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I've been wondering about putting my strips on line. I publish a fairly popular series of strips and short comic stories in the Belgian magazine "Spirou". But I was never able to find a publisher in English. (is that even possible in print? It seems it's all about syndicated 7 day a week strips with only a handful of artists getting a spot) I tried to put some strips on line through imgur, reddit and what not. Resulting in 100000+ views sometimes, but the traffic coming back to your own site is about 20 people. And so, I guess there's no way of making money of banners etc...? Maybe some of you have more experience with these things, and I'm hoping for some help 
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Sep 17, 2015 16:12
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Mercury Hat posted:Double posting because Manga Studio is on sale again, digital version, until September 29. $87 for EX, or $50 to upgrade your copy of 5, or buy the vanilla program for $15. Does anybody know when manga studio 6 (or clip studio) is coming out? I haven't seen anything posted about it, or even what the new features will be. It's great software by the way, I use it every day. I used to work with photoshop, but I hardly use it anymore. It's hard to explain, but the drawing in MS is just better. The coloring tools, with things like the "area scaling" feature, are also better.
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Sep 25, 2015 07:37
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I know most of you don't speak Dutch here, but if you do (or if you don't, what do I care), consider voting for my short story that was nominated for a Plastieken Plunk (a plastic Plunk, Plunk being a comic book character). You can find it here: http://goo.gl/FIQvWz Thanks Now I'll have to come up with a nice way to bribe the jury, which they actively encourage.
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Nov 13, 2015 11:09
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Do any of you guys have experience with people who can help set up a simple comic press site? I have a wordpress site and tried changing it with comic press to have the typical online comic layout, but I just can't get it to work.
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Nov 20, 2015 14:03
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   Phone pics of my 'serious' graphic novel project I keep working on outside of my regular work of making funny comics for Spirou magazine here in Belgium. It's moving very slowly but I really hope to finish it one day. My storyboard is about 185 pages and I think I have about 70 or so ready now without post in photoshop (adding frames/changing colors etc...).
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Jul 13, 2016 16:44
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So Mercury Hat advised me to post my question here. I'm sure I did that already some time ago, but I'll try again: I make the comic Captain Anchovy. The stories and strips are published in the Belgian magazine http://www.spirou.com/ I also translate the strips in English and put on my site: http://mrfart.be twice a week. The site was made with wordpress/comic easel like most online comic sites. However it has some errors. I payed a freelancer to fix it and she made it considerably worse. I tried to hire other freelancers and it seemed they didn't know what they were doing either. So now I'm still looking for someone who knows Comiceasel and can fix the problems. I'm willing to pay for it of course. if I can't find somebody I was thinking of starting from scratch. Does anybody have experience with Grawlix? It looks less messy than wordpress. But maybe it's very limited?
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Oct 25, 2016 18:29
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Prof. Ann Mary Ann posted:Flatulent sir, Wow that's great. I don't need a plethora of plugins. What I like about comic easel is the function to batch upload a bunch of comics and schedule in advance when they'll be posted. Is this possible with grawlix? Also, it looks like it's possible to have more than 1 comic on a site but I didn't see it in one of the example sites. Thanks
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Oct 27, 2016 22:43
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I'm thinking of drawing my next comic (if I ever get there) with a more technical pen, without variations in line thickness. I don't have money fo real rotring pens, and the way I press my pens would destroy them too fast anyway. There are some nice cheap alternatives, but the very thin ones that I like most (pilot hi-tec) aren't water/light fast. What are some of you guys favorite weapons? Sorry if this is a repost.
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Mar 30, 2017 21:14
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al-azad posted:What's your budget and why does it need to be water resistant? Right off the bat I'd recommend a disposable like microns. water resistant because I like to put in some color with sepia ink or something similar afterwards. Actually, I've been using the lack of water resistant ink in the pilot pens in my sketchbook to my advantage. I just put in shades with a water reservoir brush, and the ink smears enough to put in some blue/gray shading. It's a lot of fun to sketch on the train or in a pub on holiday. I think I'm gonna give the rotring tikki pens a try.
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Mar 31, 2017 09:00
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I got to make the cover of his weeks Spirou magazine. Besides the cover, I also got a gag page, dual game page, an interview and… a “mini-réçit”! that's a tiny album that you need to fold and staple together yourself. If anybody speaks french and lives in europe, you can find it in the better newspaper stands, or you can find the digital version here: http://ww4.izneo.com/albums/journal-spirou/n-4131-tome-4131-A24277 But I’m not sure how easy the folding and stapling will be in that one.  
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Jun 14, 2017 09:23
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I notice nobody here seems to publish on something like comixology. I know nothing of digital publishing, so I was wondering why? Is it that bad, is there a downside to it? And what about sites like big cartel? I'm genuinely asking, since people prefer just putting their work on tumblr.
