Thursday, January 31, 2008
Know thine audience
So who reads webcomics? People who (1) enjoy comics and (2) spend a lot of time surfing the Web. In a word... nerds.*
* Note that I use the term to indicate a stereotype of behavior, sans connotation. Something tells me insulting my entire audience (and myself) would be questionable strategy.
I've often noted the commonly found grouping of "nerdy/geeky" interests, those being comic books, anime, video games, computers, sci-fi (anything with "Star" in its name), fantasy (D&D, LOTR), and martial arts (Lee/Chan/Li movies, UFC, various possibly-homemade weapons of dubious legality).
The point: As I was planning to start this webcomic, this bundling of nerd hobbies came to mind. If I'm paying for a domain name and webspace, and putting in the time and work to create comic strips and a Web site, I certainly hope I can attract some kind of audience to make it worthwhile (creatively, if not financially). So I wondered, who's going to read my webcomic? Some webcomics fall right into this set of topics, which would seem to give them a big advantage. I have nothing against these comics--some have been done very well--but it's just not what I want to do. So will I be able to develop a broad enough appeal to keep the interest of the webcomic-reading subset of the general public?
In other news, this strip introduces Ned, Rob's dark-nerd rival. I also decided to add small notes/captions throughout the comic, which gives me a way to throw in extra humor, explanation, or just bizarre commentary. I think these will be fun for me to write and hopefully liven up the strip a bit.
