A Delicious Webcomics Subplot

Since I made the serious commitment to make my webcomic, I have been spending a lot of time writing the story. It hurts because I want to spend that time drawing the ACTUAL webcomic. But I know, in my previous attempts, I would just start the drawing the story and immediately write/draw myself into a corner, get frustrated, and start over wasting all that energy. After many many attempts, my fiancee and I came to the conclusion that I was very good at starting a project and very bad at finishing it. I realize now, as a hard lesson learned, that it is a very important part of successfully creating a story especially one that communicates to the reader more than "what you see is what you get".

Sure, I took all sorts of English classes, and creative writing classes in high school and college imparting on me an ostensible awareness of writings tools; plots, subplots, subtext and metaphors, both conceptual and physical. The problem with this was that I could articulate but not truly speak. My stories became stories only enjoyable to me. But, recently the more time I commit to this writing stage the more I find that I understand this mistake. My grasp of this, is letting me impart little parts of the story's world like little hidden flavors. I love the idea of applying this concept to my webcomic.

The reality is that the webcomics which update a page at a time, especially dramatic/scifi/action get so little space to give to the reader something they can take away from that single page satisfied ( Webcomics such as Penny-Arcade and PVP have the luxury because they just need a good joke and a well executed punchline ). I think that adding this type of texture to a long form/graphic novel type webcomic can really make it more valuable longer lasting experience for the reader.

"Generally I was reading the most poppy, soapy, long-running superhero stuff you could get," he says. "Clairmont's X-Men, especially, because he was shameless in terms of throwing in any tiny little subplot he could wedge into the main storyline. And, honestly, the people in pop culture who are most like those that read the X-Men are those who watch Days of Our Lives, because the two have so much in common in the sense that everybody's connected to somebody else. It would reward you for being a constant reader with little asides and very complicated overarching storylines and then your reward for paying attention to the whole, extended soap opera was a giddy sort of excitement on the part of the reader when they made one of those connections."

-Jason Henderson
quote from The Austin Chronicle online article 'Overnight Sensation' by Marc Savlov

This insight, in turn, may create more readers than pageviews for the webcomic. That in my opinion is the food of webcomic creators, for profit or fun ;)