What do you think of messy creators?

[Chocolate]

What do you think of artists who are inconsistent with their comic updates and never seem to commit to 1 series? This is for artists who can’t make up their mind and keep creating new series regardless of their previous unfinished works. Opinion of their work ethics and them as a creator in general?

[DasIstWunderblyat]

Oh, me? I don't mind me. Thanks for asking

Eh, let people do their things. Maybe they're just in for fun or practising. Maybe they have IRL things that make them unable to commit. Maybe they actually finished their series but decided not to publish it. Not everyone have to be the most organized and professional. Let hobbyists live.

[Chocolate]

Oh can you elaborate? Why are you like that?

[conventurecomics]

If it works for them art is cool no matter what form as long it is not a tracing, or AI, raw created by anyone who creates the messey art works. Also if they get subscribers for their works than that works for them as well.

[PrettiMidnight]

To me, it sounds like they had inspiration and let it out lol. They’re creating and it makes them feel good doing what they love. As far as work ethics, it’s not my place to judge how another person works.

[BoomerZ]

If you are talking about as a hobby, no problem. If you want to be professional, big problem.

[XiuLyn_12]

I think small creators can be inconsistent and constantly create new works.

It's mostly because they're trying to find out what comic/novel works best for them in terms of enjoyment and engagement.

However, big/famous creators will most likely have their work viewed and liked widely. For them to casually leave one work and start another is too... bad?

I mean, as a reader, I wouldn't want my favorite comic to end abruptly... Even if they make another one, there's no guarantee I'll like it as much as the previous one.

That's just my opinion.

[darthmongoose]

I think it'd be arsey of me to judge them, honestly. Especially because I used to be a lot like that myself.

If one of them asks me for advice because they're failing to build an audience, that's literally the only time I may bring up that their lack of focus on one thing and poor time management might be a large contributing factor. I'd happily give them tips on how to manage the grind and deal with the FOMO of committing to a single comic while thinking "but...what if this other thing is the right one!?"

But in all other scenarios, if I judge them, I'm just an arse.

If I have more subs than them, and I'm like "HAH! They lack my dedication!" It's like... Wow, no kidding, 38 year old professional illustrator, you sure pwned that ninteen year old of whatever, take that, kid! ...It's pathetic, right? I have nearly 20 years of extra experience on them, I should damn well hope I'm a bit better at managing myself after making and learning from all the exact same mistakes and having had enough professional work over the years to feel self-assured about sticking to a project.

If I have fewer subs than them, what do I even say to myself? "PAH! They may be more successful than me, but they're unfocused and messy!" ...yeah but...it's not stopping people reading, right? People still like this person's work and are willing to put up with the random update schedule because the content is so good. If the only thing I can boast about is that I update more regularly, but my content is not as good and appealing, I'm being a loser, and not looking to things I could improve about my work or how I market it.

Being a bit flaky isn't the worst problem a creator can have. I actually think in some cases, I find creators who stubbornly insist on keeping making the same thing for 5+ years even though it clearly can't build an audience, and who refuse to stop making that thing, but also can't be at peace with it having a small readership are more frustrating to deal with. At least with a flaky person, they're open to the idea of iterating on their work based on feedback or changing their approach, and just need to learn when to stick with something.

[Kelheor]

They are not getting anything for publishing their creation. Why should I judge?
And if they do, well, great for them! They are creating art and probably trying to not stagnate over one thing and suffer doing what they like

[Lensing]

There is no simple answer to the question because we don´t know what projects
other artists are involved in. There are a lot of creators out there who are doing
a wide range of work. A lot of professional artists are involved in many fields, trying
out things and working on different projects all the time. Other dedicate some years
of their life just on one professional project. It´s really hard to judge things like that.

In general I rather look at 100 messy creators than all the polished professional looking
comics because I usually find their work way more interesting

[Legendofgenii]

Personally, I’m all over the place, but I’m having a good time chasing that dopamine. ️

I also appreciate that real life comes first, so if a creator stops updating or needs a break for whatever reason, that doesn’t really bother me.

[thepenmonster]

If I think it's butt it won't matter how professionally it's being run. If it's good I'll wait for a new installment. If it never comes that's just how it is in the world of handing out free entertainment.

In my experience tho? If it gets abandoned because the creator was bored it was very likely butt in the first place so nothing lost.

[NickRowler]

Inconsistent uploads between chapters is OK. But in the middle of a chapter, well it can break up the flow of the story. A lot of people usually create a buffer before uploading the first episode/page. Usually I will have a buffer of 10 pages tho I have heard people having 15 or 20.

As for making new series…
If the series are long enough to get somewhat of a story, almost like a pilot of a show, I think that is OK. Sometimes one shots can stand alone but other times they might be something you continue on.

