With only six more weeks left to use Project Wonderful, I figured I’d better start learning how to use some alternatives.
(Haven’t retired all my PW ads yet, though — so if you see more ad boxes than usual around the site, it’s because of the experimenting. Bear with me.)
Here’s what I’ve learned about Google AdSense so far.
I’ve officially revamped all the comic pages that will go in volumes 3 and 4 of But I’m A Cat Person!
However…I’m also moving cross-country (again!) in just under two months. So I kinda need to put all my spare focus on that for the near future.
Assuming the move goes as planned, BICP volume 3 will be released at the start of June, and volume 4 will follow in late July or early August. That’ll give you time to save up up for them. And maybe buy the earlier volumes.
Meanwhile: there’s now a BICP/Leif & Thorn store on Gumroad! If you’d rather collect the BICP omnibuses (omnibi?) in digital-download form, the first two volumes are available there.
For the record:
Chapter 14 was updated to season 2 of Jessica Jones, and then to a lackluster Hunger Games parody. (It couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a silly sendup of the original, a scathing work of political satire, a woobie-filled angst-fest, or a sexy revel of ridiculous kink. Protip: none of these tones work if you keep switching to the others.)
Chapter 15 was redrawn to the latest season of Voltron (they’re all half-size now, so I lose count), followed by the first season of the Steven Universe Podcast. (The official one, with a ton of Crewniverse interviews. Good stuff.)
Netflix just got more Miraculous Ladybug, and there’s also a season of Supergirl I haven’t watched, so it won’t be hard to find working background material when I get to volume 5.
Hey, readers — Thursday’s page will be up some time in the afternoon. I’ve spent the week so far juggling commissions, moving preparation, and some special surprises for next week.
In the meantime, a writing meme from Tumblr:
Inspired by Doctor Who’s “Turn Left:” Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you’d change. Something tiny (e.g. “and then Fay chose silver glitter instead of gold”) or big (e.g. “and then Rose was arrested instead of Jack”) and I’ll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.
Feel free to ask about any of my comics and non-comic works — including But I’m A Cat Person, Leif & Thorn, or, heck, And Shine Heaven Now if you feel like it.
You can comment with prompts here, or send them by Tumblr askbox (to BICP, Leif & Thorn).
Fills:
Last week’s Webcomic Chat was about pacing in webcomics! And most of my answers were relevant to BICP, so I’m posting a roundup here. (For answers to previous chats, see the blog posts at Leif & Thorn.)
Q1: How important of a role does pacing play in the success of your comic? #WebComicChat
— WebComicChat (@webcomicchat) March 4, 2018
Depends on the comic — I’m making 2 comics with pacing, and 1 without. But I’m A Cat Person, of course, is a single overarching story. I think some readers get frustrated with the 2x-a-week update schedule, especially when the plot isn’t moving quickly to begin with.
Leif & Thorn is sequential storylines in the same universe. It runs on newspaper-comic pacing — one joke every 4 panels. As long as I keep that up, I don’t think the overall pacing of any given storyline plays a role in how much people like it. Unless readers can tell there’s some big reveal coming, and are impatient for me to get there.
…and then there’s Webcomic Woes. (Link is on Patreon — they all go public in time, it’s just that patrons get early access.) It’s a bunch of disconnected one-shots about webcomic fandom feelings. It has no pacing. The fact that it’s even had a regular update schedule for several weeks in a row is purely a quirk of fate.
Q2: Conflicts and tension move a story forward. How can they affect a comic’s pacing? #WebComicChat
— WebComicChat (@webcomicchat) March 4, 2018
A lot of the conflicts in BICP come from secrets…and most of them aren’t caught out in some dramatic way, but get deliberately revealed by the secret-keeper over the course of character development. Either because the secret-keeper has grown as a person, or because the person they were keeping secrets from has earned their trust, or both.
Which is good Healthy Relationship Content! But can make for anticlimactic pacing if the reveal isn’t emotional in some other way. Take Miranda’s chapter-25 reveal — she didn’t just drop that info, she literally brought Sparrow to a graveyard and gave her a whole speech about magic and feelings and dead parents to set it up.
One thing you do want is a tense, dramatic first chapter. Don’t do a slow-and-dreamy prologue unless you have the art skill that people will be hooked by virtue of sheer prettiness. (Floraverse pulled it off, for example.)
And definitely don’t do a full-page-of-infodumping update early in the comic! Most people flat-out won’t read it. I sure won’t. You have to get people engaged and invested enough to care first. I specifically averted the wall-of-backstory in Leif & Thorn, and within a year or so I was able to start doing info pages that readers actually asked for.
