Episodes
Receiving & Processing Critique
Webcomics have a lot of moving pieces, and constructive critique can be an excellent way to troubleshoot those pieces or get around road blocks. We understand that it can be scary to ask for a critique of your work, but learning how to receive and process critique can help you, and your webcomic, to improve and grow. Today we're going to talk about how to be on the receiving end of critique.
The Truth About Art School
Have you come across a creator with a style that astounds you and wished you could bottle it up for yourself? Perhaps even....devour it? Join us today as our hosts discuss the dark secret behind art school...and the truth about how they really got their webcomic powers.
Characters as Tools
We all love creating characters, and we want to make them feel like they could be real people. But at the end of the day, characters aren’t real people - they act as tools to help tell our stories, while hopefully still coming across as having a three-dimensional history and personality. Today we wanted to talk about how to interpret characters as storytelling tools - and what to do when your audience gets a little too invested.
Commissions and Contract Work
One of the biggest questions about making comics is: what roads are available to make money off of making comics? One direction that many creators go is commissions or contract work. Contract work is specifically entering into some kind of agreement, where someone is paying you for your comic-related skills. It can be a simple illustration commission that you draw for someone in a day, or it can be something long-term that spans years and years.
Same Face Syndrome
So here’s our scenario: you’re making your webcomic, your readers are following to the best of their ability, but you’re hearing the feedback that they can’t tell some of the characters apart. This can be about how you draw them, the styles and coloring you’re using… OR there could be aspects of your writing that are affecting how they’re perceived. For whatever reason, people are getting confused. That's what we call Same Face Syndrome and we're here to help you diagnose and treat.
Starting with the Big Idea
If you’re like… well… everyone on this podcast, you’ve had some pretty epic webcomic ideas. They’re really cool and exciting, maybe you’ve even been developing them for years without even drawing a page, and it's such an expansive idea it's probably going to even longer to draw, maybe even ten years! (if you’re lucky). This is a situation that can be both exciting and scary, and today we're going to talk about taking this BIG idea and using it to start your webcomic journey.
Comedy
There are a lot of approaches to comedy in comics, and I wanted to get an episode together about that. Humor is OFTEN rooted in all kinds of cultural trends: current events, age groups, time periods, and styles, so it can be hard when people ask about how to learn to write comedy to find a way to talk about it! But Bob and Delphina are going to do their best today to break down at least their experience and approaches, and hopefully that’ll help you too
Buffers
We’re not here to tell you how to live your life. If you want to post every comic page as soon as you’re done with it, that’s valid. But! A buffer of comic pages can help keep your comic on a steady release schedule, set healthy reader expectations, and prevent burnout or stress during the times when you can’t be at your drawing desk as often. So let’s talk about buffers!
Beginnings
The beginning hooks of your webcomic are what's going to inspire a reader to keep reading, and there are lots of approaches to starting out, depending on the story you're trying to tell. Today, we're going to talk about the many ways to begin a beginning.
Jam Session! Motivation
How do you stay motivated making comics? It's a hard question, so today we're going to jam about it and see what answers we can find!
Shortcuts and Time Savers
Webcomics take so long, and while the perfectionist in our brains might tell us that we MUST do everything the long way, I think we've all pretty quickly learned that the easier you make the journey for yourself, the better. So this is going to be some quick lessons we've learned that changed our process and made life easier.
Sticking With One Idea
Do you have a bunch of ideas, but you can never stay fixated on just one? It can be tricky to stay focused for a project as long as a webcomic, especially when everything else starts to look SO MUCH SHINIER. But there are things you can do to increase your chances of seeing it through to the end and resisting the Plot Bunnies, so today we're going to talk about that!
Drawing from Photo Reference (with AdorkaStock!)
Drawing anatomy and poses can be tricky, but there's some excellent tools out there for referencing poses like the awesome stuff that Sarah makes at adorkastock.com. But how DO we do it in an effective way? Let's talk about it!
Coming Up With Names
Does your webcomic contain characters? Maybe even places? Perhaps it also needs.... a title? If any of these things are true, you've probably had to sit down and face the struggle of deciding names for the things in your comic, as well as for the comic itself. These things are important, giving vital information about tone, genre, details of setting, and all sorts of other cues to the reader... But why's it gotta be so hard? Anyway, today we're gonna talk about it!
Alternate Formats
Webcomics are pretty great in our opinion, but they're not the only way to get a narrative story out into the world. Prose has been an option forever, but today, with so many new technologies, there are so many more options available! You could use anything from video games to podcasts to tell a story. But each option has its own pros and cons depending on what sort of project you're building, and today we're going to talk about them!
The Intro "DO IT (feat. Shia LaBeouf)", and the Outro "It's Good To See You Again!!", both by Adrianwave, have been used and modified in good faith under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licensed. Edits include: Fade IN/OUT, and a repeat added to the beginning of "It's Good To See You Again!!". For more information on this creative commons use, please reference https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/