Patron requests: webcomic edition!
Here's Pia from Little Tiny Things.
Patron requests: webcomic edition!
Here's Nick and Ki from GPF Software!
Patron requests: webcomic edition! Abominable Charles Christopher!
Patron requets: webcomics edition! Here's Kat and Creampuff from Tales from Alderwood
Patron requests: webcomic edition! Here's Eggie from Adventures with Eggie
Spring is back and I have been really enjoying cucumber sandos recently :>
(From Don't Forget to Eat)
This month on Patreon it was Patron Requests! The next special event will be AMA comix in June :) Thank you so much everyone for helping me get to 300 followers on Patreon! 🎉This month's illustration is available as prints, cards or wallpapers.
Here's a summary of everything that went down:
Thanks so much for following my work!
jammyness reblogged
I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.
I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."
Feel free to repost, no need for credit
jammyness reblogged
The TradeWaiters are back and ready to join the Nancy Renaissance! We read the first print collection of Nancy by Olivia Jaimes, and weigh in on the new artist who has taken over an ancient but venerated comic strip. Spoiler: Olivia Jaimes is lit, and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. We discuss the fraught circumstances of rebooting legacy newspaper comics, and have a lot to say about what makes Nancy #relatable.
Also mentioned in this episode: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson Opus and Outland by Berkeley Breathed Mutts by Patrick McDonnell B.C. by Johnny Hart Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson Family Circus by Jeff Keane For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston Popeye and Mousetrapped by Randy Milholland Cards Against Humanity The Cartoonist Cooperative and Baby Reindeer created by Richard Gadd
Music by Sleuth
You can also follow the TradeWaiters on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and Ko-Fi.
Nancy! This was a great comic and a fun chat :)
jammyness reblogged
are you craving bug science related zines? I always am. here's a whole swarm of FREE mini zines!!!
Bug! Zines!!
jammyness reblogged
Hello everyone! It’s that time again and I am currently building my June commission queue. If you like the artwork I produce and are interested in commissioning me for a botanimal, pet portrait or anything else send me an email. All critters welcome!
Private client commissions is how I make the majority of my income. Please share so I get get my art to more folks who may be interested. Thank you!
Some fanart of Tre and Olly because I really enjoyed @bigbigtruck's Shot and Chaser side comic!! :)) There's a few hours left to get a print edition, but digital is also available.
Hello please don't be alarmed, I am updating my avatar.
You have probably noticed I've been drawing myself occasionally as this scraggly alley cat, and I'd like to do this more.
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jammyness reblogged
ABOUT TIME!!! for those out of the loop homeowners’ associations in the US 1. suck horrendously in every way 2. were the beginning of the end of urban biodiversity
"Soltys decided to push back. She tidied up her plantings, but she also partnered with regional environmental nonprofits to help introduce a bill in the Virginia legislature to protect the right to grow native plants in HOA communities. Soltys was inspired by first-in-the-nation legislation passed in nearby Maryland in 2021—born of a like-minded couple’s years-long and costly legal battle with their own HOA—that now serves as a template for other states. Last year, Maine enacted a similar bill, and Minnesota went a step further, requiring not just HOAs but all municipalities to allow natural landscaping."
Anonymous asked:
In your view/experience. is the rate of "incompleteness" among webcomics more or less the nature of online personal projects as a whole? Or is there something specific to webcomics like laboriousness, audience expectations, relative medium infancy or whatnot?
well for one thing webcomics has changed significantly in the last ten years. it used to have a much lower barrier for entry, just get a smackjeeves account or set up a website with a wordpress plugin. starting a webcomic when i started my webcomic vs starting a webcomic now are totally different experiences.
so i can only speak to people who started their webcomics roughly ten years ago. and roughly ten years ago a lot of us were a whole lot younger with a lot more time and energy to spend on a comic for free. this part is probably still somewhat true for new artists.
but then you get older. your ideas change. your skill develops and the old stuff isn't as good. or you don't have as much time, you got a day job. unless you're one of like five people on earth your webcomic is not paying your rent. you need to make money. your shoulder hurts. you're 30 now. you're struggling to make updates on time between whatever else makes you happy and what else you need to do to live. you wrote this story when you were 21, you don't relate to it anymore, you have different ideas, you've grown up, your audience has noticeably dropped off from the peak, social media managing is hard, you have to go to work, you're so tired, all the time.
it's a lot of things.
