Day 289

So about 2 months ago, Senthil sent me a link to a website for publishing comics, Tapastic.com. He had never read my comics but was aware I used to make them. I have actually posted some of my comics online before around five years ago. However there were a lot of other comics on that site so it was hard to get noticed so I stopped after posting a dozen or so. There were some things I liked about this new site though. One was that it was relatively new and they seemed very driven to expand and grow. They apparently secured a good amount of start up money which is how Senthil heard about them. Their focus is not just on web comics but on visual stories in general so graphic novels and manga are also present. Since they're kind of new, there are less comics to compete with. Also, if your comic gets really popular, there is a chance to make some money. So I decided to give it a try. It's not like I have to do anything, my comics are just sitting on my hard drive. 

You can find the strip via this link. I decided to post one comic strip a day for two weeks and then taper off to just two a week. With the comics I already made during college, that would be enough for about four months of content. After one week, I got an email above from the site advertising my comic strip Prim & Proper. Unfortunately, this didn't go out to everyone who visits the site. This email was sent to fans of black and white comics. Still I thought it was cool that I got noticed by someone who runs the site. One week in, I had around 100 views. After this email, it doubled over the weekend. Then I steadily got more views since on the front page there's a section for new comic series. So I was sitting on the front page for a week or so and then hidden further down the list for a few weeks after that.

One day, I decided to look at Tapastic's Facebook page. I scrolled down and was surprised to see one of my comics posted there. So that was probably another source of viewers. Around 30 people liked it on Facebook but much less liked it on the actual site which was disappointing. Then a few weeks ago, Tapastic had a new feature on their 50 funniest webcomics. Surprisingly one of mine made the list (the same one above). Unfortunately, mine was literally at the bottom of the list. They must have some algorithm that takes into account views and likes to order it. The majority of comics on the list have tens of thousands of views while mine barely had 200. I don't think being featured there helped me too much because you have to scroll down a lot to get to mine so people probably aren't seeing it. 

Another feature Tapastic has is their daily schedule. They put good series onto a special calender so people can see and find good stuff and it makes the creators publish content on a regular schedule. I mentioned before that I could possible make money off this but only I get popular. The only way I can see this happening is if I get on this daily schedule. The fact that I was featured on an email, on their FB page and on their top 50 list shows that someone is aware of me so all I can do is wait and see if they contact me. One thing that could possibly be holding me back is that I'm not active on the site in the form of commenting, liking and subscribing to other comics. If I blow up, then I might start making comics again. If not, I'll just post everything I have and then stop.

So if you already read my comics, then there's nothing really new. You can go to the site and flip through my comics if you want to give me more views. Anything more would require you to sign up. Something that might interest you more though is my old comic strip I made in middle school, School Daze. Our old site Kidscant was originally made to showcase these comics. I don't remember how many comics made it on there but I figure Tapastic is a perfectly fine vehicle for School Daze. A week ago I started posting them which you can see here. Unfortunately, they're gonna go up slowly so you can't read them all. Maybe I'll mention them here after every 10 are uploaded so you don't have to keep checking or if you forget. I didn't have any digital copies of these comics though so I had to take photos of each one (all sixty of them) and I'm slowly going through and editing them in Photoshop. It's kind of tedious getting them to look as good as possible but I think it's worth the effort. I still consider these comics to be one of my greatest achievements as a young adult. That and Phat Chat. Oh Phat Chat...