Chloroville has a new look!

I thought the old design would last for more than a year, but due to a major version upgrade of Word Press and Comic Press, my old design didn’t work very well. So I spent the weekend reworking the website.

Frankly, after creating 20 strips in Adobe Illustrator really made my life easier when it comes to designing new banner for the site. I just copied existing artwork and characters from the strips and made a simple juxtaposition. Oops, now you know I am a really really lazy person.

Comic Press is getting better and better. The new version offers some exciting layout templates, and they make your life so much easier. This time, the only two files that I modified were “header.php” and “style.css”.

If you are overwhelmed with the vast amount of css styles in “style.css”, I suggest that you download the add-on “Web Developer” for Firefox browser. Once you have your Comic Press setup and have one strip posted, view the page in Firefox, and in the Web Developer toolbar, click CSS > View Style Information and you can use your mouse to rollover different parts of the webpage and know exactly which CSS class you need to modify.

Recently, my webcomic has been reviewed by The Floating Lightbulb, a website dedicated to webcomics. The review is generally positive, but the more startling thing about it is that it also reviewed a different comic named “Ripeville” that features fruit characters.

When I first checked out Ripeville, I thought, gee, someone stole my idea but used fruits instead! But when I read a bit further, the author of the comic started his comics in May 2007, while my site started in Jan 2008. Now am I the one who stole someone’s concept?

After crying and panicking in the bathroom for about two hours (just kidding), I calmed down and came to the conclusion that it’s really a coincident and no one stole no one’s concept. The reviewer of my comics later wrote to me, “As far as your comic resembling Joe’s (the creator of Ripeville), it is startling but this has happened before in comics. I’m just damned if I can think of a good example right now.” Well, Garfield vs. Heathcliff, for one immediately comes to my mind, and they are not webcomics to begin with.

Now I think about it, when I first started Chloroville, I already was aware of a children TV show called “Veggie Tales”, but I knew I would not be copying them because 1) my drawing style is totally different from theirs and 2) the content would be very different and geared towards adult 3) I have never watched a single episode, because I don’t know when the show starts and I am working in an office during weekdays.
There! Let’s move on and draw more comics!

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.