Ground breaking Comics?

[CttMaurice]

I've had a thought on my mind... like literally a couple of seconds ago.

Is it a good idea to create a comic or novel that goes against what a common and particular story is. Say the night in shining armor saves the princess, but instead of that, we get a darker twist. I believe that creating a comic that is niche right away can get the readers that one wants right off the bat. Creating a comic that is basic and a tale told hundreds of times (with a little creativity of course) will get you a lot of readers fast.

Mine is a niche comic from what I believe and I know it will probably attract niche readers. A comic where there is an assassin adopting a little mage girl probably isn't all too common lol. But that is just the way that I write. Perhaps, that is because of the kind of media that I expose myself to.

My question is, does the comic being niche truly affect how one gain reads? Is that even necessarily a bad thing? What are all of your thoughts?

[likhoradka]

I think niche would get you a more loyal audience. When there's little content for something you're into, you might be more likely to hunt it out and cling to every little thing you find. At least in my experience...

[ble]

I think is really hard to be a trend-setter. But they have been cases i can think:

Something like One punch man, despite starting as a webcomic with bad art about superheroes in japan with an invincible main character that can defeat anyone with one punch. If you told anyone that premise, they will laugh, but it became a HUGE success.

Now i see a lot of series with an invincible main character that can't be damaged. but I think they took inspiration from OPM. So that's an example of a niche series that managed to set the trend.

An example of western niche comic series would be the walking dead. Because it was published in Image comics, a publisher that started as 90's edgy superheroes, yet the creator managed to be published because he lied to the editor and told him that the series would have aliens and shit later on, as the editor didn't believe a comic only about zombies would be well liked. I believe Walking Dead became the top seller comic in Image comics and got a famous tv show and all that.

[TheGentleArtist]

With it being niche, you will gain more loyal followers; but you can be sorta hard to find and it will take awhile before you do get popular enough to break a trope. So it's not necessarily bad nor is it good.

[NickRowler]

Sometimes having a twist or subverting expectations can help make a hook for your comic. Especially if you are using that to expand on a theme. However a story doesn't need to be "100% original". It's ok to use common tropes.

Creating a comic that is basic and a tale told hundreds of times (with a little creativity of course) will get you a lot of readers fast.

I think a lot of this depends on audience. Some may be OK with it, while others may be tired of the same thing over and over.

My question is, does the comic being niche truly affect how one gain reads? Is that even necessarily a bad thing? What are all of your thoughts?

I think it depends how niche you are going. If your comic only appeals to a small group of people, you may have trouble pulling in a general audience. I like reading surreal stories however, other people may dislike them because they are hard to follow and confusing. So having something to ground your story can help appeal to people.

[Legendofgenii]

I like niche and I like tale as old as time too. There’s definitely room for both!

[DelythThomasArt]

Niche is hard, it's why its been a bit rough for me with mine, but I sorta knew that going in.

As my comic currently is very "self contained" in that its a comic about a storyteller, telling a story. It's not a page turner or anything and isn't really something to just binge either. So for me it's been a slow burn, but those who enjoy it really do like to say how different the tone is. Best way I can say is it's like a bedtime story, just something you an ep of before settling down.

[DiegoPalacios]

Unconventional is not ground breaking by itself. It all comes to excecution.

Also, unconventional doesn't neccesarily means a niche readership. Sometimes it can appeal to bigger groups.

[Caro]

I wouldn’t necessarily equate niche to groundbreaking. Even within niches there are specific conventions that carry through and things can still be done to death in every niche.

That said, I think the comics medium is really neat because it in itself is a niche medium but its a medium that’s visual and incredibly accessible. Early on in my “comics career” (years before Webtoon was as big as it is) I would get comments almost daily saying “This is the first comic I’ve ever followed” or “The first comic book I’ve ever bought” and I was technically working in a niche but it was a niche that was just... not really filled by mainstream comics but very accessible to people who didn’t traditionally read comics and wanted to read comics but maybe didn’t have a lot of stuff in comic book shops representing their interests at the time or just didn’t know where to start. Working within a niche early on was the reason I managed to have a career in the first place.

