How to end your webcomic

How to end your webcomic

by KrazyKrow - 07/13/2005 - 07:42

It's not a topic that comes up too often, but webcomics, like anything, must eventually come to an end.

The requirements for an ending that will satisfy readers are obviously going to be different for a daily gag comic versus a dramatic comic, but what would you say are a the key ingredients that any ending should have?

I really liked the ending to Exploitation Now (short and to the point) as well as that the one to Wigu. On the non-comic front, I thought the last episode of Seinfeld sucked, but I thought the ending to 'Allo 'Allo was perfect.

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RE: How to end your webcomic

by RPin - 07/13/2005 - 12:15

I thought the final episode of Seinfeld was a perfect wrap up of the series.

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RE: How to end your webcomic

by William_G - 07/13/2005 - 12:36

I plan to end all of my comics in the exact same way Blake's 7 ended. Dig that fresh gear...

Let me hear a shout-out from the three people who know what I'm talking about.

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RE: How to end your webcomic

by gtron3000 - 07/13/2005 - 18:15

The best way to end a comic of any sort is to plan it from the beginning. I have a general outline of my whole story plotted out, although my ending is already years away. That way, you can weave clues (or misleading bits of info) into your story as you go and when your readers look back on it, they can piece it together like a puzzle. That's how most satisfying endings work.

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by CatherineHarrell - 07/13/2005 - 18:54

Agreed. Nothing is more jarring for readers than a webcomic that suddenly stops without warning. It's always best if the ending makes sense with the rest of the strip.

(snazzy comic, by the way!)

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by Uncle Ghastly - 07/13/2005 - 19:32

The ol' American Graffitti ending never goes out of style.

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by KrazyKrow - 07/13/2005 - 20:35

So Freddie becomes an insurance salesshemale? :)

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by Pepper - 07/14/2005 - 04:41

I know what you meant! My own comic was originally going to be "Blakes 7 with furries". Went off on a tangent some time ago and I haven't been able to steer it back, but what the heck... :wink:

Endings... I agree that a story strip needs a planned ending, just like any novel. But sometimes the story doesn't develop in quite the way you thought it would (I know this from 20+ years of refereeing role playing games). So if you can it's worth having multiple "key points" in the storyline which you steer between. Plan so any of these could lead to an end point if you decide that you've had enough.

Whether you like a happy ending, a Blakes 7 one ("they all get shot down in an ambush - or did they?*") or the much laughed at Dallas "it was all a dream" approach, your ending needs to be carefully planned and satisfying to the reader.

Though as a million Marvel comics will teach you, just because someone dies, doesn't mean you can't bring them back later.

* Did anyone read the follow up novel, where you find out several of them survived, and you find out what happens to them all later? I have no idea who wrote it, sorry William. :(

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by William_G - 07/14/2005 - 10:38

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake's_7

But it never came to pass and thus we have the most bad-ass ending of any SF show placed on tv.

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Death: The Final Frontier.

by Uncle Ghastly - 07/14/2005 - 11:42

[quote:8b9aa493a5="Pepper"]
Though as a million Marvel comics will teach you, just because someone dies, doesn't mean you can't bring them back later.

This is one of my biggest gripes with comics and science fiction in general. Everyone is a freakin' Lazareth. It completely trivializes death and robs it of its dramatic impact. When John Byrne killed off James Hudson in Alpha Flight the readers were saying "cool, I can't wait to see how you bring him back". After having seen heros killed and ressurected countless times they'd just come to expect that anyone a big name in comics wouldn't stay dead, couldn't stay dead. Byrne vowed that James Hudson was dead and would stay dead. Unfortunately when he left the comic and was no longer in control what happened? The inevitable, turns out he didn't die but was magically teleported away moments before his appearant death. :roll:

