Very cool how life is just constantly suffering and fighting my brain who is a 5 year old having a tantrum
Iām stuck in so many thought loops day in day out and I feel like my default pattern/mantra is now just āi donāt want to be here I donāt want to do thisā. And then comparing myself to people who seem to have these systems and no issues of doing things where as Iām just always scrambling scrambling like a panicked animal, distressed and bored in my enclosure clawing my way out. i feel so tired so lonely so burnt out I feel like i want to have nothing to do with anyone or this world. I have completely lost my spark, any creative joy I have is always overpowered with fighting my brain. And itās all because I am weak and have no willpower to create systems for myself that work so nothing will ever really change. Nothing will ever really change for me even if I keep on trying. Iām always just being controlled by impulses and what gets me the next tiny dose of dopamine and serotonin since my brain is so completely unable to provide them naturally
(yeah im being evaluated for ADHD diagnosis but itās very slow and i donāt know if iām gonna make it alive to the other side)
In your view/experience. is the rate of "incompleteness" among webcomics more or less the nature of online personal projects as a whole? Or is there something specific to webcomics like laboriousness, audience expectations, relative medium infancy or whatnot?
well for one thing webcomics has changed significantly in the last ten years. it used to have a much lower barrier for entry, just get a smackjeeves account or set up a website with a wordpress plugin. starting a webcomic when i started my webcomic vs starting a webcomic now are totally different experiences.
so i can only speak to people who started their webcomics roughly ten years ago. and roughly ten years ago a lot of us were a whole lot younger with a lot more time and energy to spend on a comic for free. this part is probably still somewhat true for new artists.
but then you get older. your ideas change. your skill develops and the old stuff isn't as good. or you don't have as much time, you got a day job. unless you're one of like five people on earth your webcomic is not paying your rent. you need to make money. your shoulder hurts. you're 30 now. you're struggling to make updates on time between whatever else makes you happy and what else you need to do to live. you wrote this story when you were 21, you don't relate to it anymore, you have different ideas, you've grown up, your audience has noticeably dropped off from the peak, social media managing is hard, you have to go to work, you're so tired, all the time.
Taylor touched on it, but yeah webcomics are EXTREMELY not the scene they were when a lot of people our age got into it (people our age now being in the position of having enough work behind them to 'abandon' it meaningfully).
Almost everyone I know who used to run a webcomic back then still cares a lot about those stories. Some people have moved into different mediums, some have rebooted their work and repackaged it for places like patreon or aggregators, a lot of them still produce free work for their audiences in one form or another even if it's not a continuation of their original 'one big story'. And some of them ARE still plugging away at the same projects, the same way they always did. But the skills that got people into webcomics 10-15 years ago are not the skills you need to get any kind of attention in today's market.
I complain a lot about 'hustle culture' taking over artistic spaces online, and that grievance really roots from what happened to webcomics more than anything else. There is no reason that you should need to be a marketing guru to publish an free indie comic online. There is no reason that you should be expected to update daily, or three times a week, or even once a week if you don't want to. There was genuinely a time when some of the best examples of the genre (and best known among Webcomic Likers) were uncategorisable experiments published one page at a time every other phase of the moon on wordpress blogs or static html sites.
If you were excited by webcomics as a medium in 2010, you were probably excited by qualities of the scene that simply don't exist any more - or at least certainly don't exist in the same form, or to nearly the same extent. Project Wonderful and webrings meant tiny comics still had shared readerships, and an avenue for connecting with new audiences through peers with similar interests. Micro-forums and comment sections meant each comic had its own little mini community, often full of other artists who were excited to talk process. Maybe the defining artistic relationship of my whole career, which has opened up more job opportunities than my actual degree, was forged in a webcomic forum with about 8 regular users.
The biggest loss I felt, personally, was the disappearance of spaces for talking about art with amateurs who really cared about experimentation and expression. A lot of it was super goofy, but bouncing off other teenagers with messy over-ambitious ideas about infinite canvas and found-object comics and branching storylines really ignited my passion for trying things. There were always parallel conversations about how to find an audience, whether merch was worth it, which conventions made money, but they were just as questing and experimental. Today, creative spaces are (somewhat necessarily, by nature of the way the internet has changed around us) dominated by marketing talk. The question hanging over every creative question for webcomic artists today seems to be 'but will it drive engagement'. And that's fucking miserable.
Anyone who got into webcomics before the shift to algorithmic feeds, omnipresent adtech and the premeditated murder death of Project Wonderful has probably looked around at some point and thought 'where the fuck am I?' Some artists have adapted comfortably, but a huge proportion of those who were most invested ten years ago were just never going to be interested in the skills that drive the current webcomic market. Because it is a market now, not an art scene. People have always needed to make money, and webcomics have never been especially profitable, but there was a time when they were an outlet - something you did after your shift at the bar, because it came with broad possibilities and a vibrant social scene. Now they are a second job.
