Hello all 3 of you (tops) who read my blog. I should explain myself.
I have disappeared because I've started a webcomic (finally) that I've actually been updating on a regular basis. I've had a few false starts on webcomics in the past, and this time I'm determined to stick to it. I've also been getting favourable responses, so that's helping. Mind you, 99% of the people reading my comics are my friends, and would likely not tell me if my comics sucked, so I should take that for what it is. When I get around to doing some real promotion (not until I hit 30 strips, as some wise webcomic authors have suggested) then hopefully I'll start to get some feedback from people who don't know me directly. Whether it's people emailing me with things like "hay faggit, ur comic sucks lol. go back to idiot school" or just staring for hours at a Google Analytics screen and wondering what the fuck a 'bounce rate' is (I know what a bounce rate is...now). I'm taking some advice from the people who do Webcomics Weekly, and I'm not getting too ahead of myself before I've established some kind of nest for myself. That is, I'm not thinking about t-shirts, or conventions, or books or any of that crap, I'm just focusing on the comic, and as a sidebar, getting people to read the comic. Of course, the best way to do that is to make a good comic, so I'll try. I'll probably look back on the comics I'm doing right now in a year or two and cringe, but we'll have to see. It's like those wise webcomickers said - we have the unique opportunity of practising and improving while also presenting it to an audience. We can get real-time critique as our art and writing develops, which is something that was unavailable back in the days when in order for your work to ever be seen it had to be syndicated. My short term goal is to put out 100 comics in the first year. That is, hit comic #100 by January 2nd 2012. I'm sure that I'll miss an update or two, I'm human, and I need to work and go to school and to actually have ideas and stuff, but I'm going to try. 100 comics in a year, that actually sounds crazy and undoable now that I see it written out. Then again, I'm at 20 now, so we'll see.
As more of a record for myself, here is my current plan:
Comic 30 - apply for Project Wonderful to put a couple of ads on my site. This will (maybe, hopefully) earn be a couple of bucks, but most likely earn me nothing and put my name out there for advertisers to notice.
Comic 45 or 50 - put out my own ads. The reason I don't want to do it before this is a) monetary b) so that I can prove to myself that I can go half of the year without a lot of outside encouragement and still want to do this and c) I'd like to have a really nice backlog in case people like my comic enough to spend some time reading it.
Comic ~75 - At this point I'll probably start to expand the way that I'm telling people about the comic. I'm not going to start listing it on those "webcomics top 100 list" sites, because let's be honest- who cares? I used to go to those sites when I was 11 and the comics it had me reading were usually pretty crappy. When I say I'll expand, I mean message boards that I frequent, talking to people I know who run blogs and stuff, it's not gonna be anything major, I'm not looking to become Scott Kurtz 3/4 of a year into my strip, but I want to sort of get used to talking about my comic.
Comic 100 - Celebrate, then realize it's an arbitrary number and get working on comic #101.
That's basically that. How much of this is going to go according to plan? Who knows, maybe this time next year I'll have a few more readers than I do now, maybe I won't. I'm not gonna agonize over it so early into my comic. I'm doing this because I love doing it, and there's nothing I'd rather do than draw comics for the rest of my life.
Speaking of my life, I need an internship, and a job ... FAST.
All that being said - I probably won't be updating here often. I've started a tumblr (HERE) and my comic is located at www.adventuresome.ca. I'm not gonna take this blog down, because I'm sure I'll want it again sometime, but for the time being, that's where you will find all of the garbage that spills out of my brain.
Laters, yo.
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