Standing Out

You don’t get ahead by being lost in the crowd, as some business person or lifestyle coach has inevitably said at some time. It’s as true in the vacuous world of “lifestyle gurus” as it is in comics.

At the time of writing there are so many comics out there that you could not possibly count them all, never mind read them all. Your comic is going to be one of many in the genre and even in the artistic style you have chosen. If you want to be noticed, you have to do something different.

There is a lot of luck involved in getting your comic noticed and making it a success but luck is not something you just have to wait for. The phrase “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it” is attributed to many people, from US President Thomas Jefferson to professional golfer Gary Player but regardless of who said it first, it remains true. It’s a little like playing the lottery: there may be luck involved in picking the right numbers on your ticket but the more you work at it, the more tickets you have.

Standing out from the crowd is one of the best ways of making your tickets more lucky. There are many people who would say the best way to make a webcomic a success was to start before 1997 and that really comes down to the fact that back then there were fewer comics, so it was easier to get noticed in the huddle. Since we don’t all have time machines (and those that do are keeping them secret), we’ll have to forego starting before 1997 and instead work on being different to the other comics in our field.

What makes your comic different from every other comic in your genre? If you don’t know, it’s time to take a long, hard look at your comic. There has to be something you’re doing differently, or what’s the point? Maybe you’re doing a gamer comic but all your characters are fruit. Maybe you’re doing a supernatural comic where everyone thinks your main character is a vampire detective but actually they’re a human suffering from erythropoietic porphyrias (which no doubt causes all kinds of problems when real vampires come knocking).

If so, your comic stands out. Now it’s time to make the most of this difference.

It’s not enough to have your comic’s quirks as background detail. Your fruit gamers need to be fruits who game, rather than gamers who happen to look like a low-brow pineapple, an elitist grapefruit and a wisecracking pomegranate in an on-again, off-again relationship with one of the others (probably the pineapple, if most gamer comics are to be believed). Make fruit-based jokes. Create situations that are only dangerous to fruit, to increase the tension and provoke drama. Do comics and stories that no other comic could do because their characters are not game-playing fruit.

In short, make sure your comic delivers something other comics could not deliver in a million years.

I’ve taken some odd examples here but that was simply to make the point in an easy-to-spot manner. The differences in your comic may not be that extreme but they can still be enough to work with if you are willing to put in the time. Perhaps your comic is a slice-of-life comic produced in an impressionist style; be it hand-painted or digital art. If you do that well, you have a chance of being noticed by a different crowd to what would normally flock to a slice-of-life comic.

Similarly, if you normally produce a gag-a-day comic in the style of The Far Side (difference to other gag comics: high-brow but funny biology jokes and non-sequiturs) or xkcd (difference to other gag comics: high-brow but funny maths/computing/physics jokes), try throwing in references to farming, or making jokes that pigeon breeders will love. Expand your readership by being that genre’s comic which people who don’t normally read comics will read.

In short, the more you do to make your comic unique, the more chances it has of becoming a success. If you look at it from the point of view of the reader rather than the writer and really get to grips with what is different (or what could become different) about your comic, you can run with that to produce something that critics (and there will be many) can’t say just rips off Successful Comic X.

The further you get from the crowd, the bigger your chance of making it.

If you’re going to be drawing webcomics, one of the things you will almost inevitably have to do at some point is draw a person. Since we are surrounded by people (or images of people at the very least) every day, we have become very good at recognising when a drawing of a person does not look right. Learning to draw humans (or a passable facsimile of a human) is one of the entry-point skills you will need if you are going to be a success at making webcomics.

Before I go any further in this article I would like to take a second to state that what I suggest here is in addition to taking art classes. Some people have left comments, or e-mailed me (or even simply gone off and made jokes on forums) about how in a previous article I suggested copying other artists as a way of learning to draw.

The fact is I didn’t intend that to be the message for that article; which was about finding your style and identifying your weaknesses by comparing your work to that of other artists. Nothing beats getting a thorough grounding in art by taking a decent art course; and everything you read here should be taken on as an addition to that course.

Now, back to the discussion. Let’s put society aside and look at the human form from a purely aesthetic standpoint. Taking even the most average, slightly overweight people with the usual level of muscle development that comes with a Western lifestyle, it’s easy to spot a load of differences between the male and female form.

Height Differences

First of all, there’s the issue of height. Unless you’re looking at a particularly tall woman or short man, the average man will be an inch or two taller than the average woman. This is well worth remembering when laying out your comic pages. Unless your Western women are tall (or wearing heels, etc.), the top of their heads should be anywhere from around 3 to 6 inches lower than the top of their male counterpart’s head. This is based on average height data taken from the United Kingdom and United States, so feel free to adjust it to fit with wherever your characters come from.

It’s also worth noting that if your characters are travelling in time, this height difference will change. Western people are generally taller now than they were in the past (I’m not as well versed on the changes in other parts of the world but if you’re setting stories there, I’m going to assume you know a bit about those locales so feel free to leave comments on this) so when travelling backwards in time, it’s entirely possible for your characters to tower over their ancestors; or at least be a few inches taller. See all those centuries-old vampires on TV? How are they not short-arses compared to modern folk? Totally breaks the suspension of disbelief.

