jimzub:

Nope.

meredithgran:

Publish it on your own website, of course! Don’t use social media as your primary platform. What will you do when the Kochs buy up Twitter? When Monsanto merges with Yahoo and Tumblr? Maybe…. they already have??

My website has a good chunk of traffic and costs $9.50 a month to host and $15 a year for a domain name. Learn basic HTML, install Wordpress or another archiving system, and pay the $3 a month for a basic web hosting plan. Or get a friend to help set it up/host it for you. It really is easy, and it’s empowering to own and control your thing! Don’t buy into the pre-installed internet! And tell my students to listen to me too! :(

THIS. Social media is great and important but it shouldn’t be your primary distribution channel. Nothing is as good as having your own website.

meredithgran:

I already do this, and I am

meredithgran:

No, I made tons before it! Starting in grade school I made xerox paper comics about my pets. I had a few original characters:

“Poosh the Penguin & God” - a lot like Calvin & Hobbes/Bloom County. Poosh was commanded by God (represented by an anthropomorphic cloud) to save the world. Kind of like if Sinfest was drawn by an 8 year old girl.

“Flatfoot & Misty” - frog and turtle duo with Ren & Stimpy type slapstick humor. Misty was also my pet turtle. I got pretty mad when The Swan Princess (1994) had a similar frog and turtle team, because I’d intended for this to be my ticket to fame. These were the first comics I “self published” by taking them to the deli around the block and photocopying them.

I got really into this 1995 computer game “The Dig” and made a sorta original comic based on that. It was about a German scientist trying to escape an alien planet with his 2 other crew members, who were always busy fucking and not helping him. My sister made a parallel series with the same characters – if one of the pages turned out bad, she’d fold it up, staple it closed and write “REJECT - Don’t Open, Don’t Throw Away” on the outside.

“Spice’s Picture Book” was a series I made in a notebook over multiple years, but would only do a couple of entries per year, when my family was on vacation. Spice the cat would terrorize her neighbor, The Man. Pretty heady stuff. My brother spoke fondly of this comic at my wedding.

I made a bunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics over the years. Probably a few Lion King comics too. I made a Beavis and Butthead comic episode called “Crapper Jacks” in 7th grade that got chocolate all over it and it looked like crap.

I made a lot of Final Fantasy 7 comics during my “chibi” phase. These were probably the first ones I scanned onto the computer, with a handheld scanner at my friend’s house. I shared the images in AOL chatrooms by e-mailing them to anyone who wanted to see them. Shortly after this I got sick of comics and just wrote fanfiction for 2 years.

I returned to comics and did my first webcomic in 2000, a magical furry teen cat romance. My pet bird Kiwi was in it, too. No I don’t have any evidence of it. Sometimes people come up to me at cons and scare me by saying they remember it. I’m glad furries are considered cool now.

In 2004 or so I did my 2nd webcomic, a tongue in cheek superhero fashion college student adventure. It was sort of proto-OP in some ways, and is mostly lost to the ages. A few people remember this one; I gave it up to finish my thesis. My next comic was OP in 2007.

All right, this is probably a good note to end the Asks on. Thanks guys!