WordPress 2.5 brings a lot of new features to the table and one of the interesting things is avatar icon for the comments that you made. Originally I thought I could create a small database of avatar icons for readers to pick, but smarter people have come up with a much better solution - Gravatar.com.

First create an account at Gravatar.com with a valid email, then log in, and pick an image on your hard drive and upload it. That will become your avatar icon, and whenever you make a comment on any WordPress blogs with the same email address that you registered at Gravatar.com, your icon will appear in that person’s blog comment section. Very cool!

Somewhere on the Internet a shop is selling a T-shirt that reads, “No one cares about your blog.” I find it really funny because it is very true. Sooner or later, there might be a T-shirt that reads, “No one cares about your webcomics.” Webcomics is a subset of blogs, in my opinion, and there are tens of thousands webcomics that no one cares about, or waiting to be discovered then ignored. Some get to the top and be cherished or worshiped. There are just so many webcomics out there, and people have so little time, it is simply exhausting to go through a webcomics directory to find one that to explore, and I would imagine people have problem discovering my site.

Since the beginning of my own webcomics, I have discovered quite a few things:

• Keeping it alive is not easy. It’s really a test of my diligence, because it takes time and effort to come up with something decent to present to the public. There are times that I simply don’t want to draw even a straight line but I don’t want to let my readers down (I think currently I have about 50 or so?), despite how few, I have to draw one every week. One of the most valuable advice that I got from the many webcomics forums is “Set up a schedule for posting and stick with it.” I despise websites that have really good comics but have unpredictable update schedules.
• Coming up with an interesting story is also difficult. I don’t know how comic artists that can come up with a new strip everyday get their ideas. I now carry a notebook with me and whenever I have a funny idea I will jot it down. If I don’t do it, I will forget about it and even when those ideas come back, it will be one year later.
• English is a problem for me. My mother tongue is Chinese, and many times when I think my strip is ready to go, it’s not. I send my strip to my editor Jey, and he proofreads it. Often for each dialogue bubble I have at least one edit. He would also send me recommendations to make the dialogues wittier. I also show the revised strip to my coworkers and ask what they think. They will also sometimes give me funnier versions. I couldn’t imagine making more than two strips a week as everyone has a full time job.
• Promoting a webcomics site (or any other websites) requires a lot of effort. But before I go on, I think that the best way to become popular is to have frequent updates, especially when you have daily updates for you can develop story arcs without losing momentum, and people are more likely to bookmark your site. Reading a comic strip is fast and addicting, but drawing one is a slow process. To promote my weekly strip, I submitted my site to a few webcomics directories. That’s only the first step that any webcomics artist must do. I also participate webcomics forum to let people know that I have updates posted.

Looking back, I already have 12 comics posted and a few months have already flew by! Let’s see how this site goes and I will write another post on my thoughts of this new venture.

If you have been reading webcomics for a while, I am pretty sure you have stumbled across PVP. PVP is created by Scott R. Kurtz and it is one of the poster-boys of webcomics. It has a huge following, spawned a website dedicated to criticizing it, and due to its success, Scott works full time making a new strip everyday, and sells all kinds of PVP related merchandize.

PVP is partly webcomics and partly blog (just like my site). On 2008/01/19, he posted his video podcast about his wish to turn his “Adobe Photoshop + Wacom tablet” comic workflow to “Adobe Illustrator + Wacom tablet”. Illustrator outputs vector graphics, which allows the user to stretch or shrink the art to any size you want without any loss of quality. Photoshop images, which are bitmap graphics, on the other hand, lose their quality when you enlarge them.

See his podcast here for his dilemma:

Now guess what? My comics are all created in Illustrator. I have been using it for years (my full time job is a casino game designer), so it has become natural to me. Ironically, I wish to draw freehand professionally in Photoshop like Scott and other proficient webcomics artists. Illustrator webcomics takes a long time to create, and simple strips like mine can easily take me 3 to 5 hours to create and polish and still I cannot achieve what you can do with Photoshop.

I am learning how to make a comic the new traditional way, but first I have learn how to draw with pen and paper as I have zero patience with them.

Comics is more than just pretty drawings (or may be it has nothing to do with prettiness), it involves writing, planning, pacing, placement of graphic element to show action, flow of time, locations, moods and many other things. I was actually a little hesitant to create my own comics, because I knew the most I could offer were a few cute vegetable characters.

So I went to my local bookstores and searched for books on comics. There are many, to my surprise, dedicated to a huge variety of related topics, from drawing big eyes Japanese-style cute girls to American-style super heroes and fantasy monsters. To me, the book that really stood out was Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics”.

“Making Comics” doesn’t particularly teach how to draw, but it offers you very valuable insights. For example, some book might teach you how to draw a super hero standing up straight, but “Making Comics” shows you how you position your eye level on a subject to suggest to your reader the possibility of authority or weakness. How you combine different basic emotions to create subtler and more believable emotions - for example, how do you draw a “pity” looking face? The book shows you by combining a face that shows mild joy and a face that shows mild sadness could get you that non-black-and-white emotion.

The book is a joy to read, because it is created in a comic book format. If the book is purely text, it will make no dents in my head after finish reading it - I would remember nothing. Because it’s in comics format, when I suddenly feel like I could reuse some advice from the book, I can quickly flip through the pages and find the right topic. The book has offered so many insights, now that I am eager to try them all. I am more confident, and your comics would definitely improve if you follow Scott McCloud’s advice.