I've been listening through the archives of the SF podcast, and I have thoughts about a lot of the topics...so I figured, instead of just letting them bounce around in my head, it was worth typing them up and maybe getting a conversation started.

It's a little behind the times since I'm still all the way back in September, but most of the topics are evergreen for webcomic creators anyway.

Feel free to use this thread to talk about each new episode as it comes out, too!

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Comments from episode 12:

Wordpress Plugins

One of my sites uses Comic Easel (which got discussed), the others have the Webcomic 5 plugin (which didn't, so consider this a rec).

W5 does have the "multiple comics on one site" functionality that's being planned for Grawlix! It doesn't work exactly like it would in my ideal world, but it works well enough. And the plugin overall is actively supported.

Apparently the popular opinion is in favor of simple back-end interfaces with fewer options? Me, I get frustrated with the simple ones. If a function isn't ranked as important enough to have an Obvious Button, it gets buried somewhere impossible to find, and inevitably the buried functions include stuff I wanted to do.

Transcripts

Transcripts are tragically underused on webcomic sites.

They let readers search your archives for specific lines and scenes! They break down accessibility barriers for fans who have trouble with text in images! They give you an easy way to link the thing you referenced to make sure no one misses it! It even lets you do extra jokes!

People were talking about your webcomic CMS having a designated Transcript Entry Area. Honestly, I've never seen the point of that. If a comic runs on Wordpress, you can just put the text in the body of the post.

(Possibly there's useful extra functionality in the Transcript Entry Area if you do a comic with multiple available translations? I don't, so I haven't had reason to look into it.)

Web Resolution

The interviewees kept talking about DPI in this context, but that's only relevant for print. On-screen, what you care about are the dimensions in pixels.

For the record, the standard for BICP pages is 625x825, while Leif & Thorn daily strips are 825x275.

So, ad-hoc poll -- what size do the rest of you use for the comics you post?

I do long form comics and depending upon site 800x1100px or 900x1238px. I do my work at 450ppi and a canvas of 2000x2751

I hate WordPress with a red-hot hate, but partly that's the frustration of being a coder (in the "I know HTML and PHP" sense) and being actively prevented from doing things I know how to do by the WordPress system, and partly because I'm an admin here, and despite WordPress being used by only maybe a quarter of SpiderForest's members it seems to create 75% of the problems members ask the admins for help with. :P Whether it's refusing to run our banner across the top, or an update that messed up their entire layout, or getting hacked, it always seems to be dang WordPress. And there's nothing I can do about that, because you can't just know PHP, HTML, and MySQL, you have to be an expert in specifically WordPress to fix things there.

Then again, I own a Mac and go on long rants about the stupidity of Microsoft Word and how I don't understand why anyone would use it for writing projects so, you know, I'm one of Those computer people.

I use transcripts, and I agree they're tragically underused... (for me, since I use snippets of French and occasionally Spanish in the comic, it was also an easy way to provide translations. I try hard to only use stuff that's easy to work out from context, but a few people would still always want to know....) I don't like to put them in the body of the post, though; I use that for talking to my readership. Besides, not everyone wants to read 'em, and I try to keep my layouts as uncluttered as possible. Since I use a simple PHP backend I just wrote a quickie hack module that lets me keep scripts in their own subdirectory... one of these days I'll get around to cleaning it up enough that other people could use it.

On size, my early comics were posted at 700x933. Then around 2015 or so I realized I was letting somebody else's content (eg ads) take up way more vertical space and reader attention than I needed to, redid the site to move my sidebars down to the notes and comments section, and started posting pages at 980x1268. This was a relief. Because I work in 3D, I can't get away with exaggerating facial expressions the way traditional artists can, and so it was difficult for me to do anything but really close shots. Bigger pages let me sprawl a bit more. Annnnd fill them up with all my dang text EVEN MORE but let's not talk about my horrible over-dialoguing habits....

I do make a point, as I hope most folks do, of working at print resolution (300 dpi) and only shrinking the pages down for posting on the website -- just in case I do want to take it to print someday. Probably why folks were talking DPI is that's the two most common problems I've seen -- people doing art at a low resolution or small size (thus killing themselves when they wanted to do print versions) and people uploading print-resolution pages to their sites. Some CMSs will resize this on the frontend so you don't even realize it's a problem, but if your backend is filled with giant 300DPI 20MG images, trust me, it will eventually be a problem.

