If you could have started your webcomic in the beginnings of webcomics like Megatokyo, PA, PVP etc... did would you?

What year did those start... 2000? :S

Earlier for some, like 96/98. MT started a bit later than the others, in 2000.

But I think that even starting now is good. If you're talented (like those guys are), and work on it for 8 or 10 years, I'm sure you'll have a great following.

toothpastefordinner started sometime around '95 if I remember right. While there would be a lot less competition to make it big since you'd be automatically the biggest as the first, I'm not sure I'd want to be one of the people charged with the task of breaking into a new audience and creating a new art form.

Even though it would be incredibly interesting to be in the leading wave, I'm not really even sure it would be much different than now. I think the competition vs. pioneering aspect would pretty much even things out and it wouldn't be too horribly different.

If I had started drawing back then, my pictures would still all be on paper and not uploaded, since no free servers offer enough storage space (and I have no money). It would also have remained very ugly since my friends won't give me good critiques and don't know much about art. There would be no audience either, since I'm no good at self promotion... and not good at art. (Frankly, I'm amazed I have any readers here.)

In short, no.

No, not really. On the one hand, being part of the first wave would have been nice - but on the other hand, creating and hosting webcomics wouldn't have been as simple as it is today. Also, I probably wouldn't have been able to pluck up the courage to post it in the first place.

If I could take Jayfri, Rokas and Liz with me, with the abilities they have now, then hell yes.

Back then it would have been easier because the artists at the time aren't as good as they are these days. Today it's harder for an artist just starting because everyone's used to brilliant photoshop effects and great body details. They expect something grand because that's what they're used to. But if even I started a comic by myself and did it for eight years, I'd maybe be at their level by now.

But yeah, if I could do it and could take the artists with me and we had all the resources we needed and maybe the cash to get some t-shirts and other merchandise printed up, and were able to get to all the right conventions, then yes, I would.

Don't think I could have. Dial up was the worst back then. I might have hosted it at a dumb msn community, but my art and story telling skills were null back then.

If it was like 2000 or before probably not possible. I'm not sure I even had the internet back then. I only found out about webcomics in 2002.

I could have and should have totally did it.

Though the pages would have looked MUCH worse way back then, still that would have given me so much more practice, feedback, and web knowledge!

The problem is back then there were no free hosting like DD or SJ, and the hosting (for pay) that did exist was (1)small and (2)hard to use. Even if you paid lots of money to maintain a big site for yourself, dial-up meant you still would have had to limit the filesize of your pages.

And scanners/tablets were (1)expensive and (2)primitive. So were the paint program I'd imagine. And nobody knew how to really use Photoshop except professional animators, I'll bet.

And I'm sure self-promotion was harder too, because you don't have the ready-made venues that you have now.

But if you conquered all that as a pioneer, and produced (and promoted) a quality comic like what you're capable of today, you probably would be a Megatokyo.

I started My pinky painting comic series in 97-98... and I was using Photoshop back then too, but didn't host any images at all on the net till 2000. I just didn't know about web hosting before then. I had some comic pages up , but didn't continue with the series properly until late 2003- early 2004.

Didn't get a tablet till 2001 either.

I regret that I didn't go forward and properly host Pinky TA back in 2000, but ... whatever. I didn't.

I nearly did, but I always had something else to do that got in the way.

I wasn't ready back then. I was too busy with role playing and fan fiction (*shudders*) at that time. AND my art was not nearly as good AND George had not come to me yet! (That is the most important reason of all)

Since I only started doing a comic strip because I had this character in my head that kept doing funny things :D

Let's see here. I was...about 8 years old.

I was too much into cartoons, video games, and even Action figures back then.

So that would be a no.

Unless you mean, if I was the same age and still had the (somewhat) artistic talent I do now? Yes, I would LOVE to.

I was doing superhero webcomics back in 1996! Woohoo!

