And that's probably it for the April update! There may be one more page coming this month, or it might get bundled into the May update ā Iāll see how busy I am.
3.18. I struggled for a long time with trying to come up with a decent visual language for "cyberspace" (man, that's a weirdly dated-feeling term, but I don't know a better one) - Ghost in the Shell casts a very long shadow and is obviously vastly more accomplished. I'm not sure I completely succeeded, but I think it gets across what I want!
3.17. In which a Database is Modified. I'm really not sure how I came by the term "eyeball flatteners" but it made me cackle like a cartoon hyena so it stayed in.
3.15. And here is a reveal (which I hope is readable as intended ā I feel like itās hard to depict this without ripping off Ghost in the Shell) which raises still further questions.
I did a āone year onā retrospective on my personal blog about what the process of doing OUBLIETTE has been like and any particular lessons learned. Read it! Or donāt, itās cool.
The comic has a proper archive page! There are functions with this wordpress theme which generate that automatically, but I was really struggling to make the results look other than ugly as homemade sin. So itās a bit manual, but thatās fine if Iām only really updating it once a month.
OUBLIETTE is now featured on both the Webcomics Library (linktree) and the very cool new Webcomic Travelogue. I might also be submitting some stuff there, watch this space.
On which topic, thereāll be at least one Comics I Like post in the next month, and Iāve added links to a lot (24!) of individual comics I like there too ā some complete, some, mostly narrative, some comic. Have a browse.
I've been making a webcomic for a year now; here are some things I've learned.
Mosaic from one of the very first pages. These have aged alright, I think.
Making a webcomic isnāt one skill, itās a bunch of different skills flying in close formation.
Obvious really, but a shocking amount of effort when youāre actually learning them all from scratch; you realise why the credits for most successful pre-internet comics had one person doing pencils, one inks, one letters, one coloursā¦ Writing is a skill; art is a skill (and drawing expressive people is a totally different skill to drawing plausible mechanisms or cityscapes); visualising a scene and segmenting it into panel layouts is a skill; inventing and applying colour palettes is a skill. All of these Iām essentially teaching myself from a baseline of zero (except writing fiction, from a baseline of āI worked hard at this ten years agoā).
Added to all this, webdesign and website management are another skill (of which more anon) and trying to get anyoneās attention about The Thing I Made in the hideous algorithmic nowhere-land of 2020s internet yet another, which I mostly canāt be bothered with. Learning is fun, but itās A Lot, especially when this is a hobby for fun and the minute it stops being fun I donāt have a reason to do it.
3d model of Erewhon St flats. Another thing to learn how to do.
Accordingly, workflow matters a lot
I have found it quite difficult to mentally jump from one skill to another, and have found it easier to apply each skill to ābatchesā of pages than to apply each process to a page in sequence. I try to script out an entire chapter at once (though changes invariably come later), and then draw it in blocks of c.4-5 pages, first with rough sketches and panel layouts, then working out props (including 3d models to help with perspective, and 2d patterns that can be distorted into backgrounds), then lineart, then colours, then shading, then speech bubbles etc, to a block at a time.
I have adjusted the āstagesā of design (this is what Iāve been using in the last few months) and while I still donāt have this nailed, I think an update schedule and drawing approach based around batches of a monthās worth of pages is currently feeling easier and more time-efficient.
The very first comic page I did ā embarrassingly crap in itself, but a helpful reminder how far Iāve come. A Remastered version will appear in the comic in a few years, and itāll feel good to compare the two.
Practice (and process) makes my art both better and faster, but thereās always something new to learn
This project was partly a learn-by-doing approach to teaching myself digital art, and Iām getting there. My art is still very much Not Good but is visibly improving as I discover shortcuts and become more practised and comfortable. These improvements make my drawings look better but also make it quicker to churn them out. I have found a relatively consistent way of drawing faces (which were definitely my weakest point and I hope are now merely weak), and various tools and technical techniques to make things go faster (without, hopefully, being quite as obvious about it as all the low-end high school romance webtoons out there assembled from the same prefabricated Clip Studio assets.)
However, as soon as I get comfortable with one thing I discover I want to get better at the next (Iām still rubbish at clothing, for instance). It might be one day Iāll reach a level of āfundamentalsā such that, rather than going through complex processes, I can just pick up a stylus and bash out what I want to. But that feels a long way off.
