However, the work of professional teams is also never going to be on the same level of originality and creativity that an independent creator’s is going to be.
There is absolutely a problem between looking at the work of tens of hundreds of people, working full time on said work, and expecting the work of a small time creator to be able to be at that same level of quality. The thing with webcomics is that… The most memorable ones are the ones made by independant creators. Since this is relevant to this blog (…in a way, shhh), I wanted to add something to this. A platform for anyone to join with an easy access, not a highly guarded spaces where the famous VIP people can enter only. That’s not what zines are supposed to be! That’s not what they were! They were a platform to publish fan content, ANY fan content, and they should stay like that. When it comes to zines, I’m pretty horrified seeing the current zine culture resembling professional art books with skill limitations. You simply can’t fight capitalist corporations or demand same quality from single people as you’d expect from a team of (well-rested) professionals doing a job they’ve been trained and hired into.
It’s their day job! The hobbyist artists do their comics ON THEIR FREE TIME after they have come back from work or school. Oh yeah, another thing these big corporation people doing these comics and all work related to them DO IT FOR THEIR LIVING. It is like putting face to face a professional basket ball NBA team versus one hobbyist basketball player, and then the audience is upset when the hobbyist can’t keep up the phase of these professionals because hey, it is just a comic! Just draw it? Can’t be that hard? How can a one, single person, fight and stand against a team of tens of people, professionals in their field, with big bucks behind them to support for example online visibility by targeted ad campaigns and social media posts? This doesn’t include supervisors, either. Notice that I didn’t even include yet the script writers, who will be a team of their own, consisting multiple people brainstorming together. Again someone keeps eyes on the analytics of the social media posts - possibly the 9th person (aka yet another team). A graphic designer, the 7th person, will then create these ad campaign images, while a social media content manager - the 8th person - posts them online, creating also engaging social media content like competitions or promotions.
Then someone else, 4th person that is, posts the comics online - and trust me, big corporations have multiple people handling their online pages, even if it was just one online page - while 5th person (aka a team) keeps eyes on analytics and sees how to promote the comics better, while 6th person (aka a team) plans better marketing plans like promotions and ad campaigns. I wanted to add here what’s also different between professionally made comics VS home artists?Ī professional publisher will have multiple artists working on the same comic a sketcher, an inker, a colorist and a typesetter. Everything nowadays is an industry, and if you’re a single teenager who wants to write a webcomic, nothing is more intimidating than seeing the professional full colour long-form stories on these sites, the artists of which usually have assistants and full creative teams helping. It’s very good that webcomics are being taken more seriously as an art form now, but it feels like it’s becoming harder and harder for small-time artists to find places and projects to express themselves. You go on webtoon to see what other comics are on there, and you’re competing for views not only with other amateur series, but also with professional industry comic artists. If you’re a beginner artist who wants to publish a small-time webcomic, webtoon canvas is one of the biggest platforms. The official Batman webtoon is a perfect example of this. People complain if chapters are too short or if the story doesn’t progress in the way they like it, because ‘they’re paying for this’ and it kind of sucks. People who are used to reading professional webtoons expect full colour long-form chapters uploaded every week. Nowadays with the advent of the webtoon, the expectations for webcomics, which were once an amateur’s way to experiment with breaking into comics and telling stories, have MUCH higher expectations. Sure, a lot of stories got abandoned (which still happens) and a lot of it was not very good, but people didn’t really expect amazing things from webcomics they read for free. Websites like smackjeeves were cool because you could find basically anything on there.
Webcomics used to be a great platform for amateur artists because they were relatively unpolished, could update one page a week or a few pages a month, and people would be happy with it. This is a joke mostly, but I’ve been thinking about this since DC announced their collab with webtoon.