For those of you who weren't aware, The Three Virtues podcast has just posted an interview with Dark709! Well actually, the interview has been up for almost three weeks now, but I only discovered it was up yesterday. It's great fun to listen to if you haven't already - it's nice to finally hear the dude's voice, and it's funny just for all the awkward, breathless pauses as Eljay and Kahi try to avoid having a heart attack while talking to the most famous BZPower comic maker ever. (On a side note to the TTV cast, I really enjoyed Alena in this interview - in past interviews I found her somewhat distracting, but here I think she really managed to anchor the interview, perhaps because Eljay and Kahi had so many awkward pauses...)

But there was a very specific part of the interview that really intrigued me, and that was when Dark was asked about what might make for a not-so-good comic series. Here's the quote of his answer:

DARK709: When people get too immersed in the storyline of their comics, it can become really complicated and then newcomers who try to read the comics it will be really hard to follow...you're not going to want to be confused by the storyline and see tons of inside jokes that don't make any sense to you. I think it's important to appeal to a really wide audience, with a simple storyline, really good humor, and funny characters.

 

KAHI: What about people who right off the bat want more of a serious, plot-based series? What do you have in advice for that?

 

DARK709: I think history shows us that a lot of the series that were completely focused on the storyline and had no humor didn't really fare so well. Didn't get many posts and everything. I mean the top three most popular comic authors, Nuparurocks, Gavla and myself, focus on a lot of humor and everything. I still think it's important to focus on storyline, but just not so much that your whole series is focused around it. Except for if you want to do a movie, where its cool visuals and everything, I think it's easier for people to watch an animation rather than a comic when they're trying to follow a complex storyline.

 

(Kahi mentions seeing plot-based series that work in some occasional jokes and a little humor)

 

DARK709: That's the kind of mix that I think is important. But also if you're going to do a storyline comic that's just focused on the storyline, I think you're going to have to really commit yourself to do amazing graphics and make a comic like every two days. I know Gavla releases a comic every two days and his comics are really storyline focused. I think it's important to get those comics out really fast.

Now there's a lot to go into here, so I'll start with a bit of a summary - there is some good advice about how to work with a serious comic series, but there's also some assertions about the forum I don't entirely agree with. But starting with where Dark ended during this exchange, I think there is some good advice: have some decent graphics (which I'd say works for you if you're doing a humor-based series as well) and be consistent with your updates - you are telling a story, so you got to make sure you actually tell it, lest people get bored waiting for the next part.

But the part that raised doubts for me was where Dark said that storyline-based comic series haven't fared well on BZPower, which didn't seem to fit my experience of the comic forum. Dark backs up his statement by saying that the most popular comic makers on the forum are those who do humor-based series. This is indeed true, but I think it might have more to do with some of the elements that define humor and storyline-based series.

When you're focused on a plot, you're telling a story - and every story has a beginning, a middle, and (most importantly for my argument here) an end (whether such a series actually makes it to the end is a different question altogether, and after telling one story you could jump right into another). But in a humor-based series there generally isn't a definite end unless you impose one on the series. As long as you can match your characters to one humorous situation after another, you can do a strip comic series pretty much forever. So it fits that the longest-running topics on the comics forum would be humor-based series.

But then there's the question of popularity. I do think Dark has a point about the issue of complexity in comic series and how newcomers can get confused with the storyline and inside jokes - this is something I had to deal with when I retired and decided to get more serious about looking at other people's series. But I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. You do narrow your audience when you introduce complexity, but there are people who demand a serious plot-focused series and are willing to invest the time to read it. Ask your parents if they understood the Bionicle storyline when you were following it - most likely they're going to say no, because they didn't take the time that you took to get to know the characters and what was going on. So yes, you might be sacrificing some popularity in doing a complex story, but you also earn some really dedicated, hard-core fans.

But having said all these reasons for why serious series are generally not as popular as humor-based ones, there's still the basic question: is it true? Does history really show that plot-focused, humor-less comic series just don't make it here?

I think I may have found evidence otherwise. Looking through the most popular topics on the forum (in terms of replies), I found several series that were very storyline-focused. Now, there's those series that are heavily story-focused but have a fair amount of humor, like Dark suggested: Generic Quest (50 pages of posts) and Legends of the Matoran (20 pages). But then I found some series that seem to have virtually no humor, and were still popular: The Mercenus Chronicles (31 pages), The Fourth Wall (22 pages, almost double the number of comics), and The Legend Of Destr (17 pages). However, all these examples are defunct series - probably the best example of an active storyline-based series I could think of was Cloud 9, which has little humor but is gaining in popularity - the topic only has five pages so far, but that's not too shabby for a series that's less than a year old. None of these series seemed to have comics being posted every other day like Dark suggested you have to do, but they did all have pretty good graphics, ranging from solid to stellar.

...And then I found it. The series that seemed to contradict everything Dark said about what a serious storyline-based comic series has to do. That's right...I'm talking about Nosferatu. It is a series that is completely focused on storyline, with almost zero humor (in fact, they were really quite dark), the graphics are...well, they're okay for their time but they're still a little amateurish (like I'm one to talk... ), and over more than a year he only made 53 comics - not bad, but not exactly every other day. And yet, it's the 20th most popular topic in the comics forum (14th in terms of views!), with 40 pages of posts. I'd say that's faring pretty well. I guess the question then becomes whether there was something unusual about Nosferatu's success, but I don't feel like I'm in a position to knowledgeably answer that.

I get where Dark is coming from here, but I think his interpretation of the comics forum reflects a fairly narrow viewpoint of the forum. We're all guilty of that to some extent, the trick is just to realize there's a whole other side to the forum that you, the casual comic reader, just frankly don't know about. I'm still trying to find that other side of the forum, and I've barely hit the tip of the iceberg. But like I said, there's some good advice from Dark and the interview is still great to listen to. I definitely recommend it, as it gives a good look into someone who is still one of the most dynamic figures in the comics forum.