OOF to KAT's point on the full sized pages... Compression of large pages to fit the template slow load times! It is imperative to save files at lower resolutions! My 900X1238 pages are saved at 90% quality and come out to approximately 180-217kbs per page.

I only know HTML and CSS, and I get by! But then I'm just working on my sites, which is not a large sample size.



But again, it's the 20MB that's the problem, and that comes from the dimensions in pixels, not the print resolution.

If you upload a 2500x3300px comic page, it's going to be a huge and unwieldy filesize. If you set it to 72dpi but it's still 2500x3300px, that only affects the way it would look in print. The file will still take up lots of space on the disk and take longer to load on the website.

(I managed to attach a 300dpi icon. Since it's 50x50 px, it's tiny.)



Also a good point!

That's with saving them as JPGs, right? I go for PNGs with a limited 256-color palette, since that almost always looks better with a non-fancy cel-shading style.

For the BICP pages (625x825) they usually come out between 80-120KB each. Leif & Thorn strips (only 825x275) can be as small as 26KB, rarely over 75KB.

I learned to upload in 72dpi the hard way. Was terribly confused about why my pages were loading so slow on Tapas (with their accursed infinite scroll) and realized that I was using unnecessary resources to load 300dpi pages. Oops. =_= I draw them all in 300dpi, but convert them to 72 for web. Runs smoother that way.

I... also am very sad at wordpress. :C I didn’t know more code than html/css until recently, but I managed fine with custom comic CMSes. I’ve found WordPress to be too heavyweight and clunky for my comic’s simple needs. And it doesn’t play nice with my own custom stuff. D:

I believe I was one of the people in the podcast you’re responding to, though, so. xD;

I export to JPG which automatically makes them 72 dpi... That would be a "save for web" equivalent on most programs
I've done png's before and I really don't notice any difference in quality... though PNG's tend to be more lossless...

You're listed in the credits, so you must've been there, but I guarantee I was not tracking which specific artist said which things ^_^;

As for right now...if you want to convince me you got smaller filesizes by changing the DPI resolution without changing the size in pixels, I'm gonna need to see the files to believe it.



PNGs have multiple options! If you export to PNG at 16 million colors, they're totally lossless.

You can also compress them by exporting with a 256 color palette. I attached a quick comparison (including the palette-picking settings I use, for reference). You can see how the compression worked pretty well, it's only really noticeable if you zoom in.

Listening to episode 13!

I've never used a beta for comics, because my process (or "process", air-quotes and all) is too disorganized and last-minute to fit one in. So it was really heartwarming to hear artists talk about their beta-reading friendships.

And all the advice was spot-on. Like, by the last five minutes there was only one point I thought someone should've covered that hadn't been brought up...and then it was the very last thing said. (The bit about "even if you don't have any criticism, it's also helpful to tell the writer what specifically you liked, and why.")

Favorite off-topic piece of advice: "start with a story idea that's relatively short, but expandable."

Frankly, that's the kind of webcomic I want to see more of as a reader! These days it seems to get overlooked/downplayed in favor of the "single long-form graphic-novel takes-five-years-to-post epic" style. Some of which are lovely, don't get me wrong, but it's hard to imagine something like Schlock Mercenary or Skin Horse -- two of my favorites, both of which have kept right on expanding for 10+ years -- coming out half as masterfully any other way.

On to episode 14!

And hey, nice continuation of the previous, in that it focuses on how to avoid some of the pitfalls that can sabotage a single long-form graphic-novel takes-five-years-to-post epic.

As someone who's done both, I'd love to hear an episode unpacking the short-but-expandable format one day, too.

Plus good advice for people with a variety of working habits and writing styles. (How have I never heard the term "discovery writer" before? All this time I've been describing myself by reading out the whole definition...)

We're Glad you're enjoying the podcasts! The feedback and thoughts your sharing are extra icing on the cake! It's good to hear that audiences are getting something out of the subjects we've been discussing!

Heh, at first I went looking for comments on the podcast posts themselves, or an official/pinned forum thread, but no dice. Then it finally clicked that I could start my own thread, that's what forums are for XD

And now for episode 15! The one about collaboration.

