Good Idea: Launching your comic with several comics in the archives already.
Bad Idea: Trying to be cinematic with those comics.

We’ve all seen webcomics where the first page is a character doing… something. Nothing special, just panels of a character making breakfast or walking down the street. The next page is either more of the same, or it’s all black, but there’s always a caption: “Cartoonist’s name presents…” - the third page is more character stuff. If we’re lucky there’s some dialogue, but not enough to gleam any real insight into what the comic is actually about. Page four is, again, either more character activity or all black with yet another production credit.

The comic basically continues like this, with a rather nice buffer of pages but it’s little more than an attempt at a movie-style opening. This works in movies but it doesn’t work in comics - least of all webcomics, where the opening pages should be giving your reader an impression of what your comic is about. If nothing happens for 16+ pages, half of which are production credits, your reader (that’s me) will lose interest. What you have there isn’t a comic at all - it’s a storyboard.

Just something to chew on.

On Wednesday I was interviewed by the esteemed gentlefolk of the GigCast. I spoke in detail about Ghost Hamster and how it works, so if you want to hear me preach about how brilliant an idea this is then by all means pop over and have a listen.

Welcome to Ghost Hamster. Lawks, typing that feels weird. Truth is I’ve owned this domain for a few months and the project it was originally intended for appears to have fizzled, withered away like a… well, like a dead hamster left out in the sun. That’s not a pleasant image, true, but consider yourself lucky that you can’t imagine the noisome aroma that you’d be “treated” to were you to stumble upon an actual rodent corpse. I’m suddenly reminded of a friend whose hamster escaped from its cage and went missing. They only found it again when they were packing to move house, moved a wardrobe to load it into the back of a van only to discover the very flat, very dead, very pungent animal mostly congealed against the wall.

I’ve strayed somewhat from the actual intended subject matter of this blog post. Namely, Ghost Hamster is here! Ghost Hamster exists to lift the burden of the webcomic creator, accept not all of your burdens because that would be silly. Specifically there’s one problem which seems to affect pretty much every cartoonist I know: You’ve come up with a superb joke, but it didn’t really work with your characters, or the format of your webcomic. That’s where Ghost Hamster comes in - you can draw the comic, email it to me and it’ll be placed in the queue as the next comic update. Updates could be daily. Or bi-weekly. Or weekly. Or monthly. Or… well, it really depends on how many strips come in. The nature of these little ideas is that they tend to pop into your head when you least expect it.

This isn’t Ebaum’s World, or Tokyopop, or any of those companies or websites out there with a view to stealing your content and making money. I’m not planning on printing any books together, and I don’t intend to run any advertisements on this site. Your work is your work, and is protected by a Creative Commons license. You’re free to post the comic strip anywhere else that you like - your blog, DeviantArt, wherever - and you’re free to ask me to take it down at absolutely any time. Honest.

Now you know this site is here, it might be worth subscribing to the RSS feed, which you can do by clicking the text link at the top of the page. You might also want to send me a comic, but of course you might not have one to send yet. For the time being I ask that you keep this site in mind for when those random flashes of inspiration hit you, and that you let other people know we’re here so that they can do the same.

Have a good’n, peeps.