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2 years ago
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As with many things, I think the secret to success with a New Year's Resolution is to aim low... or is that get high? Either way, achievable goals with sticky, tangible results. None of that "shooting for the moon" nonsense. I mean, have you seen how that's going lately?
On that note, OHP's website has finally made a rough landing in 2024! It doesn't have the latest art from around here yet (guess that's exclusive to you lucky ducks for the moment), and the fan-art page is woefully out of date, but everything should be linked, operational, and (dare I say it?) pretty once more. It even looks decent on smartphones for a change (wow)! As a new feature, I've also tagged all 296 pages, so the whole comic is now searchable by every single character of note (as well as by several unique tags for other purposes). I'll probably be adding a few more fun tags and a slightly more robust search tool to improve accessibility and re-readability, since one of my long-term goals with the existing pages is to make specific ones easier for fans to find. Maybe transcripts eventually, though AI's got me feeling some ways about making things too accessible on the web...
Going back through 12 years of links in my cyberquest to rebuild, something that stood out to me is the absolute state of older webcomics. A bunch of the stuff I remember fondly seems to have been scrubbed from existence, either intentionally by their creators or through years of website rot. I can definitely empathize with the latter, but man, what a bummer! Some others have moved behind paywalls or to print-only, and a few more appear to have switched to CBR/CBZ archives, which is... a choice, I guess! Webcomic monetization is one of those things that's always eluded me, since I've been hesitant to charge for the content itself. I do wonder sometimes if things might've shaken out a little differently if something like Patreon had been around in 2001...
Anyway, that's enough navel-gazing for now. You reading any good webcomics these days?
On that note, OHP's website has finally made a rough landing in 2024! It doesn't have the latest art from around here yet (guess that's exclusive to you lucky ducks for the moment), and the fan-art page is woefully out of date, but everything should be linked, operational, and (dare I say it?) pretty once more. It even looks decent on smartphones for a change (wow)! As a new feature, I've also tagged all 296 pages, so the whole comic is now searchable by every single character of note (as well as by several unique tags for other purposes). I'll probably be adding a few more fun tags and a slightly more robust search tool to improve accessibility and re-readability, since one of my long-term goals with the existing pages is to make specific ones easier for fans to find. Maybe transcripts eventually, though AI's got me feeling some ways about making things too accessible on the web...
Going back through 12 years of links in my cyberquest to rebuild, something that stood out to me is the absolute state of older webcomics. A bunch of the stuff I remember fondly seems to have been scrubbed from existence, either intentionally by their creators or through years of website rot. I can definitely empathize with the latter, but man, what a bummer! Some others have moved behind paywalls or to print-only, and a few more appear to have switched to CBR/CBZ archives, which is... a choice, I guess! Webcomic monetization is one of those things that's always eluded me, since I've been hesitant to charge for the content itself. I do wonder sometimes if things might've shaken out a little differently if something like Patreon had been around in 2001...
Anyway, that's enough navel-gazing for now. You reading any good webcomics these days?
We've still got Sluggy Freelance, Oglaf, and Spacetrawler, and Krazy Krow finally had a hit with Spinnerette, which would be Krakow 5.0 by his old system of naming.
The Power of Stardust is kind of interesting, I love the idea that Stardust was just a helpful non-humanoid wizard from another dimension whose job was turning things into other things, and all his bizarre, lurid vigilantism was just a cultural misunderstanding.
There's archives of Empowered, Gold Digger and ElfQuest online, that's still good reading if you never got the hold-in-your-hands editions.
I am glad that Cat Rackham still exists in print but I'm a little sad that one's site got vaporized. Atland seems to have totally vanished, and the Dumm Comics collective appears to have slid into the darkness after "the thing" happened, taking all those webcomics with it. I was happy to see that a some of stuff I thought was gone still exists and just moved, like Wendy/Girly. I'm sure many of these probably had notices up at the time that I wasn't around to catch.
I wonder how much of this stuff is only available through the Wayback Machine now?
The Wayback Machine often fails to retrieve image files, so a lot of the early stuff is lost. And a few of the authors involved went as far as blocking the Wayback Machine, when they depublished.
I think Joe Cool/Zodiac might have died IRL, I haven't seen any new She-Hulk With A Dick pictures from him for years and years. And Joshua Quagmire did pass away, he literally updated his webcomic one last time from his death bed with a borrowed tablet, say what you like about Josh, he had work ethic. Cherry Poptart came back as a webcomic! Well, minus the "Poptart" part, thanks to the lawsuit from Kellogs, lol.