Fitz
And while Jim Davis isn't drawing and inking the strip, himself, any more - he's still involved with the series.

Are you kidding me? Maybe that's why it's gone downhill.

I definitely know how I'm going to end Faust. As far as how long it'll be, I really can't say. It's definitely not a story that could go on for years and years. (I'm thinking it'll last another 3-4 years. Or something.) Now, does that mean I have the entire comic planned out? No. No it does not. :P (I should probably get started on that.)

VegaX

Aurora Borealis
If it's a 100 pages that read great, doesn't matter if they show 20 years of history or conversations during a family dinner. Actually, you could set an entire story during that dinner and just tell it through flashbacks and conversations :)

Ha-ha, you'd have to be a REALLY great storyteller and a visually creative artist to make that work i think. :)

Well, I noted down a story idea few weeks ago that happens entirely in one location but on several different dates across the years, so I'll probably test that idea in a couple of years. :D

VegaX
Talking about endings though, i wonder how many comics here on DD that actually had a proper ending. I'm guessing the abandoned ones are in a great majority, which is of course sad.

Absolutely, a list would be great. Especially for someone like me who likes to read complete stories :)

Yes, there is an end. But this is only one story in the Chronicles.

I felt there was some rapping up of some of the story in Charby. Trying not to get into spoilers, the last few pages revealed the possible main objective of the characters.

Even as a fan I sometimes feel sad when a favorite comic/TV series/video game is coming to the end. Sigh... Avatar... Guru Guru Ponchan...Please Save My Earth.. I miss them. When you are a big fan, you don't notice the filler.

With my comics... The story lines are long. I know how they end, I just don't know how to build an exciting climax for the endings. So it's the climax I'm working on. There is a possibility that I might not make it to the final ending, but I have plans to at least look forward to end the upcoming story arc.

I don't want to look ahead too far. It's a bit too intimidating. I want to take it story arc by story arc. If I make it to the end, awesome. If I don't, I might end it early at the end of a story arc and start a new comic. Lord knows, I got plenty of ideas.

I can't imagine ending a comic. I've only ended one comic in my entire life because I ran out of ideas.

I've had an "end end" planned for Punk-Pink at one point, but the characters seem to be moving in a direction opposite of the way I originally intended the stories to go - characters are developing far more interesting backgrounds than I had imagined, for example. I'm sure eventually I'll end it, when I feel like all of my avenues have been exhausted, but for now I'm really just getting started.

I have an ending for The Journal the only problem for me is fleshing out (and actually making) the main story. I think I sort of had the ending to begin with and then worked backwards and thought about the beginning, the middle sort of reveals itself to me every so often it's just actually restarting the story that's the problem right now...

My comic has a fairly fleshed out ending. The world I created my comic in, however, has many options for other stories.

VegaX
The bad thing with webcomics, or good depending on how you see it, is that there is hardly ever any "cutting room" editing done. While traditionally released comics have a issue size of 22 pages, a webcomic can easily drag on for hundreds of pages for each chapter. I think very few authors have the self critique to cut in their story and generally makes their comic way longer than it needs to be.

read my latest page of KFK :D

NickGuy
The bad thing with webcomics, or good depending on how you see it, is that there is hardly ever any "cutting room" editing done. While traditionally released comics have a issue size of 22 pages, a webcomic can easily drag on for hundreds of pages for each chapter. I think very few authors have the self critique to cut in their story and generally makes their comic way longer than it needs to be.

I readily admit that I glossed over much of this thread... but i caught this interesting tid bit!

I actually think that an advantage of webcomics is that it breaks free of the 22 page format. The whole 22 page thing was something that got formulated as a happy medium between acceptable reading length, expectations from talent, and cost effectiveness. Its sort of a meaningless formula that is adhered to mostly out of it being the way things have been done for some time. Same goes for the 6 issue story arc (dictated to publishers by book chains as the perfect length for a TPB).

Anyhow... that much said. I do 22 page chapters... hahah! Why? Cause I print each chapter as a comic... and it kind of helps me put some structure and boundaries in an otherwise willy nilly ness.

See... i've just sucessfully argued with myself.

Anyway. As far as endings go: WAY far away i have an end for Mastorism, but there are at least 3 major stories i want to tell before I get to that point (I am in the middle of the first)... each story, though, has its end. I have yet to decide whether or not I want to take a break and do something different between stories... i think it will depend on the readership. If i feel that I can get away with doing something else and not lose the readership i have built for Mastorism... okay. But more than likely that will not be the case, so I will just have to continue. It should be interesting...

The 22 page thing is simple. If you exclude the weekends, this is roughly the number of pages an artist can do if he does one page daily.

I'm moving towards print myself, but I'm more interested in trades/graphic novels, so the lenght of chapters becomes irrelevant at this point.

I'm pretty sure I'll be someone who doesn't end a story, but doesn't continue it forever, either--my schedule/motivation would just slug me and I wouldn't update as much, and eventually, not at all.

a very sad fate indeed, but I've seen this happen time and time again with my stories, so I'm pretty sure it'll happen to this one as well. :/ question is, rather, how long it'll last.

And then what????
Aurguably the longest single epic comic wholly created by one man was the 15,145 page Opus The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, by Henry Darger...who spent his entire life writing and illustrating this massive work--which until his death--no one even saw! Wow.
My own creation started life as a one off--a 24/24 comic just to say I did it. Now it has grown to over seven issues and two hundred pages...more than I ever imagined...yet the STORY I now have as planned will go on a long time before it culminates in a single big bang conclusion and an end. Trouble is, the pace of creation is slow at three pages a week. Sometimes the vision seems to weigh me down...sigh.

The worst thing is, already RW has ruled my life for so long that I'm not sure what I would do if bereft of it...that's the scary thought. I guess I'd need to start another comic, heh!

