If you're looking for free advice I'd say your major issue is experience; I'm assuming you haven't done a webcomic before so the fact of the matter is that whatever it is you're doing now is gonna suck nuts a hundred different ways you'll only notice after you put it out the door that you've never even thought of no matter how "perfect" you try to get it beforehand. It makes sense for Burlew to do delays cause he's been doing the comic he's doing for a long-ass time and so has a pretty developed idea of where he wants it to go and whether he's getting there, but when you're just starting out you'd probably do a lot better accepting as inevitable that your early work is gonna be flawed.

If you want "perfect" there's a pretty standardized way to do that IE. 1. write a standalone novel 2. do a shitty fucking first draft, then fix it. If you're gonna work in a serialized format you don't really have that option so in your case the order of operations goes 1. put it the fuck out there 2. learn as you go.

I myself am working on one now that I have an artist I can find and throw stuff at if she gets lazy, though I am making sure we can stick to a schedule or have a massive stockpile first. But I digress

I honestly have no problem with updating randomly. I give VGcats this slide now. What I have issue with is him saying he updates regularly and doesn't. If you update randomly say you update randomly. Its just common curtesy to let the reader know not to expect it at designated times.

If he has since done just that I fully retract my critism of course. But until then I will continue to be irate because of my hatred of false advertising

Newspost from 10/14/2007.

He also says there he'd try and have three comics per week on average. Honestly I can't be arsed to work out the actual average these days because I really don't care as long as updates don't stop completely. I know comics are coming, it doesn't hurt to check every day, everything's cool. What I don't quite get is why he doesn't build some sort of buffer, but a) it's his comic and he better work on it the way he prefers, and b) for all I know he does and it just looks different from the outside.

Well he did mention in one newspost somewhere that he would try and build a buffer of comics if he could. I don't know how well that went.

In so much as I don't care about Burlew's updating schedule--this argument is terrible.

Just because I'm not a mechanic that doesn't mean I can't tell when my car won't start, even if I can't tell you exactly why.

Just because I'm not an artist that doesn't mean that I can't tell when paintings aren't anatomically correct, even if I can't tell them exactly how to fix it.

Just because I'm not a webcomic artist that doesn't mean I can't tell most webcomic artists lack anything resembling skill and probably shouldn't have started in the first place, even if I couldn't write their jokes better (though this one I could probably do--Jesus, some of them are terrible)

I mean, I'm not going to stand here and leap down your throat for calling DD bland, or saying that 8-bit theater misses sometimes because you don't have a webcomic. Standing over there and telling other people that they can't judge Burlew's update schedule because they don't have a comic is pretty hypocritical.
It's a stick figure comic about D&D.

I don't think posterity is something we have to worry about.

Much as I hate to say it I have to agree with Krylo.

I've faced the "You aren't an artist so you don't know" argument before and it never made any sense before nor does it now.

I won't deny that. There certainly is a measure of tradeoff that I'm marginally okay with considering each episode is consistently worthwhile, and I do prefer it being good as opposed to being bad and regular.

My problem is that it seems like he has so much of the comic planned out in his head - IE he mentioned in the TPB of Paladin Blues that he had already planned out on introducing V's mate, and foreshadowing the IFCC for V's fall from grace - and yet the updates have slowed to a crawl, and this is pretty much his entire job (aside from working for WotC occasionally).

It strikes me as irritating to have an update schedule grinding to a halt of 'once a week, maybe, I dunno' and blame it on an illness he's always had (or at least had for a very long time). Making this comic for Whatshisname as the co-creator of DND and churning it out in like two days just seems like a faceslap.

Honestly I'm not trying to be a jerk here but all signs point to Burlew reveling in the benefits of his awesome job and it kind of irks me.

All due respect Mirai, but let's take a few authors that hit the big time.

Anne Rice
Laurell K
Robert Jordan
Tolkien

Out of all of them who churn out books until circumstances said otherwise, how many have had off books?

I'm glad he's pulling back. Even for myself as a writer, I have writer's block for the novel I'm currently working on. And while life goes on, at least I know there's people willing to read it. It just may take a while to see the progress on our (creator's) side. He probably has a lot of material and judging from the depth this could literally take YEARS to finish the entire thing. And he may need to do research every now and again for it. What's a few weeks of short updates?

Twilight is a book about glittering vampires that have no problem in sunlight and only drink blood when absolutely necessary. Oh and the protagonist girl has the hots for one of them for absolutely no reason. He acts like a dick to every single person including her and has no personality whatsoever. Oh and she is instantly popular for no reason when she joins a new school...But only when she hooks up with Edward. She's terrible at everything by herself. Remember, this is a series praised for female empowerment.



It's wildly popular among crazy teenager girls and will remain so for quite a while.


Sadly.

I think the important thing we're forgetting in this artistic merit versus smooth production debate is that none of us can do anything about Burlew's update schedule. Like it or not, we get the comics when he decides to do them. So I'm thinking, liking it it in the long run means less heart problems.

more or less my stance. I dont like that he doesn't update regularly, and I honestly do not think he has a legit excuse for not doing so. There are people that DONT draw stick figures that update more often then him.

Is it pure laziness? Probably, but that doesn't change the fact its his work and if he is ok with it stagnating them its his own business.

But dont give me the "he is waiting because he wants to make it great" that doesn't work in this media. Thats perfectly fine when the entire product is released at once, or atleast a large chunk of it. But when you are delivering your product a page at a time, with majority of your pacing reliant on the flow of those pages, waiting does not make it better, it makes it worse. Especially with his four lines all waiting story arc. People have trouble even remembering what the others are doing because its common to go months without seeing them.