So...tired...
Penny's first Comicon...
Realizing that we were going to be going to Comicon, I had a bunch of these 2.5" x 5" cards printed to pass out while we were there, it's kind of like a teeny-tiny movie poster for Hold My Life. Remains to be seen whether or not it was worthwhile, but if you got one of these, and it drew you to karmiccalamity.com, I'd like to hear from you. It'd be nice to know whether or not the cards would be a worthwhile tool for building an audience, but really the only way to gauge that is by response from people who actually got one of them. So, if you're out there...
Comicon 2005 was boatloads of fun, it seemed to me (I may be wrong, though) that there were more webcomic-related panels this year than last. The webcomics panels were, far and away, the focus of the con for me this year. I did enjoy every single panel that I attended that related to that subject, even though some were more substantive than others.
However, there was a series of Webcomics 101 panels this year that were new. Like I said before, some were more substantive than others. The one on "Getting Started" was interesting. I heard a few people in the audience mentioning things like interactivity and asking why there weren't more long-form webcomics, which I found encouraging because, well, Hold My Life is a long-form webcomic that features interactivity. I also got some ideas for a couple of new features that I can add to the main page (an FAQ and character pages specifically) that I'll be adding to karmic calamity tomorrow. I'll also be changing the "About" page (yet again), as I realize now that I really need to differentiate Hold My Life from the plethora of daily gag strips that are out there.
From what I can gather, we've got an abundance of daily gag strips, and very few long form webcomics. If you ask the daily gag strip people, they seem to think that, if you aren't updating the comic every day, then the readers will forget about you. Myself, I don't agree with that. Television shows come out once a week, print comics come out once a month, and I don't think I've ever forgotten about a television show that I liked or a comic that I liked. It's all about devising and sticking to a realistic schedule, whatever schedule you can actually stick to, and then becoming a habit for the reader.
Unfortunately, I didn't get much from the "Building an Audience" panel. The speakers seemed to veer off-topic too often, and when they were on-topic, there wasn't a lot of useful information. It was a little disheartening, because that was the panel that I'd actually had the highest hopes for. My friend Kevin works for azcentral.com, which is the website for the newspaper I work for. He can tell me (and has) exactly how many hits a certain feature on that site gets. For example: last month, they got 1,032,083 comics page views. It'd be great to get Hold My Life on, perhaps, on the newspaper's entertainment site.
Just a thought: how can you speak about building an audience if you don't know whether you really have one? Again, I'm reminded that I really need to toss myself into the webcomics community and not be the eternal outsider, always looking in.
In contrast to the Bulding an Audience panel, the Adventures into Digital Comics panel on Thursday afternoon was terrific, by the way. The writer/producer/director, Sebastien Dumesnil and moderator Leonard Cachola ran a very informative discussion about where digital comics are now, and where they could go in the future, and how all that tied in with the comics market bust of the 90s. The whole thing was inspired by the documentary they'd recently finished, of the same name. I'll be on the lookout for this, as it seems very interesting.
posted by Dale Ingram @ 10:15 PM
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