Shit. lets do comics

[kringle]

I was re-arranging my bookshelf and i stumbled upon one of little kringles fundemental inspos, "making comics" by scott mcloud. the copy i have now on my desk is one a friend gave me for christmas but i used to rent the jumbo version of this book from the libary all the time.

for a while i just did single character illustrations in the void of space, but recently i've deff gotten more into doing comic projects (some naughty some nice) at around 4-5 pages each. i've got another jayvik comic locked and loaded (i have 5 pages pre-thumbnailed but now im thinking to see if i could extend it to ten) but i'd deff wanna do more original ones, but also more in general!!!

  anybody else got comics they wanna push out. anybody WANNA get into comics but need a bit of a push? lets talk!

[NocturnalPossum]

I've been wanting to put out some storytelling stuff, but I wasn't really sure if prose or comics or some combination of the two would work out better
Maybe I should start making some thumbnails again...

[kringle]

I've been wanting to put out some storytelling stuff, but I wasn't really sure if prose or comics or some combination of the two would work out better
Maybe I should start making some thumbnails again...

oooooo i'm really digging the vibe of these thumbnails you posted!!! honestly i think doing some form of illustrated prose is fine, why let the ratio of text vs illustration stop you if its something your having fun making, yeah? 

ik when i first read sin city i thought all the pages that were really just hard broiled detective novel prose + vibey illustrations really put things into perspective for me cause i didn't know that was an option as a wee youngin.

you should deffo start cooking those thumbnails again!!!

[NocturnalPossum]

honestly i think doing some form of illustrated prose is fine, why let the ratio of text vs illustration stop you if its something your having fun making, yeah? 

ik when i first read sin city i thought all the pages that were really just hard broiled detective novel prose + vibey illustrations really put things into perspective for me cause i didn't know that was an option as a wee youngin.

Yeah, it's always just a question for me of "Would this be better as an Animatic" or "How wordy do I want this to be?" and it gets quite difficult when you think different mediums would work better for different parts of a story

[kringle]

it gets quite difficult when you think different mediums would work better for different parts of a story

ok so what im hearing is that you want to write homestuck. you want to do homestuck. the Homestuck Format.

like FR tho just go w/the flow of feeling how what sections go best with what format and go from there. trust ur art gut.


edit: also congratz on the 300th post!

[rolypolyphonic]

Yeah, it's always just a question for me of "Would this be better as an Animatic" or "How wordy do I want this to be?" and it gets quite difficult when you think different mediums would work better for different parts of a story

You could always try mixing it up; my own 'webcomic' isn't really just a webcomic but it's a multimedia story, so while there is a 'main' story in the webcomic everything else is done through prose/videos/games/etc.

ok so what im hearing is that you want to write homestuck. you want to do homestuck. the Homestuck Format.

Honestly I'm sometimes surprised that sort of multimedia project isn't more common among solo artists/writers to begin with.   Homestuck is the most famous example among contemporary works but there aren't a lot of examples besides that, outside of fanventures which tend to just do multimedia the same way Homestuck itself did. There are other webcomics which sometimes have 'side' content in a non-comic format but they usually don't make being multimedia itself an integral part of its format, with the non-comic stuff usually just being asides.

[digi_jean]

Ugh I've always thought comic artists were the strongest among us. I really love Endling's (probably still on DeviantArt) webcomics that he did for OC Tournaments (OCTs) back in the day.

[rolypolyphonic]

Ugh I've always thought comic artists were the strongest among us. I really love Endling's (probably still on DeviantArt) webcomics that he did for OC Tournaments (OCTs) back in the day.

I've never heard of that particular artist before but OCT's are something I don't really see very often ever since the borderline-death of DA, sucks because I always considered the OCT as having been foundational in a certain 'style' of storytelling that I don't see acknowledge/used very much.

[digi_jean]

I've never heard of that particular artist before but OCT's are something I don't really see very often ever since the borderline-death of DA, sucks because I always considered the OCT as having been foundational in a certain 'style' of storytelling that I don't see acknowledge/used very much.

