How To Make My Comic Popular? Any Advices?

[s1tra.achra]

Read Orchid Frost | Tapas Web Comics

[darthmongoose]

You wanna be popular? Hang on, lemme put on the only proper music...

Okay, let's do this. First thing, let's look at your first impression....

Your cover would benefit from a few changes:
1. Make the text pop from the image more. Avoid handwritten text because it looks amateurish, and make it a brighter colour like a bright gold or white so it stands out from the things behind it.
2. The character and the wall behind him are too close in saturation/value. Try making the wall duller so the character pops out more.
3. If you redo your cover art, consider cropping in closer to the character and a more dynamic composition that uses diagonals so there's less blank space and it looks less planted and static. Here's a good tutorial on composition.

The banner is two images, one black and white, and the other colour. Make it one colour image that fills the whole space to it looks more finished, designed and polished. If you don't know how to do that, put some time into learning and getting better at whatever image editing app you use by searching tutorials.

Now onto the comic itself...

You're not using the Tapas format and the space if gives you effectively. Make sure your pages for Tapas are always 940 pixels wide so you use the full space, it'll make your comic look way better on the platform and easier to read on mobile (where most of the readers are).

The pages tend to look muddy due to a lot of similar levels of value (brightness) and saturation of colours on characters and backgrounds. Make backgrounds more muted and either brighter or darker than characters so the characters stand out, it'll make them pop and make things look better.

Handwritten text is really hard to do without looking amateurish or unpolished. I highly recommend heading over to Blambot.com and browsing the dialogue fonts section for a free dialogue font you like. Anime Ace and Digital Strip are popular options.

You might also want to consider learning to make speechbubbles using shapes in your image editing app of choice. It makes things look better presented, again improving the impression your comic makes.

Put gutters between your panels. Lines are okay, but white space between panels and having panels with a black stroke around can add a bit of extra presentational flourish.

Hopefully making these changes will make your comic look more polished and attract more readers.

[s1tra.achra]

Thank you! I appreciate it

[naladraws]

HELP when i saw this thread name, i immedtnally started singing popular in my head

[WhoDrew]

Wow,

That was impressive,

I don't suppose you could offer some similar feedback for my comic series,

I've been trying to build a following since 2020,

I'm currently inching toward 500 subs and could benefit with finding more readers,

Thanks in advance @darthmongoose

Here's my series,

Read Gamers Guff | Tapas Web Comics

I also have a thread where I offer further support and promotions to anyone who's looking to be discovered,

Check it out if you're interested,

https://forums.tapas.io/t/drewstadium-package-need-help-with-promotion-i-can-help-you-there/54235?u=whodrew

[phantasmalart]

Do you think you could help me figure out how to make mine stand out a bit more as well? (I will look into the font for text as I hadnt realized that would seem ameture-ish, I use Ibis Paint and the font they give is very boring)

Read Fine China and Glass Walls | Tapas Web Comics

Thanks in advance!

[darthmongoose]

....Is it okay to just hijack somebody else's thread where they were asking for advice to help their own comic and turn it into "Darth gives you advice on how to gain a following"? I feel like maybe asking the thread creator first would be good? I'll answer briefly, but @s1tra.achra if you'd rather people took this to another thread, it's totally okay to say that.

@WhoDrew I actually don't know how I'd recommend building a following for this on Tapas. The problem is that it's a perfectly polished comic, but you're making a comic with an artstyle that evokes Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts and American Dennis the Menace, and making jokes about 30+ year old videogames in a gag format was popular in the early 00s....on a platform where the average user is a 20 year old who likes narrative-focused Romance stories. It feels like a comic that might have been pretty popular 20 years ago, but I don't know where I'd market it now. Reddit?
It's also really hard to effectively guage your actual reader appeal because you engage in so much sub-for-sub with an added promo element.
I've said before on various threads, a large reason I don't do sub for sub, and don't recommend others do it, is that it doesn't give you a sense of whether people will read your content without and incentive other than how entertaining it is, and so makes it hard to make changes or learn from it for future works by seeing what people reacted well to. I want to know that people read my comic just because it's entertaining, not because I paid them with subs or promo, and if people weren't reading without that, I'd know I needed to change things.
...And honestly with this comic, the realistic change is "completely change the style and maybe even format or subject of the humour to appeal more to a zoomer audience" OR "Try other platforms, like social media where single panel comics perform better and the audience skews older".

@phantasmalart your cover needs a proper font (which you already noticed) and the text should be in a colour that stands out more, and there definitely shouldn't be like a third of your cover partially obscured by a big semi-translucent triangle. Maybe have a look at the resources I posted earlier about composition, and consider looking at tutorials about covers or examples of good comic covers. Fortunately, I got you covered (hehe) on this one, here's my pinterest board of great comics covers, complete with a couple of tutorials at the bottom:

https://pin.it/43QbBp6

A good Tapas cover reads well at a small size, so go for bold, simple and with some strong contrast if you can, and focus on the character over the text. People are drawn to characters. Maybe put your character in a way that gets across that she's really small, like have her sat in a teacup or something. Try to really sell what your story is about.

[Kazuha_Kirito]

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