From Ran Brown:
The pinup. Pretty, interesting, usually higher quality than your actual comic and one of the first things that gets teasingly tossed around when discussing bad webcomics. Pinups have a time and a place–bonus art, gift art, your personal gallery, and even your professional portfolio, provided that your portfolio does not consist entirely of them.
"It’s been a month since you started your comic, and your front page boasts that you update twice a week. Your story is long format, so that’s a slightly taller order than one page a week. However, the 31st rolls around and all you have to show for your ’schedule’ is two character profiles, a cover, two actual pages, a fanart, a pinup and yet another pinup thanking your darling fans for a hundred page views. Something is wrong here."
If this scenario is at all familiar to you as a webcomic artist, especially in relation to your own works, then you may just have a problem. Here is a list of commonly seen variants of pinups, the places that you will commonly see them, and whether or not they are appropriate:
The Character Profile:You’re new to the webcomic scene, an you’ve just signed up on a free host. You decided to sign up before you had any pages because you didn’t want someone else to steal your comicname.freehost.com, and also you wanted to build up a little hype and get your site design done.
You don’t have any real pages that are done because designing an appropriate web page is hard, but you do want your potential readers to know that you are hard at work, and give them a little preview of what that work includes. So, you post up a few pages, with a picture of each of your main characters as well as information that you think your readers might be interested to know about them, like their favourite food and blood type.
How to Use: I am a firm believer in the idea that all character information should be presented on one page, set aside specifically to showcase your characters. A page that is separate from the rest of your comic. If you make changes to that page and add new characters, let your readers know in your author comments or RSS feed.
However, if you absolutely must, use them before you start your actual pages and the second that you have a real comic up there, relocate that information to a ‘characters‘ page.
How Not to Use: Do not post a new profile instead of a comic page, even if you’ve just introduced a brand new character. If you really feel you need to post a character page up with the rest of your comic instead of on your characters page, do so only between chapters or story arcs, so as not to disrupt the flow of your story. Disrupting your story is a no–it will annoy readers, especially during tense or cliffhanger scenes, and more fickle readers may just stop reading.
The Splash Page: You didn’t have time to draw a comic this week, but you don’t want to not post. Instead, you decide that your readers will be pleased of you toss up a pretty splash art instead, whilst apologizing and making excuses in your author comment.
How to Use: Again, I’d say never, but since there will always be exceptions, I personally believe that splash pages are acceptable on major holidays (Christmas, Hallowe’en, St. Patrick’s Day, etc.), but only if they are not replacing a regular update. Only post them as extras, and if you can help it, keep them separate from your comic–let people know about them in your news or author’s comics.
How Not to Use: While some readers might say ‘awww, how cute, you made a pretty piece of art,’ a lot of them are going to be wondering why you had time to make a ‘pretty art’ and not an actual comic page. Make pages your priority. If you know you need to update Friday, make sure your page is the first piece of art you finish, and don’t sit down to do a full page, full colour picture until that promised page is done, scanned, uploaded and ready to go.
The Fan Art/Gift Art/Guest Comic: A fan sends you a neat piece of art and you decide that you’re feeling lazy this week and throw it up there instead of a regular update. You sweeten the deal by plugging their comic in the authors comments.
How to Use: Fan art and gift art shouldn’t be posted with your regular pages. Put them on their own sub-pages and show them off in your updates and authors notes. Again, anything that disrupts the flow of the comic could potentially lose you readers. Guest comics, on the other hand, are fine if you use them correctly. If you do a strip comic, inserting them into your updates is easy and not jarring, especially if you write a gag-a-day; nothing is being interrupted, and it isn’t as jarring for your audience. Guest comics are much harder to pull off with long format comics, because serial comics are often telling a story from update to update. Adding a guest comic disrupts the flow completely.
"Example: A great example on how to properly use guest comics is Sinister Squid’s Gibson Twist. Every time he finishes a graphic novel’s worth of pages (about 200 pages of dedicated, on time comic pages) for his comic, Pictures of You, he writes a bunch of neat side stories and has other artists draw them. He plans far in advance to the point where he can tell readers who might not be interested when the regular pages will be updating again, so that they can skip them if they want to. This gives him a chance to work on the next book and take a rest."
How Not to Use: Art–sparingly. Or never. Guest comic–don’t use these too often, and if you do use them, warn your readers in advance and let them know when regular comics will resume.
The News Item: You just hit a thousand page views and want the world to know! You make a a pinup with some of your characters and a bit block-letter ‘Thank you!’ message and post in in place of a comic. Or, you just put up a cool ‘donate’ button, and want people to notice it, so you draw a pinup with info on how your audience can help you and post it in place of a comic.
How to Use: Even if you don’t post these in place of a comic and treat them as extra, off schedule information, they look really tacky. Do not post up a splash page for anything that can be conveyed in a news post or author’s note. Use these only in times of emergency.
Example:I used to work on a comic called RAnSOM. I posted twice a week, and in November, a week from my 21st birthday, I got a call at work from my mother telling me that, that afternoon, I was getting my wisdom teeth out and that I’d got a last minute appointment before her insurance stopped covering me on my birthday. I had exactly one comic in my buffer, and ended up making a crude announcement image that everyone would see to let them know that I would be pumped full of Tylenol 3 and in no state to make a comic for the next little while.
How Not to Use: Do not use this to announce benchmarks like page views, donations, your position on top lists, new t-shirts in your store, etc.–again, it disrupts the flow of your comic and makes your readers annoyed and/or unhappy. It can also end up looking like you’re pandering. If it can be conveyed in your news posts and author’s notes, leave it alone.