Just a quick post for this week.
Tree Sprocket, by Al Nennig, is one of my favorite comics. But, it needs to update its newspost more often. While the comic itself always updates on time, the newsposts have been considerably neglected as of late. Although his most recent comic came with a newspost, it was only a sentence long; the last update before that was August 28th.
If you update the newspost as much as the comic, which Tree Sprocket used to do, people will come to expect the same consistency out of the newspost as well. Even if you make no claims of the newspost's importance or schedule, people begin an association similar to Pavlov's dogs. Eventually, to update the comic and not the newspost leaves readers feeling only half-satiated.
A newspost satisfies in ways a comic cannot- the two complement eachother. The comic provides a dose of abstract humor and the newspost grounds the reader back into reality by perhaps talking about where the comic idea came from (while not ruining the joke), or maybe pointing out a "happy-accident" that occurred during the comic-making process. Alternatively, the newspost might become something of an unofficial blog where the author offers a tiny morself of information about their personal life. Not so much information as a LiveJournal (god forbid) would present, but just enough to give the reader some sense of who it is that's making the comics; the author begins to sculpt a personality of their own outside of their comic.
It doesn't take much to update the newsposts with the comic. A simple blurb about the comic itself (while avoiding the temptation to explain the joke or point out how funny the punchline is), and/or a tidbit on the author themselves, answering questions such as: did they have a good weekend? What'd they do? Any cool songs they've heard recently? Movies? Anything. Just give us something.
Tree Sprocket, by Al Nennig, is one of my favorite comics. But, it needs to update its newspost more often. While the comic itself always updates on time, the newsposts have been considerably neglected as of late. Although his most recent comic came with a newspost, it was only a sentence long; the last update before that was August 28th.
If you update the newspost as much as the comic, which Tree Sprocket used to do, people will come to expect the same consistency out of the newspost as well. Even if you make no claims of the newspost's importance or schedule, people begin an association similar to Pavlov's dogs. Eventually, to update the comic and not the newspost leaves readers feeling only half-satiated.
A newspost satisfies in ways a comic cannot- the two complement eachother. The comic provides a dose of abstract humor and the newspost grounds the reader back into reality by perhaps talking about where the comic idea came from (while not ruining the joke), or maybe pointing out a "happy-accident" that occurred during the comic-making process. Alternatively, the newspost might become something of an unofficial blog where the author offers a tiny morself of information about their personal life. Not so much information as a LiveJournal (god forbid) would present, but just enough to give the reader some sense of who it is that's making the comics; the author begins to sculpt a personality of their own outside of their comic.
It doesn't take much to update the newsposts with the comic. A simple blurb about the comic itself (while avoiding the temptation to explain the joke or point out how funny the punchline is), and/or a tidbit on the author themselves, answering questions such as: did they have a good weekend? What'd they do? Any cool songs they've heard recently? Movies? Anything. Just give us something.
posted by chrisp at 10:13 AM
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