Case Study: Mediocre Web Comic

As with all of the case studies involving projects that I attempted prior to 2010, what you’re about to read is the product of my memory, some notes that I’ve dug up, and some old website files that I kept in an archive. I hadn’t intended, at the time, to do a public case study on these projects, so please bear with me. Projects from 2010 onward are far more detailed.

( 2009 )

I used to draw. In fact, I used to draw quite a lot, starting when I was very young. I remember, though I don’t know what happened to it, a notebook that I used to keep that contained drawings of things around the house. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time, and I can still vaguely picture the drawing of the stereo system and how proud I was of that one. As a teen and a 20-something, I drew images from comics, many of which I still have. Mostly I’d freehand some Jim Lee X-Men stuff or pages from The Sandman – there’s a particular image from The Wake that I did in ink and colored pencil that I still love. But they weren’t my images, they were copies of other peoples’ images.

I decided to try my hand at cartooning in 2009. I came up with the premise – two main characters, Mike and Luke, and random observations about their lives. I drew six strips, posted them, and called it a day. Cartooning is hard when you’re a little OCD about the things you create.

What worked

Looking at them now, I still like the art. It’s not award-winning, and it’s obviously the work of someone who is new to cartooning, but I think it’s a good start. I think the writing worked for the most part, at least as far as getting the strip and the characters set up.

If you visit the site and read the six that I posted, you may well wonder who the talking animal character was going to be. The answer is, I have no idea. I didn’t think that far ahead. Maybe the ghost of Spanky, the Lovable Cockroach.

The computer is obviously a PacBook Pro.

The R30 t-shirt that Mike wears is my MWC version of a real shirt that I own, from the Rush concert tour in 2004.

What didn’t

Ugh, just look at that logo. I can’t believe that’s what I went with… but in fairness, I did intend to change it once I got the strip rolling.

When I say I was a little OCD about the strips, I guess I don’t mean that literally… but when it comes to things that I create and put out there for the public, I do tend to over-analyze them. I would obsess about every line, about every color. Are Mike’s t-shirt sleeves the right length? Does Luke’s hair look the same panel-to-panel?

My marketing was pathetic. I promoted the site via Twitter and… well, that’s about it. The site wasn’t optimized for search engines in any way, and my traffic was extremely low. I don’t think I ever had more than a hundred visitors to the site, to be honest.

Verdict

It took me two months to come up with six very average comic strips. Clearly, cartooning of this kind is not my strong suit. I’m not one to think that talent or success comes overnight, but I’m realistic enough to know when my talents lie elsewhere. It’s one thing or the other: I either needed to be less OCD about the strips I drew, or I needed to give up the strips, because posting once every week or every ten days wasn’t going to be spiritually or financially rewarding.

This site never made any money, but then, it wasn’t monetized much at all. I had a few links up to some t-shirt designs that I resurrected (my CafePress shop was still open in 2009, despite my abandonment of them).

Incidentally, although Mike looks vaguely like me (and has my middle name for his first), he’s not me. I’m the disembodied voice from above.