WWQ&A: Signing your work

Another question!

Ahoy, gentlefolk.

Just listening to the “Ding!” Podcast, and I figured I’d throw in on the subject of signing your work: back when JjAR had just started drawing Jump Leads, I showed the art to some friends. One of my friends recommended getting JjAR to sign his work - not as an “I made this!” marking but as a security measure against art theft. Now this may well end up being a moot point as the print edition doesn’t feature the signature on the individual pages, but that’s why we ended up going with signed work.

Have a good’n,
~Ben
www.jump-leads.com

I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but I think a signature, small and inside the last panel, can actually act as more than a theft deterrent or a proof of credit. In “Starslip” I have no need to put a signature and I never had before, but to me it means a couple things:

1. It makes the strip look more professional. I think the strip reads differently with my last name scribbled on it. I think it looks less amateur.

2. It indicates ownership and pride. This goes with (1), but it’s important. I’ll come back to this idea in a second.

3. It’s actually a punchline cue! Most interestingly, the way I used to read the signatures in newspaper comics was almost the same way you receive a laugh track on a sitcom. It means, visually, “I’m done, here, that was for you. I have delivered the joke.” In that way I almost think a signature belongs to the punchline! It can actually function as a prompt. Probably not a strong one, but we are conditioned to expect it somewhere on a four-panel strip.

Ben, I’m interested in how you explicitly said JjAR was signing his work “not as an ‘I made this!’ marking.” Here is a story from my deep, dark past. When I was young, somehow the idea of “letting your work speak for itself” got confused to me with “putting your name on your work is the same as bragging.” Of course I wanted credit for the work, but if the important part was the work, then shouldn’t that take the whole spotlight? I mean, people knew what my drawings looked like, so that was enough of a fingerprint.

I can’t tell you how many things were stolen from me in high school. It took me a long time to get over my shoegazing, misplaced, quasi-modesty to start signing my work. It’s not bragging. You know what? Maybe it is bragging, but what’s wrong with that? Sign it! The art on Jump Leads is amazing, too. JjAR should be signing every panel twice.

Maybe that’s not how you meant it, but it was important to say. Sign it somewhere! You can make it small, but do it!

WWQ&A: The Same Three Ideas

I feel that all the jokes I come up are always a variation on the same three jokes (and as such, I end up drawing the same stuff) how can I mix it up?

I try pretty hard to find a joke and after jotting it down, I end up realizing “the protagonist are yet again too immersed in their nerdy fantasy worlds to properly connect with reality, LOL!” and I groan.
I could just say “its my theme!’ but do you guys have any ideas?

Yours in webcomics,

Yannick Belzil

It’s easy to get into a rut. I actually avoid doing one-shot gags in “Starslip” nowadays because I find it a lot easier to write from inside a storyline — where the topic is self-propelling and I don’t need to come up with a new scenario each day.

So your issue is, you’ve got some assembly of gamers or nerds that constantly view things through the lens of their obsession, and those are the only gags you’ve been grinding on. My advice is to remove one of those constraints and force yourself to look outside that setup. For example, if they’re constantly butting up against reality, remove reality for a while. The characters don’t have to be standing in line at the bank with the punchline “I hate camping the money spawn!” Let them play games and discuss that totally within that.

I’m trying to figure out how to generalize that concept, of denying yourself some setup. It would work for any strip. Okay, let me give a “Starslip” example. There’s a joke type that comes up a few times and I desperately try to avoid it: my characters discussing modern-day pop culture through the lens of their future. There are a zillion jokes I could do like this one, and they’re all the same.

So to fix this, I stay away from pop culture. I let them discuss their lives. They have misunderstandings, they get drunk, they forget important things. Don’t feel constrained that your characters are nerds, so they can only be one-note nerds that talk about nerdy things.

How about a character who’s their friend, who isn’t a nerd? What would he do? What if one of your characters said “hey, all I ever do is look at everything through the lens of video games. Is something wrong with me? I’m going to quit cold turkey!” Then you can have a story where he’s trying not to be a geek, but keeps failing. You could do parallels with a drug addict trying to quit. Now you’re doing withdrawal jokes in the form of nerd jokes. You could even do the same jokes as before, but now that it’s couched in a character’s internal struggle, it’s more compelling!

