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Comic Story and Pacing, for #WebcomicChat

Mar10
by Erin Ptah on March 10, 2018 at 10:06 PM
Posted In: Blog

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.)

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.

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.

…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.

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.

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!

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Update All The Pages: 50% complete!

Feb25
by Erin Ptah on February 25, 2018 at 9:03 AM
Posted In: Blog

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.

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New BICP merch!

Feb15
by Erin Ptah on February 15, 2018 at 8:54 PM
Posted In: Blog

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.

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Update All The Pages: 35% complete!

Feb03
by Erin Ptah on February 3, 2018 at 9:54 PM
Posted In: Blog

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!

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My proof copy of BICP #1 arrived!

Jan11
by Erin Ptah on January 11, 2018 at 8:08 PM
Posted In: Blog

…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.)

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Update All The Pages: 20% complete!

Jan08
by Erin Ptah on January 8, 2018 at 6:46 PM
Posted In: Blog

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.

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New Year’s Resolution: update ALL THE PAGES

Dec26
by Erin Ptah on December 26, 2017 at 1:23 PM
Posted In: Blog

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.

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Geez, I type up that whole thing, and then Patreon goes and backflips anyway.

Dec13
by Erin Ptah on December 13, 2017 at 5:49 PM
Posted In: Blog

(Crossposted again.)

The latest Patreon admin post does confirm that there were other motivations for the change than “our users will definitely love this”:

We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around.

(You know, the first email about this to creators said they had focus-grouped the idea, and that users liked it? Talk about a non-representative sample….)

So, yeah. Maybe we can have happy donors and a non-bankrupt company in the same package after all.

What a week.

…and hey, have I mentioned that I have a short story coming out December 20, that will be available for free to all my patrons? It’ll be a bit more exclusive later, but for the duration of December, everyone who donates as little as $1 is getting 13K words of snowbound cross-cultural hurt-comfort AU. My holiday gift to you.

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Some informative links on the Patreon fee change.

Dec11
by Erin Ptah on December 11, 2017 at 3:12 PM
Posted In: Blog

(Crossposted between here and Leif & Thorn.)

If you’re supporting anyone on Patreon, you’ve seen the recent email about a change in the fee structure. And maybe looked at some of the official admin posts about it too. And probably seen a lot of general outrage.

Well, it looks like there may be factors in play here that Patreon isn’t talking about — but you might want to know.

The biggest one is that, under the previous fee setup, Patreon was most likely losing money on all $1 pledges. And all $5 pledges. And, in fact, any pledge lower than $14.29.

So for a creator like me — I’ve never gotten an individual pledge higher than $10. My account has always been losing them money. They’ve been using venture-capitalist dollars to subsidize my work for years now.

Frankly, I’m surprised and grateful they kept that up as long as they did.

The second factor is about legal issues, so it’s not as inflexible as the math, but also not likely to change any time soon. Basically, Patreon’s previous setup arguably put them in a legal category that involved regulations they haven’t been following and fees they haven’t been paying. The new setup definitively puts them not in that category.

No amount of user backlash is going to change any of the above. If Patreon has to choose between “fewer, crankier users, but you actually make a profit” over “everyone stays happy for the next 12 months and then you go bankrupt”…well, what would you do?

I’ve seen some people talk about looking for alternate ways to support their favorite creators, but the details are always vague. Or maybe they’ll mention Paypal. Here’s the problem: I’ve had Paypal for a decade longer than Patreon has even existed. Anyone can click the buttons on my webcomic sites and send me a donation every month, if they feel like it. Guess how many people have felt like it?

Zero. The answer is zero.

And, look, you can turn the question around and get the same thing. If I cancel either of my $1 pledges, the likelihood that I’ll bother to go to the creators’ websites and send them Paypal donations every month is also zero. The technology is there; human nature is not.

I know some patrons are canceling pledges because they can’t afford to keep giving at the same level under the new system. That’s completely legitimate and understandable. You do what you gotta do. No reasonable creator would or should give you grief over it.

But if you’re canceling pledges because you want to put financial pressure on Patreon to switch back to the old system — please know that it doesn’t work that way! Unless you were pledging more than $14.29 per creator, even if they get $0 from you under the new system, that’s still more money than they were making from you before.

I do wish Patreon had rolled this out differently. I wish they had led with “we’ve been subsidizing you out of our own pockets, and we can’t afford to keep it up,” instead of going with “we’re doing this because it will make everyone happier!”, because, uh, that clearly did not land well.

But I’m not mad about the underlying decision. And I’m going to keep using the site, both as a creator and as a patron.

(One more link, for anyone who’s not a patron of mine but would like to be.)

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Technical Difficulties: the aftermath

Nov10
by Erin Ptah on November 10, 2017 at 5:36 PM
Posted In: Blog

So for the past few months my computer has had a couple of bluescreens and other random errors…culminating in this past Sunday, when it tried to boot and couldn’t even find the hard drive. Not fun.

The good news:
I got a new drive! Solid-state, so it’s faster and more durable. My programs are all reinstalled. Most of my data is safe. It only took four days, and I even had some things in the queue that I could post in the meantime.

The bad news:
It cost $600.

Yyyyeah.

How you can help:

– Commission some art. Doable again, now that Photoshop and my scanner are back up and running. Having stuff to work on will even help me get all the settings reconfigured.

– Donate through PayPal – if you don’t want any art but still feel like sending money. This is the link that gets you a bonus wallpaper.

– Donate through Patreon – you can sign up for a recurring donation, or sign up and then cancel five minutes later to make a one-time payment. Also gets you wallpapers.

– Click the “Purchase” link on this art (it’s just the high-res version of the image) as a quick’n’easy way to send money through dA.

– No cash of your own to spare right now? No worries. Link your friends to Leif & Thorn or give a bump to BICP to boost my ad revenue.

Every little bit helps – even $1 or $5 at a time can add up fast. And share this post around! If just 10% of readers chip in a few dollars each, we could have this thing covered by tomorrow.

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