What are you currently up to?

[Karen]

Hello,

One thing I'm always curious about is what is everybody's story when it comes to their webcomic. Like is it just a hobby? Are you trying to market your comic? Are you currently making a decent living? How are things going? Basically like a mini interview where we share what's going on in our own personal webcomic-making world. I guess that means I'll have to start...

I started "Good Times" because of a school assignment where I had to immerse myself in the Independent comic world and I made 3 strips to try it out. Well it was actually a lot of fun. This was about 3 years ago and since then I've been evolving and working on making my webcomic something I really like. It's been a lot of fun and I'm hoping that someday I can make it into either a part time or who knows maybe a full time gig I can really have fun with.

Currently I'm debating a "re-launch" of my strip to start fresh and I'm getting ready to go to San Diego's Comic Con to pass out little free sampler books. Either I'll get some new viewers...or people will get some neat coasters out of them! Who knows...

Good Times!

[Karen]

There's a 5:30 in the morning?!?!? I thought at that time everyone was asleep in their comfy, comfy beds....goodnight everybody...

[Tim]

I actually started out the way, about 10 years ago I created a submission packet to the syndicates (insert evil overtones here) to get several lovely form rejection letters. It then took years of reading webcomics to realize HEY I can do that, I don't need no stinkin' syndicate! And from there the Legendary Boys of Floyd got it's start. I am enjoying it immensely, the hardest part is coming up with new ways to attract traffic and maintain viewers.

[Karen]

Power to the webcomic! :)

[Neftali Rivera]

I have a comic strip called Midtoon that is not up yet. I own the Midtoon.com domain, but I don't have a website hosted yet. I have been tinkering with my comic strip for a while now, having several false starts, but I hope that I can keep up with my expected Launch date of Jabuary 5 2009. (Not sure if I will be able to, though).

As far as hobby vs. market, I am working on some type of micro-finance concept that would make it not profitable, but self-sustaining. Of course, it is still to be seen if my material is good enough, since no one has seen it posted yet. If the micro-finacing is not successful I will resort to do the strip for free and publish a "year-book" for sale at the end of each cycle.

Midtoon is a strip (designed as a newspaper daily) about the residents of a small suburb, particularly the Campos Family, composed of John Campos, his two sons, Erik, 16 and Javier, 8 (from his first marriage) and his wife Mabel. John Campos is a lawyer, currently employed as an advisor to the Mayor of Midtoon. Mabel currently stays at home, but is planning on going back to school to finish her degree in biology. Erik and Javier are enrolled in public schools. Other Characters of the strip are the neighbors, particularly from a small apatment building across the street and a doctor that lives in the house next door, with a child of Javier's age. The settings on the strip are The Campos' home and may other locations across the town.

The theme of the comic itself is social, political and family life, as seen from the eyes of the members of the Campos Family and the rest of the cast of characters.

We will see what the future dictates. Good luck to everyone...

[Neftali Rivera]

UPDATE:

Midtoon.com is online

subscribe to my comic for free by emailing [e-mail]

[Click-Track Heart]

I've doodled for years. Years, I tells ya. I wanted to be like my extremely talented old brother that didn't have to work for his God-given talent. Here in the future, I'm not as good as he was, but I'm finally starting to enjoy my art.

Because of this new-found comfort, I started dabbling in webcomics for a film site, www.filmmedium.com, for awhile. But as that site sort of died out, I turned my attentions to simply sharing my art and called it Gibberish. However, I felt like I was cheating my viewers by not giving them SOMETHING along with my doodles, so I combined my desire to tell stories, and Gibberish became something I never intended. Now almost six months later, Gibberish is still going. I've had a few guest artists, and an "official" website is in the works.

Right now, it's pretty much just for my personal entertainment, as it makes no real money, but I'm hoping to keep the promotion up and get a decent reader base. Money is always good for the work, but simply having a crew of people coming back every posting day is enough of a payment for me. Really, I just want to tell stories, stories that are read by someone other than myself and close friends. I mean, isn't that what the internet is for, sharing our stories?

[Dipswitch]

What's the story? Well...

I like video games. So, when there came a site called playitreviewit.com, I decided to try my hand at writing reviews. To set my reviews apart and give them an audience, I added some comics about gaming to them...based on an ill-fated concept called "Ninja Squad", which was an attempt at a newsletter comic, but didn't make it.

So, then, I came up with the idea for Dipswitch. A comic about gaming, and occasionally about two guys. Denethor Moore and Vic Benson, the clerk and manager at a video game store. It's got some swearing, some R rated humor, but mostly it's a strip about video games.

I've been drawing for as long as I could put pencil to paper, and have had no formal training (it definitely shows in my comics). I love to draw, I like to make people laugh, and since both are fun, I started my website (with the help of a great guy) and began drawing Dipswitch on a regular basis.

http://www.dipswitchcomics.com

check it out!

I like Good Times, by the by. It's a fun strip!

