Hmm well the plot of my comic3 is more like the second type you described. I introduced the "tip of the iceberg" of the conflict in the prologue, but the first two chapters are more about the initial interactions of the two main characters. The next chapter will really up the ante in terms of conflict, but I really think once the "real" conflict hits the stage, it will be unexpected.

so, my thoughts: it is tricky to pull off, and might not be the best way to get a ton of subs right off the bat, but I think the pay-off can be awesome when done well. I love stories that slowly build the suspense until you're jumping out of your seat--think Secret Window. Or rear window. Or any Twilight Zone episode. Plot twists are expected and necessary--if a story goes predictably, it's not very interesting. The trick is not leaving your audience feeling like they were tricked or lied to. In other words, there should be hints at what's to come. I think most people like it when they can look back and say "this was foreshadowed! We should have seen this coming!" In any case, no matter what kind of story it is, what keeps me interested are the characters.

That's not always the reason why some stories take the scenic route. Not all stories are plot-driven. Mine1 is character-driven, so while there's a major OH SHIT PLOT quest thing waiting for the main character, I deliberately put it off. In terms of real world time, there's still like one year of updating to go before the story gets to that quest.

I COULD have put it near the beginning. But that would have completely shifted the focus away from what the story is really about. This story is not about mind-blowing twists (though that doesn't mean it won't have any of those!). It's about the characters, their relationships and internal changes.

Even when we do get to that OSP quest, because of all the character development that will have happened by then, the focus will remain on the characters. ...If I do this right, that is.

I see pros and cons to both approaches but, as far as what keeps me interested, it's the characters. How the characters respond to each other and how their reactions and motives can steer the plot into different directions. I have seen comics handle the pacing to varying degrees.

What I like to do is analyze the first issue (of other comics)... Umbrella Academy2 has a great first page, I automatically know the world I am getting myself into. Whereas Midnight Nation1 reveals the world on the last page (of the first issue). I like seeing how the story beats, transitions happen, as well as any character development. It's interesting seeing how much information is actually given to you within that constraint and I try to apply that to my work.

So, I feel that the story can be presented to me in any way, as long as the characters actions and motives are interesting.

But I will say, that I am doing the later with my comic!1
If you like a slow burn crime drama, maybe you can check out mine!
The first chapter is almost done... so plenty of pages to catch up on.

It's a bit of a side-note, but it's something that I always try to keep in mind about the nature of conflict in stories. Conflict is almost always character driven. What I mean by that is that conflict is usually the result of two or more (or one, if we're talking about internal conflict) characters interacting either directly or indirectly. Those characters, or aspects of the same character, each have objectives -- NEEDS. And good conflict is best developed from the collision of those needs. Example:

Single mother goes to the grocery store, dragging her kid along. The child, who looks unhealthy and thin, is throwing a tantrum while they shop. She eyes a few items, then puts them back. When she rolls up to the check out line, her cart is filled with cheap canned goods and such, and the cart is mostly empty. She looked at a lot of things, but took very little.

Meanwhile, a young woman has a fight with her father at their home, because the father is refusing to apply for medicare to get support so that he can get insulin for his diabetes. She tries to talk sense into him, and he derides her, insults her, and chases her out of the house. She's still wiping her eyes when she gets to her workplace: she's a cashier at the grocery store. When she arrives, she is yelled at by her boss for being late, and reminded that she's on thin ice and if she screws up today, she'll be fired.

The stories collide. The single mother notices that the man in front of her isn't able to use his food stamps at that store any more: it's a new store policy, and the cashier girl's hands are tied. The mother looks panicked. She leaves the line, stuffs a few cans of food into her purse, and tries to bolt for the door. The cashier girl notices and stops her. They struggle ...

... and how the conflict resolves here isn't the point. The point is that we can infer that the single mother was planning on paying for her groceries with food stamps. We understand her need and obstacles -- she needs to feed her son, and her son is pushing her to the limits of her patience by being an unhappy and unruly child.

We can infer that the cashier girl NEEDS her job, because she's planning on using the money to help take care of her Dad. We get that her Dad and her boss are obstacles, challenging her to stay on her altruistic path.

