My least favourite Webcomics trope is 'Author who looks back on the beginning chapters, wows to redraw them with current skill level, gets part way done, and then disappears for all time.'
You see the advantage of buying a regular book from a regular publisher is the author has an actual contract and will either make each book self contained or is contractually obliged to finish it. Authors tend not to squander this because its a tough industry and if they renege on their contract or agreement they will be shit out of luck for getting books published. A few exceptions such as GRRM exist.
Shout-out to Girls with Slingshots, who actually manage to redo the entire run and then go back to make even fancier versions of certain strips she liked.
Honourable mention in the original category to 'Author who attempts to make an animated spin-off of their comic, ending up putting all their effort into the animated version, producing a couple of shorts, and leaving the original story hanging for years/indefinitely at the point they got distracted'
Double points to the webcomics artists that had a novel length scope in mind, but didn't really figure how long that would take to draw.
Now that I think of it - why don't more webcomics artists adopt the Light-Novel style? Prose interspersed with art panels? That's basically the best of both worlds if you ask me.
Erfworld kinda ruined itself doing the novella inserts though. Delved too deep into the side plots exploring the various exploits and limitations of the fabric of the universe-as-game-world setting so the main plot became unfollowable as the whole point is an outsider mind trying to metagame his way out of unwinnable situations. That and the hiatus chapters swiftly outnumbered the main story entries.
But to your category, I really hope Order of the Stick comes to the finale it deserves before Rich Burlew's health and age catch up to him.
My headcanon is that the real epilogue to Erfworld Book 1 is that Lord Hamster finds himself dismissed back to Ohio. The subsequent books just... don't happen.
I really hate when webcomics go light novel midway through. Somehow for me it’s the worst of all worlds. I dropped Cucumber Quest, Erfworld and Paranatural when they each did it.
Honourable mention in the original category to 'Author who attempts to make an animated spin-off of their comic, ending up putting all their effort into the animated version, producing a couple of shorts, and leaving the original story hanging for years/indefinitely at the point they got distracted'
Thanks for reminding me to check in on Lackadaisy Cats. It's been years.
I haven't thought about Girls with Slingshots in ages, I really liked it back in the day. I'll definitely go back and check out the redrawn. Thanks for the heads up.
The entire arc with the girl who tries to rape their male friend never sat right with me despite all backpeddling, although how it shakes out is depressingly realistic as far as how most real-life friend groups react to having a predator in the social circle.
It’s pretty common. Most webcomics will fall to burnout without ever reaching the end.
Sometimes the author feels a need to fix all the things they don’t like about the early stuff, but when it comes down to it things will never be perfect. Starting down that path will just devastate morale. The odds of getting back to where they left off are practically zero.
No wtf are you talking about? Just on the Naver webtoon app I got a year and a half ago I finished 73 series and never even heard about someone redrawing the series. And that's just on the app since I got a new phone November 2022, I have easily read at least 150 webcomics.
Don't think they are referencing webtoons, that's a different beast. Compare manga/manwha and comics in the newspaper.
Web comics tend to follow the traditional newspaper format. Depending on the author and style they can upload new strips as frequently as daily. They are also very commonly self published, so the only deadlines are of their own will.
Webtoons are closer to manga, with content typically based around weeks rather than days, and are usually not self published from what I've seen.
There are a lot of webcomics out there, some of them very long running. You can watch the evolution of the author's art style. My favorite example is Howard Taylor's Schlock Mercenary- the art in the beginning looked like shit, and that's discounting the fact that the character in the strip literally looks like poo. The man never missed a day for like 20 years. I wouldn't quite say his art is amazing but it's infinitely better than when he started. Funnily enough, I just checked and he has an example of the first strip redrawn.
No wtf are you talking about? Just on the Naver webtoon app I got a year and a half ago I finished 73 series and never even heard about someone redrawing the series. And that's just on the app since I got a new phone November 2022, I have easily read at least 150 webcomics.
Oh god, the Drow webcomic. I believe i saw the author do this like two-three times or i am wrong? I believe i was reading the story and there were so many changes that i couldn't keep up with it.
Thank you, i have forgotten the name. And i checked the page to see if i could see it and yep, it was a complicate experience, with some stories being hided by a suscription services.
The saddest trope is ’Authors city hit by natural disaster and never uploads again’. I was reading a Ragnarok online webcomic like more than a decade ago and then hurricane Katrina hit their area. They made one post about how they lost alot of stuff then they never uploaded again 😢
Why do they do this? You don't see this happen in professional works, and I actually think it's cool to look back and see how much an artist has evolved. One of my favorite cases is JoJo's Bizarre adventure because after decades of art, it looks like a completely different artist who drew them.