So, yeah I think there’s still so much ground to cover in comics and as long as the work can speak to an audience and find their way to em then it could only help to expand the general readership of comics as a whole! But it can also be a good way to set you apart from the hundreds of thousands of works fighting for attention!

[darthmongoose]

I think something niche in themes and genre can be very successful if instead of focusing on the things that make it different from other works, focuses in on the way it tells a story of human experience that resonates with people.

On paper, my comic is extremely niche. It's like... a shounen manga but it's about mostly women, and they're not drawn in a super-sexy way for the male gaze, a lot of the characters are some flavour of LGBTQIA+ and there's a lot of political allegory.
But people don't tend to say "this is a weird comic", or even "I like this comic because it's so different and unique", they say "this comic is really easy to read!" or "I like these characters!" because when making it, I never thought "my comic will be good because it's different", it's different because I wanted to make a comic that I wanted to see as a queer woman who loves shounen manga. I instead focused on making the visual storytelling as easy to follow as possible so that people could follow this rather quirky concept, and on fleshing out the characters with introductions that help you get into them. The comic's uniqueness is exactly what makes it a hard sell, so I often downplay it in marketing, or try to sell it based on similarities it has to other stuff to bring in readers.

Here's a little secret I've learned about readers over the years... People don't actually like things being different all that much. They will say they do, but when somebody says, "I like this comic because it's different" they usually mean "I like this comic because it has tropes I like in it".
Like you will see people swear down they like Final Fantasy XII more than X because it's "more original" when FFXII is basically Star Wars with airships while FFX is... about a spoiled underwater football player who gets sucked into the post-apocalyptic future by his undead uncle figure and must try to stop his love interest going on a suicide mission to fight his dad who has turned into a kaiju. Like it's absolutely bizarre and I've never seen another story like it! FFXII is definitely the more serious and political story than FFX and has a bigger feeling world and more fancy-sounding dialogue... but the characters; the roguish pirate, the strong-willed princess, the naive young man who dreams of adventure... they're much more by the book, and so is the storyline. People are just not very good at objectively identifying why they like things. These people actually like XII's grand scale, unique aesthetic and how seriously it takes itself, and that the series that went more soap-opera esque and silly dipped into a more classic Fantasy vibe and lower tech setting that appealed to them personally. They incorrectly interpret "different from other products that were popular that I didn't like in a way that I like" as "original".

"Serious loner warrior/killer/assassin adopts a child" isn't a trope that's everywhere, but it's not so rare I'd call it "niche", it's pretty much Lone Wolf and Cub, The Professional/Leon, multiple runs of Wolverine, Batman and of course, everyone's current favourite The Mandalorian all use or are based on this trope. Instead of focusing on the originality of the trope, the important thing is to focus on how you use the trope to tell a compelling story.

Somebody is bound to use the term "unoriginal" about my comic at some point if they don't like it, it's just inevitable. "Oh it's just another SJW queer manga thing about young adult characters having feelings and it has a girl with a giant sword. Why do people like this dross?" It's just such an easy criticism to make. You can make any story sound like practically any other story if you cherrypick your tropes and story beats. Like, "pff, Batman Begins? That's just The Lion King! Young boy whose father shows him their mighty, prosperous kingdom witnesses death of said father and runs away, returning to a ruined land ruled by thugs years later, and must fight to take his rightful place in charge of things by overcoming his treacherous mentor figure. SO unoriginal!"
So instead of focusing on originality, which is a hard-sell anyway because people like stuff they recognise (that's why everyone likes fanart so much after all), I focus on storytelling and characters.

[thedude3445]

I'm not sure I have any groundbreaking thoughts on the topic (pun sadly intended), but I like a lot of the thoughts in this post because I think it's so much more important to cater to the way the story is told rather than the originality/lack of originality in terms of set-up or setting. That stuff is all dressing to the characters and storyline, which as you say can be a quite hard sell if it strays too far from audience expectations.

