L.A.W.L.S. Universe's New Home

It's 2014 and I must say I'm excited about the things to come. I've had my hands in so many projects in the last year that it will be nice to finally announce them and begin to let them unfold. To make sure that I'm able to make time for everything though, I had to make a major choice about one of the most important things to me, the future of my comics. That choice had to do with one simple yet complex problem; where I should host them? I had opened this point of discussion on my blog about "The Women of Interest," and on the Corvink Facebook to get input from my readers and to my surprise, people were very supportive of moving the comics here. The decision came down to time management and work consolidation. Basically, my ability to be able to manage 4 domains, each with their own Wordpress install, while being able to provide quality posts, without compromising my sanity or health, became too much to manage in the past. Thus, the all three of my comics (and any future comics) will all be posted here at Corvink!

LAWLS-Announcement.jpg

To answer the inevitable question: Is there anything different about reading any of the L.A.W.L.S. Universe comics (L.A.W.L.S., ALT., or Words of Interest) now that they are on this site? No, not really. Each comic basically has their own themed blog (that looks a lot like they used to on their own domains) which can be found by adding /alt, /lawls, or /wordsofinterest to the end of the corvink.co URL. You can also still use their old domains, which re-direct to their new locations, to access them quickly. The nice thing about them now basically having a centralized hub, however, is that you can also just come to the main site and see the which comic was recently posted, on the side bar. Not only that, you are now able to access any of the comics from the menu bar drop down that says "read comics" at any place at the Corvink website! This is all made possible because of my switch in CMS (Content Management System).

"Duck Faced Selfie" from ALT.

"Duck Faced Selfie" from ALT.

Much like most webcomic artists, I was using Wordpress w/ Comicpress, but I was inclined to agree with the opinion of Scott Kurtz, the creator of PvP, about Comicpress in his blog called "Comic Unimpressed." Don't get me wrong, for what it is, it's a much better choice than other free alternatives like SmackJeeves, but it really feels more like a means to an end.  For me, I now look at Wordpress/Comicpress as a great way to trial run your concept. Before you invest money in paying for a CMS, which I am now doing, you should post strips for a few month or even a year to see if 1) you're able to gain a readership and more importantly 2) that you find out that this is really something you want to do or not. The Webcomic industry is NOT an easy business and if you aren't passionate about it, your work not only ends up falling short, but you can start to become jaded about webcomic creator cliques, internet trolls, lack of traffic in comparison to other creators, etc. If you're not passionate about creating for creating sake, the death of you comic may come long before it even has a chance to thrive. If you're able to push through all that, still love doing what you're doing, and hopefully are seeing some sort of monetization, at some point, I personally now feel it's best to pay for a service like Express Engine.

Paid services have more stable backends that can protect you from malicious virus' because of the fact that they are not open source (anyone, regardless of level of skill, can modify code or create plugins). Also, out of the box, Wordpress/Comicpress is does not do any comic justice in the design department, which means you have to either pay someone to design it for you or spend months to years learning CSS yourself. Taking the DYI approach, which I did for years, means you can look forward to spending hours upon hours finding plugins for various crap you really don't need. I mean, unless you enjoy installing a plethora of server hogging and vulnerable plug-ins just for kicks. Some people enjoy the sweat taste of pain and suffering, I think they call that Masochism? Who am I to judge.  All the same, I am not one of those people, and I began to tire of having to spend all my free time making my site perfect, to only have destroyed because of occasional updates and frivolous "upgrades" to Comicpress.  I have nothing bad to say about the programmer behind Comicpress, he means well and really is a nice guy, but his constantly toying with the code, and gradually forcing of a migration to installing even more plug-ins (Comic Easel for instance) has on more than one occasion rendered a lot of very meticulously thought out CSS edits useless. What does that mean? BROKEN WEBSITE + HOURS OF RECODING/STYLING ALL THE THINGS. This, in my opinion, is not a professional way to deal with the presentation of your comic, and if you are serious about making a career in webcomics (or anything creative for that matter), you can not be investing your time in places outside of the most essential part of your art form, creating it. This was one of the largest deciding factors behind my move to this centralized site.