Initially, a friend of my wife's offered me free webhosting on his server at his house, which was wired out to the internet. Then about 6 months later, I went and got an ISP and some webhosting. The secret was to do all my own HTML. XD

Well, back in those days, webcomics werent really as rampant as today. As long as you have any semblance of a plot, you can get noticed.

I'm one of those who started as early as 2000. And if I started during the early days with the same skill level of drawing that I have now, I bet my comics could have been more popular.

Anyway here's one of the old Brood Knight pages:

kyupol
Well, back in those days, webcomics werent really as rampant as today. As long as you have any semblance of a plot, you can get noticed.

I'm one of those who started as early as 2000. And if I started during the early days with the same skill level of drawing that I have now, I bet my comics could have been more popular.

That, and your stuff wasn't in english. Probably lost a big section of your audience with that. Also, the way you have to click on a page, and then go back so you can get to the next page, when other webcomics were just a click of the next button probably would have caused some problems as well.

Oh well, at least all that's been fixed and you have an awesome comic now

I think it would have been kinda cool, but to go back to a time when I had like a 9.6 baud modem (or SOMETHING like that) and dial-up?! Nooooooo thank you!

I loved the newness of the net for me, and had thought about doing some kind of webcomic back in those days, but I honestly had no good ideas back then and nowhere near the talent or capability to do it right.

Back in 1996 I didn't know webcomics existed. What was the internet like, back then? I don't even remember.

I think the family computer had a 16k modem? Did everyone use AOL or something? Back then, if a picture was bigger than 150kbs, I don't bother trying to look at it. It would take over a minute to display. That's no way to read a decent webcomic.

This is the very very very 1st webcomic page I've ever drawn...

Back in late 1998 to early 1999.

It's been a couple weeks, but I've been off doing my thing, so I'm going to throw in now that I'm here....

I started in 1997; that's when my site first went live. Heard too many complaints from those using free hosting sites, and faced my own frustrations trying to visit them, so I decided that if I was going to make the effort to put stuff up online I was going to make sure my place was mine, and that it was technically reliable. Domain name registration and server space was expensive as hell. When Stormchild went up, it cost me something like $75 a year for domain name and $300 for server space.

That was in the old FAHQ (Fan Art Headquarters) community site days, I think, where many similar artists congregated, whether they did fan art or not. Maybe it had become AAHQ (Anime Artist Headquarters) at that point, but hadn't become OCAD (Online Comic Artist Directory) yet. I wasn't really keen on associating myself with the "manga artists", but they were more accepting than the "comic artists". To the comic guys my art was manga, to the manga folks it was anything but. As a reader, my tastes run more towards US mainstream and indies, but my style has unintentionally been closer to manga, and a lot of the comic artists and communities just absolutely HATED anything that resembled manga. Militantly so. I couldn't post much of anything to a comic community without getting shit for days in the thread. There was one exception, and that was the Hydraski's Cesspool forum, where I met my best and oldest friend, and sometimes collaborator, Anthony, but even after a couple of years the militant comic folks filtered in, Hydraski's changed hands a couple of times, and then eventually folded.

That was...I don't know...it all kinda blurs together at this point, but over on FAHQ/AAHQ/OCAD it was just bunches of people kicking around like Mal, Naska, L0cke, Saka, Long Vo, Ling, Clay, Nosebleed/NB, RSJ, Josh Lesnik, StopHim, Kendra and various others all hanging out, if any of those names mean anything to anyone nowadays. A lot either disappeared off the face of the planet or actually did stuff, like L0cke with his comics and his crew with Gaia Online, and Clay with Sexylosers and Nosebleed who went on to start Icarus and publish AG.

There were the round robin comics that came to be dubbed "Impromangas", like Pennywise and Controversial Jack. Concepts were suggested by an artist, the first couple of pages posted, and then the community as a whole would vote on which one they wanted to do as a new Impro. Artists would sign up, have like a week to do their pages, as many as they could do, from one to whatever (some would do ten or fifteen), take the story whatever direction they wanted, and then at a designated time or page count, the original artist would come back in to do the wrap-up.

