#you should also read the webcomic

[paintpencilink]

@bludragongal I'm just a rando tagging you, but this reminds me of Thistle 🥺

THE GOBLIN

A short comic about a mysterious creature living with the monks of a secluded abbey.

I made this comic five years ago, and it's still probably one of the most personal things I've written.

If you'd like to support more of my comics, consider preordering my new graphic novel, THE PALE QUEEN, wherever you get books.

[v0id-of-thought]

But do the people know that the story lead/codirector who dropped the gay Luca art was writing banger Haikyuu fanfiction in 2020?

[ohitslen]

My favorite pieces of media are Trigun, Monster, Princess Tutu, Strangers From Hell, Link Click, Beyond Evil, the webtoon Guardians of the Videogame and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint

It’s a very elaborated way of saying I choose to make myself depressed and being gay is also a choice

[dippityart]

geekfest 2024

[theintelligentfool]

here are some really fantastic pieces of art i commissioned from my friend hal (who is, by the way, the author/illustrator of a truly fantastic webcomic i am so excited to see develop) about two years ago, the latter of which has been my profile picture ever since! both of these pieces show his fucking endless talent for facial expressions, shading, and using very tasty colors. i especially like the clothing and fabric in the first piece and the poses + lighting in the second.... genuinely if u want to see ur ocs or sonas or anything rendered with actual love in every line u should commission my friend hal!!! im not just saying that bc we're besties im saying it because i mean it!!!

[chucktaylorupset]

okay so imagine madoka fed kyuubey so many treats that instead of being evil the creature decided to rescue madoka from a militant misogynistic cult, incidentally turning into a kaiju to break her out of the base, and so kyuubey -- who now looks like godzilla -- holds madoka in the palm of her hand and madoka looks into godzillas eyes and goes "kitty?"

thats the new update of tiger tiger

[savingthedeadwebcomic]

Do you miss the owl house?

Do you want a show with a similar vibe but for a slightly more mature audience and IN SPAAAACE????

I got you! But it isn’t exactly a show…

I have an ongoing webcomic called saving the dead which is about the alien daughter of an evil ruler of planet Cora 6. A planet which was at war with earth for a while, Their dad eventually destroys earth entirely but eventually lux finds out that all of the humans who now lived there are now ghosts!

Plot ensues

Not to mention there’s also lgbtq and neurodivergent rep all coming from my personal experience as a queer autistic person!

Hope this inspired you to read it! You can read it on this tumblr blog, Instagram and webtoon I’m pretty young and this is my first time doing such a big project like this.. hope you’ll enjoy!

[videcoeur]

Now the only thing left to revive the homestuck fandom would be either a Netflix live action or an animated version.

I'm still waiting, hollywood, it's been 15 years. Get on it already.

[dykeza]

Finally sat my white ass down and read hs2 (I left off at Sollux being reintroduced for a four years in the making joke) . So like. God I love Homestuck?

[senholiday]

Skyvein is a sci-fi/fantasy webcomic about a band of magical misfits fighting back against an authoritarian regime to reclaim their magic and salvage what’s left of their broken world, and features a cast of qtpoc.

Skyvein is free and can be read on it’s home site, Tapas, or Webtoons!

You can also follow me on my 💜Instagram💜 (mostly for tattoo updates, but occasionally other things).

You can support me and get bonus material on my💖Ko-fi💖! i release things there for everyone sometimes, so even if you just follow me on there, you’ll get tidbits here and there~

Emi’s such a troll.

Thanks to @acesincomics for the comic share, and Happy International Asexuality Day!

[humanmorph]

having thoughts about webcomics tonight. like ooohh my god i love webcomics

[hieronymus-botch]

Recently finished Amphibia and thought “Man, it kinda sucked how in the end all of the amphibians felt like they were just there to facilitate the Calamity Trio’s character development. Hey, what if I flipped the script and wrote an isekai-type story where the fish out of water ordinary human is there to facilitate the character development of the various weird alien fantasy denizens?” and then realized that I was describing Undertale

[supatroopa]

Read Clown Corps btw

[genericpuff]

Tbh at this point you should just make your own webcomic app/website because it would probably be 100 times better than whatever going on with webtoon right now.

hahaha it wouldn't tho, sorry 💀

Here's the fundamental issue with webcomic platforms that a lot of people just don't realize (and why they're so difficult to run successfully):

Storage costs are incredibly expensive, it's why so many sites have limitations on file sizes / page sizes / etc. because all of those images and site info have to be stored somewhere, which costs $$$.

Maintenance costs are expensive and get more so as you grow, you need people who are capable of fixing bugs ASAP and managing the servers and site itself

Financially speaking, webcomics are in a state of high supply, low demand. Loads of artists are willing to create their passion projects, but getting people to read them and pay for them is a whole other issue. Demand is high in the general sense that once people get attached to a webtoon they'll demand more, but many people aren't actually willing to go looking for new stuff to read and depend more on what sites feed them (and what they already like). There are a lot of comics to go around and thus a lot of competition with a limited audience of people willing to actually pay for them.

Trying to build a new platform from the ground up is incredibly difficult and a majority of sites fail within their first year. Not only do you have to convince artists to take a chance on your platform, you have to convince readers to come. Readers won't come if there isn't work on the platform to read, but artists won't come if they don't think the site will be worth it due to low traffic numbers. This is why the artists with large followings who are willing to take chances on the smaller sites are crucial, but that's only if you can convince them to use the site in favor of (or alongside) whatever platform they're using already where the majority of their audience lies. For many creators it's just not worth the time, energy, or risk.

