Friday Archive Dive: handling criticism

Today's Archive Dive is from January 26, 2012, when we discussed handling criticism.

I've been dealing a lot with criticism over the past few weeks. The storyline I've been working on in "Evil Inc" hits a few nerves -- particularly with subjects like marital infidelity -- and as a result, I've gotten more communication than I've ever gotten for any one storyline or strip.

And not all of it has been positive.

One long-time reader -- someone who has shown up at almost every one of my east-coast convention appearances -- has written to say that he's not reading until this storyline is over. In addition to negative e-mail, I've gotten a few negative comments on Twitter and Facebook, and I woke up this morning to a negative review on a Web site (not to mention a listing on ComicsIDontUnderstand.com for a recent Courting Disaster comic).

And every time, the overriding urge is to jump into the fray and say, "No, no no! You don't get it! It's like this..."

But that would be a mistake on so many levels:

Read the entire post and comment there.

Bonus post: Breaking the Q1 slump

As I mentioned in an earlier post, ad revenue tends to plummet in the first part of the year. Most businesses are reassessing their budgets in the first quarter, and most of them habitually cut back on spending until those budgets are cleared. It's especially noticeable coming after November and December, when ad budgets are ablaze with holiday-shopping promotion. It's a steep drop that puts me into an annual panic.

And right around now, you're probably getting "helpful advice" from your ad networks, like this...

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Halftone patterns: A process

Thank you to member Chris Hart for sharing his process on creating halftones.

You’re probably wondering why someone would be crazy enough to add halftones to their comics. Modern printers can easily handle flat tones of gray.

For me, I use halftones for aesthetic reasons; I think they add to my simple style, and I want to evoke the look of classic comics.

The size of my comic strip is 13” by 4”, and the quality is 1200 DPI. 600 DPI is fine for black and white, but I sleep better when it’s 1200. Besides, the difference in file size is negligible. I save it as a TIFF in Bitmap mode. It’s nice to have these plain line art files handy in case I ever decide to color them…

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When To Give Up

There's a pretty level-headed piece from First Second Books making the rounds that discusses an important topic in comics: When to give up. It's worth your time to read.

It's written from very much the same standpoint as a site post I did here back in 2010 titled "If It All Falls Down." From that post...

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If it sounds too good to be true...

As happens from time to time in webcomics, we're entering another period of time in which creators are being inundated with a lot of amazing claims. As you've seen in the forum, new webcomic aggregator sites seem to be on the rise. And my inbox is full of people who are trying to make sense of amazing claims of new business models and overnight success that they're hearing from other sources.

So let's take a moment to try to make sense of it all.