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Jul 31, 2017 21:13
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Kojiro posted:Well, they're completely different formats, really. Putting it on Tumblr means its free to read, comixology means they have to pay for it upfront, very different markets. You're right, they are very different. But I see a lot of stuff on tumblr that could be sellable on something like comiXology, but people don't seem to bother. Does that mean the profit is so small it's not worth the effort, or do they keep it free out of principle, or have another way of getting some revenu like patreon...
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Jul 31, 2017 22:23
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Kojiro posted:Yeah I've not made much on comixology either, also if you're outside the US they pay you in a cheque, which is pretty not great since the bank takes a chunk out of foreign cheques. Throw your stuff on there if you like but don't make it the backbone of your business model. Patreon is much better for that kind of thing. Well, everything I ever made was already published in Belgian magazines. These are very much my backbone .If I publish something it would just be the english translation of dutch/french stuff and it feels like it would be more fun to publish it in the form of a digital book as opposed to images on a website. But I have no illusions of making any noteworthy money with it.
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Aug 1, 2017 08:15
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My first 2 Captain Anchovy albums will be published in Dutch in January. I'm still selecting content. After all these years I got hundreds of pages and the selection process isn't easy. I hope I'll get to do something similar in French. Had a positive meeting about it this weekend, but it's all wait and see.  
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Oct 14, 2017 00:01
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I use the story editor too, but it's far from perfect. I've set my default fonts etc in the preferences, but for some reason when I enter text into the story editor, it sometimes displays a random font, sometimes even with vertical text direction. As far as I know you can't change fonts in multiple textboxes or layers at the same time? Why can't you select multiple text layers or boxes holding shift? It's so tedious. Or am I missing something? I also wonder when they're gonna make it possible to do super basic text edits, like rotate. Or is this also something I missed? edit: I just found out about apply tool property to selected text. At least that's something. but when I drag text from one page to the next in story editor it keeps changing the text back to vertical text direction. mrfart fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 12:50
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 Published another compilation album in Dutch from my gags and short stories I made for Spirou, a Belgian comic magazine, published in French (making it very complicated with all the translations). Anyway, I'm grateful I get to make that comic. But my more alternative graphic novel has been on hold for forever; I decided the try and get a government grand, now that I found a small publisher who wants to publish it. But chances are slim.   
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Dec 5, 2018 22:29
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Johnny-on-the-Spot posted:If you publish a comic on webtoons, can you print physical copies to sell as a patron reward, or convention special, or have you lost the rights for that? It’s your work. They don’t pay you, so it would be disgusting if they also would take your rights away. It shocks me a little that people somewhat meekly assume companies have the right to do that. I guess we’re getting used to taking poo poo.
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Apr 23, 2019 10:39
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I think it all depends on the website or app your comic is viewed on? The standard comicpress/easel wordpress site doesn't have the option to make pages scalable. Or not as far as I know. But I have friends who publish on that webtoon app or izneo app in europe, and it's a bigger resolution. But the app adjusts it to your screen size.
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Jun 16, 2019 10:29
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sweeperbravo posted:Where do you go to talk about poo poo? This has always been a problem in the comic world. I thought it was just so small in my country (Belgium), but the worldwide community seems almost smaller and I don’t know any forum with a substantial amount of pro or semi pro artists who you can talk with. It’s the same with technical forums for clip studio or something. There’s not enough activity to get something going. And, as others here said, the mainstream social networks don’t want real discussions, they want you to get lost in their UI and click poo poo you shouldn’t.
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Jul 10, 2019 17:11
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lofi posted:Comicpress seemed to break most of Wordpress for me, I could never really get it to play nice with any other modules. But I don't know of a better solution. It has been giving errors lately on my site. I didn’t change anything and don’t know how to get rid of them. It’s always been something like that with comicpress. And again, there’s no community to ask about it. I asked the creator himself about some of the problems, and he answered a couple of months later. Understandably, he has better things to do.
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Jul 11, 2019 05:53
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So I submitted a comic at comixology. It's a compilation of about 80 pages of jokes and small pages I made a long time ago for various European magazines. I don't know if they'll approve it, but I was a bit shocked to find out it takes up to 3 months for them to tell you, and even if they do it's another 8 weeks before it's even on their site. I'm not sure if you can submit anything yet in other languages, and since most of these stories were originally in Dutch or French, I was thinking about selling these versions somewhere else. But I don't know where. The only Dutch/French online comic platform only takes submissions from big publishers. I would like to sell a pdf or something somewhere, but sites like bigcartel ask a monthly payment, and we all know these comics don't sell enough to make that an option. Maybe I should just give it away on my site with a donate button to paypal or something, I don't know.
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Jul 25, 2019 15:36
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Neon Noodle posted:Gumroad is really good, I’ve used them for probably 8 years? I sell both physical and digital items and have never had a problem. Their payment plans seem confusing now. The links on their help page don't work anymore. Do you pay a monthly fee, or just a percentage on a sale?
