Digital Comics

Back in 2011, in June I attended the Comics Launch Pad with a few friends. There was a lot of useful seminars that went on, and new crazy ideas as to what comicing will be like in the future. With the coming of the digital age, less and less people are using books to read and more are using digital technology. For example, the kindle, many use it for reading as it's easy to carry around, it stores hundreds of books and it only weighs under half a kg. The same will happen for comics.

Nowadays, newer generations are growing up reading everything on a screen, comics included. Many don't care if the comic is digital or paper back they just want to read comics. When buying comics it has to be of a high quality if they are to be keeped. If its a cheap looking comic then it is most likely to be disposed of, if its high quality it is bound to be put on a book shelf. 

Web & Webcomics

The internet and webcomics have been around since the 1990s, their has never been a middle man between the internet and webcomics. There are lots of different formats for comics online but the most popular seems to be strips. Some examples below:

                             My Cardboard Life - Pirates by Philippa Rice

                          Menage a 3 : Kind of Soft


From what I've seen with the online comic industry a lot of artists start online with big projects then move more towards printed projects once they gather a big enough fan base. For example Yu + Me: Dream, a very popular webcomic where the artist managed to entertain a huge audience and make some money from merchandising products from the comic. She also improved her art work as she went along over the years, as well as contain many different styles through out the story to fit the dream like world she created.

<-The start of her comic in 2004.
Megan Rosalarian, has improved vastly over the years the image of the right is near the end of her webcomic. She built up a huge readership and she finished the comic to suit her and her readers need for an end. She has six volumes of this comic in print, as well as other projects.







You need a readership of over 10,000 to make any real money in webcomics as only 1-5% of your audience will actually buy things from you such as t-shirts, books etc.

To achieve this you need to stick to a schedule, making regular updates, so if you're doing a regular comic format page you need to update once a week, if its a strip comic then it's at least 3 times a week minimum. You need to keep the readers coming back for more so you need to feed them chunks of your story to keep them hanging on and wanting more.

Advertising yourself correctly works as well, it gets you out there and people find your online presence more easily. For example using face book, twitter, comic message boards, blogs etc helps. Getting to know your audience is always good too, shows you want to know what they think, make them feel involved with the project.

Jan and Sam: Nice Day

Again another experiment, this time using my roughs that were on the previous page and having it set as a click through using the arrow buttons. My mistake in this was the page size. It's rather too big for ones screen.

I did nothing by ~Shaz-da-baz on deviantART

Hit the first hyper link. Uploaded it to DA as blogspot does not support swf. file types.

This was an experiment to see if clicking over an image would take me to another set of images. It worked but it's layout is a bit confusing so I'll have to work on it.

For my interractive comic I will use this story here. It's short, self contained and I'll be able to experiment in a few ways with this. I feel this story will be more special with a self contralled way of reading it.

1000 Words

This story is a self-contained short. It is about a girl whose parents are about to divorce and she thinks if she can draw beautifully that she can keep them together, so she seeks the help of a wandering artist that happens to be in the area. The story is sweet and the way it has been put together is beautiful. The colours are gorgeous as well as the use of colour. There isn't much interaction other than hitting the next button for the page, which in its way does have the reader interacting with the story.

The story is panel by panel so you don't know what to expect next as you don't have it laid out for you on the page.

After my series of experiments for stop motion I've come to want to do an interactive comic, I've researched into current interactive comic projects and their is a wide bredth of them, they're appearing up and are popular.

Home Stuck

This animated/click through comic is rather entertaining! It's style uses pixels to its advantage, it isn't one that you'd judge on its style, its up to your own interpretations as to how you view the comic. It uses the basic of tools that you'd find on your system, microsoft paint and uses it to illustrate a story. Certain areas are animated and others are just still. It uses a various different animation techniques.

This comic is about a boy named John, who is homestuck. He mainly looks around the house for interesting objects. I haven't gotten too far into the story yet but from my view of it, it is drawing.

This is an example of what I meant. When the user rolls over the image it pops up an image to the right of the screen.

 Here it shows how the reader moves from one page to another whilst exploring what else is on the page, for example the 'pester log' as the author named it. Giving you more insight into what John does whilst he is at home.

I think this comic is well crafted and reaches it audience rather well. I may use some of these techniques when creating my own short comic.

beak

This started off as an experiment again, but I realised the images where coming out really orange, so I scrapped this idea and re-did it.

This is an updated version of the one above, it all started off well and fine until his beak fell off which caused me to giggle and leave it as it is.

I found this on youtube when I was researching videos for stop motion animations, his work is really smooth and flows very nicely. Inspiring video.

Twirl

This originally started out as a little fun experiment however I didn't have much of a story planned out for him, so it cuts off really shortly. I've learned that when doing this again I shall have to create a story board for the character.

I don't know what this one is, I was going through my camera the other day and I came across a series of photo's I took. I decided to put it together, I learned from my last mistake, I should use photoshop instead of Flash to put it together. There is less pixelation to it than in the previous stop motion experiments.

Prep the oven

A tutorial for creating a simple game.

Rolling dough

Where I'm going with my animation experiments.