Another thing I like to do is go against type and spoil expectations. In a strip about nerdy guys, it is par for the course to have a really hot girl who loves gaming, but is still completely normal and social, and sexy, and all the guys lust after her.

But what if you played with some aspect of that? What if the hot girl character was too much of a gamer, and it actually turned off the others? Then you could have other characters be unaware of that, so when your primaries see her coming, they groan and roll their eyes, and the other guys ask “But she’s so hot! Are you guys gay?!” Maybe that guy learns the hard way why no one can stand her.

How interesting would that be beyond the cookie-cutter “I’m hot and have big boobs and play games too?” character?

I realize those are character elements, but they’re important. If I was handed a non-descript cast and told to come up with gamer jokes, what I wrote would boil down to whatever game jokes I could come up with. Maybe I wouldn’t have any ideas. If you have fleshed-out characters, you have more options.

But here’s a straight-up gag-writing tool that has nothing to do with character. Something I used to do in “Checkerboard Nightmare” was to have Chex juxtapose two concepts that shouldn’t go together, or take that to a ridiculous extreme.

Example: Because the Amish don’t believe in using electricity to do work, Chex has a plan to sell magnets to them instead, thus making them beholden to him. In the last panel, the Amish have used the magnets to built giant mechanical ants and flying magnet-ships, and in the background a city is destroyed.

I don’t know where I got the idea to do a strip about the Amish, but the joke there is that all a humble people needed to become megalomaniacs was just a little power.

Another example: Chex is talking about how he’s really gotta try hard to become famous this year. He says he’s gotta kiss ass like never before. “No ass will go unkissed, including my own!” In the last panel, he’s built a backpack-like device that lets him kiss his own ass.

So he completely went off on a tangent and decided that the route to fame was literal butt-kissing. Or maybe he forgot the fame part entirely.

Twisting around some turn of phrase, or going off on an unreasonable tangent has provided me with a lot of fuel for making up jokes. The key for me is to avoid the same old setups. Yes, Chex wants to be famous. Yes, the future is different and wacky compared to now.

Anything you can do to bend or break old premises is better than just using them, because everyone else is already using them. That’s why so many webcomics with similar premises read the same. Your goal is to not get lost in the crowd.

WWQ&A: Character personalities

Hey, Kris here. You guys submit a ton of questions to our Webcomics Weekly podcast, and even though it’s an hour long, we can’t possibly answer them all! But now there’s good news. I’m introducing a new feature to Halfpixel.com: WWQ&A. It’s where the four of us will answer as many overflow questions as we can. Let’s get started!

Hello WW panel!

Love the podcast, listen to it every week, and hope to soon start a web comic of my very own! Right now I’m designing the characters for my strip and seem to be having trouble with it. The characters I’m making are always lacking in personality or are over used cookie-cutter stereotypes. How do you guys create such unique and interesting characters?

Basically, I keep running into those old sitcom characters cliches, having an extremely serious person and a happy-go-lucky guy. Should I be trying to break away from this? Or accept it?

Thanks a lot,
Marc Lefevre (ribbit ribbit, oui oui, etc.)

Good question. When I started out, I tried to avoid cliches, and ran headlong into them anyway. But you know, sometimes cliches are there for a reason. There usually is a centered character and an off-center character so they can play off each other. The degrees in which each of them is each thing can differ, but without it there’s no conflict.

Chex and Lyle were pretty much verbatim “crazy guy/straight guy,” but there was enough material to go for five years. I even had fun with the idea that no one in their right mind would even tolerate Chex for any amount of time. Chex was and is a tortured, delusional mess in a happy-go-lucky suit.

Now I have Vanderbeam, Cutter and Mr. Jinx. Vanderbeam isn’t happy-go-lucky or crazy, but he is off-center and he makes rash decisions. But he thinks he’s being centered and reasonable. Cutter is his straight man. But then I have the dynamic of Cutter and Mr. Jinx, where Jinx is even more of a straight man than Cutter is. So when they interact, Cutter can be the off-center one.

So that dynamic is always going to be present in some way, to drive action. What’s important is motivation. Chex had a lot of deep-seated issues that were fun to hint at, but that was all absurdity. Meanwhile, in “Starslip,” those characters are a lot more fleshed out, and they all have flaws and fears and desires that make them act the way they do.