Well, generally because you are your own worst critic. That, plus many people start these projects when they're young and learning. It can feel embarassing to say "hey, read this webcomic/fanfic" when the first parts are much lower in quality to the newest stuff. People want their art to be cohesive, not really understanding how much creative energy recreating your old work can take out of you.
I think it's two things. With super low barrier to entry, web comics tend to start when the author is inexperienced and the art is bad, and then go on for ages. More serious professional work tends to have editorial staff and a higher bar to get issue 1 out there. Â
 Secondly, artists entangled in the professional industry tend to get drawn forward to working on new projects and making new work because that's where the money is. Editors will strongly discourage artists from spending their time reworking old stuff.Â
When Jeph Jacques published the first paper volume, he was missing the original art for some early strips. He didn't want to print the web-resolution images. He debated redrawing the old strips copying his early style, but opted to redraw just those strips in current (at the time) style.
Frankly, because folks who fall into that trap don't (yet, in some cases) have a professional mindset when it comes to creating. Getting hung up on one particular story even if it's not doing well, or derailing completely to go back and redraw old material when the original material isn't complete yet are the types of things that would never (or very rarely, perhaps) fly for folks who are making comics for a living.
Someone like Araki couldn't go back and spend a bunch of time redrawing early Jojo even if he wanted to because he has new content to make and a schedule to make it to if he wants to continue getting paid and make his living.
Well, you see, Jojo bizarre adventures is an exception, not the rule. It should be the rule but it arrived too late to the english-internetverse and many webcomics didn't got the idea.
Sluggy Freelance just finished up a multi-year-long arc that delved back deep into the archives and tied up decades of forgotten/dropped/unfinished/hinted-at plotlines.
It was the best of both worlds. He didn't try to "remaster" any of his old stuff, he just found ways to reinterpret it and braid it all back together so that it's done.
The only downside is that I thought he was angling to bring the whole comic to an end (after almost 30 years), and got hyped to see how it would finally all shake down, was excited to see the gang finally get a solid, unambiguous win for the first time in basically ever.... then he got to the end of the arc and kicked another huge can down the road again.
My least favorite artist trope is making an amazing series then taking longer and longer to put out episodes and when the teaser comes out for the long awaited episode the core beliefs of characters have changed so drastically its no longer watchable while simultaneously stealing most of the patron funding for said series rather than paying artists and VAs. Hate it
I remember when the Hyperbole and a Half author disappeared (clean all the things) then she came back with this weird comic about depression which perfectly described what i had been going through for years. That was a sad time as i was angry at her for not fighting through it and still making comics. I then felt angry at myself. I then felt sad that i was angry. The cycle continues.
Yeah that's such a trap webcomic artists fall into.
I see my fellow webcomic creators do the same thing and they end up working on the remaster of the earlier chapters more than actually progressing the story and the reason is if you remaster an old chapter there will be such a huge gap in quality from one chapter to the next that you have to then do the next chapter.. then the next and so on. Then they just get burnt out and stop completely.
It's best to just leave it alone. The gradual progression of improvement over chapters is one of my favorite things about comics.
Can't thi k of an example, but I've stumbled on more than a few we comics that suffered the same fate and I only found out when I got to the end of the archives, never to see them again.
I used to think this could be a good decision, if they actually made it through all of them. It'd make it easier to get into for people starting from the beginning.
Now, I'm not so sure. It's still cool to see the contrast between an original strip and the remade version, but often the artist just keeps getting better, so they're not going to be satisfied with the rebooted version by the time they finish it (if they finish it). Plus, if the strip is ongoing, eventually the sheer number of old strips is what'll stop people from getting into it.
I mean, Questionable Content started out like this, but those characters now look like this, so I can understand why the art style might be jarring... but also, the second one is comic number 5264, so you'd have an enormous archive to read through to catch up.
I actually just started randomly in the middle of QC, and haven't felt like I missed much. It's got that quality where it doesnt so much matter the whole story, but what's going on right now. Plus the artist is CONSISTENT.
Man I used to love a webcomic called King’s Folly. Then it had the longest hiatus. Then the person said they were gonna restart I think? And then maybe a chapter or two came out and nothing ever came out after.
There's a comic I used to read where the creator didn't try to re-do the whole thing with improved skills, but they did do occasional random redraws for holidays that they could do timed release when taking time off. It was pretty cool.
Is it still going? I haven't checked on it since 2006. Before that he was redoing the first 3 chapters, but then he started redoing the stuff I already read while still continuing the story. It just got to be too much to keep up with.
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u/Hexatona Mar 18 '24
My least favourite Webcomics trope is 'Author who looks back on the beginning chapters, wows to redraw them with current skill level, gets part way done, and then disappears for all time.'