I'm writing this with the intention of starting discussion, so reply at will. Sorry for those who may see this 2-3 times.

I think one of the lead contributing factors to my current disappointment with webcomics is time. Time affects the comic in many ways, and I can't think of one that's positive.

- Drawing Time - A webcomic is, with few exceptions, a hobby, rather than a job. This makes time an immediate enemy. You may get fleeting recognition, but you're probably not going to get paid. Does it make sense to invest time into something that's going to be labor intensive, and perhaps not as enjoyable as say.... sitting around an nomming a cake?

There's also a direct trade off in quality and quantity. You are one (or perhaps 2-3) person(people). You can create something amazing in five hours, or five things mediocre in the same amount of time. What you ultimately go with is your decision, but it will affect your ability to crank it out, and your overall happiness with what you've produced.

- Fake Suspense - Recently I've taken to reading quite a few webcomics at once. Lackadaisy, Phoenix Requim, Fey Winds, etc. This seems like a monumental task. It's not.

If a webcomic like these (the three in particular that came to mind are very labor intensive to their artists) updates once a week for a year (and let's assume, for the moment, that all those updates are on time), for someone who is with the publishing from the beginning, it would seem that the comic has been around forever and you can't wait to see what happens next.

You want to know what the next page is and you wait a week for it. What's on the last page can be as boring as dirt, but since you have to wait to know what happens next, you get a fake sense of something amazing around the corner. What's especially incredible is the artist seems to pick up this fake sense of suspense as well, because they will continue to create pages that are boring as dirt!

Currently 'Girl Genius Online' is suffering from this (by the way, I'm actually quite fond of this comic, because of it's intricate mythology, and do suggest it to everyone in the mood for a good 'Girl discovering herself' story with robots and blimps). Agatha has spent the last month of updates standing in a room (which hasn't been drawn in much detail, I think it's just the Green Gradient Room) complaining about how tough life is for her. Now, I won't argue that it isn't tough for her, but I really stopped caring about two pages ago. And I'll be damned if I don't want to know how hard life is next week, too!

I sort of wonder if Garfield has been suffering from fake suspense for years. One day, I swear to god, something new will happen in that comic (take a look at Garfield Minus Garfield, which some have mentioned is ten times funnier with the cat removed, though I felt a lot of it was depressing in a way the original can't touch).

Fake Time - Fake Time works like Fake Suspense, and I think that both are entwined with each other.

Someone coming at these comics for the first time goes back and reads them from the beginning. What I discovered in a lot of cases is the webcomic suffers on a second (or long introductory) reading from the fake suspense lent to it by weekly updates. What seems to a regular reader to be a gripping story that has been going on for a year is actually 49 pages of a plot that didn't move forward, a week the artist was sick, and two cover pages that weren't nearly as interesting to look at as a real page and didn't take half the time, but counted as a weekly update anyway.

What you uncover is a phenomenon where in real life, a year has passed, making it seem a year has passed in your story. What's actually happened is it took you a year to perhaps detail a day's worth of character time. And many, many current webcomics suffer from this. Find one at random sometime, pick it up, read it from start to finish, and marvel at how little has actually happened in X amount of pages - which chronologically have been updated to for Y amount of time!

I'm actually shocked that Tracey Butler, in the sparse updates of Lackadaisy there have been (due to that horrible thing known as 'time' no doubt!), has been able to advance her plot and character development better than many webcomics manage to do in years of time. How is it possible we see a new page every few months, but I know more about her tangential characters (full of win, btw) than I know about the main characters of Phoenix Requiem - which is updated with 2-3 pages weekly?

I think part of the issue is going in without a script (by the way, my understanding in Phoenix Requiem is mostly scripted, so I'm not suggesting this is an issue with it. In fact, a great deal of this comic's pacing is quite good, and the art is lovely), in tandem with a weekly comic updating in perpetuity, a lot of urgency is lost. A comic is a favorable medium in some cases because you can less abstract than a written word. You can show exactly what you want seen and, barring drawing problems, have no question that they saw it. It's meant to be a visual, stimulating medium, not talking heads. You watch Fox News for talking heads.

What I don't understand is why some artists are turning this potentially gripping medium into weeks on end of characters standing around and explaining things (this annoyed me about Star Trek as well - the mind meld scene where Spock explains the entire plot would have been way more interesting if the story began that way, instead of what was essentially cop-out flashbacks - though I do realize this would have made the movie longer. Romulus exploding > Kirk's birth. Sorry. And to be fair, it was my only issue with the movie :3). This seems to be an ongoing issue with Girl Genius Online, though it's forgivable because it's supplemented with actual action.

I think a story that really needs this advice right now is Dreamland Chronicles (incidentally, after seeing the concept art for this comic, I sorely wish it had been drawn rather than given plastic 3D characters and suffering the same lack of background detail that every Ice Age movie does - because backgrounds are hard to model and everyone should be looking at your character anyway!!!!! But the concept art is so cool!). Currently, the protagonist of DC is being lectured on how to gain the ability to fly by pure will. I have lost *count* on how many pages this has gone on, and I swear to god it's the same copy/pasted 3D image again and again, each with about a sentence of explanation. DC is a bit ahead of the pack by updating somewhat daily, so it'll get out of this phase fairly quickly, but I can't imagine how bored I would be if the same format were used spaced out over several weeks. HE'D HAVE BEEN STANDING THERE IN THE SAME POSE FOR TWO MONTHS ALREADY. I think DC is suffering from a severe lack of urgency, and is wasting time reexplaining information we were already given, with one sentence per panel and the same plastic expressions. Author commentary also indicates he has not scripted the events out at all. I'm hardly shocked.

Yes, some exposition is good - we can't be completly lost - but I don't read a comic to be spoon-fed your lore. If I'm spending more time reading your text than admiring your art, I feel you've missed the entire fucking point of using a visual medium (I hold sunday funnies to this same standard. If you're funny joke takes an editorial column to understand, maybe you should try that instead).


Fake Suspense and Fake Time are both issues that don't occur in the 'biz' when you create a single publication, with 50-100 pages that come out at once. Quality/Quantity still holds true. But when you work in a system with strict budget constraints, you're not allowed to waste audience time. You don't have the space to do it. You have a script with the entire plot written out, and I believe (it's been years since I've looked) it's even worked down to a page how it needs to go.

Maybe what I'm asking for is catering to the ADHD mentality we hold to today of I NEED CONSTANT STIMULUS.