funny pictures for the internet for free. Though he still posts content insistently. He's reached the dream where he turned his IP over to other artists to do all the heavy work, and artwise has gotten to do art stints for... some series. Hellboy is floating to my mind, but that can't be right. Maybe constantine?
He's making better and more reliable money now, but the cost has been his e-peen as one of the "big boys" of webomics. And considering he never really did shit with said clout...

He's a decent bloke. Or at least was a good many years ago when I had a chance to interact with him. I suspect modern politics have rotted his little bong brain, but back in the day he was very polite, humble, and gave people the time of day. Abrams is the same way.

And in the complete other direction you have the other John, John Rosenberg, the Goats guy. He was always a massive douchebag, but he went all-in on being an autofarthuffer with trolls remorse around the time of Obama. IIRC he had a trustfund and married a girl with a professional job and family money so now is just a worthless self-important "artist".

And you have the Dr. McNinja guy who just straight pivoted to Comic books based on his work for the web. And quite frankly, homie deserved it. DrMN wasn't always my cuppa (It had really obnoxious fansimps. And is a much better to binge as completed comic than when it was running given number of cliff hangers and non-mics he put out) but it was very good art and full color.
 
Arthur Morgan said:
printed the comic first, say a graphic novel style series like Gunnerkrigg or Order of the Stick, and put it in stores and up on Amazon. A month later, you start putting pages up and let everyone know that the series will soon be available to read for free entirely, but if they want to find out what happens ahead of time, they can buy the book.
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A webcomic called Heaven Hunters is actually trying this strategy with its tenth issue over on Comicfury, just with Kindle instead of Amazon specifically. I wonder how it'll work out for the author.
 
Arthur Morgan said:
It stopped being viable more than a decade ago. Most webcomic people these days are either creators from the old days who managed to maintain a dedicated audience, or have a main job that actually pays the bills and the webcomic thing is a side hustle. Even many mainstays from the old days have abandoned webcomics.

I feel like the only way it would work now is if you printed the comic first, say a graphic novel style series like Gunnerkrigg or Order of the Stick, and put it in stores and up on Amazon. A month later, you start putting pages up and let everyone know that the series will soon be available to read for free entirely, but if they want to find out what happens ahead of time, they can buy the book. It was my plan for my Lightbringer comic, which never happened. However, the fact that no one really did this probably means it wouldn't work, print and web comics tend to have two very different audiences and markets.
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Its still viable but...
Back in the day, there was gradiant. You could crawl-walk-run. Get a webcomic, get a little trickle of ad revenue, get more popular and it was part-time income, and then you could decide if you wanted to make the jump to full not. The hobby to full-time pipeline was a cycle almost any decent webcomic in the aughts went through.

Then the 2008 meltdown happened. Ad revenue had already started to drop, with the only really good money coming from flash ads & porn, but it was still decent if you got in with a good network even if you were small time. After 2008, if you weren't doing millions of impressions a month to qualify for higher-tier rates, you weren't making enough to be worth the postage on the check.
So the "part time" section of the pipeline dropped out, and this excluded a lot people who weren't already "gud". Tl;dr, when your funny pictures on the internet are earning enough to make your bank account go up, you might decide to really put in the time and money to take classes to improve your craft.

So you now you self-fund and hope to go viral and collect some pay-piggies, or you self fund and hope to go viral and pivot your skills and contacts into something that makes money - either other art jobs or somethign back office like Jeff Rowland did. There isn't a "Semi-pro" minor leagues anymore. But thanks to patreon there are more "majors" than ever, just like in my horse example, they just don't have a very big effect anymore.

Also just an aside, most of what you see getting reposts and what not are Xitter comics. They are one-shots cromulent with ADHD attention spans. The most "continuity" you get is when its autobiographical (see: Mom Unpleasant Narcissistic Bitch Comics)
 
Wow! Comicfury is still a thing?! Same for The Duck (formerly Drunk Duck). Seems like that would be where the "semi-pros" might go, but I wonder if those sites are still players these days, or just another example of internet ghost towns. Looks like people still use them, but that doesn't mean anything.
 
