Broken Frontier

Up and until now, I haven’t written much about my own webcomicking experience, for reasons of irrelevance (it’s not even updating anymore) or conflict of interests (but I’m not saying it’ll never update again). But for the last Daily Read of the year, I’m going to break that rule for today only, if only because I see a parallel worth exploring between my own experience and the meteoric rise of several webcomics of late.

Beyond the names, beyond the banners, the pitch is the singular most important feature on Top Webcomics. For all the time you put into building the story and audience of a webcomic, be it several hours or several years, you only have between two minutes and thirty seconds to catch someone’s attention.

The pitches seen below each entry of Top Webcomics are an excellent example of this. Here’s how my webcomic “Hector!”, (pictured below) currently defunct at place 1,049 on Top Webcomics, reads: “The noble Hector, reborn as Sebastian William Moore, must reclaim his place in both fact and fiction by undertaking a task of the mischievous minstrel Johnny Black, who has succeeded in conning just about everyone.”

I wrote that a little more than a year and half ago, in the starter days of my webcomic venture. It’s passable. It tells the (admittedly complicated) story, introduces the major players and tries to hint at the mythic proportions of the adventures. But it lacks the ever-prevalent hook needed to truly win readers over.

Now let’s look at Last Blood's pitch. “After zombies take over the Earth, vampires must protect the last surviving humans so they can feed off their blood.” Look at that. It’s about half the size of mine and does the job ever better. We see the setting, the premise and the conflict both externally (humans + vamps vs. zombies) and internally (humans vs. vamps) so beautifully it’s almost impossible not to click the link. But you can go even further, and even shorter, in producing a pitch perfect pitch.

A couple years ago, I briefly spoke to David Rodriguez when he gave a brief presentation with current Catwoman writer Will Pfeifer on comic writing at the Rockford library. Among the advice he gave to me was the creation of a logline combining two concrete, visualized titles to better describe your own. It’s like Titanic meets King Kong, you could say, or 28 Days Later meets 16 Blocks. It’s a way of giving your audience – be it your average webcomic reader or a suit-and-tie studio exec – something to chew on.

Of course, at the time, I didn’t know what the heck Rodriguez was going on about. Why would I compare my original, never-before-done, just-what-the-industry-needs product to two titles which have already been done before? Why would I limit myself like that? Well, because the alternative is very, very, very hard. I learned the hard way, through headache-inducing pitches and disappointing drafts, that Rodriguez was absolutely right. And just to spite me more, the Starkweather writer produced his own winning example – Shadowgirls. (pictured right) It’s like the Gilmore Girls meets H.P. Lovecraft.

To be fair, there’s a little more to this system of pitching than can be expressed to most newbies. Maybe there is something to be said for learning the hard way. If you go about pitching by comparing your webcomic to two movies you care little about, you’ll probably end up doing a disservice to yourself in the process. Start with your influences – with the works you care about the most – and then work your way out. Just don’t cast two tight a net. Very few people would read Last Blood if it was pitched as “Blade II meets Underworld.” Most people would probably wonder “What’s the difference?”

Try working your way through DVD collection or bookshelves emphasizing as many different works you’d watched and read, all while keeping the themes and plots of your own work in mind. I’ve already got my mine, but unlike my old Hector pitch, it’s four words instead of thirty-five. Have you got yours?