Week 1B

Stripped Response 

Stripped was a documentary about the history and future of comic strips. I found this documentary very interesting because I’ve never really thought about comic strips themselves. I love graphic novels and manga, so longer stories through comics, but I have mostly ignored strips with the exception Calvin and Hobbes. So it was interesting to see this whole new world of comics. It was interesting to hear about how many of the creators loved Calvin and Hobbes, I got hooked on it the moment I found my first collection but always felt like it was my thing. However clearly it is a huge thing loved by many, but that was what Bill Watterson wanted to create. A comic that felt personal and small even though it was huge. Clearly he succeeded because that’s how I felt, and now I have the desire to make something just like that. Watching this documentary has made me seriously consider trying to get into creating a comic strip. I am not a great long story writer so whenever I try to write a long comic book I end up falling short, but I think I could succeed with something smaller like this. Luckily the one thing this documentary did was to clearly lay out how online comics can do well in this digital era as comics move away from syndicates and newspapers. This was something I’ve been curious about for awhile after starting to become more aware of web comics. To me someone who gives away a comic for free can’t be making money right? But that’s wrong in reality some of the web content creators are actually pretty successful. The first major step is to just put content out there for free and to build a fanbase. Once you have people reading the comic you need to start interacting and showing yourself as a character/interesting person to the fans, If the fans know who you are they’ll be more attached to the comic by having this creator figure. The final step is to monetize the fan base through things like Patreon or or Kickstarter. Also starting to sell merchandise with your comic IP on it. Finally but not as important as you might think you can collect ad revenue off of your website. After watching this documentary I am excited to try this for myself, I love to draw and I think that this will be a good avenue for that.  

Week 1A

The beginning of class to today was lots of housekeeping and just going over the syllabus.This is the second class I have with James so most of it was the same as earlier today. On the syllabus there three projects scheduled a comic strip, a self contained comic page, and then a complete comic book. I am really looking forward to doing the comic book because I’ve tried to make comic before but almost always stop them early because It is hard to do something like that on the side, but having it as a project like this means that I will complete it. I am also interested in the comic strip too, unfortunately I do not think I am all that funny so I will have to reach deep for that. For the second half of class we watched a TED talk from Scott McCloud the author of our text book. It was very interesting and made me consider the future of comics in a way that I never had before in how they will evolve with the computer. Another thing that McCloud brought up was about the empty space between panels and how important it is in showing the passage of time in comic. When I have done comics before I butted panels up next to each other and was not happy with it and now I understand why.