What results is a conflict between mother and daughter, strangers, where the emotional stakes are high for both of them. This situation, however mundane, is a matter of life and death. Not every scene needs to be that intense, but the stronger the stakes, the better the conflict.

We can get all of that without those characters ever clearly stating their needs in the script or story. And that's the sort of story that I love the most. Those first two scenes that lay out the clues as to what's going on in the background for those two characters are absolutely imperative to sell the moment of conflict. We have to care about both of them.

And so, I never mind a good slow burn ... so long as the build-up is actually meaningful towards what comes next. Scenes that don't plant seeds to be used later on can sometimes hurt the pacing of a good story ... but so long as you're gardening, and you're not being too on the nose about it, it really can be effective.

That's a bit of a rant/sidetrack, but hopefully it helps!

TL;DR The pacing only suffers, in my opinion (only!), when your scenes aren't planting seeds that will pay off when conflict happens later on in the story. And seeds are best planted in such a way that lets the readers discover them through inference, rather than spelling it out directly.

When it comes to plot and development for my comic1, I'm constantly keeping in mind my end goal. Since my work, like @keii4ii's is predominately character driven I have to be careful about my pacing, and remember that every scene must move not ONLY my characters to their final destination, but to move the overarching plot along as well.

What I did in writing Kamikaze was throw my readers straight into the action. They have no clue what's going on, but by the end of that first act, they have the stakes, they know the main character, and they have some idea of what our main character is going up against. By throwing them in head first, and then watching the stakes play out, they're in on the concern for what happens when Markesha inevitably has to move forward.

I love the slow and steady method, but you've got to be merciless when you're doing that because every single scene and line HAS to push that plot along. If it doesn't it's got to go, and that's the downside of it: you can have fun, but it's got to be limited or straight up tied into the plot (which can get ornery) otherwise you get off path. That's the way I do it anyway. I come from a TV script writing background so for TV/film it's all about making sure every piece of dialogue and plot point moves the story at a steady pace.

I don't see a problem with either, it's how you go about it. I personally won't be the best person to go to for questions like yours, since I read just about anything and the only thing I can tell someone is that I like the characters or the colours or the setting or some other random thing; I don't have an specific preferences. What keeps me interested could be anything, but I've noticed that it's characters mostly, a story could be amazing but if I think the main is a total butt-cheese I'll stop reading it.
Like, your characters don't have to be perfect people, quite the opposite. But I like practicality, characters with believable, human flaws; who struggle with their own internal conflicts. I very much love characters.

As far as your comic being "slow and steady", I don't see a problem with that, some people like that sort of thing and some who won't; really all that matters is if you're having fun. My pacing is slow as balls, which I like to blame it on all the horror movies I used to watch where it started out all happy, then eventually got worse; but I digress. Void has the fastest starting pace I've ever done with a story, and I still debate with myself if it's too much too fast. Lmao! So far your comic's pacing is fine.

My story is also focused on character development and has a slow start as well. I don't mind those kinds of stories, however, for webcomics they tend to be harder to deal with because many webcomic artists upload at a pace much slower than what a full time comic artist does which can be off putting for readers since it takes a long time to get into the meat of the story.

I don't think plot-driven or faster-paced stories are exempt from this. The exact requirement might differ a little, but no moment should be wasteful. Everything has to contribute.

Though I guess slower-paced story writers might be at a greater risk? in that it might be easy to forget that "I'm taking my time" doesn't mean "I can afford to waste time"?

Definitely. A meaningless random fight scene is as much dead weight as a meaningless random conversation.

However, a random fight with a couple of thugs where our hero is wounded and that wound causes him to fail in a key later moment, resulting in the loss of a loved one? That's the pay off.

A random conversation where two characters are chatting about children; one of them never wants to have kids, and the other one really hopes to be a father some day? Well, if they have a one night fling one issue later, and the character that doesn't want children gets pregnant three issues later, and that drives a wedge between them because they both are thinking about that conversation that they had ... there you go. Payoff.

It's not that simple to execute. Timing and pacing are tricky things. But if you're making sure that there is payoff for those individual "slow" or seemingly disconnected moments, then you're on the right track.

