I absolutely love the song that this title comes from. Every youth pastor I've ever known worth his salt has listened to that band.
Some nights are hell. Not because of anything that has to do with real life, but because my imagination is a slave driver. I'm not sure how your imagination seems, constant reader, but mine is a merciless bitch who loves to flog and spur. Every now and then the log burning in the back of my subconscious spits an ember into my brain, and it sits there - sizzling - until I can't sleep or think about anything else. That itchy, burning sensation some people get behind their eyes fills my head and before I go absolutely crazy I have to write something down; outlines, bare bones fillers, sometimes entire novellas of ramblings and ideas.
Thus, I have discovered my dream career. All I would do is spew forth radical ideas for someone else to write. I'd be the venture capitalist of the literary world, slinging from story to story like spiderman on a verbose rampage. Zip, swoosh, plop comes a plotline onto your desk. "Thank you literary spiderman!"
"Everybody gets ONE."
Something has been percolating for a few weeks now, and the only reason I'm mentioning it is because I know only a few people read these things anyway. I think I want to start a webcomic. Possibilities:
Parody of real life comics: There's quite a few of these out there, and they seem to do quite well. Girls with slingshots, Questionable Content, Something Positive, and others are all great reads, and have been running for years and years. Jeph Jacques, the author of QC, literally makes his entire living off of these. Least I Could Do is another good one, but stretches the boundaries of reality a bit more than the others. Believe me, enough bizarre and macabre humor occurs around my friends and I that I think I could write one of these pretty reliably for years without having to stretch my imagination to create new drama and jokes. Someone recently told me my facebook page is the written equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, sans melting clocks. I'm not sure if that was a compliment - I AM sure that it's material. The problem with doing a comic like this is that you don't have a set reader base that you can immediately zero in on easily. Readers of these comics seem (I say seem because I have no way of verifying this) to be very casual and normal people, with varying senses of the absurd. Uniformly what I've noticed about these comics personally is a genuine sense of human relationships: how they work, how they run into trouble, the absurdity of just how complicated they can get in real life. On top of that, most of the comics I've mentioned above are successful not only in the long run, but funny enough on a strip-to-strip basis that readers can get hooked easy.
Can I do any of that as a writer? I hope so... but any stand-up comedian will tell you that making your friends laugh does not equal good comedy. In fact, it can be just the opposite - you could just have really f*ed up friends.
An action-adventure comic with a unique twist:
There are quite a few webomics out there that try to pull this off, with varying degrees of success. Google searches of the title of the comics are good ways of judging this; everyone "knows" that google searches are somehow prioritized by number of hits. If the comic is popular enough, it shows up higher on the list. The wiki article on Google Bombs is fascinating in relation to this, by the way.
Some of my favorites in this category include Zap!, Spinnerette, Flipside, Gunnerkrigg Court, and Goblins. All of these have fantastic art, decently original plotlines (well.... Zap! can be generic at first, but it got more complex as time went on), more than a little humor, and truly engrossing settings. In particular, Gunnerkrigg Court mixes science fiction with Fae particularly well.
The key to these comics seems to be the key to a good story overall. Have an interesting protagonist whose traits set him/her apart from the rest of the world, with believable human personalities. You know why so many people dislike Superman? For a large portion of his comics, he's a goody-two-shoes. People enjoy conflict, characters with more than one dimension. In addition, these comics are successful because they can make you run the gamut of human emotion. Goblins has some extremely powerful scenes of heroism, and there's a strong undercurrent of sacrifice to the whole thing. I can't emphasize enough how deeply that can resonate with someone like me.
While the art in these comics is superlative, there are a few that use basic forms of representation, yet still can be remarkable by virtue of the writing. The best example of this is the Order of the Stick. By simple expedience of good writing, D & D jokes, and an interesting plot, OOTS has been one of the most popular webcomics to date. In some cases the simpler art style even adds to the enjoyment of it.
The comic based on random absurdity:
You all know these comics, if you read any at all. They're some of the most popular. XKCD and Doctor McNinja are two prime examples. McNinja could fit in the adventure, quirky protagonist category as well, but I feel that Chris Hastings' sense of humor is more Douglas Adams than Marvel Comics. Could those two ever be used together? Yes. Chris is authoring a Deadpool comic soon, which is the holy grail of comics for me. I will definitely be ordering some off the web if possible. Hell, I'll drive to a good store in Minnesota just to pick it up. Chris's work is good enough to be worth it. Check the news at the bottom of the link I provided for more on that.
These comics are often the funniest out there. Another one that I genuinely love is Rock, Paper, Cynic. No particular rhyme, reason, or continuity (McNinja has plenty of continuity, though) are needed to enjoy these. I feel that this would be a very Zach-friendly way of going about things, since my brain is such a huge pile of absurd anyway.