Webtoons as a format reminds me of OCTs, particularly in how some authors make use of the vertical space. I do wish OCTs would come back though!

Here's one example of Endling's many OCT entries - Part 1 and Part 2.

[rolypolyphonic]

Webtoons as a format reminds me of OCTs, particularly in how some authors make use of the vertical space. I do wish OCTs would come back though!

Here's one example of Endling's many OCT entries - Part 1 and Part 2.

Waouh, those comics are really cool! And yeah, I always wondered whether the vertical strip comic format originated from dA in specific.

I feel like there's a lot of multimedia storytelling stuff that either originated from or was popularised on old dA that still exist today on other websites but people don't make the connection to dA anymore; it's a shame because I feel like I owe the origins of my own webcomic to the stuff I saw on dA back then. 

[kringle]

Homestuck is the most famous example among contemporary works but there aren't a lot of examples besides that, outside of fanventures which tend to just do multimedia the same way Homestuck itself did. There are other webcomics which sometimes have 'side' content in a non-comic format but they usually don't make being multimedia itself an integral part of its format, with the non-comic stuff usually just being asides.

i think its because of the large swath of skill-sets you'd need to make a good multimedia comic, ud need to know about at art, AND animation, AND frontend webdev, AND music, AND gamedesign. and by the end of it it took kind quite a bit of people to make homestuck at the level that it was being made.

that said, i do wish more people would be willing to take up the challenge!   (myself included LOL)

I've never heard of that particular artist before but OCT's are something I don't really see very often ever since the borderline-death of DA, sucks because I always considered the OCT as having been foundational in a certain 'style' of storytelling that I don't see acknowledge/used very much.

Here's one example of Endling's many OCT entries - Part 1 and Part 2.

omg i learned something new today!! this is like a side of internet history i never really heard abt before. had no idea people used to do this back in the day or that it was prolific enough people have an acronym for it LOL. i totally see what u mean with the webtune format but i think webtunes are more like spaced out yea? these deff read more like classical comic/manga pages with more dense paneling but just like stapled one on top of the other. if anythint reminds me of like mangadex uploads.

would love to hear more or be pointed twoards something where i could educate myself on this topic!! most of my online comic knowledge comes from webcomics and webcomic collectives like hiveworks, so knowing more abt this would b hella cool. 

I feel like there's a lot of multimedia storytelling stuff that either originated from or was popularized on old dA that still exist today on other websites but people don't make the connection to dA anymore; it's a shame because I feel like I owe the origins of my own webcomic to the stuff I saw on dA back then.

this is really interesting to hear!! i was pretty shy in my early internet days so i mostly stuck to browsing tumblr as unobtrusively as possible, it's always neat but also a little melancholy to hear about how deviantart & similar websites played such a large part in developing the online art culture and aesthetics, and now that history is mostly gone and entirely unarchived.

tbh, would make a good zine! feel like the best way to reclaim and immortalize that era would be to archive it analog.

[rolypolyphonic]

i think its because of the large swath of skill-sets you'd need to make a good multimedia comic, ud need to know about at art, AND animation, AND frontend webdev, AND music, AND gamedesign. and by the end of it it took kind quite a bit of people to make homestuck at the level that it was being made.

omg i learned something new today!! this is like a side of internet history i never really heard abt before. had no idea people used to do this back in the day or that it was prolific enough people have an acronym for it LOL. i totally see what u mean with the webtune format but i think webtunes are more like spaced out yea? these deff read more like classical comic/manga pages with more dense paneling but just like stapled one on top of the other. if anythint reminds me of like mangadex uploads.

would love to hear more or be pointed twoards something where i could educate myself on this topic!! most of my online comic knowledge comes from webcomics and webcomic collectives like hiveworks, so knowing more abt this would b hella cool. 

Yeah, I definitely think the webdev aspect is the biggest barrier of entry but even before I made my own website I got around to it by using a blogging website (and I mean a 'standard' blog, not a microblog like Tumblr). I think part of the problem is a mixture of people overestimating the amount of skill it takes to even get started and just a general lack of information/popularity on alternative platforms.

