I have to say, I am a little bit scared, and I will explain why.
When I started to develop my webcomic, I decided to post my comic five days a week. This would be one black and white strip a day, Monday through Thursday, and a double sized color strip on Friday. This way people could get into a habit of checking the comic weekdaily, and the Friday color strip could be the end-of-week bonus like the color Sunday newspaper comics. Some webcomics post less often, like Monday-Wednesday-Friday, but I really wanted to get more content than that out there. More comics a week equals more content for people to enjoy, and that means more visits to my website, and hopefully more of an audience. Also, having a schedule really keeps me motivated. I have motivation problems (I’m lazy). So I set the goal to five strips a week.
I decided to make two months worth of strips before I posted anything. This would give me a good decent buffer of strips in case I fell behind in the future. Because I was just beginning, I would give myself as much time as I needed to come up with the first month of strips. Then for the second month’s worth of strips I would set a deadline and do a weeks worth of strips every week for four weeks, to get me into the groove. Then I would start posting the strips five times a week.
There was so much to do. For the first month’s worth of strips I had to come up with templates for the strips and then developed a work pipeline going from thumbnail sketches to full sized roughs to final art. I worked on designs and personalities for the characters. I made decisions about what media to use, what fonts to use, and what color schemes to use. Writing was easy at first, but I found when I turned the script into a cartoon it took a LOT of rewriting to make it work. That first month of strips took me about three months.
Last night I finished the twentieth strip. The last of the first month’s worth. Now comes the second month’s worth. Now comes keeping on a schedule and doing a week’s worth of work in a week. This is why I am afraid. This is still going to be a LOT of work. I don’t want to back down and post less often. I really want to post a weekdaily strip. I feel it is important to set up a comic that posts often and posts regularly. But doing this much work in a week might be too much to handle, especially since there are still things to fugure out artistically and technically. And I still need to learn how to POST the comic…
This just might kill me. I’m scared.