However, if you upload like 2 or 3 pages and nothing happens, this is a red flag that you don’t pre-plan your comic. If you took time to plan out your series, thumbnail it, and made your buffer, you would have more time to see if something “doesn’t work”. You would have the ability to change the issue or just drop the series.

I am saying this as someone who tried to write comics as a teenager but went straight into drawing them and noticed that after 4 pages, I would just drop the series. I noticed when I took time to preplan, I no longer struggled with this. I have had several series that I ended up scraping because they just didn’t work. Maybe they were interesting ideas but I guess I didn’t have enough there to make something worth spending time to draw out.

[ThunderChicken]

I feel that art is art and should not be rushed or forced to adhere to strict scheduling. I mean, I certainly appreciate when it does (I like knowing that a new episode of a comic or novel will be posted Monday at 11:00 local time), but it's not the end of the world. That said, if an artist or writer is going to drop a series they should do certain things to ease the pain:

If it is a long series and has plenty of followers and it's dropped, do your readers a favour and post a summary of how the series would have ended if you hadn't dropped it. I recently spent several days binge-reading a webnovel only to find it dropped on episode 175. Thankfully the writer did exactly what I said above and posted a full summary of what would have happened had the story continued. Even though they dropped the story (for personal reasons, which was also explained and made it understandable) the readers got closure - characters we followed through 175 episodes of story were not simply abandoned.

If a series is to be put on hiatus, make a post that it is going on hiatus. Even if you don't want to tell your readers why, at least tell them that you're doing it. Several series that I follow simply stopped updating. Some of them have been more than a year now. No explanations, no "we'll be back, life got in the way" messages. Just stopped in the middle of the story. That is very disrespectful to your readers.

If a series is going to be dropped and never picked up on again, the best thing to do is to delete it from Tapas. That way you don't get people discovering the story and starting to read it only to come to a dead end. If it's not deleted, at the very least the first episode should be edited to clearly let the readers know that the series is incomplete, abandoned, and will not be finished.

As for myself, I cannot bring myself to start writing a new story before the current one is finished. This actually takes a lot of determination from me, because I have ADHD and have the attention span of a golden retriever on meth. Even as I'm writing one story I have another in the chamber, but I know that I must finish the current one before starting a new one or it'll never get finished. And I also can't bring myself to start publishing a story until it is completely written. Once it is written I can start publishing on a serialized basis, knowing that I won't leave readers hanging - even if I lose interest in continuing weekly updates I can upload it all and let the readers decide whether they want to finish reading it or not.

I say "losing interest" not in reference to the story itself, but in the art associated with it. My stories are "illustrated webnovels". Even though they are fully written I must still make up a new image for each episode, and those take time and effort. I've never lost interest yet, but if I do I can upload the whole thing without images and it'll still be a normal webnovel.

[KSlinger]

I'm definitely in the 'inconsistent update' category and it took me a really long time to make peace with that. I have sympathy for other artists who are the same because, as others have said, sometimes this hobby is thankless and exhausting, and we aren't getting paid, and life can be hell. How can we possibly judge? Even people who seem to be professional can be spinning plates. Maybe they're inconsistent because they're consistently having to prioritise?

As for project hopping I genuinely appreciate every scrap of work available from creators whether they lead somewhere or not. I think roughly half my Tapas reading list are comics that stopped dead somewhere along the line which I still refer back to for inspiration. Perhaps because I'm not an avid consumer I don't understand fan frustrations, but to me everyone's just working hard and doing good work-- for nothing, usually. Good for them.

[moontokkym]

I just assume that they don't have ambitions to be professionnal and that's ok. As long as they're having fun with whatever current project they're on that's cool ^^ That or they have other priorities that mean they can't commit to a tight schedule, as someone who has been adhering to a schedule, I know that if I where to pick up a few extra hours at my day job I would not be able to do that. Most people can't afford to sink that much time into something that makes them pennies every month if that.

And as others have said above, seeming professionnal can just mean it's absolute chaos until the deadline. I've been posting every week same day same time for months. During that time I have had
- 2 conventions and all the prep, merch production, travel and stress that ensues
- 2 bouts of RSI forcing me to stop drawing entirely
- 3 weeks of intense rushing to catch up from the RSI breaks
- multiple weeks of burnout that only stopped when I had to for the RSIs
- 3 vet visits including surgery
- extra shifts to pay for that surgery
- and much much more.

The only reason people on Tapas don't see that is because I have a month delay between pages on patreon coming out every week and pages on Tapas, so if anything happens patrons see the crash and burn and Tapas just keeps on swimming. I'm currently on break, no one on Tapas would know. They'll only know in July when the absence of new pages makes itself known.

[Caro]

I feel like I probably fall into this category but I have my reasons.