The temptation to go back and fix things is strong
A lot of the story was formed before I started drawing it but a lot more of it has emerged over time. As I get better and more comfortable with all this, Iām realising I have accidentally boxed myself in, or missed opportunities, in early pages, and now have concepts and parts early on that I want to change.Ā I also note little infelicities in writing and art that are worth fixing.
Iām conflicted about what to do here. Chats on various sites (Spiderforest discord, mainly) have been helpful with the sense of a webcomic as an early draft. Kill Six Billion Demons reset itself fairly early on to make a bunch of Early Episode Weirdness line up with the massive plot that Abaddon later delivered. I am tempted to make tweaks ā but I am also worried that way leads endless tweaking and no forward progress. Hum. Better to resist for now.
A great pleasure of doing your own world is just inventing random things. Hereās a cable-car station, with apologies to Otto Wagner.
The net is awash in art tips ā lessons on specific things are what work for me
There are an infinity of drawing guides on the internet and I have found almost none of them helpful. The same search term will get you Fine Arts degree stuff and dudes who just want to get a perfect lensflare on yet another sameface anime girl in an incredibly beautifully over-rendered background. There are also generalist āteach yourself from scratchā sites which I also find unhelpful ā I tried drawabox on āfundamentalsā and stopped after drawing a bunch of boxes because I donāt care about drawing boxes and the exercises were doing absolutely nothing for me. I can only really learn by doing and I can only consistently make myself care about doing the thing if there is something specific Iām trying to do ā thatās been the whole point of the comic.
Where I have found a particular thing sticking is when I have a specific object or concept Iām trying to draw and thereās a guide to help with that. The Etherington Brothersā guides are great on individual things (although in the most unhelpfully diffuse format possible ā please for goodnessā sake sell me an ebook, Iām not buying a massive stack of Ā£25 hardbacks); individual Clip Studio tuts are also often good, although also often obviously targeted at people who arenāt me.
Website management hasnāt really got any easier
I wonder if one of the lesser reasons for the decay of the internet into its total capture (front end, back end and finances) by a handful of hideous megacorps ā social media being the big one ā is that it feels like far more of a headache to do your own website than it was a decade or two ago. I learned my WordPress skills for uni websites circa 2010, since which Iāve forgotten most of them, and while the backend of that hasnāt really changed at all (this horrible Gutenberg thing aside), finding hosting and making it work is the same amount of a faff as then and setting up SSL certificates even more of one. Generic ready-made site builders like Wix are crap and the bespoke webcomic plugins for WordPress exist but need a few technical skills to make work; Toocheke was a struggle for me; Comicpress is great and well-documented but hasnāt been supported in yonks so one day (The great Erin Ptah has had a better time with Toocheke with than me, here are her reflections). CSS and WP theme design is yet another skill and one I now have essentially no interest in learning again except to get a viable website.
Iāve only glanced, and might glance again, at Tapas/Webtoon, but last time I did they seem to be forcing a vertical scroll format, have rather worrying TOS, and absolutely awash with indistinguishable romance manga slop. Which might be where the readership is but I donāt care enough about the numbers to make that compromise. A much more appealing and more old-internet solution seems to be the site Comicfury which does most of the hard work for you. If thereās a next time I would probably use that, like my pal Crow-Caller.
Momentum is essential, but so is time off
From the beginning Iāve tried to do something with OUBLIETTE every single day, on the basis that keeping good habits and keeping the comic in my head are positive and self-reinforcing. I think this was a good approach with two main problems. One, when I fell off the wagon (usually due to a holiday or some other full-time commitment) it was really hard to get back on it. Two, it was getting exhausting and increasingly conflicting with non-comic things which also matter to me (like a job, partner and life). I found that giving myself one day off each week made it much, much easier to keep the momentum up but I havenāt found an answer to the first problem yet. I had a huge amount of personal and work commitments pile up and basically had to write off late November through to Christmas. But Iām back in the saddle!
Audience feedback: not obsessing over numbers is essential, but positive feedback is incredibly motivating
From the endless variations on āplease review!ā on fanfiction.net back in 2004 I have seen creative friends who associate their self-worth with online audience feedback to the point that a lack of it actually hurts them, and am determined to avoid that. It helps that Iām older and have less to prove; I donāt care about ānumber goes upā and I donāt want a big following, thatās far too much grief in this day and age. But the sense of howling into a void can be thoroughly demotivating and the occasional comment from someone who is actually reading and appreciating things a powerful antidote to that. I have several loyal and regular commenters who really raise my spirits whenever I see something from them. And a very low point in motivation late last year coincided with a good friend ā who I hadnāt even realised read the comic! ā dropped me a message about one page. I think itās safe to say without that positivity I might have given up.
