Sketches with Watercolour

Apologies, folks. It has been a little while since my last update. Things have been busy, but in a “slow simmering” kinda way.

The big news is that I finally took a deep dive into the world of WebToons. There’s an interesting learning curve there, mainly oriented around adapting my work to the constraint of that format. Plus the constraint of the specific platform I’m using (in my case, Naver WEBTOON). I get a little jealous of prose writers; as long as you respect a few guidelines, it is not difficult at all to transform one’s prose into .epub and have it beautifully reflow on all kinds of devices. Comics? Well, that’s a trickier beast.

For those not familiar, a WebToon vertically scrolls, so it makes comics ideal for reading on small devices like a cell phone. However, horizontal panels in comics (everything from wide panels to splash pages and a lot in-between) are not ideal. That means that things have to be “rejiggered” quite a bit. I’m still in the experimental phase right now, but it took quite a bit of research and a goodly amount of math to figure it all out. As with most things, trial and error does the trick.

I’ve put two of my short stories up. You can find these at https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/wizards-for-hire-cheap/list?title_no=959052

Am I going to continue with this format? Well, that’s harder to say. The big problem I’m running into — aside from the sheer amount of work that it requires to transform my comics to vertical scrolling — is that there are a lot of comics on that platform. A lot. It’s mind-boggling, actually. That means that discovery is a problem and one I’m not sure how to solve. That’s always one of the problems with the internet; it is an amazing resource, but the sheer amount of content on it can make finding things tricky. Even on a dedicated platform like WEBTOON, it’s not easy. To quote Wikipedia, “As of March 2023, Webtoon (sic) has grown to receive more than 125 billion views annually. It has 85.6 million monthly active users worldwide, and has become the top webcomic platform in the United States with 12.5 million monthly active users.” In an ecosystem like that, I am an incredibly small fish.

To transform WOLF’S HEAD into that format would require a good chunk of time. And the key point is this: it would take a lot of time WITHOUT any guarantee that I would find many readers. So it’s a bit of a poser and one not easy to resolve. I’ve got more figurin’ and thinkin’ to do!

And now, here’s some art!