How do you see the future of the webcomics "industry"?
Will it continue to grow and become accepted as a mainstream form of entertainment, or is it a bubble waiting to burst?
Webcomics are for faggots and communists.
>>77425311
its been the same as its been for years
a lot of shit with only a few making any sort of living from it
People that try and make money from it from the start are idiots and/or assholes
It will become mainstream once people over a certain age all die off.
>>77425370
This but webcomics have been popping up faster and faster because more and more people realize that it can be for fun or to improve your art and/or storytelling skills and if you stick to it you'll eventually have at the very least a few dedicated fans after a while.
>>77425311
BUMP with best comic
>>77425311
People can whip out their phones and consume them casually while waiting nearly anywhere. Kind of like manga sold in train stations. It'll supplant most other forms of comics, and the sooner current publishers get webcomic versions of their properties out there, not just digital comic books, they sooner they will be safe.
>start a webcomic
>real life happens so barely update it
>have a lot of cool ideas but it's still in the intro chapter so it's flat out boring if you're an archive reader
>on top of that make it in a painterly style, so it's not easy getting it out regularly without it looking like shit
>just want to tell this fucking story but I can see myself getting caught up and making it for like ten years and only getting halfway there if it continues at this pace
>on top of this have a bunch of other ideas for comics I want to do that I'm passionate about, while the drag of actually producing this comic is dispassioning me on the one I'm making right now
I just wanted to make a comic about little kids getting bullied, being friends, and discovering the mysteries of life
There's probably never going to be a ton of competition, just the one clique of popular creators joining together to make some convention and merchandise cash before they either fall into obscurity or move onto bigger and better things.
SEASON 2 WHEN
>>77425895
From the thumbnail I thought that was a panel of yours and was about to compliment your skill. Also unless you've somehow been taking reader's money for the comic via a funding site there's nothing stopping you from switching comics. If you've been on the intro chapter for so long I'm assuming it doesn't have too big of a fanbase and if you don't feel passionate about it it will sour both it and the comic you actually want to work on. I'd like to see it though.
>>77426104
It's not that I don't feel passionate about it, the things I want to say in it are things I'm ridiculously passionate about and I think are worth suffering a bit of, I dunno, an Illustrative dry spell, just to one day get to it and have it really click.
http://squaresinthesky.tumblr.com/archive
when I say real life happened, real life fucking happened. But yeah it's like, twenty people are reading the thing and a lot of them are friends so the logical part of me thinks it's a total waste of time, but the artsy fartsy side wants to keep at it to someday get to the really crazy stuff that'll turn heads and HAVE A MESSAGE, MAAAAN.
Maybe I should just scratch it and start over with a buffer and a simpler artstyle, but that kinda feels like it'd be chickening out, because I went into it wanting to get better at coloring and to get an uncanny effect where it'd be this relatively naturalist style with a bunch of little subtle things wrong with it to create this atmosphere. But I feel like I've worked on so little of it over so long that I've lost track of a lot of basic stuff.
I desperately want to tell this story but boy it's tough trying to make it what I want it to be, let alone something good enough that others would want to read it.
>>77426292
Just trust your gut on what to do. Even if your brain says to stick with your old comic try to focus more on your new one. Give yourself at least a week or two and if you feel like you should be doing the old get back to it. It's like a psych trick a lot of people know: if you're torn between two flip a coin and decide based on your feeling on what result you got. That usually only works on people under twelve though.
I'll bookmark your comic though because I like the style and the brown kid reminds me of my thoughts before they turned into actually real suicidal thoughts so it's sort of nostalgic to me :P
>>77426487
Thank you for the words of advice, anon.
>>77426292
for what it's worth, that page piqued my interest ands i'd like to know what's going on in that story
>>77426946
I'd rather not spoil the whole thing upfront, but here are a coupl of early sketches and just a couple of influences for the story. the tl:dr is it's a couple of girls exploring bully politics and uncovering a vast conspiracy that may or may not be real.
There's a webcomic bubble? I mean I know a handful of patreon barons making a moderate living off it and a larger second tier making maybe enough to scrape by as a single person with a room mate, but I thought the medium as a whole was extremely unprofitable.
I think webcomics' success is tied with crowdfunding. When countries will start taxing the shit out of it it's going to be a problem.
>>77425437
>more and more people realize that it can be for fun or to improve your art and/or storytelling
It really hurts when an artist create a mediocre webcomic about their lives and instead of improving they get stuck when they could do something else, being a comic artist isn't for everyone.
>>77425437
I think this is a golden age for self-publishing and it's great that anyone can make a comic about anything and have a chance... but it's not exactly just you, your comic and your public. There's a lot of skills and efforts you have to spend into things that have nothing to do with the comic.
A great thing about having a comics industry is that artists can focus on what they're competent with and let someone else handle the logistics.
In many cases, webcomics are already profiting clever business-people and "personalities" more than legit artists, and it might get worse in the future.
>>77428506
No. Webcomics have done well since before crowdfunding became popular.
>Will it continue to grow and become accepted as a mainstream form of entertainment, or is it a bubble waiting to burst?
People actually read webcomics? They are the equivalent of gag a day comics in newspapers. No one is ever gonna get tons of money or pageviews unless you get lucky and have a huge stupid fanbase like Homestuck. There is no bubble and it's never gonna be accepted.
If they were good or worthwhile they would not be webcomics. The only way you can make anything out of it is if you make porn or you already had an established fanbase to begin with.
A major publishing/editing company will round up a bunch of the more talented/marketable/accessible ones and form something akin to a mini-Image and become immensely popular and imitators will spring up and all of these patreons and whatnot will go by the wayside.
The reason we have big editorial companies like DC/Marvel in comics and TOR/Penguin/HarperCollins/etc in books is because they have the capital and resources to invest into promoting and producing their products and also because they have some oversight over the quality of their products so you know going into it that you might be reading a good book, but at the very least it's going to be readable and not fanfic-tier garbage.
Granted, DC and Marvel's (though mostly Marvel's) editorial staff at present are fucking terrible, but the point is that if webcomics had something akin to this, a company that actually gave a shit about managing and curating the content they promote and produce, it would blow all this current crop of bargain bin crap out of the water and reshape the industry, and I think it's only a matter of time before it happens.
>>77429081
I think what makes webcomics popular is that they are not accessible to most people. They're not something someone off the street can pick up and read a lot of the time. You need some knowledge about internet subculture or stuff about anime or something like that.
>>77429081
Yeah all that is really holding a proper industry back is the Big Two and their undying IPs. I'm afraid those are here to stay for at least another decade.
>>77426292
I'm checking it out. I like the art. Might be a while before I actually fead it. You in the webcomic creator threads?
>>77429729
I lied I read it now. Really like your art style and it's interesting so far. Will keep reading.
