I’m working on a big chart of Which Characters Know What Spoilers. Any readers want to help fill in some blank spaces?
Current as of this latest chapter…so if you haven’t read that far yet, don’t click the image! ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
That’s right, I’m getting that sweet cross-platform linking action by pointing you to the campaign for Leif & Thorn Volume 1!
Closed the Volume 5 cover poll from the previous post, because the winner, by a landslide, is…Blake!
Now I just have to figure out how to draw them for the cover art. Their buff/manly/spiky-haired form is the default one they take when it’s just them and Walker, but it doesn’t actually show up in the book, so I’ve gotta work out a pose that captures the vibe of their femme/Desi form. (Featured image: some draft possibilities.)
Reseda pretty much keeps her standard form no matter what, but putting her and Timothy/Camellia on volume 6 does mean I get to draw Camellia with the softer, less-clean-cut aesthetic she settles into once she’s no longer closeted on the job. Which is nice!
…anyway, all this doubles as penance art because today’s page will be late. Check back in a few hours – it’s on the way.
(There’s a poll in this post, and your vote is also Important, so read carefully!)
Now that the first four volumes of But I’m A Cat Person have been edited and released, I can finally…ah, give myself a pat on the back for getting halfway there, then roll up my sleeves and move on to the next chapter.
Volume 5 is going to include chapters 16-18, plus the short Interlude 4. (And an extra-large batch of bonus content to make up the pagecount.)
Volume 6 will have the more standard set of contents: chapters 19-22.
Which brings me to the decision — who goes on the covers?
See, in the first four volumes, the cover features the most prominent Being from the chapters within…
…and basically, I got lucky. The plots all lined up nicely, so that of the five core Beings on the main team — Patrick, Reseda, Poe, Kara Lynn, and Cybele — one of them was the obvious choice for each volume.
So it would be nice to get Reseda on volume 5, right? (The chapters where she got the most spotlight before that were unfortunately in volume 1, which was taken.)
But based on the contents…volume 5 is much more Blake-centric. Their big showdown with Kara Lynn is ongoing throughout chapters 16-17. Reseda only appears in chapter 18 (plus a few panels in chapter 17), and isn’t pivotal.
Looking forward to volume 6, this is where Reseda finally gets her most prominent sequences since her introduction. Chapter 20 is mostly her big experiment with Sparrow (plus Timothy’s big career change), and chapter 22 is where the two of them make their plot-turning-point road-trip to Chicago.
There’s no other obvious “main Being in the plot” for volume 6. Blake only appears in chapter 21, and it’s her turn to be non-pivotal.
So, readers — what do you think? (It’s a non-binding poll. Don’t hold back!)
The good news is, Volume 5 has all the pages edited. And once I know who’s on the cover, I can start color-coding the bonus features.
Chapter 16 was redrawn to the audiobook of The Fifth Season, then the newly-released season of Voltron, and finished off with Star Wars episode 8.
Chapter 17 was redrawn to the sequel audiobook, The Obelisk Gate (it was really good, okay, I had to see what happened next asap), then to a whole lot of the first season of Friends At The Table.
Interlude 4…okay, the third book of the trilogy was out, but the library copy was on hold. So I redid this art entirely to Friends At The Table.
Chapter 18, same thing — it’s a really long show, okay — interspersed with the second season of the Steven Universe podcast. Not because I finished FatT season 1, mind you. Just because I wanted a little variety to break things up.
Final note: There’s going to be a Kickstarter in September for the first volume of Leif & Thorn! A serious print run is more cost-effective over the long term than what I’m doing with BICP…but you do need the cash upfront.
So keep an eye out for that. I’m still tinkering with the specifics, but you can definitely look forward to something BICP-related in the stretch goals.
All the fun I’m having with the Democracy Poll widget on Leif & Thorn, I had to go install it on BICP too.
Starter poll! You can pick up to 3 answers, and enter a new one (canon or non-canon, it’s all good) if it’s not there already:
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.