Then there was the black suit alien symbiot story in Spiderman. This was the one that made me stop reading comic books. The jist of the story for those who didn't read it, too young to remember it, Spidey and a mess of other heros and villians sent off to an alien planet fight a "secret war". While there Spidey, whose suit is starting to get a little ragged, encounters an alien symbiot who becomes his new suit (a snazzy black and white one). War ends, everyone home, Spidey swings around town in his new threads which give him some additional powers. Symbiot suit starts taking over Spidey's mind which is its nature. On it's planet none of the animals it uses as hosts are sentient so they naturally assert their sentience over the other animals, but the symbiots are emotionless too. So as the symbiot is trying to take over Spidey's mind it's also experiencing all these new feelings and concepts. There's a trade off going on. Spidey discovers that the suit is vulnerable to intese sound which has a lethal effect on it. He swings up into this giant bell tower and the sound of these massive bells ringing is so intense it drives the suit from his body. It also causes Peter to fall unconscious. The symbiot suit flees to a safe distance and then waits for Spidey to come out of the tower and he'll just grab him then.

Well Spidey is down for the count and being battered by the sonic waves from these giant freaking bells. The symbiot suit braves the intese sound, goes back into the tower and rescues Spidey. Now it has Spidey unconscious and completely vulnerable. It's powerful enough now that it can take over his body once and for all. But then the suit realizes that Spidey isn't like its normal prey and that he'd rather be dead that become enslaved to an alien symbiot. The symbiot now has all these new emotions and concepts from Spidey such as empathy and nobility and self sacrifice and now the idea of taking over Spidey's body is repugnant to it and so it chooses to destroy itself rather than enslave Spidey.

Great story, lots of drama, great exit for the alien symbiot suit, wraps things up nicely and everything can now go back to the way it was pre-alien suit. But oh noooo. Someone else takes over the books and says "hey that alien suit thing was cool... let's bring it back but make it a BAD GUY this time". And thus Venom is born and everything that was beautiful and meaningful in the end of the alien symbiot suit story is completely trashed.

Comicbook writers just can't leave things freaking DEAD!

Thats when I realized that while a bit of fun escapism Superhero comic characters never really develope much. There's always a reset button waiting for them somewhere down the line. If they get killed it's only a matter of time before someone brings them back somehow and that along with the fact that comic books had become as expensive as paperback novels ended my days of buying and reading comics.

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by William_G - 07/14/2005 - 13:38

I'd like to note that what I've read of Toxin (The above symbiote's grandson) it seemed... dare I say it? Not bad.

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by KrazyKrow - 07/14/2005 - 21:07

I had no idea the black suit was that cool, I just knew Venom as the evil Spidey from Capcom games.

Long live creator-owned properties! That is, unless the creator decides he wants his property dead.

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by spargs - 07/15/2005 - 03:06

I'm a fan of the "everybody important dies" ending. The most extreme I've come across was the last Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy book where every Earth in every single parallel dimension is destroyed along with most of the main characters.

Gives a nice Hamlety feel to a work.

Or there's the X-files/Buffy approach to the ending where you're left wondering what the hell is going on.

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by scarfman - 07/15/2005 - 16:34

I have the last two gags of Arthur, King of Time and Space already scripted. Of course the ending of the fairy tale thread will come from Malory an'em, but for the other threads I have at least mental outlines; and I have nearly twenty-four years to work out the actual scripts.

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by Anonymous - 07/15/2005 - 18:24

now gosh darn ain't it swell to be readin comics online fer free? -8-

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by Anonymous - 07/16/2005 - 00:26

In the case of superhero comics, I really don't care if anyone dies. Not because they've been brought back to life and so I expect them to come back, but because when characters have been around for 20 or 30 years in a series of rehashed storylines, there's no reason to kill any of them and it's stupid to in any final sense. It's like taking Charlie Brown and putting him in college after a while, it doesn't fit anything that's happened before at all. Or perhaps the problem is that they're creating these things with no thought toward an ending at all?

Along those lines, I don't read any of those comics anymore either and I wish that they'd all been made to end. I wish they weren't passed around to a variety of artists and writers just to keep them going. I wish that instead of new Superman comics being made all of the time, that superman was just a classic comic from the 40s and 50s, spiderman ended in the 60s and batman only had to deal with each member of his rogues gallery once or twice before the batman saga ultimately ended... with his death or retirement or whatever. As it is now, if someone kills a long running character in any of those series I'll think it's the stupidest thing they could do.

