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Mad Rupert Comics Zone

@mynameismad / mynameismad.tumblr.com

The personal art blog of MAD RUPERT, an extremely short comic artist and writer, and author of Sakana and Robber-Robert.
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sakana-comic

🐟✨SAKANA UPDATE✨🐟

Back to regular updates after this behemoth of a page! You wanted MORE backgrounds, huh? No? Nobody's forcing me to make pages like this?? Hold on. Wait. Hold o

Read SAKANA pages 647-648 here!

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SAKANA
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of m
sakana-comic.com
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mynameismad

Did you see today's update? I worked very hard on it 😵‍💫🙏

#sakana#my art#reblog#self reblog#comic pages
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ngoziu

You can get all of my books personalized when you order through Blue Willow Books! (BARDA pre-orders are open now!)

  1. Order paperback copies from the shop here: bluewillowbookshop.com
  2. Mention the first name personalization you'd like in the comments section. :)
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mynameismad

You can still grab a signed copy of BUNT if you haven't yet! IT'S VERY COOL!!! (Also pick up all of Ngozi's other very cool comics!!!!!!)

#bunt
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sakana-comic

🐟✨SAKANA UPDATE✨🐟

Let's take a break from the busy fish market so I don't have to draw so many detailed backgro--oh uh…

Read SAKANA page 642 here!

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SAKANA
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of m
sakana-comic.com
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mynameismad

Haha...difficult discussions about the state of webcomics that started in the early 2010s notwithstanding....please check out my 14 year old webcomic that I came back to after a 4 year hiatus because I have a devastating need to see it finished!

#did u c yesterday's bupdate?
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reblogged
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sakana-comic

🐟✨SAKANA UPDATE✨🐟

Let's take a break from the busy fish market so I don't have to draw so many detailed backgro--oh uh…

Read SAKANA page 642 here!

Image
SAKANA
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of m
sakana-comic.com
Avatar
mynameismad

Haha...difficult discussions about the state of webcomics that started in the early 2010s notwithstanding....please check out my 14 year old webcomic that I came back to after a 4 year hiatus because I have a devastating need to see it finished!

#sakana#my art
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ohcorny
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?

ohcorny answered:

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.

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mortalityplays

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.

#have been feeling this very acutely for several years now!!!
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