I'm handling every role when it comes to my current comics -- see comments from episode 13 about not being organized enough to fit someone else in -- but I do have two experiences of it...

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1) The Hellsing fancomic I started in high school, which had multiple gags and even whole storylines that came from other Hellsing fans emailing me to say "hey, wouldn't this be a cool/funny/clever idea?"

In retrospect I think some people were a little disheartened if I didn't include the exact letter of the suggestions I sent them. A lot of things had to be changed up based on the needs of the plot, or on what would lead to a joke I liked better, or just on who I felt like drawing at the time. But ultimately it was my comic, they weren't commissioning me to draw specific things, so I had the final say.

Not sure whether I was at any fault for not making that clearer, or whether it's fair to say "they were being presumptuous, and setting themselves up for a letdown."

(Or, to put it another way: was I doing the geek thing of making a social blunder by not spelling it out? Or am I doing the lady thing of feeling overly responsible for soothing other people's feelings by worrying about it?)

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2) A comic I was commissioned to do the art for...which I won't link, because there was only one issue and I never got completely paid for it.

We didn't have A Contract, but we had an email exchange where I said "this will cost X amount per page" and the writer said "yes, I will pay that." So when he fell out of contact I'm sure I could've lawyered up and gone after it. I didn't, partly out of anxiety over confrontation (I know, I know), partly because I don't think he was withholding the money out of meanness or anything -- I think he had good intentions but genuinely overestimated how much money the project was going to make.

(For the record, I didn't sink any of my own money in printing books or anything, and I wasn't such a popular artist that I was turning down other paid commissions while doing this one. Lost some time and effort, gained some valuable experience...came out pretty okay, all things considered.)

Anyway! The comic had a page-by-page script that included all the dialogue and at least a general idea of what the panels would be. For most of it I drew exactly what the script said, assuming it wasn't my place to give editorial input. Even when it was maybe stilted or awkward.

On the last few pages I finally asked if I could make some changes. In retrospect I wish I'd done that more. Would've made the unpaid work more fun to draw, and given my editing muscles a bonus workout.

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So the podcast episode was mostly heartwarming tales of good collaborations.

I kinda wish they'd made space for more bad ones. There was a short "here's how to prepare in case it goes bad" digression at the end, but it's helpful to have object examples of What Not To Do.

Maybe people were concerned that they wouldn't be able to anonymize the stories enough? Which is understandable, the webcomics world is a small community, but still.

Sidenote: Everyone was regularly referring to their comics as "the project" rather than "the comic". Is that a habit from freelancing on lots of non-comic projects, or what? Anyone reading this who does it, can you pin down where you got it from?

Hmm, stark comment dropoff after the first episode I commented on. Should I be starting new threads for each one, to make it clear there's new content? Or are people still reading this thread, and just not finding anything new to say?

I'm reading and I know we definitely appreciate your comments! While I'm always lurking every day because I love forums, sadly many of us don't check the discussion threads from week to week (or just skim them) and you're probably jumping from one topic to the next faster than people can read/opine. Also I haven't listened to a lot of these episodes in several months and I don't remember everyone's points.



I do know in general we try to stay positive and not bash specific people or companies. Also it's sorta uncomfortable (at least for me anyway) to talk about "here's how I've been taken advantage of in the past", especially when it might be friends or family that you still have in your life. Which is why I wasn't on this episode, eheheheh.



I do think there's a lot of similarities between taking commissions and doing other sorts of projects with clients (I used to do a lot with board game designers and still do freelance graphic design, for example). It's just a nice umbrella term, I think!

While I did the interview with Meg/Yoko for the collaboration episode the panel talked about things I hadn't thought of, and like Delphie I'd not listened to it since the podcast went live.

Collaboration can be a difficult thing. Me personally, I would have to start a new collaborative effort in order to feel comfortable with the idea. I'm pretty controlling of my IP's, and I have even turned down people who've requested to RP with my OC's because I don't want them used in a manner I wouldn't do myself.

Even picking up a new collaborative effort I have a feeling it would need to be a very clear idea of how it was to work and the division of labor... That stems from the many "group projects" in high school where I or a few others and I ended up doing all the work and the lazy people who sat back and let us expected to get the grade use workers earned...

And truthfully I'm not sure if it would be better with a complete stranger or a close friend? :P