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Jul 26, 2019 13:28
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Neon Noodle posted:Percentage on sales. Thanks for the advice. I gave it a go: https://gum.co/theprof I'm sure I'll make a fortune The first stuff is very rough, but I wanted to make it chronologically and give a little 'history' of the comic scene in Belgium. Anyway, never got to do much with this character, as it was deemed too alternative for the market. 
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Jul 30, 2019 17:14
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readingatwork posted:A couple thoughts. thanks, I lot of sound advice. Also, some of these bright colors will disappear when converted to CMYK, though, I don't know if anybody still cares about printing, but I have to. I got a bit of a shock that I found a magazine publisher who will actually pay for a side project that I handed in for a subsidy. I even got a small subsidy from the Flemish government too. Though, that's more for a more alternative project that I'll be doing after this album, I guess. This will be more of a 'broad audience' comic about a mid-life crisis dude, who decides to start skateboarding again after 30 loving years. ABSOLUTELY NOT based on real life in any way. 
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Jul 9, 2020 11:52
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readingatwork posted:
Well, I have my website http://mrfart.be/ which has a 'new' old comic strip weekly, but I should really translate some newer comics in English and upload them. Same goes for tapas: https://tapas.io/series/Captain-Anchovy sometimes I put them on twitter but I often forget. I tried insta, but basically had to re-cut everything, and didn't want to bother.
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Jul 9, 2020 17:09
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I used comic easel on my crappy word press site to schedule all my comic strips twice a week for a whole year. Anybody know of a good tool to do this for twitter? And maybe instagram. Though the latter also basically requires you to recut all of the comics into single squares and post them in series. It’s an insane amount of work. I was hoping to use the share function on the Wordpress,but the share plugin I use doesn’t share the image, just a link on twitter. http://mrfart.be/comic/captain-anchovy-ice-scream/
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Jul 29, 2020 21:36
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I just finished making a font for a new graphic novel. It has a lot of variants (variations of the same letter, to make a font look more natural) and ligatures (combinations of certain letters have their own variation). It all looked perfectly well, but now I notice to my horror clip studio doesn't seem to support ligatures or variants? It just uses the first variant of a letter and none of the ligatures. If this is true, I'll be forced to switch between clip studio and my 10 year old copy of photoshop to type all the text. This seems like such an important part of comic fonts that I struggle to believe it's not supported? I really hope I am doing something wrong and it is possible to use them. Maybe any of you have any experience with this.
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Sep 25, 2020 23:46
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Neon Noodle posted:You wouldn't happen to have a 10-year-old copy of Indesign, would you? Because Photoshop's text handling is horrific. If you think text handling in photoshop is bad, don’t try text in clip studio:) it would drive you nuts. But really, the problem is having to switch between software. It’s nice to see how much space you’ll need for your text before finishing a drawing. Especially in my situation where I’ll have to put the text in 3 different languages.
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Sep 26, 2020 11:33
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Reiley posted:I am a Photoshop user trying to learn CSP and one of the nicest techniques I learned was type something in a font/size of your choice, drop opacity and use the text as an Ames guide for hand-lettering on a layer on top of the text, then turn off the text layer. That's how I handle text in Photoshop. If it was one language, I wouldn't mind hand lettering. That's really not an option for me. The new fonts I made with a lot of variables and ligatures become very hard to distinguish from handwritten text. But I'll have to use something other than clip studio, seeing as the new update didn't change a thing, and apparently people have been begging for the option since at least 2015. It's not really a priority, and maybe even an unknown problem, because the developers are Japanese.
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Oct 1, 2020 08:44
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Truman Peyote posted:
I used to scan in bitmap in very hi-res. But I've been drawing digitally for a long time, so I don't really know. Thin lines are tricky Maybe experiment a bit with the resize? Photoshop has a couple of settings how to interpreted when scaling. I'm putting an old project online that I never finished due to not finding a publisher. I was putting it on reddit ,could put it here too, but maybe it's not the right thread.                     
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Aug 6, 2023 22:30
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readingatwork posted:I loved that. Reminds me of the Flight anthologies. Do you have a website/social media? Thanks. I haven't even put this story on my own website yet ( https://mrfart.be ). And the problem with my social media is that I used them for my more kid friendly comics in dutch/french. I tried for a long time to get some traction with them in English on birdsite/tapas etc. But that didn't work at all. It was a bit of depressing project, in that I really believed in it, but I couldn't find anybody interested in it, and I kinda kept working on it for a long time not wanting to give up, but maybe should have.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:57
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Yeah, nice style.
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Dec 14, 2023 19:14
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Yeah I can see both sides of this. I’ve been living from making comics now for over 2 decades. Just scraping by. And I only did this adopting to the fraco/belgian market. I have friends (much more talented friends) who did this with more artistic comics and subsidized work. But I never managed to get to that level. But adapting a little I managed to still tell jokes and funny stories in comics. I keep riding that wave as long as it lasts. It definitely doesn’t exist in the English speaking world. It seems to be accepted that comics is something you do as a second job, and you post work for likes and make money for Zuckerberg.
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Apr 27, 2024 23:17
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