Comic Genesis Forums

I will be starting a new webcomic soon, and have been considering various hosting options. I could just get my own domain, but an established site like this has benefits as far as generating traffic and such goes... Here's the problem, my comic is animated.

http://bronzepig.ca/temp/comic6.html

The art will be a lot nicer than that, obviously, I'm actually a pretty good artist :p I was just making sure the code worked. It uses Javascript rollovers, each panel is a separate image, and it would require a custom table layout and snippet of code for each page. Would hosting something like that be possible here, or do you support one image file per page only?

It's certainly an interesting idea. I've seen webcomics before where the 'page' has no dialogue on it and the reader needs to mouseover the characters to see what they are saying.

Your question is certainly intriguing. I know that full video animation is not allowed, simply due to bandwidth issues.

The main thing to consider is if your system would be compatible with CG's automated webcomic system.

Q: How many files would be associated with a single day's comic?

Ideally, it'd be one. That would work relatively easily.

If there's two or three then you might be able to work around it, though it would require a fair amount of duct tape in order to get it to work. If it's more (say, two files per panel) then it probably won't work with CG's system. You'd need to turn off the auto software and if you do that, then there are plenty of hosts with more features (like php and mysql) that you might be better off using.

It's not up to me, but I think it'd be a tentative no - but would require assessing by one of the staff for an 'official' answer.

Q: Can you provide a link to some sample artwork? I'm just curious, I don't think it would be relevant to that style being hosted here or not.

That's pretty much what I will be doing, I want people to be able to appreciate the art with no dialogue. I will also be doing some actual animation, however, to help convey emotions etc. I'm an artist first, so that comes more naturally to me. I studied Classical Animation at Sheridan College, i may as well put my training to use. and i figure one of the strengths of web comics is being able to take advantage of digital media that you can view on the web, including scripting and animation.

For a single days comic it would be anywhere from 2 images (default and mouseover, single panel) to 18 (but smaller. I'm thinking 9 panels would be the absolute maximum I would do) though it would normally fall in between there somewhere, probably averaging 6 panels per page = 12 images. so yeah, I guess that would put an end to that. :p

art... I haven't scanned anything for this particular project yet, but here's my devART gallery: http://bamfette.deviantart.com/ (which hasn't been updated in ages, I lost my password)

From what you've said so far, it seems to me that you'd be falling into a gray area between what is and isn't allowed on CG.

You'll probably want to pm the admins (Kisai and STRedWolf) and either ask them directly or point them towards this thread.

I'm still thinking that you won't be able to host here. However, if you do, you're going to have a fair amount of difficulty wrestling the Automated software into doing what it is that you want.

While you wait for a reply from the admins, you may want to havea look around at different hosts and see what they are like. It seems to me that you'd be wanting something with php and mysql support in order to make things easier for yourself. Look for an automated script called Walrus which is pretty good and flexible if you choose this path.

Other than that, there's not much else that I can suggest.

I looked up walrus, but there was no instructions (it just said version 3 was 'coming soon' there was a download link, but no readme file for installation)

But I was mostly after a community to help with providing traffic, I can update it manually easily enough, if it comes to that. I don't know jack all about PHP, (well, I know enough to modify existing scripts to a limited degree) but a little SSI used creatively goes a long way, and Adobe creates the table layout for me.

Raye Gunn wrote:I was mostly after a community to help with providing traffic...

Ah, okay - well that's a different kettle of fish.

Where you are hosted is irrelevant. Indeed, an independent host would probably be better. What you want is to become active in the various webcomic-related communities such as Comic Genesis, Drunk Duck, Smackjeeves, BuzzComix, Comixpedia, etc and 'mention' your comic every so often without spamming.

You might also want to read up on how to attract readers.