See you in a year!
My next plan is to keep on this to the end of 2025, at which point ā once again ā Iāll consider if it is still worth the effort Iām putting into it, and Iāll also decide if itās worth going back and fixing some early stuff. At current rate of Narrative Unfolding I can see the planned story lasting 500 pages, which if I donāt speed things up a bit is going to be ten years of my life. And, Iāll be honest, itās a colossal amount of time and effort to produce something I still really hesitate to describe as āgoodā rather than āpassable, but improvingā.
In case anyone is wondering (I've seen a whole batch of delightful theorising comments lately!) "saffron" isn't a euphemism for a science fiction drug - it's literally saffron, the spice. The significance of that may emerge at some point. (Also the protagonist of a fun comic.)
Panel 3 was, ultimately, written in the shadow of the greatest "you go ahead and handle that for me" in history.
page 3.13 out either tonight or tomorrow depending on when I'm happy with it!
The February update was not early in the month. But here we are anyway! A brief one (three pages) for Feb but I promise a big chunk in next month's update.
Thanks, as ever, for reading. You canĀ read the whole comic from the beginning here
And thereās p.310 and the whole January OUBLIETTE update done! I hope the February update will be fairly early in the month but am not certain yet.
Between now and then Iāll be posting a retrospective-on-year-1 post; Iāve got another Comics I Like post cooking as well but that might be after I update myĀ own.
Thanks, as ever, for reading. You can read the whole comic from the beginning here.
Realisation #1 as I post this comic: Iāve only realised now scrolling through 3.06-3.10 that almost this entire section is three broad landscape panels to a page (breaking out on the next page.) Some of the cosmodrome session was the same ā I thinkĀ itās what I mentally default to when I want to show lots of, well, landscape (as this section has been showing lots of building and vehicles ā itās the first daylight and close-up look weāre getting of any of the city).
Realisation #2: the political statements here are oddly the most unsubtle when they're actually being written in service of something else.
NEW PROJECT ALERT! For the past year I've been working on this in the background and I'm so happy to finally share it with you all! The Travelogue is a new place to learn about comics near and far. Come along with us as we explore the vast expanse of stories the community has to offer!
The big highlight of the Travelogue is the tag system we built to help you find new comics! We've been able to work with a number of groups to help give a broad variety of stories to explore!
For more curated selection we already started making Collections. If you liked the early days of the Webcomic Library when masterposts were more common this will be an excellent tool for you!
Thanks to a number of lovely volunteers we have reviews and articles waiting for you that will help you learn more about the stories we host and more about what resources the webcomic community has to offer!
How do I support this project?
The biggest thing right now is letting folks know about it! Reblog this post, share it with your friends, use the site to find new comics! We do have ads enabled so just by looking around you're financially supporting this project. If you want to chuck a bit of money directly our way to help keep the site up and running and support the team running it, you can donate via Ko-Fi.
We have a submission section for creators who want to contribute to the collection we have so far. You can also submit reviews by reaching out to us at [email protected].
A big thank you to all the folks to have come together to help make this possible, including Krispy ( @feathernotes) and Luckbat! This really is a group effort that really shows what can be accomplished when folks work together. I'm delighted to have an new opportunity to collaborate with others and tell yall about new stories!
āWhat is this comic about?ā āCathartic expressions of the type of profoundly aggressive public transport social flexing I do a lot less of than I secretly want to.ā (See alsoĀ Allison, J., 2019)
While much of the architecture of Band 2 of the second city is more functional than decorative, the funicular and cableway authorities have stuck stubbornly to the same ornate style (characterised by faux-marble cladding and green copper roofs) as elsewhere in the city. The rolling stock, on the other hand, is rather more austere these days.
As you will notice by the little widget on the main website, I was accepted for listing on the delightful webringĀ KNIFEBEETLE,Ā which collates interesting long-form narrative comics.Ā I applied not really being sure whether my still-quite-scrappy comic meets the standards of polish required there, and was surprised and honoured to have made the grade ā a number of, for my money, the best webcomics around are on there (O Human Star, Going to Weather, Ten Earth Shattering Blows) or associates (3rd Voice, Unsounded, Fairmeadow, Lost Things Club).Ā Do have a look!
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