By 'overestimating' what I mean is that I imagine people mostly imagine the 'only' way to do a multimedia story is that it only works if you're immediately at an equal level in all the skills involved but one benefit I find is that if there's a particular thing that I want to happen in the story but I'm struggling to do it in a comic form then like... I don't need to make it a comic. I can just write it down as prose. Not to mention that a multimedia story doesn't need to be all-media-ever. I think those webcomics that have prose side-stories are technically multimedia and are relatively common enough.

I think what usually happens is that a lot of comic artists already do other stuff like prose/animation/etc., it's that stuff that isn't in their 'standard' comic format tends to be stuff they do 'on the side' and don't 'count' for the story. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting the 'actual' story to be 'just' the comic, but I do feel there have to be at least some artists who do that because they think a comic 'should' look a specific way and not necessarily because they don't want to do it a different way.

And by 'lack of alternative platforms' I think most places where people post their work (mainstream SNS) are very constrained in the format you can post in so understandably to fully utilise the benefits of multimedia you'd have to find a way to organise them. So either:

• You have to build a website from a scratch, a huge barrier of entry
• You have to use a website that is very flexible (before my own hand-coded website I used FC2), which is something very few people know about and would require you to have to build your audience on a more popular platform anyway because basically no popular website fits the bill

This is honestly related to the stuff I said about dA: for all its problems, pre-Eclipse dA was perfect for a certain style of storytelling oriented towards multimedia/hypertext/worldbuilding, but most people don't really see 'the format of a website' is being important to or even essential to 'the way a story is told', and I think that really affects the way people might approach the stories they want to tell.

The particular examples linked by Endling have a very professional manga-like quality since it seems the artist does that as a job but it's not necessarily a 'standard' format. OCT comics (and dA comics in general) tended to have only the vertical scrolling format in common but a lot were formatted more like panels stacked on top of each other, or like a storyboard composited into one image. Some OCT's didn't necessarily require comics but allowed prose/illustration submissions, and they also often required a reference sheet of your character that described the character in depth, which lead to a 'very long vertical image ref sheet' format that I haven't seen anywhere else but dA, and has mostly died down because other social media doesn't do vertical images very well.

(As an aside: Webtoons primarily look the way they do because they were specifically designed to be for mobile readin, hence why they use so much blank space in between panels, to better simulate the passage of time).

It's a somewhat mundane thing that I think a lot of people don't notice or would even understand as being really that important (Like 'who cares if ref sheets are no longer a long vertical strip') but it's something that always stood out to me because it's emblematic of that certain 'style' dA as a website had that kind of just... faded away. dA as a website had/still has a somewhat tawdry reputation that 'deviantART style' is seen as an insult more than anything that I think a lot of the neat stuff that grew out of the website isn't really seen as a 'dA thing'.

I actually planned on writing a whole bloge poste about this once but I haven't gotten to really writing much about it. While Homestuck is a major influence to me in writing a multimedia webcomic, I think it was really the way things were organised on dA that really helped me solidify how such a story might 'look' like. I wrote about it a little here; it isn't exclusively about OCT's and is more about the aforementioned point of dA leading to a certain form of storytelling that never really gained any traction.

With all that said, I think the interplay of the narrative and the format is essential to how a story reads: I don't think stories are intrinsically improved upon by being multimedia/hypertext/generally more complex than 'just' a sequence of images; rather, it's the inverse where the qualities of a format/medium will affect what sort of stuff is most effective with it, and there are certain types of stories that are harder to write as a comic/prose by virtue of what they are, and having one story that just uses the best medium for each narrative event/arc/etc. is a way of getting around it for people who have a very particular idea that they want to do. In my case while my webcomic's 'main' story is an actual comic, I know that I couldn't have made it 'just' the comic because so much of the story relies on things that can't effectively be portrayed through visuals. There are definitely stories that work better as 'just' comics, others as 'just' prose, etc. but I do feel people benefit from asking themselves whether they are choosing a particular medium because they feel said medium has certain strengths benefits, vs choosing that medium because they perceive it's the 'only' one they 'know' how to do.