Hosting Comics Online

(1:04:40) Question 8: Hosting a Comic Online

Question 8 from Julia, California: What websites are best for starting to post a webcomic?

Topic: Hosting Comics Online
Answered: Yes
Episode: Episode 2
Time mark: 1:04:40
Full Ep. Notes: Ep2 Show Notes

Responses:

There are 3 things you need to consider before hosting your webcomic online:

• Are you ok with the paradigm of webcomic distribution? (Giving your art away for free).
• Are you ok with, or desiring to learn how to, work with website development? (Does the word "code" send you into a regular or catatonic panic?)
• How much ownership/authority do you want over the design/presentation of your webcomic?

Things you may want to consider before deciding to build a webcomic

• Consider not making a webcomic
• Think about creating and showing sneak peeks to your friends through social media instead of spending time developing a website. Whatever makes it easiest.
• Publishers, understandably, have mixed feelings about webcomics and monetary gains through them (once printed, print rights are tricky).

Webcomics are awesome. They kind of fall into 2 different camps
(outlined well on this Tapastic sponsored website MakeWebcomics.com)

• Camp 1: Self hosting (like my own comic Hipster Picnic)
  • WYSIWYG
    • Squarespace
    • Wix
  • Wordpress
    • Comic Press / Comic Easel Hipster Picnic uses this.
    • Webcomic
    • Manga Press
  • Grawlix
  • You code it & deploy it
  • Hosting:
    • Blue Host
    • Others: Godaddy, Tigertech.net, etc., etc.

• Camp 2: Hosting on content aggregates
  • Tumblr - I host "My Arm: The Comic" on Tumblr and even wrote a tutorial, that is outdated, on how to create comics on Tumblr.
  • Tapastic
  • LINE Webtoon
  • Smackjeeves
  • Comic Fury
  • The Duck Webcomics
  • You can even host on social media!
    • Instagram
    • Facebook
    • Google+