Popularity

I’m often asked, “Shane, how can I make a popular web comic? And also, how many blowjobs would you like today?” The answer to the latter is obvious (all of them), but the former is a bit trickier. The one thing I want to get out of the way right now is that just making a good comic isn’t going to make you popular. Life’s just not that fair sometimes. This isn’t a concept exclusive to web comics: how many of you have a band or musician you really like that pretty much no one’s heard of? It could be your cousin’s garage band: the important part is that they’re damn good at what they do, but they’re not the ones being played on the radio every day. Anyway, we’ll talk about this more as we get through the article. For now, let’s look at some weapons for capturing your very own popularity-dragon (no, I won’t try to expand that into a decent analogy).

Fan Service

I’ll probably just be using the first pic from google image search for all my points

This actually isn’t as effective as you might think at first. Sure, who doesn’t like looking at a nice pair of cans? Well… most homosexual men and heterosexual women, I guess, but you can’t please everyone. But even for the sake of this discussion let’s say every person ever likes to see large-chested women doing essentially anything (as long as they’ve got a low-cut shirt on while they’re doing it). The problem is that this is the internet, or as I like to call it, “The Infinite Free Porn Machine”. Seriously, it’s hard not to see naked women on the internet. They sell programs that pretty much don’t do anything but prevent naked women from appearing on your screen. That’s how prevalent it is. Relying on Fan Service as your only means to popularity is kind of like trying to grow the best tree in the rain forest: it’s technically possible, sure. But you have to be able to do more than just fan service if you hope to make a career out of it.

Adam Hughes shows that he can also draw rocks

The only real advantage of fan service these days is as an attention grabber. You can use it as a busty arrow saying, “look at me!” but unless you have some substance to back up those mammaries you’re never going to work your way out of extremely niche appeal. And speaking of Niche Appeal!

Niche Appeal

That dude’s way too into that niche

This one almost seems like a contradiction. If we’re trying to make a popular webcomic, shouldn’t we try to appeal to as wide an audience possible? Sure, of course. But it helps to have a base in some specific subculture to ease your way in. Popular web comic Questionable Content is ostensibly an “Indie Music” comic, but really only used that as a general premise to justify the convergence of characters. These days the author actually seems to avoid talking about indie music, since frankly those tend to be his worst strips. The important part, though, is that the early indie focus got a lot of word-of-mouth in those circles.

The hard part is to not take this to extremes, and especially be careful about combining this with fan service. What I’m laboring to avoid talking about is… fetish stuff. Now, if it’s your intent to just make a comic about your turn-ons, do us all a favor and just make porn. It’s more honest. There’s just something unsettling about having what is a largely safe for work comic that has waaaaay too much focus on feet, or the main character eating until she balloons grotesquely. I saw what came of one of those back on Drunk Duck not too long ago, and what the author ended up with was a lot of harassment and a fan base that was just as dedicated as they were very, very creepy. The comic has been deleted from the site, and last I heard the author basically gave up art all together after having to deal with those two groups.

In situations like this the trick is to make your niche appeal a part of the natural characterization of your cast. You can make a comic where the main character is a fashion designer without all the problems in the world somehow relating to fashion. I like to call this Yugio syndrome: where you bank on one idea so heavily that every part of the world not related to your chosen subject matter might as well not exist. People get tired of this eventually. The Yugio example isn’t very good, because that’s a hugely successful series recognized by millions, but shut up.