"Poniard" from Words of Interest

"Poniard" from Words of Interest

All that being said, because of how involved I am in the development at Decobot with Destined Legends Series 2 and a few future projects, I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be able to maintain any sort of solid schedule. Having the comics here at Corivnk will help readers quickly see if any new comics have been posted since the last time they checked. Doing it this way, I can post the comics when I have a chance (hopefully once a week for the time being), but still keep everyone updated with all the things I'm doing. I can't promise a schedule, but I can promise that I am very avidly working to get comics out regularly in the next year in hopes that I can at least make an ALT. Volume 1 book sometime in 2015... and hopefully also a Words of Interest Volume 1 as well! I'd really like to get both of these books out before I move into production of L.A.W.L.S. Volume 2. The reason for this is comes down to the basic nature of how people shop at conventions; the place I make most of my money in creating. My readers love L.A.W.L.S. how it is, but there is a HUGE barrier of entry to getting new people to want to buy or even get interested in a book as odd as L.A.W.L.S. is at a convention. I hate that this has to be something that I need to consider as far as what comic I need to be working on right now, but if I'm to be able to continue making comics, I need to be able to also sell books! I'm very confident with how often people buy the ALT. and WOI comic prints at conventions, that their books would sell easier than the L.A.W.L.S. book to strangers... and what I hope will happen is that they will be a portal back into finding out more about the characters and expand interest back into L.A.W.L.S. The great thing about this plan is that I'm getting better at writing and drawing every time I make another ALT. and by the time I get back to Volume 2 of L.A.W.L.S. I will be producing the best quality comic I can possibly make! That is extremely exciting for me.

"YOLO" From ALT.

"YOLO" From ALT.

Well, that's my rant about my comics, sorry it's was so long but I really needed to get all that off my chest. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank any one who's been reading and linking to my comics thus far, your support is amazing! I'd also like to ask if you do link to me, if you wouldn't mind changing the url to the new domain (example: corvink.co/alt) i'd greatly appreciate it! It will help with reduce any confusion for people, not to mention increase the SEO results for the comics. Anyway, with Corvink’s horizon expanding, I hope that you all continue you to follow me on this journey of creation! There’s much more I have in the works I can’t wait to talk about in future blogs. 2014, LET'S DO THIS!

Women of Interest

Elizabethan Autumn

Changes to Words of Interest

Words of Interest, as some of you know, is my "word of the day" comic in which I use royalty free victorian artwork (or my Whale an Squid characters) to not only tell a joke, but hopefully teach the reader a new word they may have never had a chance to learn. Personally, out of all my comics, this concept has always been one of my favorites. I love learning new words and finding fun ways to put them in sentences and/or use them in my daily vernacular! Using clip art (borrowed or made by myself) also provides me with the opportunity to work on better jokes because I can spend less time working on art and challenge myself to write something outside of my box. Though, I will admit sometimes I don't land every joke, but really that's the point; This comic is also a writing exercise for me to become a better writer as well.

Victorian Cadence

Victorian Cadence

As much as I love this comic's concept, it has definitely been my least visited site out of all my comics. This for me has always been a shame. A few of my favorite jokes I've ever written are Words of Interest jokes! In the time of my hiatus I've brought prints of some of my favorite Words of Interest and ALT. comics to shows and people have liked them both equally. This for me is reaffirming, though raised questions for me as to why it's not as popular on the internet. After discussing with people here and there I've come to find that people don't even realize that Words of Interest is another L.A.W.L.S. comic. This led me to investigate as to why this may be the case. I began looking through my archives and realized a few things rather quickly. I believe a huge factor in this is that other than the Whale and Squid characters, there really is no L.A.W.L.S. "presence" in them. It dawned on me that I should perhaps add some of my more signature characters, namely Cadence and Autumn.