I had planned from the start for Divine Leap to be 3 chapters and yes, I have the ending planned. Though the ending I now have is actually different than how I originally planned it.

I have several other comic ideas that I've been wanting to work on but I put them aside until I finished Divine Leap. And it'll be a while before I start them considering how long it's taking me to finish so they continue to fester inside my head. Every now and then I doodle some designs for them though.

Seeing as Lost is a fragmented comic I can't really wrap it all up and make an ending. I could reveal what's going on, but the whole idea would be spoiled if I did that, so it's unlikely it'll ever happen. But this question wasn't really meant for storyless experiments like that, so I'll talk a bit about my storytelling in general and a project I've been working on lately.

Generally I'm not good at endings. Or middles. If I go beyond the smallest stories I tend to just... let them trail off into the distance. Or abandon them. So I decided to attempt a story where I know the end and the beginning and just let the middle come as I move along. So far I've got about twenty pages or so, and I think it'll work for once. It won't be a pretty ending, but it's one I've wanted to see for a long time, so hopefully I'll get to it at some point.

We'll see.

ipokino
And then what????
Aurguably the longest single epic comic wholly created by one man was the 15,145 page Opus The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, by Henry Darger...who spent his entire life writing and illustrating this massive work--which until his death--no one even saw! Wow.

Wow indeed. I have never heard of it before (or if I did, it slipped by without me noticing) but I googled here and there and it's not exactly a comic... it's a damn long novel that's accompanied by couple of volumes of illustrations... AND I WANT TO READ IT :D
And I want to make an actual comic that's that long, haha. Hey, in theory it's possible, Osamu Tezuka did about 150 thousand pages in his entire career and there have been several creators who are in the "six digit page count club".
*gets all dreamy*

My own creation started life as a one off--a 24/24 comic just to say I did it. Now it has grown to over seven issues and two hundred pages...more than I ever imagined...yet the STORY I now have as planned will go on a long time before it culminates in a single big bang conclusion and an end. Trouble is, the pace of creation is slow at three pages a week. Sometimes the vision seems to weigh me down...sigh.

The worst thing is, already RW has ruled my life for so long that I'm not sure what I would do if bereft of it...that's the scary thought. I guess I'd need to start another comic, heh!

You need to make a 24 hour comic every couple of weeks? This way you'll be able to update daily :D

Aurora Borealis
You need to make a 24 hour comic every couple of weeks? This way you'll be able to update daily :D

Uhhh yeah.... When I remember back to that frenetic day, I sometimes shudder. I ran on pure adrenaline for like 16 hours or so, then around four am...crashed. Fortunately I was only about five or six pages shy of wrapping, so I was able to hang on and finish. It is HARD! Also, I took a lot of shortcuts with that first issue that I have slowly managed to work myself away from...so its not really a viable solution anymore...sadly. I still work eight to ten hours on Sat and Sundays to get out two pages to tide me through the week, and finish the third during the week-days. This week I was crushed by my 'real' job and so I will be late posting my last page for the week. I hate that!

I cannot imagine having completed six digits worth of serial art...it...its just too much!!!!

Pagan Zoetrope is only supposed to be about a 7 year span in the lives of the characters while the majority of them are in college. A total of 7 Volumes.

I started this in 2005 and gave myself until 2015 to finish it up. A 10 year span. All that could change, but as I see it in the forseeable future, I know how it will end, and how it's supposed to go for the most part.

Millennium has an ending! I've even written it! However, a good chunk of its second half, while planned, isn't written. A lot of its first half has to be altered, too - take a few things out, add some in, since it restarted and stuff. 8 of its 12 chapters are solid, though.

Lovefeast doesn't haven an ending, and it probably won't for a looong time. It's the kind of series that could keep going indefinitely, but I don't want it to draw on like a lot of shounen manga.
Its prequel story has one, though, and it's 80% finished writing-wise.

Also, beginning comics is a bitch. Prologues aren't my thing; I don't know WHY I try to do them.

Harkovast has a clear end.
I have a clear image in my mind for how the final scenes play out and what becomes of the various characters.
But I suspect it will be a very long road to get there. It is not called "epic" fantasy without good reason.

I like doing story arcs of around six issues or so. The series could end at the end of any arc, or continue forever depending on how many people want more, and how much good story I can get out of it. I'd never end in the middle of an arc, however.

I like doing 22-page issues, because it forces me to keep the story on-track. With YU+ME, issue 9 ended up being something like 110 pages long. It was ridiculous. I should have edited out half, and broke it down into three separate issues. Now that I started doing shorter issues, the story is moving at a much nicer pace. Occassionally, I go over by a page or two, but luckily, the freedom of webcomics says that's okay.

With Age of Ends, yes there is an ending. I have the beginning, middle and end summarised into three pages and stored neatly away in my computer. I said it would be 50 chapters to the aritst and colourist, but I think it might go even longer if we enjoy it.

However, Living With Insanity has just started and in all honesty, I don't want to finish it any time soon. I can see it being like PvP, Sinfest, etc. with numerous pages in the archives after only a couple of years (Don't think it'll ever get as popular as those comics though). I mean, eventually I might get bored with it, but for now I'm going to be drawing those strips until I get arthritis.

I'm not finishing the story anytime soon for Gothenreich Chronicles.

I have an idea that will change the story (But I'm not revealing it yet)

I am also working on 'Sidequel' stories to flesh out the plot.

I don't think of the comic for the characters, but as a world.

Engine will end in about 400 to 500 pages. Since Engine features so many key characters, the book could go on with any of them. I'm not sure I will go on though........I'll have to get there and see how I feel about it all. I do have an ending in mind though, which will be cool to draw. All I will say is the ending is all about Mr. 8, Silas and Jinn.