Cartooning - Looking For Improvement

Sometimes you can come up with a good idea, you've drawn it to your best ability, but it just doesn't look right. It might be that there's a problem with the logic, or the scale, or just something that goes against our pre-concieved ideas about how something should work.

Often we don't find out about them until it's too late.

What's Not Right!

The car on the left is the original drawing which was meant to demonstrate my pointless invention, the pizza wheel. The more I looked at it, the more it just looked wrong, and it doesn't take a genious to realise this italian bread based food couldn't possible hold a car up like that.

The Original Image

The Corrected Image

The corrected image not only looks more convincing, but it drives home (excuse the pun) the idea that using a pizza for a wheel is stupid.

Scale Issues

Sometimes you can put images together that bind with some people because they have a very fixed idea in their head of relative size. I have a few examples of this.

Example 1
This image was copied from a picture I found on a google image search and I wanted to replace their giant robot head with that of my comic hero, Bender. Then I threw in a load of other sci-fi elements in amongst the junk, plus an old washing machine (just because).

Bender's Head Problem

Now, the Death Star wasn't a problem, because the mind can reason that it's far away. But a giant Bender's head started to raise questions as to how big my little green men are. To be honest, I hadn't given it much thought, it was just a tribute. It could have easily been fixed by adding "Oversized parts, our speciality" to the sign.

Example 2
The next example was posted on Reddit. I hadn't really given relative sizes much thought, and my ignorance got the better of me. (And boy do those guys let you know when something's wrong!)

Can You Spot It?

 Okay, here's the second from to Starwars - A False Hope. I just needed to make the scene look congested, so I threw in as many vehicles as I could find. (some I'd already drawn in previous cartoons). Can you spot which one is wrong?

Well I drew one of these Juggernaut Carriers from the Clone Wars, but my reference image had no figures for scale, so it's way too small. Easy mistake to make, but the ubber geeks are very defensive about their canon.

That little mistake gained enough down-votes so that the comic was essentially buried!

So What's The Answer

1. Consider your audience, are they picky?
2. Know/understand what you are drawing.
3. If you break the rules, have a reason or explaination.
4. Review your unfinished work with a friend.
5. Ask yourself the question "is there anything wrong here?"

Posting Your Comics on Reddit (Part 2)

Introduction

In my last blog I talked about the pros and cons (mostly the cons) when using Reddit to promote your comics. But I also wanted to pass on some of my musings about the reason that one of my comics performed so well.

Let’s start off by looking at my submissions:-

Date	Comic	Score	Views	Comments
16th Oct 2017	Mr Tea	2 (75% upvoted)	66	0
16th Oct 2017	Turning in your Grave	2 (100% upvoted)	89	0
16th Oct 2017	Young Love	4 (75% upvoted)	200	0
16th Oct 2017	Cooking the Books	3 (81% upvoted)	125	0
16th Oct 2017	Science Aphorism	2 (63% upvoted)	74	0
17th Oct 2017	Classic Jokes Revisited	3 (100% upvoted)	210	0
18th Oct 2017	The Gas is Greener	167 (90% upvoted)	3400	2
19th Oct 2017	Iwo Jima	98 (81% upvoted)	2700	4
20th Oct 2017	Halloween - Squash Mosh	20 (75% upvoted)	301	0
22nd Oct 2017	Sauce of Genius	6113 (85% upvoted)	57.2k	290

What does this tell me?

• If you look at the score, it shows that you nearly always get down-votes. The percentages look small, but when you start looking at Sauce of Genius, that’s a thousand people expressing their dislike. It reduced my score by a thousand, which impacts how easily it goes into (and stays on) the ‘hot’ page.
• Comments tend to track Score, it’s not until you get a cartoon on the ‘Rising’ or ‘Hot’ page that you attract the attention of those that feel the need to tell you something.

So, why did “Sauce of Genius” do so well?

The Sauce of Genius

That’s a great question, because I didn’t think it was better than say “The Gas is Greener”. It’s not a bad comic idea, it's drawn quite well and has the following attributes:-

• It’s relatable, everyone likes sauce.

This generated most of the positive comments, people talking about their favourites and what foods it's good for. Some even talked about alternatives they didn't like.

• I had altered the label of HP Sauce to read “Brown”. 

Loads of people needed to tell me it was actually called HP, completely missing the point of the joke. In the UK it's all known as brown sauce, I just chose that one because it was so recognisable. This also generates conversations about the UK and how HP was no longer available in the USA.

• Some of the statements are not true.

OK, here's where people started to really take issues. I took a lot of flak for Buffalo really being named after the place, and even my statement about Tabasco (which was true) was generally rubbished. Way to ruin a joke guys!!
Some asked if my intention was to be as inaccurate as possible, while others were amused that so many were getting hung-up on these details. (It certainly made me laugh)
Others started to get creative and came up with their own fake-sauce-facts. (very funny)
But generally I'm a bad person for doing zero research!