Example of an Elizabethan dress.

Researching the Era

Considering how much I enjoy the Victorian esthetic I figured this would be a fantastic opportunity to learn more about it and dabble in drawing my own versions of classic styles! I spent some time researching cool Victorian hats, dresses and other things from the time. I learned though that when you search the word Victorian on Google or any other search engine, you also find a lot of overlap in Elizabethan styles as well. Unfortunately I didn't realize this when I first drew Autumn. It was a reader on Facebook that call it to my attention. At first I was worried that this would be something that would ruin the concept, but after further consideration I realized that it didn't really seem to affect what I was going for for the art: the essence of class. So, I decided to go ahead and leave Autumn in a more Elizabethan style but made sure to draw Cadence in Victorian garb. This leads to an interesting side note. The style of dress I chose for Autumn ended up giving her a bit more of a Queen-esque feel, which I liked because I've called her the Goth Queen before.

Examples of Victorian dresses

Victorian hat references

One thing I learned from this research is that I really wish women still wore hats. Maybe not the Victorian styled hats, but there are plenty of elegant choices that I think look really pretty. Am I alone in thinking this? Would any of you ladies out there wear them if the modern fashion provided you with choices that fit what you were wearing? I'm sure there are modern hats out there... but when I've gone to hat stores looking for top hats and such, it seems like most of the women's hats are hats that would only look nice if you were wearing fancy dresses. Even then, I feel like you'd have to be going to an era theme party to wear them. I don't know, maybe I'm weird. Either way, because I liked the way a lot of the hats looked I decided also that I would give Cadence I super flowery and crazy looking one. 

Preview of an upcoming Words of Interest!

Looking Forward

Since I'm talking about Words of Interest so in depth, I'm sure you're wondering what you can look forward to with this project and when I plan to implement all of this. The newly updated Words of Interest will still feature a few comics with the two main Gentlemen I've been using thus far, but I will definitely be adding Cadence and Autumn. If people seem to take to the change well, possibly I'll add the betta fish or even Hatticus and other characters. Is there any particular characters you'd like to see Dapper'd up?  

This is also a good opportunity to announce that the next book I plan to release will very likely be a Words of Interest: Volume 1. The reason being, I will be posting a lot more of these comics while I continue working on L.A.W.L.S. Volume 2 behind the scenes as well as release new ALT comics (the main object here is to be able to make better comics for my readers, while actually being able to post content). There will be more information on this later though. Let's move on to what I'm sure most of you are interested in: when I'll start these comics again!

FERLY  (FER-lee) noun;Something unusual, strange, or causing wonder or terror.

FERLY  (FER-lee) noun;
Something unusual, strange, or causing wonder or terror.

To that I'm gonna say: I've been holding off on posting again until a few things line up. A major thing is the fact that I'm trying to figure out exactly how I'd like to deal with the whole website situation I am in. Up until now I've been hosting several sites for different comics and projects. Remember how I stated above that people didn't quite understand that Words of Interest is in fact part of the L.A.W.L.S. Universe? Well, I think one reason is that it had it's own site. I've recently decided as a way to lower the amount of maintenance I have to do, so that I can focus actual comics, is that I'd like to put all my comics in one place. I'm in talks with a programmer right now who's hopefully gonna help me develop a site that host all 3 comics in one place: L.A.W.L.S., ALT. and Words of Interest. Depending on what we are able to do, the comics are going to either be hosted here at Corvink or at a single L.A.W.L.S. domain. Do you have any opinions on this matter? Frankly it's gonna come down to what we're able to accomplish but I appreciate your opinions. I mean, you are in fact the reason I am doing this! Either way, I'm hoping that in the next few weeks him and I will be able to figure this out and I'll be able to update you all on which it's gonna be. Till then I will continue to post production blogs and post samples of things I'm working on over at the Corvink Facebook.

Source: http://lawls.co/2013/11/13/women-of-intere...