May 24th, 2006
MISFIT’S JOURNEY News
Criminy! I haven’t posted here in over a month! Here’s an update on what’s happening in this neck of the woods.
Things are going pretty well with me. I’ve been lurking around at various webcomic-related and comics-related sites quite a bit. I want to start participating a little more than I have been, so there may be more posts from me on sites like Fleen, The Webcomics Examiner, Comixpedia, and the Comics Journal Message Board in the days to come.
In addition to having a job and a life away from the web, I’ve been heavily preoccupied with the launch of MISFIT’S JOURNEY and I’m the process of working on the second episode. I’ve gotten over 4,000 visitors to the Episode One page on my WCN site so far, and a fair number of comments, donations, and emails too. I ended up getting a little overwhelmed by all the email too, but I finally managed to answer everything.
I used blog ads and Google AdWords ads to drive a lot of traffic over to the story. The most effective ad was the one I placed on Tom Tomorrow’s thismodernworld.com site. It resulted in some of the best emails and comments I received on the story.
I had been considering doing the second MJ story arc as a daily or weekly webcomic, but I’ve decided against that. Instead, I’m just going to post chapters running approximately 25 pages whenever I get them done. My experiences with the first episode lead me to conclude that I will still have a substantial readership if I release the chapters in this way. Maybe going daily or weekly would take the numbers up even higher, but I think the quality of the work would suffer if I tried to do that. I’m open to doing this in the future, of course, but I just don’t think it’s the right call at this time. (I’ll see how things go with the second big story and take things from there.)
I’m still finalizing some of the details, but it looks like the next story will be 4-6 25 page chapters. I’ll release each chapter as I get it done, but I’m going to try to avoid extra long delays. The story I’m planning focusses on my year in graduate school and the various forces that derailed me. It has some long flashbacks to my youth in southern Minnesota and my Saint Olaf College education. It also has a “flashforward” to a period in Seattle when I’m fairly happy and have what I think I want.
While I’m proud of what I accomplished with the first story, I’m not completely happy with the 3d art and want to impliment some improvements for the second story. I want my Poser characters to have a wider variety of body types. I want more variation in how clothes fit the characters and I want to do a better job with clothing folds and wrinkles.
I’ll be posting links to more of my Poser art here in the days and weeks to come.
Comments and questions are always welcome!
August 22nd, 2006 at 1:51 am
Hi Ben – I think you’re better off releasing chapters as they are done. Your work is awesome, and I agree with you that quality takes priority over quantity…
I look forward to more updates!
All the best,
John
August 22nd, 2006 at 4:33 am
Thanks!