UtopiaGuy said:
Wow! Comicfury is still a thing?! Same for The Duck (formerly Drunk Duck). Seems like that would be where the "semi-pros" might go, but I wonder if those sites are still players these days, or just another example of internet ghost towns. Looks like people still use them, but that doesn't mean anything.
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The Duck has Powerup Comics and that's pretty much all it needs.
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What happened to the webcomics will outperform comics and pave the road for new age of comics?
What went wrong? It seems so baffling to me that somehow web that is full of users somehow has never produced a webcomic comparable to official industry shit. Not even fourth of what industry can do.
Every webtoon is either lame joke or generic story indistinguishable from one another mainly due to poor art style and people having lesser skills relying on fancy effects
 
Viper the rappah said:
What happened to the webcomics will outperform comics and pave the road for new age of comics?
What went wrong? It seems so baffling to me that somehow web that is full of users somehow has never produced a webcomic comparable to official industry shit. Not even fourth of what industry can do.
Every webtoon is either lame joke or generic story indistinguishable from one another mainly due to poor art style and people having lesser skills relying on fancy effects
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Gentrification of the internet + no real web publishing companies + a lot of webcomic artists have no real professional standards/turn out to be unhinged weirdos + no quality control on websites like webtoon + the main sites like twitter and facebook are awful for following and archiving a comic
 
Friendly Primarina said:
Jesus, how do you take a unfunny joke by Mike Matei and make it less funny?
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Powerup is a parody made to infuriate DrunkDuck. At a point a significant number of user avatars on the site were literally anti Powerup rants.

One of my favorite gimmicks was when they would insist that they didn't use copy-paste for the comic despite every character clearly having a single pose and several of them being recolors of other characters. Instead of recognizing the obvious fact that the creators were fucking with them, the DrunkDuck community would desperately try to "prove" this obvious fact.
 
Is anyone familiar with Blind Girl by popopoka? I don't see any posts about it in this thread and someone in the Cursed Images thread sent me down a rabbit hole.

For those unfamiliar, Blind Girl is about a blind girl literally called Blind Girl (yes, really). The comic mainly shows her getting bullied by absolutely everyone, children and adults alike, for being blind (and French).
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This is the image that introduced most people to the comic. At least this one's kind of funny, in a sadistic way. Most of the early ones were just misery porn.
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The guy was very obviously doing it on purpose. It kind of reminds me of Cyanide and Happiness or the later Borba comics in that it's so deliberately edgy it comes of as tryhard. Anyway, he eventually got bored of this and decided to send the blonde girl up there (literally called Blonde Girl) on an arc where she's still occasionally cruel to Blind Girl but actually hangs out with her
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Great, right? He got sick of torturing poor Blind Girl and decided to develop these characters. Well, the problem is that this led to a tone shift.
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All subtlety went out of the window with that last one. The floodgates were open at that point and...
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So to recap: Popopoka creates a comic in which he tortures a little blind girl, slowly ages her up over the years and once she's "old enough," he pimps her out on Patreon. Why are webcomic artists like this? There's another comic I've mentioned before, Hello from Halo Head, and the artist just posted a one off piece of a character in a bikini. Any other time I wouldn't think much of such a tame image but after seeing this and remembering VGCats guy it just makes me think all webcomic authors eventually go down this path and it makes me sad.

One final thing. This is popopoka's twitter right now:
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Now that he's let these degens get a foot (heh) in the door there's no going back. Something tells me he's going to have to draw more and more depraved shit to keep the Patreon money flowing. Maybe he deserves it for drawing a comic like this in the first place, but it's all so creepy.
 
Friendly Primarina said:
Is anyone familiar with Blind Girl by popopoka?
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Occasionally some of the stuff he draws is gross, but it's also usually funny so I don't mind. He did pretty quickly get bored of just doing standard misery porn with Blind Girl so now the comics actually have kind of a story. Also the dog telling Blond Girl to go fuck herself was funny too.
 
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