Over in IRC, a few people would sit channel all day long, talking intermittently, but in the late-night IRC sessions there would be twenty or thirty of us in a chat room shooting the shit so fast the screen would turn over every thirty seconds. New pages/sketches would be uploaded to our various hosts to plug in chat for crit or just ego stroking. Complaints of cliques, forum trolls, and chat room meltdowns inevitably ended in splinter groups going off to form new chat channels. You could be in a channel with 40 people one night, get wrapped up in life offline and come back a few days later and there were maybe five people and a bot in that channel, with everyone else having left to start a new one, only for the same thing to happen a month or two later.

A lot of artists were hosting on GeoCities and the like, because it was free, and they made do with what they had. There were forum threads about the usual, tutorials and whatnot, along with addressing certain technical limitations, like how to make your files as small as possible, under 70k, without losing so much resolution as to make it painful to read.

My first webcomic was Prenna, and I spammed update notifications on Usenet groups like rec.arts.comics.misc. I got a number of readers that way, and I don't know whether Digital Webbing was culling info from those groups or if it was a fan sending about the updates, but I know the updates were occasionally carried on the front page of DW in the early days. In retrospect I should have made contact with someone from DW directly to network, spin it into some kind of rapport, but I never did. I was content to simply put it up and mostly just leave it to word of mouth to carry it wherever it needed it go. It's gotten me a handful of published gigs over the years, though I've never really pursued industry work because I'd rather do my own than that of someone else.

I have a small but fairly loyal following; it would probably be more if I really whored myself out, socialized regularly on forums. It wasn't until the last year that I started actually advertising, and in the first few years I really didn't think of the site as much beyond just a place where I could post my art so that perhaps other people could enjoy it as opposed to it simply sitting on my bookshelf collecting dust.

For the most part, webcomics in general are really not much different then from now, just a more convenient progression of the same. And more populous.

I had drawn a comic back in 1996 called 'Kicked 2 The Curb'. A relationship comic, more for an urban audience. This is a cover from calendars I would create every holiday for family and friends which included comic



I haven't really thought about translating that in the digital art that I presently do with Better Luck Next Time. Still, had my priorities been re-arranged back then, I'm sure I would have tried started a webcomic even back then. That comic was created as a catharsis for what I experienced at that time in my life.

Better Luck Next Time is more of a labor of love because it deals with something I'm passionate about now: The world of education.

Raccoo
Earlier for some, like 96/98. MT started a bit later than the others, in 2000.

I don't think I could draw or shoot photos when I was one.

I had no chance to start that early, I just started drawing 2 years ago and I still suck...LOL And, besides that, I didn't have any means to start making webcomics at the time.

In the late 90s, I definitely had a few stories working themselves around in my head, but any comic I could've made out of those would've totally sucked. :P

making a web comic was the whole reason i bought a computer , .back in the 20th century i had no idea about what was going on with webcomics , but i just figured that i would make a website and be instantly famouse. but when i finaly got a computer in 2000 i discovered all the other things that it could be used for and the comics started to lag , and also my original story lost it's way , when i saw all the other people making comics and just the overall deluge of information and activity on the nets . before i came to internets, my friend and i were the only people i knew who drew comics. it was unique , no matter what we did. now ... not so .
its like the old saying about the little fish who lives in a fish bowl and then he jumps out of the bowl and into the amazon river , and that river widens every day to become this ocean of the internet.

EDIT - so i guess , i was there , in a half assed way. i had my comics hosted on angelfire by the end of 00 . complete with midi music and animated gifs, hit counters and guestbooks, animated cursors and pointlessly inverted images . there wasn't much communication or community back then , not that i knew of. just toplists and such. free hosting sucked ! bandwidth limits !! i remember when angelfire downgraded my storage from 50megs to 30 or something.

i think Drunk Duck revolutionized webcomics back in 2003-04. that was a great time

Nah. Slow dial-up, expensive, and I could barely draw a figure standing at the time.