And yeah, the end of Seinfeld was probably one of the worst endings I've ever seen. I'm glad Seinfeld was a sitcom, because the last episode didn't really matter. But yeah... just pulling all of those characters out... just to pull them out. Gave it the air of a series that ran a little too long =\

As for how to end? I differ from a lot of people when I say that I don't really care much about endings. I rarely get into stories because of the plot, so the climax while dramatic and such usually isn't very interesting to me. For a dramatic story, I think a great ending comes with a great denoument. Comedies are similar, and if it's one story just try to put the biggest laughs in teh end. If it's a comic strip that doesn't emphasize any kind of storyline, capture the spirit of the strip in the end instead of trying to go out with a bang. If it doesn't have a plot convention that people would regard as an "ending" then you just have to find a good point to stop it. You can give greater importance to some events(essentially defining the plot late in the game) or take the approach of a comic strip. etc etc...

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by rezo - 07/16/2005 - 00:30

the above post was by a rezo!

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by Uncle Ghastly - 07/16/2005 - 02:27

The series finale of Enterprise was absolutely pathetic.

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by Katie Sekelsky - 07/16/2005 - 16:27

[quote:994bf78a06="spargs"]I'm a fan of the "everybody important dies" ending. The most extreme I've come across was the last Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy book where every Earth in every single parallel dimension is destroyed along with most of the main characters.

Many, I'm glad this thread didn't come about 2 months ago, or I'd be extremely mad at the spoiler right now :P

Anyhow, I had fun with my old comic's ending. Probably put more effort into it than I did the rest of the whole series, as well. It was mainly an inside-joke type thing for me and my friends (a comic no-no, but my real-life friends were the majority of the readers, so it didn't matter too much at the time), so the last official strip was graduation. But then I did "Where are they Now?" type thing to show what happened to each of the characters later in their life. Might not be ideal for most types of comics, but for something to be enjoyed by my friends, it worked out quite well. (I'd link it, but I've taken down the strip now)

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by spargs - 07/17/2005 - 04:27

[quote:c8bc61b7c5="reva"]
Many, I'm glad this thread didn't come about 2 months ago, or I'd be extremely mad at the spoiler right now :P

Whoops - oh yeah, spoiler warning. But wasn't Mostly Harmless published in 1992? You've done well to avoid spoilers so far! :)

Fortunately the ending is convoluted and ambiguous enough to never be completely spoiled in less than several paragraphs. Oops, there's another spoiler, dammit! Sorry, sorry ...

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by StatusNil - 07/17/2005 - 15:44

Well, as far as the dead are concerned.. my comic stars barely anything BUT dead people, so it's kind of the point ;)
You'd think I'd be facing a nice problem there - after all, if they're all (nearly all) are already dead, how the hell am I going to end the story ?

I'm not going to give anything away (even though I already know most of the ending, but like gtron3000's it's still quite a while away) but the key word is 'closure'. You don't want the 'possibility of a sequel' option open. You don't want things to be revived and reset. That's just poor writing and ends your comic in a Garfield- or Marvel-superhero way of mediocre writing ad infinitum. You want the audience to be sad about the ending but also to have gone through a major development that will make them accept that this is how it ends. It doesn't need to be drastic - if your whole comic was about a certain situation, like say, a vacation or a love affair or whatever, the story can end with the end of that situation. If it's done well.
Doing it right is tough, though. Especially if, in the course of writing and/or drawing the comic, you too fell in love with the comic and the characters. But as said, all things must (or should) end eventually. So give your beloved story the ending it deserves.

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RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by EricMillikin - 07/18/2005 - 02:56

I think a really good way for an artist to end an autobiographical comic would be to die.

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Re: RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by Uncle Ghastly - 07/18/2005 - 11:53

[quote:704166fec2="EricMillikin"]I think a really good way for an artist to end an autobiographical comic would be to die.

Unless you're Jesus... then it's just a setup for the sequel.

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Re: RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by EricMillikin - 07/18/2005 - 21:31

[quote:612bad9e47="Ghastly"]Unless you're Jesus...

Or Mithras. Or Osiris. Or Persephone. Or Innana. Or Adonis. Or Attis. Or Tammuz.

Or Dracula.

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RE: Re: RE: Death: The Final Frontier.

by William_G - 07/18/2005 - 21:37

Or Jason Vorhees, even...

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