Even if you find short-term success, in the long-term there are always going to be profit margins to maintain. The more users you pull in, the more storage is used by incoming artists, the more you have to spend on storage and server maintenance costs, and that means either taking the risk at crowdfunding (ex. ComicFury) or having to resort to outsider investments (ex. Tapas). Look at SmackJeeves, it used to be a titan in the independent webcomic hosting community, until it folded over to a buyout by NHN and then was pretty much immediately shuttered due to NHN basically turning it into a manwha scanlation site and driving away its entire userbase. And if you don't get bought out and try your hand at crowdfunding, you may just wind up living on a lifeline that could cut out at any moment, like what happened to Inkblazers (fun fact, the death of Inkblazers was what kicked off the cultural shift in Tapas around 2015-16 when all of IB's users migrated over and brought their work with them which was more aimed towards the BL and romancee drama community, rather than the comedy / gag-a-day culture that Tapas had made itself known for... now you deadass can't tell Tapas apart from a lot of scanlation sites because it got bought out by Kakao and kept putting all of its eggs into the isekai/romance drama basket.)

Right now the mindset in which artists and readers are operating is that they're trying way, way too hard to find a "one size fits all" site. Readers want a place where they can find all their favorite webtoons without much effort, artists wants a place where they can post to an audience of thousands, and both sides want a community that will feel tight-knit. But the reality is that you can't really have all three of those things, not on one site. Something always winds up having to be sacrificed - if a site grows big enough, it'll have to start seeking more funding while also cutting costs which will result in features becoming paywall'd, intrusive ads, creators losing their freedom, and/or outsider support which often results in the platform losing its core identity and alienating its tight-knit community.

If I had to describe what I'm talking about in a "pick one" graphic, it would look something like this:

(*note: this is mostly based on my own observations from using all of these sites at some point or another, they're not necessarily entirely accurate to the statistical performance of each site, I can only glean so much from experience and traffic trackers LMAO that said I did ask some comic pals for input and they were very helpful in helping me adjust it with their own takes <3).

The homogenization of the Internet has really whipped people into submission for the "big sites" that offer "everything", but that's never been the Internet, it relies on being multi-faceted and offering different spaces for different purposes. And we're seeing that ideology falter through the enshittification of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. where users are at odds with the platforms because the platforms are gutting features in an attempt to satisfy shareholders whom without the platforms would not exist. Like, most of us aren't paying money to use social media sites / comic platform sites, so where else are they gonna make the necessary funds to keep these sites running? Selling ad space and locking features behind paywalls.

And this is especially true for a lot of budding sites that don't have the audience to support them via crowdfunding but also don't have the leverage to ask for investments - so unless they get really REALLY lucky in EITHER of those departments, they're gonna be operating at a loss, and even once they do achieve either of those things there are gonna be issues in the site's longevity, whether it be dying from lack of growing crowdfunding support or dying from shareholder meddling.

So what can we do?

We can learn how to take our independence back. We don't have to stop using these big platforms altogether as they do have things to offer in their own way, particularly their large audience sizes and dipping into other demographics that might not be reachable from certain sites - but we gotta learn that no single site is going to satisfy every wish we have and we have to be willing to learn the skills necessary to running our own spaces again. Pick up HTML/CSS, get to know other people who know HTML/CSS if you can't grasp it (it's me, I can't grasp it LOL), be willing to take a chance on those "smaller sites" and don't write them off entirely as spaces that can be beneficial to you just because they don't have large numbers or because they don't offer rewards programs. And if you have a really polished piece of work in your hands, look into agencies and publishing houses that specialize in indie comics / graphic novels, don't settle for the first Originals contract that gets sent your way.

For the last decade corporations have been convincing us that our worth is tied to the eyes we can bring to them. Instead of serving ourselves, we've begun serving the big guys, insisting that it has to be worth something eventually and that it'll "payoff" simply by the virtue of gambler's fallacy. Ask yourself what site is right for you and your work rather than asking yourself if your work is good enough for them. Most of us are broke trying to make it work on these sites anyways, may as well be broke and fulfilled by posting in places that actually suit us and our work if we can. Don't define your success by what sites like Webtoons are enforcing - that definition only benefits them, not you.

[shizamura]

I think you should read webcomics but I also think you should challenge yourself about it, go find that odd creation that's out there because one horny lady once thought it was cool or a dude was giving his first shot at a story and it came all wrong or they tried to do it traditional and their only medium was pencil and printer paper. Maybe if you like reading romance on webtoons you can go look at comic fury and see someone's nightmare of a comic or maybe you like sci-fi and there's someone on tapas drawing the sexiest priest ever who will finally not bore you. Maybe all you've read are Hiveworks webcomics when The Duck comics are right there and maybe that comic that's using only 3D assets that turned you off at first really has the most compelling writing you'll see this year. It's easy to say "read more webcomics" and give you the same three suggestions or collectives over and over. The net is vast and infinite and so is the array of human creation.

Maybe start with a random one. And then keep jumping

[lordterronus]

This description feels very VR-LA coded.

the duality of erin, simultaneously mightier than the gods and Just A Little Guy