Q3: How can panel and page layouts impact a comic’s pacing? #WebComicChat
— WebComicChat (@webcomicchat) March 4, 2018
…this one actually has come up in Webcomic Woes. It’s structured like a 4koma, no special layouts, but sometimes I’ll add an extra panel to give the reader another beat before the joke lands.
The page layouts in BICP were designed to work on-screen, but weren’t done with an eye toward print. Now that I’m in the middle of formatting them for books, that can be painfully obvious. The big issue (other than “keeping text from disappearing in the margins”) is that you want big dramatic reveals to happen on the page flip. Some of them work, others…don’t.
Mostly I just let it slide as-is. There’s only one so far (Interlude 3) (coming out soon!) where I inserted an extra page, to make sure the last few reveals happened on the flips. It’s a big splash image, something that would’ve been frustrating as a single webcomic update, but it’s designed to look particularly cool in your hands.
Q4: Does a webcomic’s release schedule affect a comic’s pacing? How can it help or hinder storytelling? #WebComicChat
— WebComicChat (@webcomicchat) March 4, 2018
Yes with long-form comics. Which is why, as a reader, I save them up and then read them in batches, ideally stopping at the actual chapter breaks. Most awkward part is when a comic randomly stops updating mid-chapter, so it gets to sit in my “you have unread pages” queue in perpetuity.
With BICP, I try to compensate for the “only 2 updates per week” slowness by putting something funny and/or cute on every otherwise-slow-paced page.
All too often I’ve run out of buffer and end up frantically drawing each page the night before it’s scheduled. (Or the night after it’s scheduled….) The one upside of this is that it’s very easy to keep the one-Thing-per-page pattern active, because I can’t operate in a mode of “okay, this page contains half a conversation that’ll be resolved tomorrow, and this one has foreshadowing for an event I’ll get to draw next week.” It’s all “draw a page Right Now that’ll be worth reading Right Now.”
The effect in an archive binge can be, uh, jerky and erratic. (I’m smoothing some of that over during the revisions, by the way. Nicer transitions between pages, that kind of thing.)
On the flip side, right now I’m working 3-to-5 pages ahead (!!), which is cool. I can plan transitions! I can realize “oh, hey, this page happens too soon, I need to draw another one to insert ahead of it for setup” and have the time to actually draw it! But here, the one downside is that it takes conscious attention to remember that I’m not writing at the speed people will be reading, and adjust accordingly.
Q5: What methods do you use to control a story’s pacing? What else do you want to try? #WebComicChat
— WebComicChat (@webcomicchat) March 4, 2018
Honestly, 95% of the time I’m just winging it.
You know how each BICP chapter is exactly 27 pages? Yeah, I didn’t plan that from the beginning. I just drew the first one and it was 27 pages, and the next one was 27 pages, and after a while I made the conscious choice to be consistent about it.
The most planning I’ve done is, like…I thumbnailed the last 5 pages of chapter 25, but even then I knew going in that I had approximately 5 pages’ worth of panels. It was just a matter of arranging and pacing them so there was a worthwhile punchline/beat/cliffhanger at the end of each page.
I know I’ve gotten better at it over time, but there’s no conscious strategy or control to it. I’m still mostly going on instinct. Instincts get developed and honed with practice, that’s all.
If you want to talk about your own experiences with webcomic pacing — in my comics, in your own comics, in the other comics you read — please jump in and share!
Actually a little more than half, since I just finished updating chapter 13, and have only drawn part of the original artwork for chapter 26.
Plus, 3 of 4 interludes are updated!
…If there was going to be an Interlude 5, that could involve anything and anyone in the BICP universe, what would you want it to focus on?
The art is hardest to update for the sketchy-pencil style of flashbacks, since you can’t just draw a whole new line and have it blend in with the existing lineart.
The text was hardest in Interlude 2 (that’s the Ann Walker flashback), because there is so. much. exposition. Text bubbles up against the margins in practically every page.
(On the updated pages, you can tell which side is the interior margin because that’s where I started putting the credit line. It’s a handy reminder where to avoid putting text that I don’t want swallowed up in the spine.)
The single hardest item was Bennett’s glasses. Seriously, we’re halfway through the archive and I still hadn’t figured out how to draw them in a straight line with both frames the same size.
Chapter 11 was updated to two bad audiobooks. One mystery where the detective kept making actively bad decisions, one gay YA where the main character’s boyfriend died horribly right after they had sex for the first time. (I noped out at that point and rewarded myself with some fluffy sitcoms.)
Interlude 2 was drawn to podcasts, including the last of the Webcomics Weekly archive. It’s fascinating as a historical artifact — the final episodes involve the artists considering the merits of this hot new thing called Patreon.
