Today's strip is from our panel at BigWow. Its a good demonstration of what can be accomplished in about an hour's worth of panel plus an hour or so more in polish. 

I mentioned Tuesday that our panel went really well. Not quite as well as the one at KrakenCon, and I'm not wholly certain why that is, but still really well. There is one point that, upon reflection, I wish I had conveyed more in the panel, that I'm going to try and dig into now:

There are two approaches to doing a webcomic, and to some extent comics in general. One is to have your entire story thought out, and be able to pre-load the majority of the work. You then publish on some sort of regular schedule or all at once until you run out. The other approach, the one that we know the most about and which is, I feel, more common, is to have an ongoing comic with a regular publishing schedule that you need to keep to. Its about this style that I want to make something clear I don't think I emphasized enough on Sunday: Your posting schedule doesn't care about you.

Your posting schedule is a promise, to yourself, your audience, and your characters, and it doesn't care about your personal problems. Stressed at work? You still need to get a comic out. Major sickness? You still need to get a comic out. Death in the family, life falling apart, house on fire? You still need to get a comic out. Once you break the chain. where does it end?  The plus side of this unfeeling schedule is that, if you can keep it, you end up with a body of work that you can look back on with so much pride.

This is where we normally do the webcomic o' the week, and we're going to mention one, but we porobably won't be going into the detail it deserves. Sometimes I worry that we never give these featured comics their due, but I balance that worry with remembering that we're trying to entice people to read them, not give a thesis. This week, we're going to talk about Strong Female Protagonist. I think the best recommendation I can give is: I started reading SFP to give a review here, and got so lost in the comic that an hour had passed before I remembered I had to write more. SFP takes the traditional superhero genre and delightfully turns it on its head through the story of its protagonist, Alison, a former superhero trying to be a normal college student. (Not going to lie, I also like that her name is Alison, because Allison is the name of the artist on Captain Quail). I can’t wait to see what happens with it, and it is worth checking out. 

Thanks,

Philip

P.S. Thanks to Kelsey for suggesting SFP.