Differences in Limb Length?

When I was learning to draw people, one of the more commonly-held beliefs was that women had longer legs and shorter torsos than men, who were more equally proportioned above and below the waist. This is generally not true in life, as you can quickly tell from measuring a person or even looking at a photograph.

The illusion of difference comes from women usually having a more defined hip-to-waist definition, caused by the way fat is distributed on their bodies when compared to men; which has the effect of appearing to lower the waist height on a man. In truth, the average person’s legs constitutes about 60 percent of their height, regardless of whether they are male or female.

Heads, Shoulders and Hips

It has probably not escaped your attention that most men have wider shoulders than women; although this is, again, somewhat down to genetics. Going by averages again, a man’s shoulders will be around 1.5 times the width of his head, while a woman’s will be around the same width as her head.

Male heads are often slightly longer than female heads, too. In general, a male face will have a longer lower half in the form of a more elongated upper lip and jawline. Note also the higher likelihood of a squared jaw on men. This can be useful to know when your characters meet differently-gendered versions of themselves from other universes, for example.

Hand and Foot Proportions

Although it’s not a 100% accurate rule, a good guideline for properly-proportioned hands is that your hand can cover from your eyebrows to the bottom of your chin. It’s a useful defensive tool against anything that’s attacking your face, and it’s also a good way of measuring whether your character’s hands are the right size.

With regards to feet, there is no hard and fast rule. Although foot specialist websites are telling me the length of the average person’s foot is fifteen percent of their height, this is not a hard and fast rule. Foot size depends on both height and bone structure, with more heavily-built people usually having larger feet. Go with what looks right for your characters.

In summary, you can see from the constant references to averages and the fact that genetics plays a large part in a person’s overall shape, there are no hard and fast rules that you have to stick to. Use the information here as a guideline to getting an average person’s shape and then adjust it to your own needs.

The Importance of Backgrounds

What makes a staged photo so instantly recognisable compared to your average snapshot from a night out? What is a typical family holiday photograph composed of, where all the family are together, smiling in front of some sight they’ve been to see? What, in essence, is missing when you look at the generic “business” photographs that populate leaflets, brochures and websites the world over?

The answer is backgrounds.

Webcomics fall into two general categories: those who use backgrounds, and those that look bland. There is a small intermediate category of comics where backgrounds are simply unnecessary because they’ve managed to walk the fine line between comics and talking heads, but that is a very select group. If you’re in that camp, you’ll know it because you can safely ignore what I’m going to say here and it won’t affect your high page views. For the rest of us, it’s time to develop an eye for scenery.

Comics without backgrounds are simply comics where characters exist in a featureless void. If that’s the point of your comic (and there are some out there where that is definitely the point – see Blank It for an excellent example) then fine, go with it. If it’s not, make sure the reader knows that. There’s nothing worse than someone leaving a comment saying “Your comic is set on Space Station X-17? I thought it was set in the Arctic, during a blizzard!”

So how much detail do you need in a comic? Well the truth is, you don’t need an awful lot. The important thing is to give the reader a clear idea of where the comic is set, and what is going on around the characters. For action shots, you can leave out all but the most important features in the background; implying speed and concentrating the focus on the action itself. For other shots, give enough detail to show that the characters are in a busy café, or a deserted town, and so forth.

Or go up to eleven and paint in layer after layer of extra detail, bringing the world of your comic to life.

Taking a leaf out of 2000AD’s book once again, it’s fair to say that Judge Dredd has the intricate and wholly tangible world that it does because of a combination of excellent writing and excellent artwork. In the better-drawn Dredd strips, the artist will often put little jokes and other features in the background detail that refer back to previous storylines; or just serve to make the world seem more real

I can recall one episode where during a scene with Dredd arresting a criminal, two alien tourists (complete with hawaiian shirts and cameras around their necks) were stood watching him. They had nothing to do with the story, but they showed how the tourist industry in Mega-City 1 was starting to take off; harking back to a previous storyline about the need to improve the city’s economy before it totally collapsed. It’s these little details that make Mega-City 1 a major character in Judge Dredd in and of itself.

The Dredd comic, and 2000AD in general, is at the extreme end of the spectrum, of course and most webcomic artists don’t have the time to create something that intricate. Although the fact that Dredd is six pages of story per week makes it comparable to a webcomic’s output, the fact that it’s drawn by professional artists whose day job it is to actually draw the comic means there’s still a lot more time to devote to it.

So what can an ordinary webcomic artist do to make their comic come to life, if they can’t devote hours every day to producing intricate detail? It’s simple: drop the detail level to only what’s essential to be in-keeping with the style of the comic, and go from there. Look at Sinfest and see what detail Tatsuya Ishida puts into the comic. On most days, it’s not a vast amount, but because it fits with the detail level of his characters, that’s fine. Where the characters are and what they’re doing is clear from the first glance.

He puts in only what is needed, and no more. That’s all you need, too.