Chapter 12 got me through two things I was saving for just this kind of work: the whole audiobook of The Last Hero, and the whole latest series of Grace and Frankie. They didn’t disappoint.
Chapter 13 involved a bunch of false starts. An unconvincing book here, an underwhelming show there. I finally got to the end via a string of medical dramas.
Interlude 3 was updated while listening to most of China Mieville’s The City And The City, which is entirely about the cool worldbuilding. There’s a murder mystery, but it’s just an excuse to hang around in the world, to the point where it was a while after finishing the art before it hit me that I hadn’t finished the actual book.
That’s a huge jump forward — Interlude 3, the Jesus flashback, was posted a whole 2 years after chapter 13 — because I’m going to publish it as a pretty little standalone story. (With the usual amount of bonus art, and an exclusive double-width version of the cover, and more.)
Look out for that in late March!
I wanted to have more of the chapters with the main characters available first…but, listen, Easter is April 1 this year, and I gotta release this in time or else what are we even doing here.
Hey, does anyone remember that I have a Society6 store?
Because I finally did! At least, enough to add a bunch of new But I’m A Cat Person and Leif & Thorn merchandise.
Click on through to get some new shirts, phone cases, mugs, clocks, and other exciting gear. And if there’s any art I’ve already done that you wish you had on a pillowcase, now would be the time to ask.
That’s all of Volume 2 (it should be out in a couple of weeks, pending bonus material) and the better half of Volume 3.
For pagecount reasons, Volume 3 is only going to have chapters 9-11 — the Whiskercon chapters, making a nice set — bundled with Interludes 1 and 2.
Now the big question is, how do I arrange them? Interlude 1 (holiday flashbacks) at the front and Interlude 2 (Walker’s Travels) at the back, the order they were posted in? Or both Interludes at the back, the way manga volumes are organized, so you get the main continuity first before switching gears?
Readers, do any of you have a preference?
Stray observations:
I had forgotten that Kara Lynn originally had these complex frilly ears. Not sure when they got streamlined into human-but-pointed. (I picked the simple pointy version as the winner.) She also had huge eyes for a while in chapter 9, but they’d settled down into their current format by the middle of chapter 10.
Bianca spent the whole of chapter 10 with her eyes the wrong color. Whoops. I was also using two subtly-different shades of purple on Poe’s eyes for a while there.
Dotan and Tina have most of their appearance in chapter 9, but come back briefly in chapter 10…and I drew Dotan’s hair completely differently. Also, left out Tina’s fox, which I decided was a little too much work to add back in.
The only panel I’ve flat-out redrawn was back in chapter 7. It bothered me even at the time, so it’s a relief to finally do it right.
Chapter 6 was drawn while catching up on a ton of podcasts I’d fallen behind on.
Chapter 7 got me through the second “season” of DokiDoki Precure (the Netflix “Glitter Force” dub)…then a ton of false starts on bad audiobooks before I gave up and used Grey’s Anatomy to finish it off. (Also on Netflix. They have 13 seasons of it. Yikes.)
Seriously, one of those audiobooks had the female protagonist lamenting that her crush is an uninterested heterosexual…while said crush is actively in the middle of kissing her. In the moonlight. On the beach. After saying “I’m interested in you.” It is impossible to exaggerate how ridiculous this was.
Chapter 8, I played it safe and put on something I knew would be good — Terry Pratchett’s The Truth.
Chapter 9 took me for-frickin’-ever for some reason. Possibly the combination of “several new characters” and “lots of panels crowded with characters, very few scenery/establishing shots/splash panels.” I got all the way through John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury, and a second Discworld book — Thief of Time.
Chapter 10 was back to a single book — Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora — with podcasts filling it out at the end. The accuracy of the time-scale is a little fuzzier on this one, since I did take a break in the middle of the book to make cookies.
Check out Volume 1 if you haven’t yet, and stand by for volumes 2 and 3!
…and here’s what was in the package:
Either there was a mix-up at the warehouse, or Patrick turned into a pulley system when I wasn’t looking.
(Somewhere, two engineering students are wondering how all these shapeshifting battle monsters got into their thesis.)
In other words — I have 5 chapters completely edited and updated, out of the 25 that exist. Anatomy fixed, lighting and textures neatened, shading enriched. (It won’t be until chapter 23 that pages were fully-shaded when originally published.)
I’ve also been moving dialogue bubbles around, sometimes to make the reading flow better, mostly for the sake of margins. The alpha proof copy of Volume 1 made it clear that, even if text bubbles are within Lulu’s official safety lines, they can still be so close to the binding that they’re hard to read.
