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stephensharpe707
Jul '19

Hello all, I'm just after some quick opinions on this.

My current ongoing series is reaching episode 220 and i'm just wondering if this is too much, especially for potential new readers who see the amount and think "NO THANK YOU".

The comics are usually 32 pages long and are spread across 8 issues (in the traditional sense) and as mentioned, it is one continuous story, but it does occasional switch from the perspective of the heroes to the villains, but all are pretty self contained in their own right.

My thought process right now, is that if I have a series per issue, it would be a lot easier to navigate back to parts of the story should the reader want to refresh their memories on plot points and characters, without having to trawl through 100's of pages to get there, I also went through a phase of posting 2 pages per episode which made things a bit messier.

But then I also get this could also cause problems to the readers who would have to subscribe multiple times to keep up with what's going on. Has anybody else faced this decision, and if so, what did you decide to do?

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    Jul '19

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Rhonder
Jul '19

This is something I've been thinking about as well and don't have any concrete solutions, but I do have some ideas:

For my comic each season/issue is going to be like a standalone story arc, and it'll be kind of episodic such that a reader could hop into any arc and be fine to pick up and go, but there are recurring characters and such, as well as swapping viewpoints.

On Tapas, I've kind of settled into the idea of editing my "Episode 1" into a table of contents episode (it's just the cover for the first issue atm, so I can just move that to the front of Ep. 2) that will give a short summary and maybe the series icon of each arc, along with which episode it starts on. I particularly like this idea here because you can put clickable links in the creator note so in theory it would be easy to hop to whichever arc you like from that first hub episode. It'll be a while before I get to season 2 to test it out, but I like this idea in theory xD

On webtoons I'm more conflicted and unsure what to do. The same concept as above applies, but my comic never really took off there (partially perhaps because it's in page format, partially perhaps because the art at the start isn't the strongest, or any number of other reasons) so I've been debating whether to try putting the next season as a new series to try and make a stronger first impression or not lol. I'll be trying scroll format with the next one and my art's improved a lot, so it's worth considering I think. The table of contents idea doesn't work as well there either, since creators notes are limited to 400 characters and you can't include clickable links. Soooo I dunno yet, will have to decide later lol.

Rodimus13
Jul '19

If you are just on tapas, you can link in the description where the info is

Otherwise, I wouldn't stress. I mean.. comic books do that all the time.

elyss
Jul '19

If I see a series with 100+ chapters I get all :cry: because I finally have something to binge. I just started Noblesse on webtoons because it has 400+ episodes.

I've also seen such a method spitting the audience because they may have missed the story migration.

claiborneart
Jul '19

Yeah, I don't have any personal experience with this, but I do know most times people do sequel/spinoff comics, they tend to only have a portion of their readers migrate over and subscribe to the new series.

You could do something similar to the Gamer, where it's all one series link, but they divide the arcs into seasons. It could also be fun to include a 'season/series recap' before beginning a new arc, so that if anyone feels lost, they know they can always scroll up to the beginning of the current arc to get the sparknotes of the story so far.

Iris-Grimoire
Jul '19

If you divided it into seasons or arcs from the start, it maybe would work, but having it just stop and go into the next series suddenly might turn some people off (and make people waiting for a buffer suddenly realize they're FAR more behind than Tapas notified them about). If you don't have plans to make that split between both series obvious anytime soon, maybe try something external to help readers navigate between each arc easily with links to the relevant episodes?

That said, 220 episodes hardly sounds intimidating if I'm interested in a series, I'm following some well past 800 and there are people in this plane of existence that managed to start going through a web series with 8k+ pages and had patience to read the whole thing after it finished. At THAT size though, I personally look at the high four digits and think that I'll just invest in something smaller or just starting out.

LT1986
Jul '19

I don't have any thoughts about making a separate mini-series for my web comic.

Now I do have an opinion about multiple series for one story, universe, etc. I subscribe to web comics, but don't always subscribe to different series that come from those web comics. I don't like switching to different comics to get information about one story, universe, etc. It is confusing, most of the material would make one story better, and I have other web comics that I'm reading.

stephensharpe707
Jul '19

Some good food for thought here everyone, and some things I hadn't considered before like the fact a lot of people have 100+ comics they're already subscribed to. I don't remember if notifications pop up for when creators post a new series, but I imagine they can easily get lost if that's the case.