Even low-concept stories can be "less original" than certain high-concept stories depending on the way they deal with the "human element" of it all, especially the main characters. John Wick, the first one, is a plot so simple you can sum it up in "Keanu Reeves kills a bunch of people to avenge his dog," but thanks to the extremely interesting cast of characters in a fleshed-out setting, it never feels stale even for a moment. Then on the other side of things, explaining the premise of Weathering With You takes a paragraph at minimum, but at its heart it's a romance story about two broken teens running from themselves, and it never really veers away from the expected despite the extremely complicated and original premise. Both of these are movies I love, but not because/despite of how "groundbreaking" they might be; it's just because they tell stories with very good emotion and purpose.

I even have this dichotomy with my own stories, I think. Hands Held in the Snow is a romance story with such a clear set-up that you can guess half the story beats by looking at the protagonists. But, at least I hope, the characters and aesthetics are strong enough that they keep people reading and enjoying it all the way to the end. Its setting is a vaguely clockpunk Venice-like city and has all sorts of details that set it far apart from most fantasy worlds, but I've never marketed any of that for a moment because I know that'd get in the way of the characters, which are the only part that matters anyway.

Then, my story ATL is a retrofuturistic sci-fi detective series about a nonbinary, superpowered slacker who goes around solving crimes and getting caught up in comedic antics, where each story arc is explicitly divided up like manga volumes despite being prose. It's a VERY tough sell because there is no story quite like it, and for a while I used that uniqueness as the main appeal. It didn't really work, and now reflecting on this I actually see why. The off-beat mysteries and the extremely vocal protagonist are the parts readers most often laud the story for, and I should probably focus my energies almost entirely on that. Or something? I'm not good at the marketing part for stories quite yet...

And my next story, a secret project that will be releasing extremely soon, has such a low-concept premise that the entire project basically has to be marketed on the title alone (and it's a real good one thankfully). To have this story succeed, I'll basically have to "trick" readers into reading it and getting invested in the characters/jokes before the Weird Stuff finally kicks in, otherwise they'll probably get bored and quit reading after chapter 2. For this project I will have to HIDE the originality somewhat. (Though since it's not out yet, we'll have to see how that actually ends up working or not.)

Honestly originality is sometimes a big barrier, especially when it comes to fantasy/sci-fi. Getting audiences interested in a story DESPITE the hurdles of having to learn this new world's "rules" is one of the main things that are required by any given story to succeed. Anything from Star Wars to Mortal Engines to Scott Pilgrim all have interesting worlds that really make their stories work, but they only work because the characters and not-especially-"original" stories power them through it.

Maybe these thoughts are too jumbled but I will post them anyway lol

[nickolaidas]

I don't think it matters whether a creator is original or not. What matters is the quality of the product.

You can have the most original idea ever, and the execution may be so bland and uninspiring that no one will bother reading it. Ever.

Or you can have the most unoriginal story, yet the characters are so relatable, the dialogue is so fun to read and the pace is so perfect that you can't help but be captivated.

It's all about execution, solid art and quality storytelling.

So many creators here are overwhelmed with the amount of works that are published here daily that they think that having an original idea is their ticket to success, fame, recognition and perhaps validation. The truth couldn't be any further apart.

Oh, and I've always agreed with what someone once said: "If you thought about it, somebody else already did it."

[DiegoPalacios]

I think something niche in themes and genre can be very successful if instead of focusing on the things that make it different from other works, focuses in on the way it tells a story of human experience that resonates with people.

I would argue that every story needs to resonate with people one way or another to succeed. People get invested in the characters and they are the ones that make the story happen.

If one can make a story that resonates with people AND is original, they will have what is called a groundbreaking story.

Here's a little secret I've learned about readers over the years... People don't actually like things being different all that much. They will say they do, but when somebody says, "I like this comic because it's different" they usually mean "I like this comic because it has tropes I like in it".

If a story works or not, will depend of the excecution, not on how conventional or unconventional it is. I agree that originality itself is not a selling point if it's not accompanied with something that wakes up the reader's interest.

That's just The Lion King! Young boy whose father shows him their mighty, prosperous kingdom witnesses death of said father and runs away, returning to a ruined land ruled by thugs years later, and must fight to take his rightful place in charge of things by overcoming his treacherous mentor figure. SO unoriginal!"

