TALK - Comic Thoughts

This isn't a story. This is me thinking about my current and future process for telling image based stories. While I speak only about Little Witch below, this also applies to Statue Rentals and whatever other insanity spills forth from my brain in the future. Before diving in, a warm welcome to any new members who haven't seen me welcome them before. Thanks for your time...

I'm starting to wonder if I chose the wrong format for my comics. I decided to make them one big page with panels inside, probably because of my love of comic strips and comic books. I'm finding the format isn't necessarily in line with my story telling. Below are previews of just the frames and speech bubble that will be seen in six future Little Witch comics. (What's with the circular stuff? Wait, and find out. Heh. No, that's a sequence where someone is remembering a past event. You could figure out who based on the bubble color. The colors are consistent from page to page.):

They are certainly visually interesting, I guess. But, the necessity for the little curved pink arrows is unfortunate. There are 63 little panels in those 6 comics. Even at the full 3840x2160 image size, some of the tiny ones are only 240x320 pixels. My plan for those is to include the tiny panels at a larger size as bonus images. But would these comics be better served as 60-odd uniformly sized images around 1280x720. The story would unfold vertically.

Even "uniformly" would have to be strict. The center vertical panel in the top left comic is 1280x2160, or the equivalent of 3 1280x720 panels. There's nothing saying that couldn't be kept as is in this more uniform presentation.

I also think a vertical presentation would favor "surprise endings" far better than hoping the reader doesn't glance at the lower right corner of the image and see the spoiler before reading toward it.

The change to passing would also be interesting. I could take a more webcomic view of the pages. Little Witch #5 through #9, #10 through #14, and #16 through #22 are each story arcs. I think they'd present on a website better as 26, 63, and 49 images, respectively, that are released a couple times a week, then now as 17 images release 3 every 2 months, as currently planned. (Although, I don't know if the panel counts would translate one-to-one if split up. Some "single panels" might still end up as 2 or 3 panels just so long sequences of dialog don't last forever.

(Sidebar: As I'm writing this, panel 10 of 14 is rendering for an episode #21. This may also be influencing this post.)

I started thinking about this when I was showing a comic to someone on my phone. The text was hard to read without zooming in. There are other navigation issues. If that comic had been merely 5 or 6 1280x720 images. Navigation would be far easier, even if some zooming were needed for the text.

Frankly, the largest barrier to switching formats is inertia. Currently, I have 79 Statue Rentals and 135 Little Witch renders that would probably need to be redone to fit the proposed standardized format. (And oddly, I'm considering this anyway. The Angela, Tish, and Jenny models I'm using were "morphed into children" in an entirely incorrect way I have discovered as my Daz knowledge grows. Rebuilding their models from scratch and redoing any scenes they appear in has been on my mind.)

In any case, I've mostly written this to think about it more structurally. I considered making this a poll but the options probably would have been:

• Stay the course.

• Single panels rule! Especially if they release more often or even if they don't. (And you could fix the models. Think of the children!)

• A mix of both?

• Why are you asking us? You're going to do what you're going to do.

• Squirrel?

Yeah, I acknowledge that fourth one is the most likely outcome. But, I'm hoping for some insight from you, my helpful readers. No pressure. Comments, as always, are encouraged.

(Sidebar: Hadn't planned to mention the issue with the kid models. But, now that I have, I'm curious. How old do you think Angela, Tish, and Jenny are?)