The resources at that time were out of my reach, and even so, I barely understood the internet or computers when I first found out such a thing existed.

If I had the resources and knowledge I have now, sure, but that's just an obvious choice.

The first webcomic I ever read was Leisure Town back in '98, that was some amazing stuff. Bendy animals with foul mouths have a special place in my heart. :) I don't think I would have considered putting a comic up, even if I was into comics back then (I wasn't). I was already paying a lot every year (since 97 or so?) for webspace, domain, etc. to maintain a fan site. That stuff used to be really expensive.

By the time I got into webcomics (around 2001?) the market was getting relatively saturated, 8 Bit Theater, Megatokyo and Penny Arcade were already supporting their creators, and Keenspot and Keenspace already existed. (Not DD yet though, not for another year or two.)

There's an idea people have that just because you had a webcomic back in the day that meant you had a higher chance of success, but I don't think that's the case. It took even more business sense and dedication back then because it wasn't as easy to put things online. Comic networks for the most part didn't exist, and it was difficult to find an audience. Most people at that point were used to print quality comic books and I don't think they would have been as accepting of comics with only passable art. It's easy to look back and say 'oh well all you'd have had to do was...' but if you were actually doing stuff back then, you wouldn't have known that. :)

skoolmunkee
Leisure Town

OMG i forgot all about that! LOLZ

Oh, hell yes. I could've had several stories completed by now. They all would've sucked, of course, but still.

I'll tell you what.

The internet became a "thing" when I was in high school. I remember using gopher to search usenet for--I remember specifically-- Mike Allred interviews-- thinking about how great ISDN was versus my 14.4 modem (yep, before 28.8 and 56k... hell, I've even used a 1200bpm to connect to Prodigy waaay back in the day).

In THOSE days before getting dial-up service at home was a regular deal, we used to connect to local BBS's to share files, chat, play games, email each other (locally of course). At that time I created a 3 panel comic made entirely of type characters that I would upload and distribute to the various BBS's. Webcomic? No. There was no web. But it was digital distribution, which I had forgotten about until seeing this topic.

Also in those days, I was printing the original version of MastorisM on my mom's copy machine. A friend of mine (oh yes... a SysOp!), made the suggestion that I make and distribute those comics digitally-- I thought he was nuts. Remember at the time, if you wanted to look at a digital picture, you had to download it and open it, which meant eating up valuable HD space (my whopping hard drive on my 486DX66 was 420 MB... yes... MB!). Even more nuts was my friend who said that all comics in the future would be made by computers!

Funny how things have changed over such a relatively short period of time.

I'll say this... the way things worked back then, I probably wouldn't have done it...

If back then things were like they are now, I most definitely would have been doing it. I see a lot of kids on here in highschool or whatever making comics and publishing them for the world to see, and I have to think "how cool is that" and wish that I could have been doing this that time in my life!

Hmm, I got on the internet somewhere in 2000, which was couple years after I stopped drawing regularly. Around that time (or perhaps 2001) I had a short return and did a bunch of 1-3 page long comics, but the magazine I was going to send them to collapsed, so I stopped drawing for a next couple of years.
Seeing as I had a connection that wasn't even 56k (more like 33k on a good night, you couldn't connect during the day at all), no scanner, and I still used an Amiga at that time (an upgraded one, yes, even with internet access, but not capable of displaying more than 640x256 in a browser window, every site I saw was looking stretched), there was no chance of me getting into webcomics. Besides, where would I put them? I couldn't afford server space if I wanted :P

Now, what I wish I did was get into photoshop and get a scanner few years earlier. MAYBE I'd make a comeback to art around 2002 when I moved to pc. When I think how many pages I could've drawn in 6 years :(