I generally make it policy to never ink and color a stand-alone piece (like a pin-up) and release it all in one day. When I've finished the pencil I may call it a day and move on to something else before coming back and giving it a once-over the next day to see if there's any tweaking that needs to be done. Generally, there is. Then, when I color, it'll be the same. Since I use pencil to color, I DEFINITELY don't want to skip the pause-reflect step, as once the pic is sprayed with fixative, there ain't no going back to fix things. Stepping away for a period of time definitely helps me refine a piece.
That is one of the first things I learned at comic school: leave your pencils overnight. Next day, you really start noticing errors.
Bustertheclown wrote:Stuff about status of webcomics and comics in general
Any new medium or genre that doesn't have instant aristocratic status as old ones is instantly tagged as irrelevant. Comics should have followed the film, which escaped the ghetto thanks to serious work of cinema theorists such as Eisenstein and Vertov, and later again french journalists such as Truffault and Godard, both of which rose conversation to a new level. Comics never had consistent theoretical thought, nor a strong generation of theorists. It's serious critical work appeared only sporadically, in form of single, lone authors. Most of what is passed as critical work in comics is in "short review and a star rating", or "dos and don'ts in comics" form, neither of which is considering comics as an art form. Most of literature about comics tended to be written in the patronizing style, as if written for exactly the same reader stereotype that comics tried to get away from. Lately there are things like doctoral works on topic of particular comics and such, so things might get better, eventually.
Writing about webcomics, well it's all mostly journalism. Best of bunch are, I'd say, on the level of New York Times review, which is still just a hint to reader whether to watch it or not. It's hard to do art theory as a hobby, I guess. Specially on internet where you get called "pretentious", "exclusivist", "elitist", by every militant geek who wants you to write more about Penny Arcade. What prevents webcomics from being a more seriously taken medium is a topic that deserves a book-long essay.
How do you get beyond that, then? How are you able to separate the good from the bad and useful from the useless?
My attitude has always been to take everything as a useful information. Even if it's not constructive, it's telling you how one archetype reader is seeing your comic. If you get an advice, you got to think, if you applied this advice, whether it would still be the comic that you wanted to make?
One of the main things that holds most comics back is that they're done by a single person. There are a handful of ultra-talented people (of which I am definitely not a member) who have both top-level writing and art abilities, but the vast majority don't and would benefit from delegating some of the work. You'll notice also the virtually all "professional" media is produced this way. The writers on the Simpsons aren't the same people who draw it.
Well there's a distinction between 'communal' and 'individual' art. Where former is a result of different visions and sensibilities co-working or clashing, later is a result of one person's singular vision. Think music written by a band closely working together like REM, as opposed to a single songwriter who controls most aspects of his music, like Bob Dylan, both of them having their own distinctive qualities.
Where film is almost impossible to create as a work of singular vision, comics are particularly appropriate for a single person to execute them top to bottom. There aren't too many artists who are both great artists and great writers, but there's significantly more of those who excell at one, but are good enough in another. Comic author may not be the both best artist and best writer, but very often he's the best artist for the kind of writing he writes, and the best writer for the kind of art he draws.
Well, you're welcome to disagree. I just personally can't come up with a single counterexample that I've ever seen.
It's strange that you think so, because on top of my head, almost every webcomic writer that is any good has shown a serious progress over the course of his career. This specially goes for early generations of webcomics.
Consider Sluggy Freelance. Early on it was a riot, but it's storylines were fairly simple pop-culture parodies that never had more than a few characters and setpieces. Later, author developed a style of intensely complicated, multilayered storylines. This didn't always work to his favor, but it was always impressive how skilled he got at juggling several balls in the air, and catching them all in time.
CRFH is another obvious example. Whereas it started as a crude gag comic with humor that was mining stereotypes, with freedom to explore out-there topics. It later became a story with ridiculously high emotional stakes, multitude of characters and interweaving storylines.
Those art-brute beginnings had their charm, but make no mistake - this art brute approach was not the choice, is was a necessity. They didn't start writing more complex because they changed their mind midway. They did it because they learned how to. Proof to that point is, whenever any of those writers embarked on new projects, they never chose art-brute approach again.
John Allison is an example of author whose skills in writing humor improved. His early comic Bobbins was, at it's beginning, a simple gag comic that relied on visual jokes and stereotypical characterizations. Then it visibly got better as it went along. Currently, he's a skillful writer of understated, character-driven jokes that mostly rely on impeccable rhythm and speech patterns.
As for PA and VGCats - both gained a lot of viciously devoted readership early on thanks to type of humor and topics that appealed to internet crowd, and I can not think of an environment less conductive for development than that.
The thing is, all of these disciplines rely on certain innate skills that they can't teach you. For example, most drawing books try to break characters down into basic shapes that exist in a 3D space, which they assume you can already do or can figure out from a couple examples. However, if you simply can't look at an object and break it down in this way, or visualize the component parts in a 3D space, you'll never be any good at it, and lots of people can't. Writing is even worse. You can listen to things like audio commentaries for the Simpsons where they go over how they write jokes and how things like subverting the audience's expectations and calling back to something just after you've forgotten it can be funny, but they give you virtually nothing to go on as to where you should get your ideas from. That has to come from within.
Oh, breaking objects in simple shapes is most certainly a skill that you can practice. Like perspective, it's geometry and knowing math helps, though in this case, very simple math.
But in case you have a peculiarity of being completely unable to see simple shapes in objects, perhaps you'll use this peculiarity to devise an art style that doesn't rely on it (and there are many good comic artists whose style doesn't).
Writing and drawings are conglomerates of such disparate skills that, most likely, you can always channel your art towards the skills you do have, if you care enough to work on it. Just like how Hagar creator, being extremely nearsighted, developed a style that circumvented this. Basically, most of people (with some exceptions, obviously) are born with all the basic skills needed to become good authors, but they have to develop them through work.
Incidentally, getting ideas can also be practiced. There are numerous books that teach you how to, for instance, reliably get ideas for gags when you are a comedy writer. These literally contains methods for how to get inspiration from things surrounding you. They certainly don't guarantee quality of writing, but they seem to help a pro not to run out of ideas.
There are certain character traits that can prevent you from becoming a good author, though. Some of them are lack of self-criticism and stubbornness.
