How do you feel about posting your older comic pages?

[MST3KFan]

So for over two years, my comic POW! Right in the Nostalgia has been mainly posted on Comic Fury.

I just finally decided to mirror my comic here on Taptastic this past month. And aside from the daunting task of resizing all my 550+ pages to fit Tapastic's size restrictions (which hurt my pages' quality a bit), I've been looking back at the comics I originally did...scanned in greyscale back in late 2014/early 2015...before I finally decided to try and color my pages and question if I should have posted that stuff, and questioning if I should have posted them.

It IS part of my story, and gives quite a bit of background about a number of my characters, but I think it might be jarring to readers (outside of 550+ pages to read) to see old black and white scans and then color, or vice versa. I dunno.

I suppose I could try and go back and redo, or recolor the older pages...

What are your guys and gals thoughts on your own early work?

[novasiri]

I have so much i want to redo every time I go back and read my older pages. I want to redo the entire first two chapters of mine, Aether Eternius. Mostly since I changed a lot since I started, and the newer pages really reflect that the best. though I've been told time and time again to keep them as they are, and only change them when I move onto trying and publish them. Or I'll get obsessed with redoing them to a point that it would be betetr to just reboot it.

[mariusthered]

you are at a place i was a year ago, thankfully I have started making new comic pages, but for a long time i was just rebuffing old stuff in a never ending stream. It did however give me a few ideas for new stories . good luck on your task at hand

[MST3KFan]

I'm still doing new comic pages here for my comic myself, just right now they're only being posted on Comic Fury until I get caught up with pages here on Tapastic (almost there, over halfway). POW! Right in the Nostalgia is my 'baby' as it were that I spent a lot of time working on. Definitely not giving up on things.

[MST3KFan]

I know this feeling. Many artists I think look back at older work and think they should redo it, but as you point out, it becomes a kind of endless cycle, and then you end getting nowhere.

In some regards, I look at my old work and think"look how much better I am now". It becomes motivation to continue to improve I guess.

[Emma]

I just recently started mirroring my comic to Webtoons, and I CRIIIINGED when I looked at the first couple of pages. However, I don't want to redraw them (at least not if my comic stays web-only), mainly because it shows how much I've improved.

[SynCypher]

Salutations from a fellow ComicFury user!

I know exactly how you feel. When I re-uploaded from ComicFury, I was actually kind of distraught at how my original pages looked. Part of it was the quality of those pages had partly been due to having inadequate programs/broken tablet, but my artwork had slightly improved so, I was really embarrassed about the first pages. So much so, that I remade a huge chunk of them for my launch here, on Tapastic and then re-uploaded the comic with the new pages.

I'm glad I remade some of them but, I could only do a handful because there were just so many. So, I linked back to the originals on ComicFury. I'd say, since your comic is so long, you shouldn't have to go back and remake all the older pages. Just, remake the ones that you feel like every once in a while as a special thing. Lots of comic creators do it and that way you can still make new pages and keep on whatever schedule you've set.

[indagold]

All my comics on here are my older work. I do acknowledge a lot of pages are messy looking or bad. I lost all the high quality pages for a first part of my comic but still have the later half. I've been fixing up some art errors, dialogue and story issues before I post but not doing a full redraw.

[ryoko]

Well, my comic that I'm posting here is very, very old and getting it online has been a challenge. I did most of it on a paper size that doesn't fit at all in my scanner. Not to mention that I had done all the dialog by hand... I ended up re-working or redrawing most of it to get it to a size that can be uploaded here and adding pages to make the story flow better. Since my early work is my current work, it's been worth it to me to take the time to get it up here, but there's still more I'd like to go back and fix, but time wise I need to keep moving forward.

If the pages you want to redo are relevant to your current comic and you feel that it'll help your readers understand your characters better, then I'd say do it, but only if it won't cause you to get burned out if you're also trying to get new pages up. Also, if you let readers know why you're adding those older pages, they'll probably be really happy to have more information about a series they love, regardless of if it looks 'older' than the current pages.

[ChipGod]

If its funny, yeah I will

[MST3KFan]

At best, I've been at least thinking of coloring my older works as out of my 550+ pages, at least 170 or so are uncolored.

Still feels like it would be quite a task to do though.

[ryoko]

You could release a small chunk at a time as a special 'throwback to the past' kind of extra chapter. Then it won't be as daunting a task getting all the pages done, but still gives your readers new stuff to get them excited.

[dojo]

Although my move wasn't nearly that extreme, I did only recently move here to taptastic from my website (which is in dire need of a rehaul, and recent being back in September), and I was having to repost pages that were getting close to a year old. It was still a little painful to look at, especially since there had been large gaps between pages, and just in general I was really rusty when it came to doing comics in general as I hadn't done any serious ones since 2011 and I was finding I was needing to just plain relearn a lot of stuff.

But you know, at the end of the day, i do feel it's better to just post them and not worry too much about redoing things. If you have the time to eventually, go for it, but if it's at the expense of fresh new updates, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Readers are more likely to stumble upon your newest work anyway and shouldn't be too bothered having to go through the older art just to see when the art gets better.

[MST3KFan]

Right now my main goal is definitely to post all the pages I've done up to where I'm at on Comic Fury, then I might consider going back to the older stuff.

...Also if I have the time what with college classes and work. I was honestly surprised with some my story arcs how I was originally able to do them as much as I did, posting apage every day to completion.