Starting a Webcomic

The Web-comic Is Born

Have you ever found yourself fantasizing about something real to be anything that unreal and very illogical? Ever draw it around on your notes, test paper, or work sheet? Ever show it around to your friends an colleagues? If you do, then you have to think about to start a web-comic.

According to Wikipedia, web-comics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While most are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or, often self-published, books.

Starting a Story

Creativity is the one key to rule the web-comic business. All you need to draw is a fresh, fun and enjoyable ideas to walk around with your storyline. I’m not saying that serious story is not a creative idea, but you need to be seriously imagining your story to start of. And many people are looking for fun when they type web-comic in search engine. But, if you have an enjoyable serious story, all you need to do is start drawing it.

Drawing Media

Sketch your idea whenever you find something new and fresh. Use anything you found around you that drawable and you enjoy with. J K Rowling started her famous Harry Potter books on the tissue sheets that she found out on the restaurant. Once you have the sketch, scan it to PC, do sketch finishing and color it based on your expertise.

Some of web-comic on the Internet is published in black and white and some is colorized. Take a look at Sam Logan’s Sam and Fuzzy for a black and white published, or Jeph Jacques’s Questionable Content for colored one. No matter how you draw it people will love it when they found that your art is enjoyable. Now that you start to be serious in this business, we will talk about hosting your materials.

Hosting My Web-comic

Starting a web-comic is practically cheap. You can use any blog engine or image gallery that spread free on the Internet to host your comic. Some of famous web-comic illustrator like Ryan Estrada, Jeph Jacques, and Sam Logan use some sort of blog engines to host their arts. Only when you found that you have some serious fans, you need to think about a serious hosting.

Blog engines like Wordpress already had bunch of plug-ins to start of. Google for image gallery plug-ins and get some free and easy to set up plug-ins. Put it on your blog, do a small setting and now you already had an engine to showcase your comic. Next thing to do is promote your comic on the Internet so everyone knew that there is a comic that fun and enjoyable to relieve their stress.

Promoting Your Art

Pay for advertising is the fastest way to promote your products. In fact, almost anything in the Internet is started to be famous from advertising. Google is coming with Google Adsense if you are targeting random people. But I found that generally comic websites is working with Project Wonderful to put their advertising into.

But enough with paid advertising, for the start why don’t you tell your friends and colleagues that you start to publish your comic online. This way you can save your money for anything else. Writing some guest comics is a great start too. Usually they put the link to your website if they decide to put your work on their site. This is a really good way to promote your work freely.

Join some forum and put your link whenever you write there. Every comic website has their forum, so join and speak with peoples. Sometimes you will find some fresh ideas on the forum. And lastly, put your site on social bookmarks like Digg or Delicious. Also don’t forget to put it on Facebook and Twitter. They are really help promoting your site.

Monetizing Your Work

Putting some advertisement on your site will give you some easy money. Register your website to Google Adsense or Project Wonderful, and put their advertisement box anywhere that you found good in your pages. If you are using Wordpress, it is a very easy job as there are widgets on Wordpress. Just copy the code from advertising website, and paste it on a widget.

Some web-comic peoples are working on souvenir for their arts. If you have fans, and your fans are really love your work. There will be some of them that love to buy your icon on a shirt or handkerchief. Topatoco is a place that sells so many souvenirs from random good web-comics.

Last thing is sell your printed comic. Its fun to read comic freely on the web, but that’s not enough for collectors and some other people are looking for printed materials to read of.

Sell your creativity. Don’t just put them in your notes or work sheets as many people will be enjoy your work. While you have fun with it, made money from it will double the fun.