People sometimes ask me about “how to get into webcomics,” or “how to do a webcomic,” or “how to get people to read a webcomic.”
The truth is I don’t know! I had what could charitably be called a strategy a decade ago, but now I just make comics and put them in the places folks expect to see them — here, on Twitter, on Facebook, in your email.
But other people do it lots of different ways — there are a lot of comics that live on Tumblr exclusively, and there are comics that I only recognize because they bubble up on Reddit a lot.
Here’s an example of a comic that lives in a “comics” tag on the artist’s Tumblr… I happened across it because I saw it posted on Twitter, and then I checked out the other comic strips the author has posted. I don’t know if the comic has a name per se, but the Tumblr’s handle is Iguanamouth.
That’s just the first couple of panels! Click to read the whole thing! It’s very good.
I don’t know much about this artist (Lauren), but it seems like the comic strips are an occasional thing that she posts along with other stuff on her blog.
And I think comics are getting to be like that now — just another form of thing to post. There are people I follow on Twitter or Instagram who occasionally post comics in between regular tweets about whatever.
That’s a great thing for the comics medium and for artists, but it makes it hard to draw a line around “webcomics” in any specific form and say “This is how you do a webcomic.” It’s always been kinda fuzzy, and now it’s… just no more clear than it was, perhaps.
That’s a small tradeoff for seeing the explosion of work of a new generation of artists who grew up on comics, and are learning to speak that language natively. I think it invites more interesting voices to participate in the medium.
Lauren has more art in her “Scribbles” tag, here! They are fun drawings that aren’t comics per se, but exist in the same space as her comics; that is to say, a piece of art that tells a story. Comics is just one way of accomplishing that end, and I love that too.
