The Web Comic Experiment
When I first
started doing a weekly web comic I wanted to experiment with the format,
so I decided to start with one idea or gag and build off that and making
the rest up as I went along. Rather than choosing to write the entire
piece ahead of time I decided to create an entirely improvised comic.
Each week I would put up a single page and with that page I would try
to construct a stand-alone gag. I did this so that people would be inclined
to visit my site more often, rather than having a person waiting for
several weeks to get larger chunk of a story from me and while in the
meantime possibly forgetting about my site. In addition to having the
pages act as standalone gags I also wanted them to seamlessly advance
the narrative, because my hopes were to produce a mini-comic after its
completion. My first attempt at working this way was a big failure,
because I tried to improvise too many things at once and causing me
to quickly lose focus. The problems that occurred because of my lack
of planning there where inconsistent character design, personality and,
awkward pacing (among other problems).
With my second attempt I was able to refine
it more and correct the problems I ran into. Because I had developed
and enjoyed two of the characters through my previous attempt I decided
to continue using them. To fix my pacing by using a six-panel grid,
this standardized page format allowed me to fall into a groove much
more easily. I also took out the gag per page rule because that made
the story a tedious read, the story was constantly disturbed by gags
throwing the readers attention and my focus. Instead I tried to make
the pages standalone as much as possible.
After this piece I began to realize that pacing and character development tend to be the most important things in my comics. I realized that my strong suit is not necessarily a gag strip because my stories are narrative driven. After the completion of this piece I realized that there were really no firm rules of pacing that I work by because most of my choices are fairly intuitive. But since then I have worked quite a bit on the pacing of my stories trying to capture a realistic sense of time.