New Formatting
Other Ways to Maraud for Readers
With comic accessibility on my mind these days, I’ve been thinking about other ways people read comics. Turns out there are plenty of platforms on the world wide web that cater to a comic format called Webtoon™. It’s a comic that’s formatted for your phone screen, and you simply scroll to read it. No zooming, no pinching, no PDF or CBR readers needed. The panels are cropped and zoomed for emphasis already. There isn’t an easier way to read a digital comic, this is about as easy as it gets.
Always wanting to try something new with my work, I started webtooning Starboob #1 (in Screw Comics! #5). I’ve created a profile on the Webtoon™ site where the comic will debut in the webtoon format, a chapter every week for a few weeks, starting tomorrow, Friday. Hit the link and add me to catch it when it drops!
Formatting an existing comic to webtoon is pretty straight forward, but it does bring a few challenges. Basically you’re setting up the panels and storytelling on a long narrow strip of a page instead of a sheet of paper. Many square and long panels fit and work just fine, it’s the splash pages and the wide panels that can prove difficult to present. But there’s a solution for every story, and with the right cropping and zooming it’s not difficult to move past. I’ve been playing with the Webtoon format on my own comic site, MilqtoastComics.com. Pull up a comic on your phone to see how it works.
So, since I created my own Webtoon site, why sign up for a mainstream one? Well, I wanna go where the readers are. Being an independent author, there’s only so much social media lurking/commenting/posting one can do to drum up more eyes to my work. So, it’s time to go where comic readers are! I’m trying to expand my audience beyond the realm of native comic readers, I would like to get to the bare bones of it all and find the readers that enjoy a good story, comic or not. I want to reach readers that perhaps never have set foot in a comic store; readers untainted by the expectation of the phrase ‘comic book’; readers who are unconcerned with what comic book movies are coming out. But don’t me wrong, I love my comic nerds too!
Another reason I’m webtooning Starboob is because I posted this image last week, and received a helluva lot of praise and cheer.
I’m printing up some FREE cards with this image on one side, and on the other side a partial list of rights you have when confronted by ICE, in Spanish. Really cool, and really handy, cuz it’s ugly out there, y’all, and we need to know our rights. Starboob wants you to know your rights! And here’s the piece before the color:
STARBOOB vs ICE cards will be given away FREE starting at the next show, which is the Texas Latino Comic Con, in Dallas, TX - Saturday, August 9th - and it’s FREE Admission. Come on out if yer in the area.
Here’s something cool, I recently did an interview with Comic Indie, Houston’s premier independent comic champions. We ran the gamut of basic questions, I feel like I covered some good stuff, but I went off on other tangents thinking we had more time. I don’t know, I haven’t listened since I did it, but you can! Tell me what you think.
I think that’s it for now. Stay cool, and I’ll see y’all in Dallas!