Here's my point: when you notice the great proportion of long-running comics that just faded away or stopped altogether at some point, it is worth recognising that this wasn't just burnout. It was an extinction event.
JOIN. COMIC. FURY.
https://comicfury.com/index.php
There's still a thriving social scene full of crazy experimentation if you know where to look. It's true that a lot of the 'pop culture' view of webcomics has shifted to trying to 'make it big' on webtoon, but there are alternatives. If anyone's interested in making comics and feels overwhelmed, don't let social media expectations kill your love of the craft. I've been making comics and posting them online for 10 yrs with very little social media presence, and have a small group of readers who I love and value + have formed some incredible frienships through shared interest. It can be done! You dont have to turn something into a career for it to be worth doing
This got long, sorry, but Iāve been having this conversation a lot lately and I have a lot to say.
I was incredibly lucky to join that 2010s wave of comicsā¦ and it was just dumb luck. Right place, right time. Webcomics back then was a small but supportive community of scrappy DIY-ers. Putting out a comic every week (let alone 3x a week, or daily) was NO small feat on its own and success was never guaranteed. It was hard!! JUST making a comic is hard. We had to rely on each other to navigate setting up our own websites, learning how to make and sell merch, learning how to table at conventions. We had to take our own preorders and update a stupid little thermometer jpg on our website. We linked to each other and helped each other, and (some drama aside) we had each otherās backs.
And it worked! For a time. Nobody was living large then, but some of us could make enough that way to get by. Our communities of readers were (and still are) amazing. Even for a smaller comic like mine, I could get enough reader support to print gorgeous high-quality books and get them in peopleās hands. Thatās something Iām still incredibly proud of.
When social media came, reader habits changed dramatically. Very few readers would leave their feed. Most readers stopped clicking through to the url (so ad sales imploded), and sometimes the ones that did would just screenshot the punchline and repost it to their own social page without credit. As time went on, fewer and fewer people would share a comic, let alone followā¦now most just (maybe) click like and scroll along.
As the barrier to getting your comic on the web got lower, the quality of art got higher - and readers started demanding a much higher standard for an indie webcomic. In addition to this, some artists who gained traction at this time were subject to high levels of writer scrutiny, and that was tough to navigate.
In recent years the costs of shipping merch has gone through the roof (especially outside the US) and even if we could convince someone to buy, they started expecting rock-bottom next-day shipping like youād get with Amazon. Every single micro service you need to keep a modern webcomic machine running demands its piece of flesh (hosting/domains, shop/payments, newsletters, post scheduling, premium accounts or plugins or whatever blablabla), and thereās less and less flesh to go around these days. You basically need to give it full time hours for the chance of it maybe becoming a part time money. A few new webcomics have found their feet and thrived in the modern era, but no, itās not the same scene as it was back then. And every service that pops up to help you out has its own rulesā¦ rules that are subject to change without notice.
Google Reader was killed in 2013. Then non-chronological algorithms stopped showing us each otherās posts, even if we were following, circa 2015-2016. Then the various social sites stopped being viable at all. These days the mantra is āpivot (to video) or perishā. Or sometimesā¦ just perish.
Iām not blaming the readers for these changes. These behaviours were designed. Webcomics was just one victim, but itās also happened to a lot of other scenes (music, journalism, blogging...). Iām still learning how to fit into this new paradigm.
***
Yes, in light of these conditions many webcomickers are pushed to quit. But not all. Many of my contemporaries are putting out the best comics of their careers today.
Thereās tons of incredible new work that even Iām struggling to keep up with because there are so many amazing comics now.
Some OG webcomickers pivoted into the publishing market which comes with its own challenges: a gruelling schedule, limitations on the stories you can tell, paltry advances and then you still have to do all your own marketing. But theyāre still putting out incredible comics, or writing them, or helping them get made. Or hell, printing them. Iām so proud to be part of a community where creatives like these got their start.
Some went into Animation where you live under NDA and big studios can cancel your project on a whim, but theyāre still making amazing art.
A couple went to Indie Games, which has to be at least 10x as difficult as webcomics, and theyāre making their mark. Others went to a āmerch-firstā kind of creative practice, and others still got art-related corporate jobs.
And to those of us who have had to tap out or step back, or if you havenāt been able to make it click for whatever combination of reasonsā¦ youāre still a part of the community and Iām honoured to have shared a time on the internet with you. There is NO shame in quitting something that no longer resonates with your creative goals, or needing to take different measures to meet your human needs or build the kind of life you want. Stopping under those conditions is not failure. Every single page you put down is a victory.
***
Webcomics is far from a dead scene, itās just a bit more underground again. You like webcomics? Welcome to the Resistance to the attention-economy. Itās a bit punk to do webcomics again.
