Jun 27 2008
Webcomic Issue #1: Ability to Work Well with Mutated Alligators a Plus
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UPDATE: I forgot to leave an artist’s tag, but the drawings of Agent Black and Agent Orange were done by Polawat Darapong.
The writing’s decent, but the art could use work. Both the human and the green dude have pretty much the same expression in the second frame as they did in the first. The human has a bit of a halo effect going on in the fourth frame.
That’s a good point about the white border around some of the characters, particularly Agent Black (the human). [EDITOR: We’ve since resolved that.] Also, one thing I see now that wasn’t clear before is that the characters should probably be larger relative to the frames. [EDITOR: We’ve fixed this for future comics, but we don’t plan to modify the first comic again]. Right now, they’re each about a fifth as wide as the frame and a fifth as tall as the frames. I think that they should probably be about 25%-35% as tall as the frame.
I just cleaned up the borders and expanded the character’s portraits a bit. P.G., I’m still concerned that the text bubbles are intrusive, particularly in the first frame, but I think I can roll with that. I think it compares favorably to, say, the first few cartoons at 8-Bit Theatre. Obviously, I’m a biased judge, though. Good luck!
Also, I’d like to note that our traffic has gone up roughly 750% in the 24 hours since we’ve started running a webcomic. For example, on Fridays we usually average about 100-150 hits a day. We published the first webcomic at 7 pm on Friday and we received between 500 and 600 hits.
I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but the spurt of traffic doesn’t seem to be directly related to the webcomic release. Looking more precisely at the hourly data, the traffic spikes started at around 9 AM on Friday and continuing on to about 4 PM. Most of our traffic today was referred by i09.com and, although my chronology might be off because of time-zone differences, I’m doubtful that they were driven by the webcomic release. (You said it was released around 6 PM, right?)
Yeah. I think the hits originated from this profile of the Superhero Nation website, which was encouraging but didn’t offer much advice on areas for possible improvement.
Then it paid compliments that had the effect of discouraging me. For example, “The site is at its best when giving advice that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, but nonetheless appreciate:
I agree that many authors could appreciate that article, “How to Make Your Fiction Less ‘Weird’ and More Novel,” but unfortunately I can guarantee that no one will ever go onto Google and type in a query that would actually bring them to that article. The nature of Google traffic encourages generic articles like our latest series of “Common Mistakes of First-Time Authors.” I think those articles are useful, but it’s the sort of advice you could get from any writer. I’d kind of prefer to work on quirky articles related to superhero writing because I feel it’s much harder to find that elsewhere.
Tangentially, I was a bit surprised to see a comment from the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman (or at least a commenter who identified himself as Austin Grossman, but I’m inclined to think it’s authentic). I thought it would be interesting to give him an opportunity to critique our writing and post that here, so please make room for that in the off-hand chance that he sends us such an article (or even a link).
[B. Mac]OK, we can do that, post something from Grossman, although I wouldn’t get your hopes up… On our end, I think the only structural change to the website that we would have to make to accommodate his guest article is changing the category’s name from “Learning from Published Novels” to something more generic, seeing as Superhero Nation isn’t a published novel (yet!). If you think of anything else we’d have to do, just let me know.