Now i am picturing Batman singing Hakuna Matata.......thanks for the mental image

[But_a_Jape]

My immediate thoughts on this topic are "there's a big difference between something being niche and something being groundbreaking (I would not consider the example given in the OP as 'groundbreaking')" and "originality for originality's sake offers nothing if the writing isn't good enough to support the story" - but I feel like a lot of people have already covered both of these statements.

Instead, I got to thinking, "What would make a story groundbreaking and what are some examples?" Honestly, this question was harder for me to answer, because I'm not actually clear on what qualifies as "groundbreaking" - almost every story I can think of has had significant influence from some sort of predecessor or another. In some senses, Star Wars was groundbreaking as a unique mix of sci-fi concepts applied to a standard fantasy story, but in other ways it's not groundbreaking at all because of those same qualities.

I think when it comes to truly "groundbreaking" media, those tend not to be the big successes themselves, but may inspire a later work (or works) that propels its groundbreaking features to mainstream consciousness. Sometimes their success will come much later in time when future audiences look back and appreciate what it's accomplished.

The best example I can think of that I would consider groundbreaking would be 2001: A Space Odyssey for its very unique and innovative storytelling and filming techniques. At the time of its release, it was extremely divisive and a lot of people considered it confusing or dull (contrary to my "groundbreaking" sentiment, one critic considered it "a monumentally unimaginative movie"). But with the benefit of hindsight and observing the large impact its left on culture, we can see where and how 2001 broke new ground.

[CttMaurice]

Wow, thanks to everyone for the comments on the subject so far it is honestly super nice to see everyone deeply analyze the questions that I placed. Honestly, I didn't realize that "groundbreaking" would probably be a bad way to describe all of the things that I wanted to discuss. But the info that I got out of the accidental use of it was actually really insightful.

Never did I really claim that my comic was groundbreaking, more of just a niche that is "somewhat" hard to find.

"Wolverine, Batman, The Mandalorian." About these, they are really good examples and I can really see the similarities in some. (Although I haven't watched them T-T no time) While It good to see that my idea is out there and I have a chance of getting it out. I understand that each and every one of these examples is incredibly different from one another.

Also, as I have learned. Despite adhering to tropes as one says, the world and the storytelling of the creator can make it differ from work to work. It seems absolutely incredible to me that from the examples that I got neither are the same and yet they follow the same premise.

I guess that really does mean that even if you did follow a particular set of tropes that were done before you will still be able to make it your own.

This has been really interesting so far, but for everyone that participated recently, I really appreciate the thought and effort that you have put into all of this. I've learned a lot and hope that all of you have learned much as well!

[UrMom]

Reader gain depends on the story, sometimes it'll get a ton of readers, other times maybe a tiny cult following. To be honest a story about an assassin adopting a mage girl sounds like something a lot of people would be into, the idea of a normally hardcore, dangerous adult taking on a caregiving roll for a child is something at appeals to a lot of people, and can be found in a few stories. (comedy movies about spys and such caring for someone's kids, manga like Way of the Househusband, Despicable Me.) I don't know the actual story, but if that's the main feature I bet you can get a pretty good following if you market it the right way.
There are super rare comics like tragedies which usually get small followings, and not many people are into them because webcomics specifically are usually used for escapism, most readers don't really want to get a hard hit of reality or feel down reading a story. Horror is also niche because they're so few in numbers with webcomics, although they can get a massive following because you pretty much always know what you're getting into, and horror fans are super dedicated to the genre.

It being bad can also depend, most creators care a lot about getting a readerbase and would be upset if their story didn't get many numbers, on the other hand there are people who just want to tell a story and don't really care about how many people like it. A lot of super niche comic creator's I've talked to and/or follow tend to know their work won't get as many readers as most, so they're pretty chill with just doing their thing. Personally I don't see it as a particularly bad thing, the story and journey of creating it are the most important. Although I'm probably a bit bias since I myself am a niche comic creator. (Heavy, self-indulgent stuff. Not everyone's cup of tea.)