It's been like two weeks since I posted this, so here are my answers to my own questions...
I've been working on a retrospective infographic, hence why it's taken me so long to come back to this.
This Mortal Coil: The Rabbit and the Moon <-- Tapastic link
You can also read it at www.mortalcoilcomic.com
The art. I really went after doing the high contrast imagery. Sometimes it's a miss. Some of the early pages are tough to look at, but it got better as I went along, and I hope it will continue to get better in future installments.
The website worked out. I was going to engineer a complex thing... but really WP with some custom javascript frontend worked really well. I learned a lot about doing Wordpress themes and javascript, so now I can really do anything online (I know how to do backend PHP stuff too).
Rewriting the story. Part way through production I rewrote chapters of the story to tighten them up and re-storyboard them. It takes me 6 months to do 32 pages (estimated). I cut 80 pages out of my initial storyboards saving me over a year of work. The first time I storyboarded it I didn't have a great idea of how to approach it, hence why it was so long.
It took wayyyy too long for a "first episode." I took breaks in the middle to recharge my batteries, but 4 years is a long time.
Not a lot of comments/readers, didn't really build an audience. A lot of factors may have attributed to that: I didn't have a consistent schedule. I didn't advertise till later in the game. The SEO on my site wasn't so great. I didn't embrace social media till later. Maybe a gothic lolita shinto deity is way too niche. (But I made what I wanted)
Was this the right story? I keep questioning that. If TMC were a TV series, this would be an episode in the middle. Maybe it was too complex and convoluted.
Tighter stories. I've been taking the random ideas I have and fleshing out the stories on notecards and giving them time to breathe so I can go in and play with them and hopefully cut them down in size so I can produce shorter episodes of TMC.
Better web SEO. Doing some google searches show that I don't really rank for things that matter to my comic, and I need to work on ways of getting TMC's website and content noticed more (without going blackhat :P).
3D Models. I've been using some 3D models in Blender for composing shots, and I think that needs to be redone because the proportions are really off.
If you build it, then won't come. It was two years before I started to look at advertising my comic and then I started to see more binge readers. Advertising, showing off stuff on social media, blogging and sharing those posts -- these are all ways that helped me attract attention to my work.
Art quality first. I don't have an editor or a publisher lighting a fire under my ass, so I can spend time to make the art as beautiful as I want too, and I certainly did, especially with pages that played with animation.
Social Media. I learned how to use Twitter and Instagram better for sharnig.
Web programming. More of a technical thing, but I learned a lot about how to make a Wordpress theme using PHP, Mysql, and Javascript. So, go ahead, ask me anything about it.
Do a little everyday. Instead of playing games, I chose to do a little bit of work each night on my comic and after 4 years I have a big website, graphic novel, and a body of artwork and blog posts related to it. Phew... Of course, this means I haven't played many games in the last 4 years.
I wanted to build something that would allow me to use my writing, artistic, and engineering skills together. I know, I could do a video game, but really, I think I would end up focusing on technology too much. A comic fits the bill and I wanted to bring this story to life, so I achieved that goal.
If I were to ask a 7th question, it would be: "would you do it again?"
I'm working on it and I hope too...