We have lots of reasons to be optimistic about the scene:
All the technology we used to make that happen in the 2010s still exists today. RSS still exists. You can still type in a url, or keep a comic links folder on your browser, or use comic rocket to hold your place.
If you wanna make a comic, ComicFury is free. Neocities is free and rarebit is free. Or just put it on social for now! Who cares, just draw comics. Worry about the rest later.
If you really want to you can still get a domain and fairly cheap hosting (though itās a bit dicier now, and idk who is doing the best WP comics plugin now) but then FileZilla is free, VsCode is free. All in it's probably ~$300 to self-host, unless you got a friend who can hook you up.
Software for making comics has never been more powerful or accessible than it is today. Tablets and scanners are cheaper than ever. Clipās affordable, Krita is free.
Information on how to set this all up is easier to access than it ever has been
Itās never been easier to access vendors for low-minimum-quantity but high-quality custom products.
Shop services arenāt perfect, but the barrier to entry of selling something to someone online has never been lower, except for maybe when people were willing to use a Paypal html Buy Now button
And I canāt emphasize this enough ā there are so so many diverse and unique creatives making their most incredible work RIGHT NOW.
If you want to make comicsā¦ if you have a song still in youā¦ donāt give up! Do what you must to stay safe and well. Do what you can to make your best work and share it. You don't "have" to do anything that doesn't feel right to you.
Go make a zine and give it to your friends. Go to a convention and meet a local artist. Go join a local collective, or start one. Print a sticker at home and sell it for a few bucks. Join the cooperative, or a webring or two, or hell just tell another artist you think their work is neat.
Dear reader, if you want to see more webcomics that get to their conclusion? The only thing missing is YOUR. CHOICE. Choose to read webcomics. Most of us put them up for free, we're just delighted for you to read them. Go click around a few links and find something weird and cool. Choose to use RSS, and share the comics you like with your friends, and teach them RSS. Choose to kick us a few bucks when you can, buy our books and give them to your local libraries if you can. Choose to let comics be challenging and weird, choose to let artists be messy humans who are growing and learning just like you are.
The attention-economy game is boring, but this one is still here for those who want to play :)
I'm on my second semester teaching a class actually called "web comics," lol, and it has been helpful to articulate my experience of this shift to students (all too young to have been around for much of the transition being discussed).
It IS bleak, it IS a predictable corporate colonization & hollowing-out process. The internet IS culturally broken in ways that it wasn't several years ago, when I and others participating in this conversation here were starting making webcomics.
BUT: people are still people, and there are still many of them who will be interested in the weird, idiosyncratic work you want to make. There is functionally an infinite number of them. This is still in a way a MIRACULOUS time to be making independent comics: you don't have to pay thousands of dollars to print and distribute your serialized book, you can put it online, EVERYWHERE, for free. This is INCREDIBLE.
As individual artists we can't change the huge, systemic things happening! We can't turn the tide of the algorithmic-presentation logic of the entire internet! We can't make huge swaths of the population go back to RSS, or get back in the habit of visiting individual websites, or whatever. BUT we can do something-- we can make work without compromising in the ways the platforms want us to compromise. We can engage with our audience and other artists in a humane and honest way... We can say things and make things that institutional pop culture can't.
basically we are doing the actual work of pop culture here, as independent & self-motivated artists. what we are making is more important than these platforms and will outlast them.
I have been wanting to make a low-artifice interview podcast around a lot of these ideas; maybe i do that sometime soon; it is nice to see this stuff talked about by folks I know and whose work I really like
is anyone else just like. constantly filled with rage about their position under late capitalism and how we are expected to just keep playing this game that we know will literally kill us, is already killing people all over the world, and yet everyone around us is somehow fine with going about business as usual, with pretending we are free by being able to choose between different ways of being exploited. there is nothing more dehumanising than being forced to partake in a system that is actively detrimental to our survival as human beings, that is so physically, psychologically and spiritually destructive, and i donāt know how to deal with this anger anymore
ai generated images make me increasingly sad and tired the more i see them in more and more casual contexts. i dont know how to explain, but it just fills the world with a bunch of nothing. no matter how visually stunning the pictures might be, there's nothing behind it for me. no dedication, no emotions, no feelings, no hard work or creativity, nothing i can truly think about, admire or enjoy. i dont think thats how art is supposed to be
Once someone tagged art that I made with "woah" and I think about it at least once a week. Someone else said "oh neat" once. Someone else WROTE A WHOLE DAMN POEM IN THE COMMENTS. Anyways even just one word can change how someone sees their art. You don't even have to think about it too hard. You could put a keyboard smash and I'd probably cry from joy.
I'm also trying hard to interact more, I understand that it's hard to break away from opening your phone and being in Content Consumption Mode.
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