If you’re having fun writing good material for a wacky guy and his straight-man counterpart, just write it. Readers will buy into it if it’s believable. There are a lot of strips where the straight man is ultra-straight, the wacky guy is ultra-wacky, and every punchline is telegraphed in the first panel. Furthermore, there isn’t a reason for these two guys to be friends.

These strips annoy me to no end because what could be a natural, fun scenario becomes forced and empty. If it’s not part of their character to have a reason to associate with each other, they’d both piss each other off enough to end the friendship. I feel that way about Ctrl+Alt+Del. It’d be one thing if it was just topical craziness like Penny Arcade. Gabe and Tycho are defined as “friends,” but they really only exist to explore a topic, not have adventures. Ethan and Lucas have history, and continuity, but in that relatively sane and normal world, Ethan would be a pariah. No girl would love him, no friend would tolerate his nonsense. He is a punchline generator among human characters. CAD works when it’s a topical gag. Whether or not Ethan gets married has no impact on any working aspect of the strip, so it feels hollow.

But if you’re doing a straight-up absurdist strip, you don’t need to worry about all that stuff. Look at Bob the Angry Flower. Bob is an awful person, and his friends are just there to play off him and set him off. We don’t care about motivation there; the strip is just an excuse to play with funny ideas. But if you are going to have, like, “two guys at an office”-type humor, they need a little fleshing out, even if you don’t reveal that background in the first six months of the strip. Writing background/biographies for your characters and keeping them private can really help you sort out motivations and make your characters more real.

If that’s what you want to do, anyway!

How To Make Webcomics: Ken Done

“Webcomics” is still such a nascent industry. From a purely business point of view, so much of it is new from past cartooning business models. So much of it is different. Untested. And changing. And there are few fixed guideposts that we as Webcartoonists can point to and say, “This and THIS ALONE is the way to build a career in Webcomics.” It’s a newly-birthed way to make a living. And we’re all learning — all of us.

But we’re not as alone as we think. There are many, many art-as-commerce business models we can learn from.

As cartoonists, we naturally have a tendency to look solely within the field of comics in seeking guidance to our own career. But if you do that…if you look for guidance only from other cartoonists, you’re missing a much broader and richer tapestry of advice that could be gleaned from writers, bloggers, musicians, painters, and video artists — all of whom are experimenting with new business models online.

Broaden your scope a bit: Do yourself a favor and spend a few hours researching how Australian painter Ken Done has structured the business(es) around his art, for example. It’s very instructive to the possibilities that could await you in your Webcomics career.

Done’s business is structured on two basic principles that can be applied to most every Webcomic:
1.) Own and control as much of the entertainment, interaction and merchandising process as you feasibly can.
2.) Make money on the same art, multiple ways. What I call the “Draw it once, sell it three times” method.

As a painter, it’s natural that Done would collaborate and sell through third-party galleries around the world. This is the traditional business model of the painter, right? But as every painter can attest, this lessens the net income from any individual painting sale. Galleries can take a murderous percentage of the sale. So what Done did was set up his own online and physical gallery to market and sell his paintings. Even further, Done established his own textile and clothing shop and his own homewares design shop. Each of the three — each — are built off of the exact same paintings and designs that the artist creates. Much like a Webcartoonist who sells ads around an individual comic, then sells the comic again in book form, then sells it again in t-shirt form, then sells the original art the whole thing was based on….Done’s business is built upon selling the same piece of art multiple times — and in multiple ways. And in Done’s case, each iteration is wholly owned by the artist, and is monetized and controlled by his business. Middlemen are kept to a minimum. Profit margins are significantly higher. Direct contact with an audience is maintained. And artistic control remains with the artist.

Does this sound familiar? It should: It’s the business structure that most successful Webcomics artists have found works best for their business. And Done’s been doing it for decades.

If there is nothing truly new in the world, it does us all well to research and learn from the artists who have gone before — regardless of what medium they work in. Here are a few quick links to get you started: An ABC (Australian Broadcasting Co’s) transcript with Ken, video interviews, and, most helpfully from a business perspective, the PBS
piece (click on “Video” or read the transcrips) on how he structures and views his business.

As you read more about his business, ask yourself: How is his marketing and selling of a painting — and his t-shirts and a cookie jars based on that painting — parallel to what Webcomics do? What else can be gleaned from his business model that you can apply to your Webcomics business?