Controversy

Okay, here’s a tricky one. Personally, I’m not big on controversy as a way to get hits. Going back to that fetish comic on DrunkDuck I mentioned earlier, what I didn’t bring up was that it was the most visited comic on the site for months. It didn’t even update that often: a good half the hits were just from people arguing in the comments section about the comic, and a good chunk of the rest were people like me who were just trying to see what all the fuss is about. The thing is, though, controversy like that is hard to manufacture, and even harder to get it to work in your favor. There are a lot of comics out there that just try to be racist, misogynist, or what have you simply because they think it will get people talking about how dark and edgy they are. The funny part is, though, after a certain level people just… don’t really care. Like, if someone creates a superheroine who fights crime by shooting a concentrated stream menstruation at bank robbers in black face (and yes, I’ll bet there’s probably a picture of that on the internet somewhere and, no, I’m not going to look for it) then it’s just so beyond your meter for “offensive” that it just defaults to zero. The whole thing just comes off as a desperate plea for attention: a child shouting profanities because even punishment involves people at least noticing them. This will get people to glance at you: like a train wreck: how could you help but look? Heart racing if only for a moment at the prospect of seeing some violent taboo smeared across the pavement like a fruit stand in a car chase. But once you get there, all you find is a train politely tipped on its side, with a man in a monkey suit standing on top screaming, “Pay attention to me!” Sure, you’re looking at him, but you’ll never care about him.

…no comment.

There are a lot of very popular people who are also very controversial, but they’re not popular simply because they’re controversial. Any jackass can stand on a stage and talk about getting shit on their hands, but it takes a brilliant and hilarious man like George Carlin to get people to actually care. To laugh not at the fact that he said something controversial, but because he said something entertaining and insightful that also happened to be crude and inappropriate. The attention you get for challenging people with your writing is invaluable, but it’s useless if you don’t have anything else to back it up.

Regular Updates

“Regular!” Get it?

Okay, okay, enough musing. Here we are at a more technical point to remember: people like to know when your comic updates. It’s a lot easier for them to keep track of this information if you always update at the same rate. Even if you’ve only got a weekly comic, people are more willing to stick it through with you as long as you update on the same day every week. It gives the whole venture a sense of solidarity and reliability: how many TV shows have you just stopped watching because the network keeps changing what time it comes on? This can get to be really hard sometimes, though, especially if you’re on something like a daily update schedule. I don’t know how many of you have tried, but it’s really hard to be laugh out loud funny on a daily basis. It’s no wonder most newspaper comics are so bad: even ignoring the fact that they have to please their editor, their sponsors, etc., they’ve also been churning these things out for decades. What’s the longest you’ve ever worked on a single project? We’re lucky Charles Schulz didn’t have Charlie Brown hang himself before he shuffled off the mortal coil (and honestly, would anyone be surprised if he had?). But as long as we’re talking about newspaper comics, let’s get to something about them that brings people back day after day.

Readability

No cute picture to go with this one, sorry. This is a tricky concept to define, but I’ll do my best. It’s not just page layout or word balloon placement: it has to do with making it easy for new readers to enter your world. If someone has to read the character profile page to understand why a character is saying or doing a specific action, then that’s poor readability. Even generally harmless and normal stuff like a complex continuity can detract from readability. Keep in mind I’m trying to focus on what it takes to make a popular comic, not necessarily a good one. Big archives are intimidating to new readers, and if there’s a lot of back story needed to appreciate the most recent page then a lot of people just won’t bother. This doesn’t mean that a complex comic can’t be popular, but it’s still true that the more a new page can be appreciated without the need for a lengthy character history the more you’re likely to entice new readers to stick around. A good example of what I’m talking about is Sinfest, which actually does have a running continuity, but just about every page “works” even if you don’t have the full context. It’s written very much like a newspaper comic, with the four-panel format and the daily updates (color Sundays!).

Another feature that enhances readability is the manageable cast size. This is a big one to me: don’t create a new character when an existing character will do. I think this largely comes from authors who get really attached to their characters: even the ones who don’t “exist” yet. They’re like your children, in a way, and it’s hard to keep them from existing. It’s a difficult balance to maintain: if you have too few characters, it makes your world look empty and lifeless. Too many and it becomes a chore to keep track of them all: there are a few comics I read where I have no idea who the majority of the cast is, and in all honesty I get kind of annoyed when I see them.

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Okay, this is getting a bit long. I hope this has been as insightful as it is long-winded. I’ll probably come back to my thoughts on popularity in the future. That or just more mean-spirited reviews of bad comics. Whichever gets me more attention, really.