I have something i want to run through my followers and see what do you think about it as it would involve some change in publication.
So you may have seen me already talk about the dilemma i have regarding Monster girls in space. It’s a project that was intended to be a One-shot i would do in my free time, but i ended up having so little time that i ended publishing what pages i had, and now i upload a new one from time to time. It’s a project that i like and would like to see finished as soon as possible since it’s a one-shot that should be read in one go, but i can’t find time to do it among the tons of projects i’m into.
It doesn’t help that i keep coming up with new ideas that i want to draw and i end up drawing some of them, increasing my workload and having less and less time for each. Just recently i started this “Sukeban and senpai” short comics and people like them, and i started thinking about it and came up with an entire plot and characters for a regular fighting/romcom series, and honestly i would be excited to draw it.
But there’s just no way in hell i would find time to do it. I barely can do anything semi-regular with the ones i have right now. So i thought about how i could cut corners somehow.
Patreon and commission work are obviously a no-no. My income comes from them.
Corona-chan, honestly is a comic i didn’t expect would run that long. The pandemic keeps giving theme after theme to draw, and she’s a fan favorite. The comics themselves don’t take up as much time as the other comics as they’re short. I wouldn’t really cut much with this and it would be a let down.
Triggerhappy, i just do a page very now and then so it’s not like it would help much.
Succubus-chan’s comic, that one takes some more time from me, but i also only do about a page a month, and she’s definitely THE fan favorite.
So that leaves Monster girls on tour. I obviously not gonna stop doing it since it’s technically my “main” series. But i’m also not in any rush since the story still has a looooong way to go and most likely will be something i work on for most of my life XD. Also i’m fairly certain that it’s the comic of mine less people are interested in. I started it waaay before i started to get traction online, and i’ve talked myself about how the beginning of the story was kinda rocky due to never been intended as a regular series when i created it, and is probably hard to get into.
So i though about maybe doing something i already did with my old comic Guild adventure when Monster girls on tour was starting. I could switch the publication from 2 pages a week, to 1 page a week of Monster girls on tour on Tuesdays, and 1 of Monster girls in space on Saturdays for a year.
I would also try to use my free time to draw more pages, so lets say that with that i could draw 5 pages of MGiS per month. If i start this on February, i could do 55 pages by the end of 2022. I would HOPE that’s enough to finish the one-shot. Then in 2023 i could re-take a 2 pages per week publication on MGoT and start working on the Sukeban comic on the side in the same way i do the Succubus comic, or work on a 1 page MGoT – 1 page Sukeban basis, depending what people prefer when the time comes.
That would also leave me a year to prepare Sukeban as i would have to do many designs and writing if i wanna get it right. It’s not the same to do random Corona pages than a full manga. Otherwise, if you’re not interested on this idea, i would just keep doing what i’ve done till now and just do some random funny page of Sukeban from time to time.
I’m gonna open a poll on patreon and twitter but i don’t trust public polls too much since they seem to be invaded by bots for one reason or the other, so i would like to read your opinions in a comment. Maybe i am surprised and people care about MGoT too much to lower it down to 1 page per week, or maybe you all want to see the full One-shot and the Sukeban comic and i’m breaking my head over nothing.
You can either leave a comment here or vote in the patreon open thread.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/61508248
There’s nothing terrible in a bit of hiatus if you ran into a block and just and switch to drawing whatever rolls well. You have more than one title running, after all. Or is you just don’t have time to do it like you want.
Otherwise there is a risk that you’ll either burn out or drop quality (after which both you and readers can lose interest).
I don’t think the problem of fans “going away” from a dried well still exists like in pre-feed era (at least not for the sites that are set up properly). That is, since anyone literate enough to read this blog post is also literate enough to use RSS, the reasonable expectation is that we will notice a new page whenever it arrives.
Brandon (TheMonsteUnderTheBed.net) had a little hiatus every other month or so, he apparently draws only one comic, and it’s counting 8th year like this. With at least 3 pages of comments under each, so the fandom clearly doesn’t wither away.
Reduce the output but increase the time worked on each. Every page with action scenes has readability problems. the lack of colors, shades and backgrounds, makes it hard to know what’s going on, what are we looking for or where is the action happening. The thick lines compound the problem. If you have to make everything bi-weekly for that, it’s still an overall improvement