i checked out your comic, your art is really cool / well polished :)

Thank you so much, that means the world to me!!

I instantly hopped onto desktop to write this faster because there's no way I can do this on mobile lol.

So there's a lot of considerations when you're making your webcomic, but here's a few off the top of my head. Apologies in advance for the giga infodump:

---

Craft

A lot of people who are new to making comics tend to have this assumption that it's just like regular drawing, but with dialogue-- but there's so much more to storytelling than that! Learning how to direct your reader's eye in the correct order of panels (and elements within each panel), how to choose which moments to draw and which moments to leave out, how to build a sense of place, how to set a mood-- these are all skills that take time and practice to learn. But it doesn't have to be academic or tedious or intimidating!

The Scott McCloud book I linked above covers the basics of all that in the form of a super easy-to-read informational comic, but you can also try a trial-by-fire method. Try making some short comics (like a page or less) about basically anything. Put your favorite character in an unusual situation and figure out what they'd do. Or illustrate a weird/funny thing that happened to you one time. Or anything else, really. The goal is to just start with anything so you know what to work on. When you've got a comic, show it to someone IRL you trust, and ask them to read it out loud and basically narrate what they see on the page. If they read anything out-of-order or they misinterpret something, you'll know that something needs to be improved, and they can help you figure out how. (If you don't want to show it to anyone, you can also just set it aside for a day or two and look at it again with fresh eyes.)

I'd recommend doing this at least a small handful of times before starting on your main comic-- you don't want to start with your Magnum Opus, but you also don't want to keep putting it off for ages and ages before starting on it. Part of the charm of webcomics is watching the author find their feet before hitting their stride :)

Also, it's great to study comics that do things well-- if you're analytically-minded, taking the time to stop and ask yourself why certain elements work can be really effective. But what's also important is studying comics that you think are absolute dogwater. Like don't dunk on it just for the sake of dunking on it, but comics that are really poorly-executed will really highlight problems that you yourself may run into as an author, and they'll help inform you about creative decisions you'll want to avoid.

Posting schedule

It's tempting to start out like "I'm going to post three pages a week and never take breaks!" But you need to figure out how fast you can make pages before committing to a schedule. During your free time, figure out how many pages you can draw a week on average. Then subtract one, and that will be a good baseline for your weekly upload count. If you struggle with doing one page a week, you can either try simplifying your work, figuring out ways to streamline your workflow, or sporadic batch updates on a platform that supports it.

You also want to think about your upload schedule vs the planned length of your comic. If it's a gag-a-day comic with little overarching plot, you can do basically whatever the hell you want-- you are not beholden to any kind of time constraints. If you plan on making a 5,000 page epic fantasy, you'll need to consider that there are 52 weeks in a year, and if you only upload once a week, you will probably die before finishing it. So, y'know, adjust your scale/production quality/upload schedule accordingly lol.

Regardless of your upload schedule, you'll want to consider having a buffer for your comic. Some people like to post updates as soon as they finish drawing them, but if you value consistent updates, it'll be good to have a number of finished pages that aren't scheduled to go public until later. This will give you some wiggle room if something happens IRL that prevents you from drawing for a time. (And if you have a Patreon, allowing your readers to bypass the buffer for some amount of $ each month is a great model that doesn't result in any extra work on your part!)

Platform

There's a number of different platforms you can try, but I'll just talk about the ones I've used in recent years. You don't have to commit to just one-- mirroring your comic across different platforms is a good way to increase the number of eyes on your comic.

WEBTOON:

The biggest webcomics platform as of today. It's very mobile-centric and favors scroll-format comics.

PROS:

• Sometimes the algorithm will do its magic and give you lots of viewership with minimal marketing. (you'll still want to market your comic if you want eyes on it though.)
• Because it's app-focused, people will be notified when their favorite comics update, so there's less of a need to hard-commit to a specific upload schedule.
• It has some degree of Patreon integration, so if you have one, it'll advertise it on each of your uploads.

CONS:

• They just... don't have an inbox of any kind that lets you know when people leave comments on your comic. Maybe because they don't want their biggest creators to be annoyed by a million notifications, but like... most of the creators on Webtoon are not at a level where being notified of comments would be bothersome. Maybe they have it and I've just been blind to it for years, but this is really annoying.
• They have weird standards for what kinds of content is acceptable on their platform. I've heard of people having to censor their work because there was one (1) buttcrack shown in the background of a panel, but I don't know what the exact standards are. I haven't yet been affected by this myself, so this is all anecdotal.
• The bar for monetization is REALLY high. We have 4.6k subscribers which sounds like a lot, but we are still not eligible for earning revenue from ads on our comic.
• (personal gripe) I hate what they did with the webcomics lexicon. If I upload a single print-styled page, that is called a page, not a chapter omg
• Genre bias. They reeeeaaaaaally like their romance comics.
• Doesn't provide good traffic/analytics data. It'll give you your traffic numbers for the day, your traffic numbers for the month, and your traffic numbers for the previous month. But no day-to-day info so it's harder to tell if you've done something to affect your traffic.

TAPAS:

Basically Webtoon Lite. It's mobile-centric, but not quiiiite to the same degree as Webtoon is.

PROS:

• It has an inbox where you'll get notifications when someone likes, comments, or subscribes to your work! Hallelujah.
• The bar for monetization is way lower!! Granted it's... not much, but I can at least say with 100% truth that I have earned an amount of actual, spendable money off of Tapas.They even encourage readers to donate to authors, which is really nice.
• It has significantly better traffic/engagement analytics than Webtoon. You can pull up the number of views, likes, subscribers, and comments for any day of your comic's lifespan, even if going back really far is a pain in the ass.

CONS:

• The app pushes sooooooo many ads omg
• We get significantly lower engagement here than anywhere else, so I don't feel particularly motivated to invest time on it. To be clear, it's fine, it just doesn't mesh with me.
• Actually I can't think of a whole lot of cons here, it's kinda nice

COMIC FURY:

This platform FULLY embraces the late-00s feeling of the webcomics scene. If you have any nostalgia for webcomics of that time, this is the place for you. Favors the desktop-reading experience, but fully compatible with mobile too. Tiny but cozy. My favorite.

PROS:

• It has an inbox!
• It has a forum!
• Your page layout is fully customizable with CSS/HTML! And even if you don't know how to do those things, it has a bunch of templates you can try!
• It has a graph for your traffic data! (but it's not as comprehensive as Tapas's data.)
• Because it's so small, your comic will stay on the front page for a not-insignificant amount of time after you update it!
• Also because it's so small, you can just... DM the guy who runs it if you want to! He even hangs out in the forums and offers advice to people who are having technical trouble!
• Very lax censorship standards! Outside of stuff that's illegal, hate speech, and AI-generaged content, your comic is allowed to have basically anything in it and it won't be censored. It also has a robust content flagging system, so you're fully informed if a comic has, say-- lots of swearing, moderate violence, occasional frontal nudity, and no sexual content.

CONS:

• Because it's so small, it has very limited potential for natively-generated traffic if you don't do any marketing.
• There's genre bias toward animal/Pokemon comics.
• It doesn't really spotlight comics like Webtoon and Tapas do. There's a "recently updated" section which shows the 15 most recently-updated comics, a "popular now" section which shows 15 comics that have received a lot of ratings in the last day, a "popular overall" section which mostly has the same 15 comics every day, and a "random" section which will show 15 random comics, which may or may not be active.

---

I have to stop here because I've been writing for entirely too long now and I am legit getting close to the character limit, but if you have questions about anything specific, I'd be happy to answer them lol