Holiday Archive Dive: Branding the Comic or the Cartoonist?

While you're celebrating the symbolic end of summer (or recovering from Pax Prime or Dragon*Con), here's a holiday archive dive I originally posted in August 2011 about an important branding issue: Is it better to brand yourself or your comic?

This is a question that was submitted to Webcomics Weekly podcast that we never got to address, so I thought it would make a good discussion topic here.

Q.: I'm just starting out in webcomics, and what brought me to the medium is its potential to tell a great story. But looking at the comics that the four of you [at Webcomics Weekly] have really built your success on, it seems the comics that do well are the ones that don't necessarily have a story arc but continue indefinitely until the writer decides it's time to stop. Given this, I'm wondering about your opinions of the wisdom of deciding from the beginning that a comic will span, say, four years, and after that will absolutely and without question be finished--of course, giving way to a new project.

I don't know that I necessarily accept the premise -- that only non-story comic strips can be successful on the Web ...

Read the entire post and comment there.