September To Do List

Tomorrow is the first day of September, and the kids are headed back to school. Which is great is you're a webcartoonist, because that means they're returning to reading webcomics from school.

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.

ComicPress 4.0

Philip M. "Frumph" Hofer announced yesterday that he will soon release ComicPress 4.0 -- the first update to the widely used webcomic CMS in years.

But there's something you have to know upfront: Upgrading to 4.0 is going to mean making some significant changes to your site. If you update the theme without making these changes, your ComicPress site will cease to function properly.

Do not hit that update button until you have a handle on what you're getting into.

Here's a brief walkthrough of what's involved:

Taking credit-cards online

This post was generously shared by John Bogenschutz.

For about a year and a half I allowed my customers to pay online with only Paypal. My reasoning was that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal for someone to click on the Paypal button and pay that way, even if they didn’t have a paypal account. But, I heard from people every week asking if there was a way to pay with credit card. Eventually, I started allowing my customers that option and there is no way I am turning back.

There are two reasons that I would strongly recommend offering this as an option ...

Advice from Bill Watterson

This has been making the rounds, and I liked it so much, I wanted to share it here. It is based on a graduation speech that Bill Watterson delivered to his alma mater, Keynon College in 1990. Gavin Aung Than transformed into a comic drawn in a style very close to Watterson's own.