Friday Archive Dive: Moderating a Convention Panel

From October 28, 2008, here are some tips on making a convention panel go well.

A comic-convention panel can be an excellent opportunity to get people excited about your comic, but unless you do a good job of presenting the panel, you're going to wind up boring people. And no one is going to check out your work after you've bored them silly for an hour.

We've all been to the ubiquitous panel in which five cartoonists take turns answering the same question over and over again. They inevitably end up repeating each other's points, constantly flogging their own work, and the result is a droning mess.

Here's the secret to a good panel discussion: It's not what you talk about; it's how you talk about it.

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Webcomics and... Fatherhood?

I received a question earlier this week that seemed somewhat appropriate with Father's Day approaching this weekend, so I wanted to take an opportunity to go into the subject in greater detail. Here was the question:

Is it doable for the father of a newborn to keep cartooning at night (3 strips a week) if he has a day job? (Wife's due any day now.) And do you think that temporarily updating less frequently (less than 3/week) will hurt a comic's readership long-term?

Fatherhood and webcomics. That got me reminiscing.

It was about eight years ago, and my wife was pregnant with our first baby...

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Comic Con checklist

With a little less than six weeks to go before Comic Con International, it's time to get into gear. Here's a few checklists for travel, merchandise, booth/table, social, promotional, and self-prep issues.

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Open Call for Q&A With Scott Kurtz

In the same spirit of last week's Q&A with Robert Khoo, we're now accepting questions for Scott Kurtz to answer. Here's your chance to pick the brain of a guy who has an incredible breadth of experience in webcomics. Where Khoo handled questions from the business side, here's a chance to explore the topic from the creative side.

Post your questions below.

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What to Blog

Q:  I'm wanting to launch my webcomic this fall and i'd like to incorporate it into my existing art blog rather than having a separate site. What I'll be posting in the blog is other work on top of stuff relating to the strip.  So my question is: Would it be wrong to post pages I've colored for DC (or anybody else) as well as art I've done for other people on the same page (or even site) I host my strip on? Assuming of course im making money off of ads.

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