Dan (Dipswitch)

[Dave LaPlante]

Great Topic ! I doodled in school and created Joe Pop, modeled after a friend in high school. It turned into a comic strip and they used to put it in the high school newspaper. After high school I spent my time doing two things. I wrote and recorded songs and worked on the comic strip. A year or two later, I was married and we were starting a family. Both the music and strip got shelved for many years. There was no internet then and very few ways to break into either the music or the newspapers. A few years ago I realized that my kids were all leaving the nest and I was going to have time to spend on things like drawing again. With a little arm twisting from a friend who does a local pod-cast, I started writing and recording my original music again and it wasn't long before I started to think about bringing the Joe Pop comic strip back. I hadn't drawn the strip in a long, long time and I would never consider myself a great artist, but after a year and a half the strip is really shaping up. I put one out every week so there is a consistent improvement. I always considered the best strips to be more than just the art. There are times when good characters, and good story telling come together and then it's magic. As the characters in Joe Pop develop and I continue to create their world, the strip almost writes itself.

[PBJ]

I really just started working on my webcomic in the last couple of months - kind of on the spur-of-the-moment recommendation of a friend. I'm hoping that I will improve over the course of working on it seriously. It's a part-time thing for me, though I would really like to have more time to devote to it. I am still toying with the idea of coloring it (it's pen and paper right now) but time is a major factor for that...

Comicpress has helped a lot with that, it has really cut down on the chore time of getting the comics up. I have quite a few comics already drawn but I'm staggering them so as not to get behind.

It may sound dorky, but I basically just have a song in my heart and just want to get it out there.

[Douglas Byrd]

I'd started on Twilight Blade http://www.novacorp-online.net/NovaGG/Without.htm (i really hope that name isn't already taken ><; I'm bad at making names lol) Sort of to both tell a story and entertain people. I found out that drawing the same person twice is actually really hard to do, and as i get better at drawing my comics look worse and worse to me in comparison. couple this with an inferiority complex and total lack of feedback, it makes continuing scary, since i know not if my material is getting better or worse! XD for me, entertaining people is most important so i appreciate even being told when i do something wrong as much as compliments so that i can fix it.

[The Lehmanns]

Well, my husband has been into webcomics for years, and a couple years back he got me interested in them. We're both writers and hope to be novelists someday. However, life and family kinda put that on the backburner. We still needed that creative outlet, so we decided to focus our creativity in a webcomic of our own. The first foray for us was a webcomic was a stripI hand-drew, but it never really took off. We decided to try it again 2 years ago with our current strip. I love doing pixel art and we decided to try a new concept...doing a comic using smilies. It's been an amazing experience, and while we're not what could be considered "successful", we have a nice audience that keeps growing.

As parents, we are also very dedicated to creating content that is safe viewing for families. Our comic is all-ages. In an effort to expose more kids to webcomics in a safe environment, we started a webcomic listing/rating site last year. Unfortunately, the first run of the site was kinda spotty due to a poor interface. We're redesigning the site and will be relaunching in a couple weeks.

All of this is done as a pseudo-hobby. Meaning it's a side thing we enjoy, but we certainly aren't quitting our day jobs. But, if something came about in the future, we wouldn't let it pass us by. That said, we really don't expect to make any money doing this. As long as we can entertain some people and have fun, then it's well worth it.

[erik jagger]

Great question with some very interesting responses. In my own case my comic is definitely a hobby for the foreseeable future and, don't tell my wife but, I can't see it being a sizable source of income for a number of reasons:

1. I'm no spring chicken. I've got two kids, a boatload of student debt, and a mortgage (in the SF bay area no less!). This is not the time in my life to chuck it all and start from scratch as a starving cartoonist. Consequently, I don't have a lot of time to devote to this endeavor.

2. My stuff is not very marketable. I started out with the idea that I would do a humor strip and within a few weeks I left all pretense of humor behind. It's evolved into something entirely other. Although occasionally there is something that might resemble humor, it's never going to be a laugh-out-loud experience. It also doesn't fit into any of the established and thriving niches. It's not fantasy or sci fi. I'm clueless about video games. It's not slice of life. There are no furry critters or vampires. The main character has a job, but it's not an cube life satire. I guess, like so many of my interests, it falls into that bland and meaningless catchall of 'alternative'. Alternative? Alternative to what??

3. I am slow. Sloooooooooow. I started out updating weekly, but I wasn't happy with the product. So I changed the description from 'a biweekly comic' to 'an irregular comic'. Actually, I like that as a genre descriptor too. Scratch 'alternative' and replace with 'irregular'. Anyway, I know that posting on a regular basis is the only way to build an audience, and I'm sure my failure to do so will condemn me to the dimmest corner of obscurity. But I don't enjoy the process when I'm cramming for an artificial deadline. And I'm not making any money and I don't have any readers, so I might as well enjoy the process. The long patches between postings are particularly damning in my case because I'm not capable of making a self contained strip. My comic (22 strips so far) is one long story with each strip building off the last, and only the first few really work in as stand alone pieces.

4. I'm just not very good yet. I studied illustration. I've worked in visual design for 15 years. I think I'm a decent writer. But I've never worked this way so I'm learning a lot with every strip and although my ideas are good (I like them anyway) my execution is still struggling.

So there you have it. I'm probably never going to be able to quit my day job because reading my comic is like watching a bad paint-job dry on an ugly house. In slow motion.

Come check it out!

Agonizing Trifles