I found a pretty good article about this new thing called memeology, which I am told is much less psuedo-science than memetics. Check it out, via The Living Comic
I’ve been thinking a bit about meme propagation in terms of webcomics. Specifically, I’ve found myself wondering about how people find them.
I’m not talking here about discovering the world of webcomics in the first place, but just finding one webcomic from another. What gets people clicking from site to site, and which methods work best to keep them there?
The obvious answer, of course, is that it’s the internet, stupid. There hardly exists a webcomic out there that doesn’t have a sizeable list of links to other comics the artist likes. And there’s advertising all over the place, and webcomic collectives with newsboxes and more little 88×30 link buttons than you can shake a whole forest full of sticks at.
The thing is, though — and here I’m speaking purely from my personal experience — that stuff doesn’t work so well in the long run. There’s just too much of it, for one thing, and nothing in particular to distinguish one comic from another. Sometimes, if I’m really bored, or I have a particularly large amount of work to do, I’ll start clicking on banners and buttons at random, but I generally give those a bye.
What works, unsurprisingly, are the “advertisements” embedded in the archives themselves: crossovers and guest strips.
Over time, these have probably accounted for between a third and a half of all my new discoveries. At the very beginning, when I discovered webcomics for the first time, the number was closer to 75% or higher. I can still trace the route I took, from Alice! to Clan of the Cats to College Roomies from Hell!!! to Fans! to It’s Walky! and onwards.
(Huh… I never noticed before, but those titles could explain a lot about why I became so excited about webcomics, you know?)
Crossovers, obviously, are powerful. They get you reading the strip you don’t know for a full week (or however long), and imbue that time with the residual positive feeling you have for the strip you’re familiar with. There’s little better one could ask for.
Guest strips are a trickier proposition in this context, though. On the plus side, you get your work seen by your host’s entire audience. On the downside though, where a crossover begins with a residual positive atmosphere, the initial reaction to a guest strip is much more hostile. Rather than a familiar, liked universe bumping into an unknown, this is somebody reaching in and fiddling with the universe you already enjoy.
In case you can’t tell, I don’t like guest strips very much. The ones I enjoy tend to be from other artists I already know and read, especially those with particularly distinctive art styles. So on the whole, guest strips don’t get my clickthrough.
I’ll tell you what does, though: guest art
(Click thumbnail for full strip)I finally, finally caught up with the past few months of Rob Balder’s Partially Clips yesterday. Going backwards through the archives (with commentary turned on, natch!), I came across this strip, and noticed that the art seemed particularly detailed for clipart. Turns out it was drawn especially for PC by Eric Nault, who draws a strip called Hellbound.
Which I immediately went to and devoured the complete archives of, enjoying myself greatly the whole time.
And then I thought back to the guest comics from The Last Days of FOXHOUND, and I remembered that the one that I enjoyed the most was the one which just redrew strip #100 with new artwork.
And all I can think is that this is an astoundingly untapped resource of webcomic cross-promotion.
I mean, think about it. You’ve got the same person writing it, so the characters are the exact same ones you like and are used to — no weird alternate interpretations of their personalities. The jokes, if that’s what you’re there for, are guaranteed to be of the exact same caliber as always. The strip would look different, but it’s much cooler to have alternate art than alternate scripting. For the majority of strips, the attraction is fundamentally in the writing and storytelling, and if you keep that consistent then you can play around with all kinds of other stuff without setting off warning bells in your readers’ minds.
I think it could work, and I think it would be pretty damn cool.
Of course, I’m just a critic, and I’ve never written or drawn a comic myself. Would any creators like to chime in?
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