Amateur to pro, how to go?

[wordgunofanun]

Hey! I'm new at all this, and just started writing. I eventually want to start a webcomic with some money making aspects. Don't have a teacher in this thing, but i'd like if someone successful here would take me under their wing and show me some tricks and the basics. I currently don't have anything published, but plenty of scripts lying around. I am also a member of ICCW (indycomicscreatorsworldwide) and i encourage you all to join. It is another great online community. http://indycreatorsworldwide.ning.com/ I know i have found a lot of helpful resources there. Anyway, hi! This is me.

[Rob]

Hello and welcome.

First piece of advice. Get an artist.  :D

Next piece would be to buy the book "How to Make Webcomics."

Do that and read a bunch of articles here and then we'll have something to talk about. Honestly starting yuo from scratch is the easy stuff. Alectric did a great job of making it into a very simple comic.

http://forum.webcomicscommunity.com/index.php/topic,481.0.html

But until you have the basic plan formed (and an artist) there's not a ton we can teach you. Read Gibson's "Writing Well", plan out your comic, get concept sketches of the characters and sets with your artist so you can agree on what everything looks like.

http://forum.webcomicscommunity.com/index.php/topic,409.0.html _Part one of Gibson's Article. It's a 6 parter.

And then it builds from there. Good luck.  ;)

[wordgunofanun]

Hey, a starter kit. thanks.

[Gibson]

I'm not sure there's anyone here who could be called a "success", at least no one that posts regularly, but there are a few of us who've carved out a larger audience, and some of us who've had some critical success. Personally, I think that How To Make Webcomics book is overrated. I've never read it, so I really can't speak to its contents or what it teaches you, but no one I know whose comics are more widely read than mine has read it either.

My advice (after first making sure you've got an idea that will keep you engaged and an artist who will stay engaged with you, don't even bother until you have that down) is to go to Smack Jeeves, look through their tutorials and the help pages on their forum. Even if you don't end up hosting there or even signing up, the instructions there are mostly straight forward and the staff there are really helpful.

And yeh, if you just started writing, you could do well to read those articles. Arrogant? Damn right!

[Rob]

C'mon Gib. I gotta call BS on the How To Make Webcomics book opinion. How can you offer an opinion if you haven't read it? It doesn't hold the holy grail of answers about how to make a successful webcomic business but it absolutely does set a solid foundation of knowledge about how to create and run one.

What's even better about the book is that it gives you an understanding of the webcomic world that can lead you to explore and look for answers to those deeper, more complicated questions on your own. Without that foundation most people starting out won't even know the right question to ask let alone whether the answer is pretty good or not.

I'm almost tempted to buy you a copy just so you can see what's in it. The problem is you already know most of what's in it and you're a smartypants so to you it will all seem somewhat obvious. The problem with that is that not everyone is as smart or well informed as you (that is not directed at you wordgunofanun just a blanket statement).

I definitely think it's worth the measly $4.95 used or $7.96 new off of Amazon.

There is apparently a new book called "Webcomics 2.0" and I swear to the lord I've never seen it before just now (LOL). It's by some dudes named Steve Horton and Sam Romero. I've never heard of either one of them or their respective webcomics. I might check it out though.

Always learning. Alan Moore's got a book called "Writing for Comics" that looks pretty cool....

Dammit see what you started?  :D

[Gibson]

I'm not offering any opinion whatsoever on the content, nor am I saying it doesn't have factual information, nor am I saying it won't help some people. What I am saying is I know a lot of people who do webcomics to varying degrees of success from not at all successful to full-time webcomickers, and I don't know anyone I would consider more successful than I am who credits that book in any way. If anything, I'm offering opinion on people's opinions about the book and how helpful it really is.

If I were to offer opinion on the book itself, I would say that it's a relatively new publication penned by artists who made webcomics when there was no such thing as competition or the current wealth of technology and resources, and who have themselves said they have no idea what it takes to succeed in today's industry. I could further proffer that How To books are inherently self-loving and far less resourceful than they promise, and tend to instill in the reader the idea that there is one way to do a thing properly when success hinges, in fact, on doing things differently. I could go a step further and say it appears to me as a fairly transparent cash grab on the part of the authors for selling some really basic information that is readily available at the tip of you Google search with some personal and potentially irrelevant insights thrown in.

This is officially the most I've written in an introduction thread! Look at me go!

I am a smartypants, or as some like to call it, a pretentious know-it-all. However, one thing that has always eluded me is digital technology. I am just a mouth-breathing dolt when it comes to computers and the internet. I'm still not sure what the difference is between tables and CSS (rhetoric, please don't tell me) but I've still been able to figure out how to host a comic, an increasingly successful one despite my limited artistic skill, and even to manipulate the website to a small degree. Besides that, no matter how smart I am, I'm not the first one doing this and I can tell by the spelling on a lot of comics that were around before I was, intellect is not a prerequisite.

[Rob]

But I think you would agree that running a webcomic is not making a webcomic. Nor is it building a website or writing a blog or setting up a store. It is all those things and so much more. Just making a comic itself; a good one anyway, can be extremely challenging. HTMW lays down a foundation on the other stuff.

And while I would agree these particular authors are definitely of the "this is the only way to do it" ilk which I don't necessarily agree with the book is literally chock full of information that, while much of it could be found on the web, won't be as clearly explained and certainly wouldn't all be in one place. And I personally think $5 or so is worth the price to have it all at your fingertips.

I'm sure you could spend tons of time figuring out the things they explain in the book by scouring the internet and maybe you would get it all. Maybe not. Maybe you would miss the stuff about CMYK and DPI and then find to your horror that your comics are all unprintable two years later when you go to make a book.