In some cases, these comics can start out with vague or no direction, and end up fantastic serial pieces of pseudo-plot, like with Sam and Fuzzy. Or not - just remain true to your subject matter, like with Penny Arcade.
Ginormous, glaring problems to any of these ideas
I have no manual artistic talent to speak of. Xkcd's stick-figure comics are probably beyond me. The time it takes for the artist to color an individual ball pit might actually kill me. Playing pictionary, or pictionary telephone, with me is an exercise in abstract extrapolation. Is that a platypus, or satan's mallard? Did he actually draw "cockpit" the way I think he did?
Good webcomics have good artists, period. Just because one has a different style doesn't mean they aren't good at what they do. The difference between R.K. Mulholland, Jeph Jacques, and Phil and Kaja Foglio (their comic Girl Genius is also amazing by the way, it's won a bajillion awards) stylistically is astronomical. Talent-wise? That is a much, much tougher call. They all have huge strengths that are unique to their own particular comic.
Realistic solution? Find an artist. There are major problems with this. One, will it be the right kind of art for what I want to do? Two, do I even have a RIGHT to be picky about it? Who am I to judge an artist by his work if I can't do anything anyway? Three, and this maybe the worst of the lot, they would have to work and put up with me on a regular basis. I'm a nice guy, but I can get crazy about my work sometimes. Hell, I can get just plain crazy. How do Sohmer and DeSouza do it? They must just be saints. If we do have artistic differences, how do we get through it?
Getting the word out. I'm not terrible at this. I'm a pretty good salesman, even when it comes to things that not every consumer needs. I was a friendly neighborhood Culligan man for a while, and did pretty well at it. Fund-raisers came decently quickly to me also. But, like any good entrepreneur will tell you, the internet is crazy different. Just because you HAVE a product doesn't mean people will like it or tell their friends about it. A lot of extra work is required to promote your craft. Jeph Jacques probably spends more of his time working on promos and merch total than anything else he does. Not that he doesn't spend huge amounts of time drawing his comic, but you know what I mean.
I always feel like a cad-when self-promoting. In high school, I thought my writing was the epitome of talent and refinement. After college, it was easy to see I'm a low-budget hack compared to most of the people out there. How can you promote your work if you don't think it's any good? >.< In a nutshell: crazy levels of dedication. I've been a reviewer for an online magazine before. Regular updates are harder than they look. Nothing is more irritating to me than a webcomic that updates once in a blue moon. (Dresden Codak anyone? Also, I'd KILL for some continuity to that one.) Too many good ideas are derailed by a lack of commitment.
Still, this is real life. My sister just got married. My folks aren't getting any younger. I have an education to finish, a career to plot out, and (eventually) a family to start, somehow. My good friend (author) Justin has started his career as a professional author, and I honestly don't know if I've got the guts to make it doing that. I would love it to death, explode from the sheer joygasm of it, yet somewhere in that pile of pathos that sits in my chest I can't tell if I'm cut out for it. Nerves, man. They kill.
I have nothing but admiration for webomics artists who set an update schedule and stick to it religiously. Even when Jeph Jacques is dying from the plague, he'll update his comic with a yelling bird spewing obscenity. Hell, some of those yelling bird comics are some of my faves anyway.
Failing would blow goats. No joke, the goats would be the only ones happy about this. Still, dealing with a crushing fear of rejection is something we all have to deal with sometime.
Right?
My brain is its own worst enemy. I have too many ideas to count. If I decide on a format, how do I solidify things into a coherent whole? Do I have to? Oh, what about this new idea? Can I work that in? Should I work it in? Am I ripping off someone else's work without knowing it? Am I going to get sued? Is any of this marketable? What should I do if my ideas don't pan out? Can I start a new thread, or should I just move on with my life? Can I turn a webcomic into a novel?
You can see the problem here.
There are massive, massive techincal considerations. And by that I mean difficulties. Do I pay for webhosting? There is no FREE webhosting, really anyway. How do I update the comic regularly? What barriers are there to getting started? Is there a CLASS on this sort of thing? Would it be conceivable for me to email some of my most admired artists and ask for advice?
If I do have webhosting (and can afford it), how do I troubleshoot? If the site goes down, am I screwed? How do you handle security so you don't get hacked while hosting a webpage? If the comic takes off (unlikely), how do I expand my database to handle server load?
And my imagination is still flogging me to death.
Somehow, I have to get this stuff out of my head. As of right now, it's all sitting in tiny little appleworks files on my old ibook (gosh I love that thing). Still, writing this blog has helped me realize something: no one does this stuff alone. If they do, they're some kind of demigod spat from the head of Zeus himself.
In the meantime, those embers are kindling something still. One in particular is about to start a fire. If anything remains after everything burns down, I'll put some of it up here.
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