For the record, it’ll only be available on Lulu. The price is much lower than if I tried to distribute it through other book sites, and the print quality is visibly higher than the alternate proof copy I got from Amazon.
Working through chapter 5 (Miranda and Poe’s first confrontation with Bianca) really drove home how much I was samefacing the black characters at that point.
It wasn’t a conscious plan, it was a combination effect of “mostly drawing anime” and “not enough experience drawing black people.” As the characters’ designs evolved over the years, they’ve gotten more differentiated. I’d forgotten how they used to all have the same nose, same proportions, same jawline.
They also were shaded with the same grey — like the white characters still are — even though they’re supposed to have a range of skin tones. (Part of that was just…laziness. It’s easier if your palettes are interchangeable, you can pull from the same references for everyone.)
In the updated versions, Cybele’s skin is darker-grey and Miranda’s is lighter-grey. And I’m doing what I can to make the faces work.
Chapter 3 was drawn while listening to the entire audiobook of Orson Scott Card’s The Lost Gate. It was alarmingly standard cut-rate YA. Had to add a few more movies at the end to get all the pages done.
Chapter 4, the audiobook of Christopher Moore’s Secondhand Souls, the second of two books about ad-hoc soul reapers. The main character spends a good chunk of the book with his soul possessing a reanimated fourteen-inch-tall squirrel-bone puppet in a hand-sewn wizard robe. It’s very non-standard, and very good.
Interlude 1 was done mostly while listening to episodes of the Webcomics Weekly podcast.
Chapter 5, I remembered that I have on-demand TV to watch. Possibly just in time, because this chapter took work. It got me through all this season’s currently-released episodes of Scandal, Family Guy, and Law & Over: SVU.
Currently in the mail: beta proof copy of Volume 1, with the new art!
Cross your fingers that it looks good, because that’ll be all I need to put it on sale.
I kept telling myself I could print the original BICP pages, readers liked the art well enough at the time, or at least the ones who didn’t like it didn’t stick around as readers, it would be fine….
Then, at last, I caved and started doing updates.
Full shading! Touched-up lineart! Slightly nicer textures and effects!
The new versions of chapter 1 and chapter 2 are now live. (The original versions are still available at the Smackjeeves mirror, and I’ll put some side-by-side comparisons on the BICP Tumblr.)
The cover images are completely new — that’s happening for every chapter, at least in the early volumes. (The first five chapters had simple splash images that involved less effort than a typical page, not more, which didn’t seem right.)
All the new ones are homages to cover art from other series, mostly anime and manga. Points to readers who can track down the references.
For the interior art, the total shading alone makes it a lot fresher. And I’m more willing to mess with lighting and adjust local color to make the focal points of panels stand out. Sometimes it’s as simple as fading the background so it’s easier to see where a character is actually standing.
And then there’s the lineart. The most persistent issue is this reoccuring face-skew — if a character is in 3/4 view, almost invariably the forehead is sticking out while the chin is kinda sunken in. Which makes it kinda fun to flip back and forth between original and updated art, and watch everyone’s heads change shape.
At this point most of the working files only have two layers. Speech bubbles get their own layer, but gradients, textures, lighting effects, they’re all flattened together. Aaaaawkward. If you look closely, you can see that I got more aggressive about redoing textures between chapter 1 and chapter 2, extra time investment and all.
So, yeah, it’s taking a while. I got through most of the audio version of Carpe Jugulum (Discworld) while updating chapter 1, and did a whole start-to-finish marathon of Sherlock working on chapter 2. (Rounded off by an episode of the Thinking Sideways podcast…by complete coincidence, #233, which references a Sherlock episode.)
For chapter 3, let’s find out what the library has in stock.
In between all this, I’ve been transcribing And Shine Heaven Now strips from 2005. That’s 6 years older than the BICP pages from 2011, which in turn are 6 years older than the present. Symmetry!
Trippiest moment: transcribing a Shine sketchbook page from 2005 that collects what I called “old, bad sketches” from 2004. To my 2017 eye, the 2005 art — which was shiny and new and hot-off-the-pages at the time — does not actually look any different.
It’s comforting to see that things are appreciably better by 2011. Back in 2005 you have to squint to pick out the wonky-face issue, because everything is so skewed and funny-looking that it doesn’t even stick out.
Progress!
New Year’s Resolution: to get more than half of BICP updated and available in print over the course of 2018. At the current pace, that’s more than doable.
…it would be nice to get the Josh/Marian/Saxon interlude published in time for Easter, but that’s probably a little optimistic.