• One of the pictures appears to portray Thousand Island as a tropical island.

This one probably caused the most friction. Yes, it’s really up by New York, but I never said it wasn't. People seemed to be genuinely insulted by this one. It also generated a lot of discussion about New York and what Thousand Islands is really like.

Lessons Learnt

Although unintended, this comic was a little controversial. At first I was a bit embarrassed that people were finding obvious holes, but it soon started to feel like a joke on the readers when so many were taking it so seriously. It's one way to generate interest, but I imagine it could easily backfire if enough people down-vote it as soon as you post it. You also need thick skin and should resist the temptation to defend yourself.

That aside, I think mainly people could easily relate to it and understood the joke.

Something I'm still uncertain of is whether post images directly into Reddit is better than linking to a comic site.

Mixed Blessings - Promoting Your Comics on Reddit

Moving to A Bigger Audience

Trying to grow your comic audience is a big challenge to most cartoonists, you can create the greatest material in the world, but if nobody sees it then you might as well not bother. Most artists find one or two comic hosting sites to post to, and find they can easily get some followers and readers from amongst their peers. But you always want more, which generally means promoting your work elsewhere.

I’ve experimented with a few such as Ello and Tumblr, but by far the biggest impact I’ve had so far is with Reddit. The first day I posted five old comics and pushed my site page hits to just short of a thousand, but it’s not without its problems.

Posting Cartoons To Reddit

My teenage son was surprised when I told him I’d started posting cartoons to Reddit, like he knew something that I didn’t. I could tell something wasn’t quite right because of all the Reddit user advisory notes down the right hand panel on the /r/comics sub-reddit page.

There's stuff about General Conduct, What's OK to Post, What's NOT OK to Post, and some tips for artists. There's similar in most of the other sub-reddits, so you get the impression there's been abuse of the system in the past.

The Bad

It's best to think of /r/comics like a toxic tank full of piranhas, but if you decide to risk it you can get incredible levels of page views. In my experience they’ll either swarm all over you or ignore you completely. (mostly the latter) This week however, I did have a cartoon that went surprisingly well. It was a bitter-sweet moment, and probably something I'll cover in another blog.

Let's just say I learnt a few things.

Comments

Let's for a moment consider reader's comments on Reddit,...

• Don’t feed the trolls, try to take a back seat and don't get drawn in.
• Some may be pedantic or picky about certain details in your work.
• Some have a Asperger's level compulsion to correct anything they consider incorrect.
• Any sort of self promotion, including posting a link to your site may be voted down, possibly with a few snotty comments.

Down Voting

If you've not seen Reddit before, you should be aware that user posts are up or down voted by the readers. Up-voting makes your cartoon more visible and down-voting has the opposite effect. So you may find that a perfectly good cartoon (one that’s been received OK elsewhere) immediately gets a few "down-votes" and ultimately bombs. This can be highly frustrating and may be an indication that your cartoon isn’t so well suited to this audience.

It’s well worth taking a look at the more successful cartoons, the crowd is “laddish” or in the US you’d call them “Bros”, so you might want to consider whether your cartoon is suitable.

Coping With The Swarm

Getting onto the ‘Hot’ page is not a simple matter and in my experience it involved a fair bit of luck. I found it helpful to consider every new submission to be an experiment and not get too attached to the process or the outcome. Your work is likely to fail here, but that doesn't mean it’s a bad comic. (keep that in mind at all times!)

Use the "[OC]" tag in the title and request “Artistic Flair” from the moderator. This generally involves putting a link back to your Reddit user page from your cartoon site (you can always remove it again afterwards). This highlights your posts with the name of your comic, but don’t expect this to grant you better treatment.

Most people don’t want to leave a comment, it’s just a fact of life, but some will be compelled to type these sorts of things:-

• Witty comments (some are quite funny).
• Corrections to your work that they feel would improve it.
• How your work relates to them directly.
• Reactions to other people’s idiot comments.
• Thoughtful side discussion topics.
• General scorn.

(It's a real mixed bag with a fair amount of negative stuff there.)

My son advised me to never reply or react to any comments. This seems very alien when elsewhere it’s encouraged, but based on my own interactions on Reddit I’m inclined to agree with him. Some comments may question you directly, but it’s best to sit back and see if somebody will answer on your behalf.

Here’s one of the comments I received when I tried to defend my posting of the comic site url..

OnlySaysHaas “You make some whiney-arse comment in every one of your comic submissions about people not having a sense of humour, or being downvoted. Grow up and take your criticism.“

Okay, you can block users who give you a hard time, but it’s best to stay out of it and let the chimps play.

(Go to part 2)