Taylor touched on it, but yeah webcomics are EXTREMELY not the scene they were when a lot of people our age got into it (people our age now being in the position of having enough work behind them to 'abandon' it meaningfully).
Almost everyone I know who used to run a webcomic back then still cares a lot about those stories. Some people have moved into different mediums, some have rebooted their work and repackaged it for places like patreon or aggregators, a lot of them still produce free work for their audiences in one form or another even if it's not a continuation of their original 'one big story'. And some of them ARE still plugging away at the same projects, the same way they always did. But the skills that got people into webcomics 10-15 years ago are not the skills you need to get any kind of attention in today's market.
I complain a lot about 'hustle culture' taking over artistic spaces online, and that grievance really roots from what happened to webcomics more than anything else. There is no reason that you should need to be a marketing guru to publish an free indie comic online. There is no reason that you should be expected to update daily, or three times a week, or even once a week if you don't want to. There was genuinely a time when some of the best examples of the genre (and best known among Webcomic Likers) were uncategorisable experiments published one page at a time every other phase of the moon on wordpress blogs or static html sites.
If you were excited by webcomics as a medium in 2010, you were probably excited by qualities of the scene that simply don't exist any more - or at least certainly don't exist in the same form, or to nearly the same extent. Project Wonderful and webrings meant tiny comics still had shared readerships, and an avenue for connecting with new audiences through peers with similar interests. Micro-forums and comment sections meant each comic had its own little mini community, often full of other artists who were excited to talk process. Maybe the defining artistic relationship of my whole career, which has opened up more job opportunities than my actual degree, was forged in a webcomic forum with about 8 regular users.
The biggest loss I felt, personally, was the disappearance of spaces for talking about art with amateurs who really cared about experimentation and expression. A lot of it was super goofy, but bouncing off other teenagers with messy over-ambitious ideas about infinite canvas and found-object comics and branching storylines really ignited my passion for trying things. There were always parallel conversations about how to find an audience, whether merch was worth it, which conventions made money, but they were just as questing and experimental. Today, creative spaces are (somewhat necessarily, by nature of the way the internet has changed around us) dominated by marketing talk. The question hanging over every creative question for webcomic artists today seems to be 'but will it drive engagement'. And that's fucking miserable.
Anyone who got into webcomics before the shift to algorithmic feeds, omnipresent adtech and the premeditated murder death of Project Wonderful has probably looked around at some point and thought 'where the fuck am I?' Some artists have adapted comfortably, but a huge proportion of those who were most invested ten years ago were just never going to be interested in the skills that drive the current webcomic market. Because it is a market now, not an art scene. People have always needed to make money, and webcomics have never been especially profitable, but there was a time when they were an outlet - something you did after your shift at the bar, because it came with broad possibilities and a vibrant social scene. Now they are a second job.
Here's my point: when you notice the great proportion of long-running comics that just faded away or stopped altogether at some point, it is worth recognising that this wasn't just burnout. It was an extinction event.
JOIN. COMIC. FURY. https://comicfury.com/index.php There's still a thriving social scene full of crazy experimentation if you know where to look. It's true that a lot of the 'pop culture' view of webcomics has shifted to trying to 'make it big' on webtoon, but there are alternatives. If anyone's interested in making comics and feels overwhelmed, don't let social media expectations kill your love of the craft. I've been making comics and posting them online for 10 yrs with very little social media presence, and have a small group of readers who I love and value + have formed some incredible frienships through shared interest. It can be done! You dont have to turn something into a career for it to be worth doing
This got long, sorry, but I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately and I have a lot to say.
I was incredibly lucky to join that 2010s wave of comics… and it was just dumb luck. Right place, right time. Webcomics back then was a small but supportive community of scrappy DIY-ers. Putting out a comic every week (let alone 3x a week, or daily) was NO small feat on its own and success was never guaranteed. It was hard!! JUST making a comic is hard. We had to rely on each other to navigate setting up our own websites, learning how to make and sell merch, learning how to table at conventions. We had to take our own preorders and update a stupid little thermometer jpg on our website. We linked to each other and helped each other, and (some drama aside) we had each other’s backs.