Freewheel – the webcomic!
Saturday, November 21st, 2009Hey everybody, Freewheel is a webcomic now! It updates Tuesdays and Thursdays so you should totally head over to freewheelcomics.com and bookmark the crap out of it, or add it to your mother-lovin’ RSS feed! You can use this handy banner to advertise Freewheel on your own blog:
You may be wondering why I decided to re-launch Freewheel as a webcomic after coming out with three issues of it already as a minicomic. Well, to answer that question, I’ll just copy and paste what I wrote to someone on an internet forum who posed that very question:
Having done a ten-issue minicomic series in the past (My Brain Hurts) I was already well acquainted with the problems associated with doing a long form story in minicomic form. Mainly, here are the things that fuck me over about long form stories in mini form (which I was starting to remember by the third issue, thus the switch):
-ALL the issues have to be in print ALL the time, because it’s an ongoing story.
-Every time a new issue comes out, I have to reprint the previous issues that I’m low on or out of
-Freewheel is gonna be a really REALLY long series. Way longer than My Brain Hurts. Possibly twice as long, possibly neverending.
-it costs a lot of money to print all these minicomics
-it takes a ridiculous amount of time to create the actual comics (silkscreen, sticker, stamp) when you remember that I have to reprint all the previous issues every time a new one comes out
-you know what I’d rather be doing than spending a week putting comics together every few months and dropping hundreds of dollars in the process? I’D RATHER BE DRAWING COMICS.
-my original plan was to try to get a book deal for Freewheel, but there are a few problems with that. I’d probably have to stop doing the minis if that happened, and I’d probably have to disappear into my studio for YEARS not coming out with anything new in the meantime. With webcomics, I can keep a constant presence and come out with books at my leisure (not to mention through the magic of self-publishing, I can keep more of the profits from the books and other merchandise, instead of relying on what could easily be a one-time bulk advance from a publisher, and that’s if I’m lucky.)
-with minicomics, I had a limited amount of actual comics I could get into people’s hands, with limited ways to do so (mostly cons). With webcomics, ANYONE can read them, anywhere, anytime. There’s no limit to how many people can read it!
-with webcomics, it will never be an issue if I want to make one chapter really short or really long. With minicomics, every chapter has to be long enough to justify charging four dollars for it, and short enough that I can finish it on time for whatever convention.
-Speaking of conventions, here’s the other thing: I am TIRED of having my comic-making schedule tied to the convention season. I always end up not doing as good a job as I otherwise could on a few pages in the interest of getting the comic out “for the con.” I would rather work at my own pace and do an amazing job on EVERY SINGLE PAGE!
-I’m still gonna do minicomics, I’m just going to do one-shots though. No more long minicomic series! Only one-shots that can go out of print without it being a big deal.
