If you’re here, you’re probably a reader already, so I’ll spare you the normal speech I’ve been giving at the other places. The Apple of Discord is looking to bring one or two people into “the team” to help out for the next few months – either aspiring new webcomickers who need a leg up or bitter, depressed old webcomickers who need a fresh start. If you might be one of those, and are interested in possibly joining “the team”, please, for the love of Cthulhu, read on…
As promised, here’s the link to Round 1 of the “How NOT To” panel/lecture/rant. Fes, Tanya, Mark, and I all successfully tackled Commandments 1 thru 5, and only sort of ran horribly over time and frustrated Fes. For those of you who are just going to TL:DL (that’s “Too Long, Didn’t Listen, since it is a podcast) it anyway, here’s a brief rundown of items one thru five:
While excessive amounts of this can seriously hurt a comic, it’s not that bad… still, there’s a good reason I’ve placed this at the top of the list – comics that start out with the main character introducing him/herself and the rest of the cast to the reader. This is NEVER a good sign. There are many clever ways to get around blatant fourth-wall-breaking – having characters “write in a journal” to express their internal thoughts and feelings or having someone drop a self-important “Captain’s Log” style narration over what they’re doing – both are perfectly serviceable.
There are very few original ideas left out there. As South Park aptly pointed out, no matter how original you are, the Simpsons have probably already been there and done that. But, just because there’s very little virgin ground left, it doesn’t mean you have an excuse to wear a rut in the floor following the path of every webcomic that’s come before you. A few examples of the overused plot device are:
I’m not saying that these formats themselves are bad – I actually enjoy a couple of them – but they do carry a certain stigma upon them. If you’re a novice in the world of webcomics and are working on your first comic ever, or are looking for a comic that would be acceptable and marketable to all fields, there are a few types of comics that you might want to avoid:
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – but plagarism is still a crime. There’s nothing wrong with using the comics/webcomics you’ve read (or still do) to help give you ideas for your own comic, but how closely your work resembles the original is a narrow line to walk, and one that your readership will notice… especially if they read your comic and the comic you’re borrowing ideas from. I can’t count the number of times over the years when I’ve been reading a comic and suddenly went “wait a minute, didn’t ____________ do this exact same storyarc a few months back?”
Also, while I’m on the subject, a word about advertising and branding. If you’re blatantly ripping off Penny Arcade or XKCD, maybe you shouldn’t start things off by saying “If you like Penny Arcade…” or “Just like XKCD, but…” Just a thought.
I’m not talking about “How good is it?” readability, I’m talking about “Can my eyes make out the letters and form words out of them?” readability. It’s very important to select a font that is both scalable and discernable, something that doesn’t make the reader’s eyes bleed or cause them to have to hover 1/2 inch away from the screen to make out your 2 pt font. Script, cursive, and overly curvy fonts are all more-0r-less no-no’s for everyday text, unless you’ve got an overly girly girl character and you want to make it really obvious that they’re pouring as much sugar they can into every syllable.
I think that people, especially those who draw their comics out traditionally on pencil-and-paper and then move them to digital formatting, do not give adequate consideration to how much room words take up, or to how important they are. Text and text bubbles are going to be bonded to your art – BECOME part of your art – and need to be treated with as much skill and care as everything else that goes into the final work. That’s why comic books have guys – letterists – who’s entire job it is is to make the words look good – that’s how important it is.
And while we’re on the subject – Comic Sans. Don’t use it. Now, I’m not going to go into the whole pro-con Comic Sans debate here, and I’m certainly not taking sides – but I would point out, like I did for number 3, that if you’ve got anything that as many people violently hate as comic sans (and believe me, they do) than maybe you shouldn’t be using it as the font in your comics. The internet’s full of free fonts. Pick a different one.
This concludes Part 1 – stay tuned for Part 2, next week, same bat time, same bat channel.
I suck.
I was supposed to review Zorphbert and Fred as part of the ongoing “Plug Circle” that we of the Webcomics Planet Collective have been doing. Problem is… I never actually got around to it. Now, here’s the (sort of) good news – the reason I never got around to it is that I got so distracted actually *READING* Z&F that I never quite got around to my plug.
So, yes, in a twist of logic that only Bizarro could pull off, I’m blaming comic creator Dawn Griffin for the fact that I never actually posted the review of her comic. It’s all your fault for making such a good comic that I couldn’t simply dismiss it offhand. Shame on you.
Seriously, the comic is really good… not feint praise that I offer to anyone, either. The story follows the adventures of the titular Zorphbert and Fred, two intelligent talking aliens, as they infiltrate Earth under the guise of pets so they can get up-close-and-personal with the inner workings of humanity, specifically how we relate to said “pets” in our day-to-day lives.
It’s a traditional-style (newspaper-ish layout) comic done primarily in black-and-white, but with much use/abuse of the gray pallate. The art style is old-school cartoony, but still highly detailed, and very true to the medium it’s being presented in. Big bold lines and crosshatching draw you into the narrative, setting the tone firmly in the land of “comical” while still appearing professional and polished. Layout is consistent, and instead of using a fixed framing box it uses a hand-drawn one (a big plus for me). It’s the little touches like that that make the overall presentation very solid.
This also brought up something that I find really fascinating with comics-vs-webcomics. Most daily prinstrips don’t bother with a great deal of ongoing continuity – taking the Gilligan’s Island approach instead (enough of the premise stated upfront that anyone could easily jump into the action without any primer whatsoever) and occasionally revisiting their central themes to touch base for new readers who’ve picked them up in progress. If you want to see this in action, read (painful as it may be) a newspaper strip like Mary Worth – ever so often, there will be an entire strip dedicated to recapping current events, vary rarely even slightly hidden as a real comic – that’s thrown in there just to catch up anyone who joined our the story arc, which is “already in progress”.
Due to the internet being what it is, with the ability to have a new reader easily access almost all of the archives at their whim, a lot of webcomics don’t go back and touch their bases nearly as often… and when they do, sometimes it feels a little weird and forced. Then again, if a new reader finds themselves leaping randomly into a point mid-story, like this one here for instance, it can be disconcerting too. Now, is that comic in and of itself funny? Yes, I think anybody who’s been in a relationship (especially the men) will recognize this moment right off the bat. But since the primary focus of the comic as a whole is on the two dogs aliens, it might throw some people off.
Here’s the plus from Zorphbert and Fred – the two examples I cited are 2 comics apart from one another. That’s good pacing in the writing and planning, something a whole lot of comics - often including my own – lack. The story itself isn’t that strong, but it’s well told.
And maybe that’s why I’m nearly 2 weeks delinquent on my review. While I didn’t sit and devour the entire comic in one sitting, it did kep me coming back over and over again, picking up a few strips here and there, forming natural story arcs and stopping points in my own head, and I put off and put off reviewing it until I finished.
I’m working on making The Apple of Discord more accessible… not that I don’t have a whole website and a RSS feed and update on Twitter and all that already, but I’ve decided to try and use some plugins to conect to some of the other social networking sites. So… I now have a livejournal account set up at http://kallisti-x.livejournal.com/
For those of you to young to remember, LiveJournal (or LJ) was what MySpace and Facebook were before they weren’t anymore. While I personally have sworn off LJ ages ago, I understand that there’s still a good number of you that still use it… let’s face it, mostly for fanfic and/or porn… but now (at least hypothetically) you’ll be able to tell when a new Apple of Discord comic goes up.
Yay technology.
