I have yet to ever read a Zuda comic based largely on critiques like this.

After all, if you can’t tell a good “introduction story” in eight pages, well… you’re not trying hard enough.

Keep up the good work, and I enjoy your podcast.

We did exactly what your “test” required. You guys sung it’s praises on the podcast. We’ll two of you did.

Ha. ha.

Interesting article, not sure I really agree with it, but at least it gets people talking,

*gets back to work*

In the 8 pages of Shock Effect we wanted to set the reader up in the right direction, to know what they were in for, and most of all, to care what happened next. To be fair, 8 pages doesn’t have to be the universal, it just happened to be what the first installment of Zuda was; I’d expect the same amount of set up from the first issue of a comic book: just look at Y the Last Man #1. Even so, a year later, it is fantastic to hear from a critic, and everyone else who has written in on the forum here that story is still important for comic readers. I know it’s the number one thing for me.

If you want to see what I’m writing NOW you can check out my weekly workplace horror-comedy
series Freelance Blues, starting up again at the end of the month!
http://www.freelanceblues.com/digitalbooks/one/oldschool.php

I do know that the two Zuda entries I’ve had in the contest, Junk and Rumors of War*, both fail the test. Junk is a self contained eight pages that’s fairly explicit about the setting and what’s going on, but the main character isn’t the main character of the series. Rumors of War wasn’t self contained, didn’t name the main character or explain a damn thing about the setting.

Whether they worked is debatable, but they did okay in the contest (Rumors, especially). I did notice that it’s pretty well impossible to satisfy everyone, though. Some people liked stuff explained, some don’t. Some people like open ended, some don’t. So I dunno.

What it definitely needs to be is compelling. If you’re not going to give people the answers, then you need to work hard to give them interesting questions. I think Gulch did (and Gulch beat one of my entries) and I think most of the winning entries do. How you make it compelling is a lot more flexible.

One part I pretty sure I don’t agree with is about the synopsis. It’s there on every page, and since the Zuda pages can’t really be embedded elsewhere, it’s going to be a fairly omnipresent device, and I think any creator who doesn’t try to use that for maximum effect is doing themselves a disservice.

*Which made it onto the Digital Strips Best of 08 List. Yay!

A print comic has the whole first issue to hook the reader. It is (and should be) paced accordingly. Similar format webcomics have a similar pacing – a one issue introduction. Episodic webcomics, have only a couple of pages before a new reader loses interest.

This article seems to assume that comprehension is a necessary part of interest – it’s not. As Brigid pointed out, the winning Zuda comic was one where a dog inexplicably exploded. Not comprehensible at all, but an interesting enough hook that the reader wanted to keep reading.

We’ve been trained by TV. Hook us with an interesting enough teaser and we’re willing to wait for the explanations.

Rich, you get it exactly—it’s not so much having to know everything about the story as knowing what to focus on. Here’s a counterexample: Law and Order. Usually I assume that when a TV show opens with the camera following a character, they are going to be important to the story. In Law and Order, the people in the opening scene have one function only—they discover the corpse and then disappear. L&O has me trained to expect that, but if a comics artist did it, I’d spend the next dozen pages wondering what happened to the yuppie couple from page 1.

Matt, you cannot compare a web comic to a movie in this regard. Normally I would say don’t compare any medium with any other one, because they each have their own rules/advantages/problems, but I’ll just deal with movies here because they’re so different.

A movie is a different beast for a couple reasons. First, if I’m sitting down in a movie theater to watch a show, I’ve already paid my $8. I’m fully vested. I’m more willing to sit through a little confusion. I’m willing to site through a lot of crap if I’ve already paid for it (case in point: The original Hulk movie). A comic on the Internet is free. I have no reason to keep going it I don’t like it.

Plus in a movie, if the beginning of movie is bad enough that I do want to leave, $8 be damned, I still have to stand up, squeeze out of the row, risk rubbing my butt against the heads of people in the row and then walk all the way to my car. I don’t want to do that, so I give the movie another chance. With a web comic, I have to click on my link to check to see if Order of the Stick has updated yet.

This is what Brigid is talking about, with each and every comic, you have to make the reader want to keep reading. Ideally each page will make me want to go to/ wait for the next one. You can’t expect people to keep reading out of habit. Inertia like that is hard to earn and easy to lose.

I don’t want to take up too much real estate in these comment boards explaining my position, so I sorta dumped it on my blog:

http://webcomicoverlook.com/2009/06/05/responding-to-brigid-alversons-8-page-rule/

I agree with you, I tried my best to keep the build up interesting for my KOGOSHII (up now! please vote!) The other test is the flash viewer. There are a lot of things that would look interesting, but in the confines of that viewer it can look messy. I learned the hard way about half-tones. But I have seen some people with a lot of action on their first 8 pages and it looks daunting to try and read.

Some folks don’t bother to toggle the zooms and whatnots so you have to factor that in as well. Gigi made the text larger when we sent the high rez files to Nika, in case people didn’t zoom in, you can still read it perfectly clear in windowed mode.