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[Sappho]

Hello everybody.  Sadly I haven't had a great deal of time lately for DF, but I've been popping in now and again to see how things are going.  Recently I started doing something that I've wanted to try for a long while: writing my own comic.  I've been sharing it with my real-life friends and everyone seems to enjoy it, so I thought I'd open it up to the world and see if it has more universal appeal.  I've been trying to get something new up there every few days or so, and I have scripts written out for a while so I'll have plenty to work on.

I'd like to invite you all to have a look.  It's at http://HTTP://asimplelife.thecomicseries.com for now, but if it goes well and I find the money I may move it to a site of my own someday.  I'm really interested in feedback and I generally trust the opinions of my fellow dwarves, so be brutal and tell me what is good, what is terrible, and how I can make it better!

Thanks, guys!

Edit: URL updated!

[Creamcorn]

When's the next update?

If you answer in times more than one week, than it's meh-ish, randomly updated than I would suggest that you just reincarnate or just start the webcomic from scratch.

Right now my only complaint is that the flow of the jokes is more like a tidal wave looking through the archives. Ex look at the first comic, the joke should only be the first four panels. The next six panels would be great if they made the first joke even funnier but they really don't; the panels mainly focus on the characters disdain for his (?) boss which to me as a webcomic feels like another update.

Of course with more work or through thinking you can easily add two or twenty jokes in one update.

More on the jokes stuff, the comic following the very first one. The second update should have gone with the last six panels, as it practically breaks off the joke of the very first comic. After the second update I get lost. But I can still understand that your character hates getting up early, boss and wasting too much time. And that's most of what I have for the earlier comics!



As for the latest updates, I feel they were worth my time but the story arc flow could use some more work or organization.

[inaluct]

Some of those are really good. The Digging Around and Dream Girl ones in particular.

[Sowelu]

I thought the hourly comics were GREAT.  They were more...uh, visceral isn't the right word...but funny in a believable way.  I don't know if it's at all possible to harness that and use it for longer term stuff.

[Sappho]

Thanks for the feedback so far, guys!  I am doing it on sort of a random basis right now because it's mostly for my friends and coworkers.  As time goes on and I get better at this, I'll try to do it on a regular basis.

Also, to clarify, the first few comics I posted were "hourly" comics.  The link on the very first one will take you to the original hourly comics page by John Campbell.  There you can find a detailed explanation of what they are and how they came about.  Basically you keep a journal of your day, with a short (in this case two-panel) comic written once per hour for each hour you are awake.  So the "character" is actually me, and that is what actually happened to me those days.  Sometimes they are funny, sometimes not.  But I had fun making them, which is why I made them, and my friends here and always on me to write more, so at least from the standpoint of someone who lives here with me they must have a decent amount of humor in them.

Also, there are a few "story arcs" now and then, but mostly I just write a strip when I think of something funny to write or, more often, when something funny happens to me.  In fact, every single one of the comics so far is based on something that actually happened in my life.  A few may be funny only to those who were there, which is fine for now because as I said, the comic is geared towards my friends here.  My goal right now is to find out what is funny only as an inside joke and what is funny in general, so I can try to gear future comics more towards mass appeal.

By the way, I am very heavily inspired by Pictures for Sad Children by John Campbell, and often write my comics just after having read some of his, so there may be some similarity in tone and style (if I am lucky, the guy is freaking awesome!).

Thanks again for the input so far, and please keep it coming!  I will try to post at least one comic every few days.  Right now I am taking my experiences from last week's five-day hike and making a story of it in comic form (last time I did a narrative with photographs but I think this might be more fun).  There will be a lot of these, and again, they are geared towards people who want to know how my hike went rather than a general audience, but I hope that they will be funny in a general way as well.

[Rilder]

Definatly find a better site then blogspot, blog style doesn't really work in my eyes for web comics.

Make sure you read  "Webcomics 101" Thing.

[Sappho]

Ha, that Webcomics 101 thing is funny, thanks for that.  As for using a blog I agree 1000% that it is a terrible format, but unfortunately I don't know what else to do.  I have no money for my own domain name or server or any of that, and absolutely no programming skill (to the point where I can barely handle HTML, let alone any kind of comic set code).  If you have any suggestions for a better place to put the comic, please let me know.  I have tried a couple of free comic hosting sites, but they do not allow you to put in title text for the comic, and that's important to me.  (That is, when you hover the mouse over each comic you get an extra line of amusing text.)

[Sappho]

Alrighty, I looked around a bit and found a free web comic host that looks okay for the time being.  I'll put some effort into making the site a bit better soon.  Until then, it is here:

http://asimplelife.thecomicseries.com/

[Rilder]

Much better, + Alt text which is always nice.

[Creamcorn]

OW!

TOOOOOOOOOOOO WHITE!

[Sappho]

Yeah, sorry about the layour, I'll work on that when I have some more time.  I haven't looked at exactly how customizable the site is, but it seems like I can at least do better than what they give me.

I've started putting up the strips about my five-day hike last week.  As I mentioned, this is primarily for my friends and family who want to know how it went, but again, I am still interested in knowing which things are funny in general.  I'm attempting to add one strip per day - my first shot at regularity!  I think I will be able to keep up with that as long as I am writing about the hike, and I have about forty strips planned out for the hike, so that should keep me going for a long while.  Maybe I'll up it to two strips per day when I start getting near to the end of the month (and my time at this school).

Thanks again for all the feedback, guys!  I really appreciate it.

[Sappho]

So I went a long while without updating this because I had moved to Prague and didn't know where to scan.  But now I have found a place to scan and am resuming regular updates.

I've been putting a lot of work into these lately, and I know some of you may have read them before and not been overly impressed, but there is a lot of new stuff up there since the last time I posted about it on here, and I'd really appreciate any and all feedback you guys could give.

[JoshuaFH]

I really like it. The occasional dirty joke, and non sequitur joke, and dirty non sequitur joke just make it better.

Did you really go hiking?

[Broose]

I hate it.

[JoshuaFH]

Atleast mention WHY you hate it Broose.