As I'm sure you know I've talked to a lot of webcomics creators over the last couple years and (and this is one of the reasons I've made this place) I'm almost always surprised to find they don't know something basic in my conversation with them.

Kurtz just tweeted the other day that Image is doing a 3rd printing of HTMW. That's 10k copies sold so far. No matter how popular the authors webcomics are I can't see them selling that3 many copies if folks weren't finding value in it and recommending it to others.

[Gibson]

I'm not saying the book is useless, just overrated. I'm sure there are bits of information there that one couldn't find in another resource, but to put it up as you did as the first resource someone should consult isn't great advice. For establishing, promoting and maintaining webcomics, there are tons of free online sources for that info, and I'd be fairly surprised (though may be wrong) if HTMW covers that in a comprehensive sense anyway.

If you're talking about the actual production of the comics themselves, there are again a lot of resources online that aren't as impossible to find as you make them out to be. The first one that jumps to mind is the ongoing Making Graphic Novels from Jason Brubaker who does ReMIND which is a good instructional. There is also the sea of tutorials on deviantArt which are fairly easy to search.

And let's be honest, the only real difference between webcomics and regular comics, in terms of production, is output resolution, and even that isn't absolute.

There are also some fantastic books that come from better sources. Wil Eisner's books, Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, are a great place to start. Then you have Scott McCloud's series. Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics are invaluable. Not only are McCloud's books something that should be read by EVERYONE who makes comics, but he focuses heavily on digital comics and he draws his information from a wide variety of areas, including Scott Kurtz. These books are more than just a one-sided instructional on the mechanics of comics, but they help you gain broader perspective on all aspects on our medium. All of these are available on Amazon too...yes, they're more than $5 but they're worth more than $5.

Forgive me for being blunt, but I don't care how many copies of it have sold and neither should anyone else. McDonald's does pretty well too, but that doesn't make it nutritious. Quantity doesn't equal quality and conformity only ever makes you one among millions. I suspect a large part of the reason, as well, this book is so popular among aspiring webcomickers is that it has the word WEBCOMICS on it and it's written by people who are famous by the standards of our industry. I'm sure if U2 got together and wrote a book called How To Make Records that it would sell a lot of copies, but I doubt that same number of people would record an album, and even fewer would do it well.
I'm not saying and won't say "Do not buy this book!" because more knowledge is always a good thing and in all likelihood it will spark an idea in your own craft, but I will say buying it before anything else is folly.

[Rob]

Well, all I can say is I've read the book and you haven't. I think it establishes a nice foundation for working in Webcomics (specifically webcomics though as I would agree that there is much more to learn about the art of making "comics" from better sources) and it's all in one place (I have time to read a book, I do not have time to parse the internet for good advice, especially when I was new to this and didn't know the difference... I depend on people like you and all the other webcomics folks I know to point me to that stuff and while Half-Pixel and later Webcomics.com were great places to have that happen in the past they weren't and aren't always around... thus this place). To me that's worth the $10 I paid for it (but I got mine new and autographed/sketched in by Scott and Brad). I think you know how they both feel about me right now for starting this site.

Scott literally pulled out a guitar and with Kris Straub on backup vocals, sang me a song the other day about what a douchebag he thinks I am.

And even after that I'd recommend the book to a newbie. I'm sure many people bought HTMW because of the people who wrote it. I'm also sure many aspiring creators bought it because it has the word Webcomics in the title. And I'm equally sure than many people bought it because someone else recommended it to them as a good place to start in webcomics.

I'll agree with you that it isn't the only place to start. I can even concede it may not be the best place to start. But We'll have to agree to disagree on it being overrated because I believe strongly that it is a good place to start.

I think if someone reads that book from cover to cover like I did they get a real sense for what they are in for. It doesn't have all the answers but it does give you enough knowledge to go looking for those answers and it saves you from making a lot of very common mistakes. To me that's worth the time and money. I bet reading the book has put some people, who weren't ready for how much work it is, off of making a webcomic. Probably a lot actually.

[JGray]

The single best piece of advice the book gave, in my opinion:

If you wait until your webcomic is perfect before putting it out, you'll never put out a webcomic.

[Dragon Powered]

Um...

Hi Wordgunofanun, welcome to the drama club!  I'm sure you'll find your time here useful and informative, sorta.  If nothing else, it's entertaining.

[Rob]

Um...

Hi Wordgunofanun, welcome to the drama club!  I'm sure you'll find your time here useful and informative, sorta.  If nothing else, it's entertaining.

Oh come on. Gibson is absolutely one of my favorite people. If anything you should take this debate as proof that two people can disagree on the internet without it turning into mother insults and cursing. For my part I appreciate the discourse. I think he's wrong and I'm going to argue my position strongly but that doesn't mean I like him any less. If anything I respect him for having an opinion and defending it vigilantly. That sort of maturity is rare on the internet and it's really great that we have that here. ;)

[Gibson]

And I know that Rob has a curious fascination with Scott Kurtz that will no doubt end with an investigation of some sort.

[Rob]

And I know that Rob has a curious fascination with Scott Kurtz that will no doubt end with an investigation of some sort.

Low blow man.... low blow.  :D

[Beyla]

Really, Kurtz has beef just because you got yourself a webforum full of amateur comickers?  I heard things about the man, but always figured that was just an interpretation of a projected persona.  No offense, Rob, but when someone is all beefing it's got to be about peers if you trying to big up.  What we got is beef making no sense.  That ain't right.