So little time, so much to do -- wait, scratch that, reverse it

[rowyn]

It feels very strange not to have done an entry in the last couple of days. Which is in itself odd, because I've certainly gone much longer without posting an entry.

Yesterday was inordinately busy. 11 hours at work and baking cookies for a goodie day today pretty much ate up the whole day. Oh, and I wrote quick answers to a handful of emails. Writing sometimes seems like more of a chore than it ought to.

I haven't written anything for Scales since Monday, and nothing for Prophecy since Sunday. But I have worked on a bit of fiction, of a sort. One of the recurring things at the back of my mind is "I should do a web comic". I don't know why it's there; I hardly ever draw any more, and long ago I figured I'd have a better shot at writing professionally than doing anything involving illustration. But it's there, almost like a challenge: Could I even do it, if I tried?

I know that I could do a comic book if I tried, because I've done short illustrated stories before. But the gag-a-day pace of a standard comic strip has always seemed awfully complicated to me. How do you come up with one quick joke after another? When I'd hear Scott Kellogg or Howard Tayler write about coming up with ten or more scripts in a sitting, I'd always marvel at it.

Anyway, this was all bubbling around in my head during the day Tuesday, along with character ideas and possible punchlines. I sat down Tuesday night, wrote up some notes on the subject. Between Tuesday night and Wednesday, I jotted out a dozen or so scripts for individual comics. So now I have a slightly better understanding for how the process can snowball, with one joke leading to the next.

Of course, jotting out a bunch of jokes on a brand new idea is a far cry from continuing to come up with joke after joke after joke on a strip you've been writing for years. Not to mention that it's one thing to do a script, and quite another to draw it. I rather expect that I'd run out of steam for this venture long before I got through the second month, even if I put this on the front burner.

As it is, though, it's definitely a back-burner project -- something to toy with while it's fun and put away when it's not. Or when I need to focus on top-level projects.

For example, tonight, I have to work on Prophecy. And possibly on my basement -- I want to get those two remaining cracks sealed, and put a layer of cement over the east wall to smooth it out (it looks terrible at the moment, even more uneven and bumpy than before I started).

Maybe I'll have time for some fun in there, somewhere.

Comments

[rowyn]

I think a better model would be like Demonology 101 or Strings of Fate: a continuing story, with one or more pages/panels uploaded on some regular basis (once every two weeks?) with the exact quantity varying depending on how productive the week has been.

The trouble with that is that I don't read that format. I read the original arc of "Strings of Fate" -- but only because it was already complete, or nearly so. I've gone back once or twice since it started up again, but never gotten back into it. "Demonology 101" I've never read at all, despite your recommendation.

Checking a strip daily works well in my routine. Even checking the ones that only run M-W-F (I have several of those on my reading list) isn't too bad. But checking something every other week is so infrequent that I'll forget to do it entirely.

The page-a-day has another thing that I dislike, namely: no closure. I had no sense, while I was reading "Strings of Fate", or "Digger", that each page was a complete work. When I got to the end of an update, more often than not I'd feel cheated: "Where's the rest?" A punchline gives me that sense of "Ah, this is what I came here for".

It doesn't have to be a punchline -- it can be a DEP. But the punchline works best, in my reading experience. The "I've filled up an 8.5"x11" space, let's call it an upload" doesn't work for me at all. One of the things I've wound up doing with Scales is only making entries public after I've reached some sort of DEP, just because if I post it whereever I happen to stop writing, then I feel like there's nothing there to hang on to -- no stopping place. Where's the rest?

The other thing that makes me prefer dailies, or at least every-other-day, strips is that they have more of a sense of community for me. I read lots of books and comic books and whatnot, but most of them don't stick with me. No matter how good they are, I finish them and go on and don't think much about them again. But a comic strip that I check regularly becomes a part of my life. It has a disproportionate sense of fame to me.

Anyway, that's what works for me. Obviously, the page-a-week model works fine for some people, as readers and as writers. But I can't see myself working on a project that was in a format I, personally, did not like.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I think I failed to communicate on "Strings of Fate" and "Demonology 101". Neither of them was "page a day" or "page a week". Rather, it was "bundle of pages, every two weeks". The exact length was flexible, but it was whatever the writer thought was sensible for a block.

A better example would be Scott McCloud's "Zot". THAT is the format that *I* would like to use, if I were to do an online comic. It makes good use of the fact that this is taking place on the internet, and isn't confined to a X"xY" block, or a 8.5"x11" imaginary page. It's not being printed in a newspaper, it's not being printed in a comic book ... though I suppose that some web comic artists might hold out for the possibility that some day it will be.

In particular, with Zot, each page was a complete installment (if not a complete story), but it was of variable vertical length. The panels were each separate images, and the reader was expected to start at the top of the page and scroll down through the panels. This took great advantage of the way that pages loaded: the whole page isn't loaded yet, but you can still read the first panel, and by the time you get through it, the second one might be loaded already ... and then the third, and so on.

Often, with comic-strip formatted webcomics, there's the frustration that the comic reads from left to right, but the image LOADS from top to bottom. The result is that sometimes I would see the "punchline" dialogue balloon before I could see what was happening in the first panel. (This happened a lot when I was following "Freefall" ... before it seemed to just become a meandering parade of "cameo appearances of all my internet friends in the background", and I got bored.)

And I fully agree: there should be some sort of "DEP". It's easier to do that with a humor strip when you have a fixed space ... but all too often, I see things go into formula. Three panel cartoon. Two talking heads. Setup, response, punchline. I've seen some comics that are spoofs of these formats that Inari pointed out to me a long time ago. (I wonder if I can find them. I think Inari might be on LJ, but I forgot Inari's LJ persona if so.)

With drama, it's a lot harder to shoehorn it to fit within a set arbitary space like that. Comic books work better for such installments, because there are various ways to pad or compress. You can choose how many panels to cram into a page, and you can have a two page scenery splash if you so wish, and they come out once a month or so. Online, though, "once a month" is probably too sporadic to maintain a regular readership.

Anyway ... argh. Must clear out to-do list. Must come up with plot. Must devote time to MAKE SHORT FINITE-PLOT COMIC, just to see if I can do it. NOT one of my big mega-plots that have no resolution in sight. =P