1) I don’t make my income from webcomics— I make it from my print books with different publishers. I can post some of my work but not all of my work. Sometimes what that looks like is I sign a contract for something that might put my side project on the back burner. I have an unfinished series that people ask me about every time I post online but I had to pause it because I needed to put my efforts into another project that was actually paying my bills. But since that’s done the project is continuing and the second volume is now almost finished.

2) I managed to make a living BECAUSE I didn’t commit to one series. I couldn’t know what was going to be successful for me without throwing lots of spaghetti at the wall. If I stuck with any of my first five or ten comics and continued any of them for years and years I would simply not have a career. Looking at my first few hundreds of pages of comics and reading them today makes me realize how inexperienced I was and even the stuff I thought was amazing then was actually super weak and would have no chance of getting picked up by a publisher. It took 1000+ pages and several attempts both finished and unfinished before I felt like I could actually be a good judge of my own work and what would be successful.

I think the trick is to just not post everything all the time. And this is definitely something I goofed early on. I also just personally don’t enjoy the idea of committing to a single idea for 3+ years so most of my work is self-contained graphic novels with very flexible formats. Maybe one day I’ll have some grand long running project but I currently am not there yet. I haven’t had the right idea come along and I’m okay with that. I like coming up with new ideas and that feeling early in the process when it feels like the floodgates are opening. I’d like to feel that as often as possible.

[vapidink]

Guess I'm messy, but that's not shocking anyone, lol. I have two ongoing series, three if you count both sites I'm in, and I'm currently also working on a trilogy I'll be posting soon. My updating schedule has fallen apart, but I have no plans on abandoning any of my works. The reason I have so much going on is that, I also have a lot going on in my life, and I had opportunities in my creative work that kind of made me put some things on hold.

Mostly though, I write what I feel like writing. As long as I'm not getting paid, I really have no obligation to use up all my free time to create content. My audience understands and respects that, and I know I'm very fortunate for that, but they also know that I will finish what I start, so I've already established trust with my past work. So I get to write whatever I want, people who like my stories get to read a variety of content, and there's very little stress involved.

[TheLemmaLlama]

I'm very 'judge the story, not the creator'; I literally don't give a crap about your history if you currently have a good archive for me to go through. If a comic is being updated very inconsistently, I'll just let it sit in my sub list and maybe check back on it in a few years if it stuck in my mind well enough for me to still be interested in it

Relatedly, I find it kind of sad that people seem to feel the need to justify their breaks, like 'hey I have to take a break because I have X, Y, Z going on in my life, I'm really sorry!! T_T' -- like I don't give a crap how much or little you have going on in your life, if you 'have' to take the break or just want to; you have every right to do it anyway

Inconsistent uploads between chapters is OK. But in the middle of a chapter, well it can break up the flow of the story.

As a binger, I personally feel that waiting a week (or even a day) for a new episode already breaks the flow for me lmao The only way a creator could minimize this for me is to have good cut-off points for each episode, but the actual upload consistency is very irrelevant XD

I am saying this as someone who tried to write comics as a teenager but went straight into drawing them and noticed that after 4 pages, I would just drop the series. I noticed when I took time to preplan, I no longer struggled with this. I have had several series that I ended up scraping because they just didn’t work. Maybe they were interesting ideas but I guess I didn’t have enough there to make something worth spending time to draw out.

Huge same XD I'm glad I made those abandoned 4 page comic though; I really wouldn't have internalized people talking about the importance of planning until I tried it out myself and would've probably just ended up never starting ^^;

If a series is to be put on hiatus, make a post that it is going on hiatus.

I feel like this is only important if you've told your readers you're going to be updating at a specific pace and set that expectation to begin with, in which case yes, tell your readers when you can't meet that expectation for a while. But if you've been upfront from the get-go that you're going to be very flaky and not to expect consistent uploads, I wouldn't get mad at someone for going a year without updates or hiatus notices; the concept of 'hiatus' probably doesn't even mean anything wrt their work

If a series is going to be dropped and never picked up on again, the best thing to do is to delete it from Tapas. That way you don't get people discovering the story and starting to read it only to come to a dead end. If it's not deleted, at the very least the first episode should be edited to clearly let the readers know that the series is incomplete, abandoned, and will not be finished.

I prefer the latter to the former; I see absolutely no reason to delete a work when you can just tell people it's abandoned

If it is a long series and has plenty of followers and it's dropped, do your readers a favour and post a summary of how the series would have ended if you hadn't dropped it.

Liking your post anyway just because of this Please do this! :'D

If I stuck with any of my first five or ten comics and continued any of them for years and years I would simply not have a career.

Not intending to build a career myself, but I still thank the flying spaghetti monster every day that I did not stick to my very first comics :'D