The Gneech's blog
Quickie
Submitted by The Gneech on March 5, 2007 - 10:28
Real life, the eternal bane of the web cartoonist, has got hold of me as I move into my new house, so I'm going to have to go with a quick recommendation rather than the usual ramble.
The Web Is Not Enough
Submitted by The Gneech on February 26, 2007 - 14:44
Once upon a time, in the dim, dark past of 1999, "having a webcomic" was its own gimmick. There were not that many of us, and most of us who were there were fairly hardcore about it.
The End, the No End, and the End Someday
Submitted by The Gneech on February 22, 2007 - 11:49
In his regular column "Permanent Damage" on Comic Book Resources, Steven Grant has a detailed and interesting analysis of the "storytelling arc," particularly in regards to how it impacts TV shows like "Lost" where the mystery is the story, and how there has to be a payoff or viewers (and r
If You Want Something Done Right...
Submitted by The Gneech on February 19, 2007 - 17:21
Last year sometime I came upon "Comic Party", a manga and animé series based on a Japanese video game about, of all the strange things, creating and selling amateur comics (i.e., doujinshi). "Comic Party" is very uneven, ranging from really great to head-stabbingly dull, but until somebody makes The Great American Self-Referential Webcomic, it's as close as I've seen to depicting what being a webcomic artist is actually like.
(TokyoPop is publishing a domestically-grown take on the same idea, titled "DramaCon", actually, but it's still about doujinshi -- just Yankee doujinshi.)
One of the interesting cultural differences is the concept of the "comic circle." In the manga world, if "Comic Party" and "DramaCon" are any indicator, the prevalent model is for teams of people to work on a single title as a club. But in webcomics, teams seem to be very much the exception rather than the norm. Most of the webcomic artists I know (myself included for many years) do most or all of the work themselves, from the writing to the art to the HTML of their websites.
Some do it because they're control freaks and want it all done exactly their way; others do it because they can't find anybody else willing to help them out. There seems to be a certain indicator of status when you've reached the point where you get a "t-shirt guy" or webmaster who'll take over some of that work for you.
That Buzzing Noise
Submitted by The Gneech on February 16, 2007 - 11:08
As I'm sure people who know me will attest, I am always fretting about wanting to create "buzz". I don't know if it's my inner attention whore or what, but I'm always fighting off the vague suspicion that all the work I pour into my comics generates little more than a shrug from the world at large.