My webcomic1 has a lengthy prologue. It's 12 pages. 12 silent pages. It's slow, and because it's a webcomic and content is released slowly to begin with, it's almost painfully slow to me. But I know that each of the moments in that prologue are a) planting seeds for the story to come, and b) establishing the mythology of the world without giving away all of its secrets to the reader ... and so the hope is, of course, that it will pay off in the end. I guess we'll see! Webcomics are tricky. Their pacing doesn't really follow the same rules as other mediums.

The nice thing is that we can always learn from our experiments in webcomics. They're very forgiving that way.

My feelings are that there's a BIG difference between "you don't know the main conflict" and "being kept in a cloud of 'what the hell is going on.'" The former makes for a cool and intriguing discovery when information is revealed slowly; the latter leans dangerously close to poor storytelling.

If a character's actions don't make sense to us, and we can't figure out their motivation, that all by itself won't make us curious, and you can't blow your readers' minds if they weren't curious in the first place. We have to CARE in order to be curious. If there's a Mysterious Flashback or a scene we can't understand, sure, we'll wait to find out what that was all about. But if more and more and more scenes don't make sense to us and we can't put ANYTHING together, we'll stop being curious and start being frustrated and uninterested.

We don't need answers right away, but we do need to gain more insight to our questions as we read.

The thing is, reading Four Quarters, right now you DO have a plot -- Nana was somehow transported to another world / dream world / otome game??? and she has to figure out what her new life is without letting on that she has no memory of said new life. So she has a goal, and obstacles, and her motivation so far ("I've escaped to a dream world somehow and I'm gonna milk it for all it's worth") makes sense. Regardless of how those goals, obstacles, and motivations will evolve in the future, your comic has a plot.

I think a tricky part is that for this kinda story, if you want to take your time building up to "the real plot" you GOTTA see this part of the story as a part of "the real plot" too. If you skip over and summarise conversations, don't really show us much of what the people around Nana expect her to be or how they click or don't click with each other, gloss over tense moments or potential conflicts, and keep their interactions kinda shallow, then we're gonna take that as a clue that this isn't the important part of the story, and that's when it'll feel like it hasn't got a "real plot".

When a story builds slowly, you don't want your foreshadowing to feel meaningless -- you want those moments to have meaningful emotion so that your readers remember them, even if they don't understand their full significance. Then you won't have a story that feels like it takes forever to get going -- you'll have one that ramps up even more when the true conflict is finally revealed.

My comic is very much in the slow-and-steady category. I'm on chapter five, and I haven't introduced the main antagonist yet. Stuff has happened, plot-important stuff, and will continue to happen, but most of the time so far has been spent on establishing relationships between main characters, introducing additional important characters, and building mystery and atmosphere.

It starts off with a bit of a bang in the first 10 pages (main character is attacked by a bandit! he kills the bandit, woohoo! but no wait what's this, a small bloodstained child just stepped out from behind a tree - what now? D:), but slows down considerably after that, because the story is anchored in its characters, rather than in the plot. The plot matters - they have things to do! - but it only matters if the readers care about the characters.

As for what I enjoy as a reader... I like both types of story! I'm a pretty patient reader, who cares a lot about characters, so I don't mind plots being slow to build, as long as it feels like the author is using the downtime to actually accomplish something. If it's just empty filler - or just comic relief in a story obviously intended to be dramatic, that doesn't actually build towards something that's going to happen later - it feels a bit frustrating. Use that slow time wisely.

I like getting to know characters, and I like getting hints and clues that, if I put them together right, helps me start unravelling mysteries or secrets those characters are keeping, so that's what I try to do in my own comic. My main character has a whole barrel of secrets that he doesn't like talking about, but I drop hints here and there, and establish that reluctance to talk (it helps that his constant companion is semi-mute and doesn't really ask questions), etc., etc.

I suppose it really depends on the execution. Throwing some hints here and there are a good way of preparing the audience if done right, though don't just do it through information alone, try to use scenes that changes the mood too, something that evokes a sentiment that will make sense once the heavier part of the plot arrives.

That's exactly what I meant. You just said it better @keii4ii