A Warm Welcome (DD4, Chapter One, Pages 34-37)

…in which Alexandra's mother demonstrates a disappointing view on human behaviour.

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Okay, arts grants are sent off! After proofreading my applications one million times, I'm sure there are only a dozen embarrassing gaffes in there, as opposed to a-dozen-and-one.

I've been busy with a few other small, dumb things, too. One was that I needed to revisit all my pages and reposition text boxes that were sitting outside of a safe area. If you look at the second image above, there's a text box that intersects with Alexandra's head. That one used to almost be off the page, for reasons I don't actually know. Just an oversight, I guess.

I have also readied all my HTML documents for reading DD4 on DelilahDirk.com, so that's ready to go, once I officially declare my plate clear of things to worry about.

Finally, I've been looking into Tapas and Webtoon as delivery methods for this comic. Yesterday I spent a few hours recomposing the first few pages in the long, vertical-scroll format that those sites use.

I gotta say, I kind of like this?

I'm surprised how pleasant a reading experience the vertical scroll provides. Certainly preferable to the old standard webcomic page, with its single page up, comments below, and (often tiny) "previous / next" buttons somewhere between. And I thought the process of taking the comic out of its carefully composed page layout and putting into this vertical strip would be obnoxious. Sure, there's some re-lettering that is involved, which is a pain. But! My expectation was that this format would be a wholly annoying exercise in reducing the quality of the comic. I assumed that if anyone would have asked me, "hey which format do you recommend reading the comic in?" I would have said, "oh, the book format, for sure," like the grumpy old man I am. Instead, this feels very much like, "read it wherever you prefer!" That's a nice discovery.

Some other thoughts on Webtoon / Tapas:

• The image compression on Webtoon is absolutely atrocious. Artifacts a-go-go. Tapas offers much better image quality (and greater resolution, fwiw).
• On Tapas (maybe both), there sure are a lot of titles with the word “villainess” in  them. It’s Villainesses everywhere over there. In general, the titles are bonkers. I’m going to assume this is a cultural/translation thing—I get used to the way titles sound in Western media, and most of the comics on offer seem to be Korean.
• Every comic starts with a shot of the moon. EVERY comic. 
• No kidding, there’s a comic called “high class homos,” and it is an official Webtoon comic. Yikes.

I don't know if DD4 will find a good home at either of these sites, but based on the strength of the reading experience they offer, it's worth trying.

Of course, I could mimic the endless vertical scroll on my own site (probably), but I'm curious to see what DD4 does, exposed to the readership of those sites. Could it be a colossal trash fire, and I end up pulling the whole thing down after two instalments? Might one or both of the sites court DD4 with business offers? Will the comic just quietly exist on both sites, attracting exactly the right amount of attention? Only time will tell.