If you had the chance or time to redo some of your crappier old pages, would you do it? I've been thinking whether or not to do it and I can't really come up with a solution. My old pages for "That Random Paint Comic" used to be okay with me, but now I've improved quite a bit. Since I've improved, I can't even compare my new pages to my old pages, the old pages just look like garbage in my opinion (especially with the newer effects). I dunno, I'm not really sure.

What I'm trying to say is, would you remake or redraw any of your old pages if you could get around to doing it?

Funny i'm redoing some of my earlier pages right now while i have a few hours to spare! Well more like an hour, but yeah i look back thru the pages and if i see something that sucks i will rework it! If i don't i'm going to have a bad gotdamn day!

Nah.

I'd rather spend my time making new pages. Anyway, it's more fun for me to flip back to something I did a long time ago and see the improvement, it's encouraging to me. The past is the past, just learn from it and move on, there's no real sense in redoing things over and over.

Thanks for your opinions guys! More opinions would be appreciated, but for now I think I'll just stick to making new pages until I get more free time.

I have been redoing my work selectively since college. Just today I upgraded a comic I started in 2004.

I'm considering the remaking of pages 1-11 of American007, since it seems quite primitive and a little out of place considering that Tiffany (my character) changed her model in part 14.

I agree with Sarah's perspective. Once upon a time, I tried doing remakes of earlier pages (on another comic) and while my art had indeed improved, it really wasn't as satisfying as I'd imagined. I like original work now and occasionally being nostalgic and seeing how things have progressed. :)

silentkitty
Nah.

I'd rather spend my time making new pages. Anyway, it's more fun for me to flip back to something I did a long time ago and see the improvement, it's encouraging to me. The past is the past, just learn from it and move on, there's no real sense in redoing things over and over.

Maybe... but only too see a difference.

I should really only worry myself with newer pages.

I remade most of my FIGHT 1 archive pages whenever my pages came up.

But I'm not talking about drawing new pages. I simply colored the pages with my Pitt "Shades Of Grey" artist pens (which I didn't have before), and rescanned my pages with my 10x-better-than-my-old-POS-scanner Canon scanner, and cleaned up some stuff with my better knowledge of CG-editing. I like my old lineart.

I will be remaking THIS PAGE this week. It has been taunting me for months and I am sick of knowing this horrible horrible page exists in my archive.

Otherwise, I rarely redo this stuff. I have restarted 5 times in my life. Not really because of my art, but instead because I thought of better story material that would contradict certain things I had established.

I can't really call this my 5th remake as it is almost totally different than my earlier versions.

Remaking That's ironic is a waste of time.

In PYC's case, I am sometimes asked if I would remake the old sprite comics in a drawn format. The reason I probably won't is because 1)I'd rather spend time on new pages and 2)The old pages had too many panels to go smoothly in the drawn format.

I might do something like that in the future.
If I'm going to redo a scene I'm going to change it around and make it its own thing. Like have it through the perspective of another character and show parts that weren't present in the previous version. So it won't exactly be a redo ,but a new scene happening at the same time as a previous one.

I think even if there were 48 hours in a day I wouldn't do that.

If you're not happy anymore with what your old stuff looks like, that means you've gotten better, so it's a good thing. I'd rather use my improved skills to make better new stuff and hope that a year from now, what I'm drawing now will also look substandard compared to what I'm doing then. Move forward. Improve. Evolve. Stagnation is death. Moving backwards is even worse.

I know myself well enough not to even look back on the previous pages - because there's always something bugging me, because I feel I could've done better. If I started redoing the previous pages, I'd probably get stuck redoing the 1st page over and over again. Because with each page I learn something new. So, like SilentKitty, I prefer to give my best with a page I'm currently working on :)

I recently restarted Lady Luck, but only a small part of the reason was that I didn't like the old artwork. The script had been set at first, but then Spyn and I expanded it for the prose version and we eventually found out that a lot of people were confused by the comic, but the expansion in the prose version cleared things up. We also made some big plot and character changes in the prose and found some plotholes that couldn't be solved by simple edits.

I also wanted the artwork to be in a consistant style. The old version starts in an experimental, goes to painted, anime, and then painted.

I'd retouch spelling mistakes and the like, but never remake an entire page.

Remaking/Revising Old Pages

I'm against this.

This is pretty common though among the more artistic people. They are too nitpicky about their art that they just wanna keep on repeating it. :(

I prefer cranking out pages and watching them progress from bad quality to good quality.



Anyway thats just my opinion.

Though anyway... maybe it can be argued that I should practice what I preach. lol!

Since BK is mostly a re-do of the old Brood Knight I made at a young age when I had just bad bad drawing.

I'm actually doing that (in a weird, abstract way). I had a comic that I started some time last year, and when I wanted to continue it, I was horrified at the artwork. I've improved far too much in that short year to want to link that with the level I'm at now. Also, when I tried continuing it, while there was better artwork, it continued in a slightly disjointed way that I wasn't fond of.

Then I asked for crit over at the Webcomic list and got a beatdown. So, yeah, I'm more or less restarting the strip so that's it's more coherent and will appeal to an audience larger than me and my single reader.

I revise when I notice grammatical errors or when something is generally off. (extra lines, text box is wrong, color off etc.) So in general I tend not to revise unless I decide to make a book later on at which point I'll go through my archives and cell shade everything and edit things that need editing to make it flow right and look copesetic.

Spacehamster echoes my sentiments exactly. Gotta move forward, always. The best way to improve is to do something new.

I try to redo old comics whenever I can, but then the level of improvement I've gone through is huge, and the old comics are like 5 years old.

I'm actually doing it as much for story reasons as for aethetic reasons. Even as a Gag-A-Day Children at Play rides heavily on the shoulders of it's archive, developing characters, running jokes, and storylines, and the old art is so bad that it actually disuades people from reading them, they then in turn don't really get the current comics on the same level they might if they were really familiar with the characters.

Also, when I started I very much didn't know what I was doing, I have more specific guidlines in place regarding how the whole universe flows that greatly improve old storylines and even help to make somethings just make more sense.

If I could, I'd completely redo The Temple of a Thousand Tears . The same stuff would happen, but I would pace it and pad it better....

I guess I'm one of those writers who's never 100% satisfied with what he's written.

I'll probably redo Mercs. Right now I'm tryign to get as much content and story up as possible. Once the story is finished I'll make it pretty.

Only the lettering. When Harsho (the artist) and I started working on Shades , neither of us had any experience with lettering, so it's probably the weakest part of the comic.

I've already re-lettered the Prologue but that just made me realise I now need to re-letter the rest, too!

I am tempted, for Wolf's chapter 1 and some of chapter 2, but... yeah. Not really. I prefer trying to make better, new pages. I would be forced to remake those first pages though if I were to try and print it, because of the shift in the standard layout I have now.

Otherwise I would never do it.

well, i just upload 1 old page and in the comment is a link to my old pages. In a sense, I dont feel the need for me to have redo my pages, but since the sake of this current comic was for me to test my self and improve, verses satisfying the readers, I went and redid the pages. Now I feel more constant though "My Lady" will still go through some changes in style in other areas.

The story is a short story too. So the style change is not so drastic that people would want to skip the first chapter.

However, for my next project, I will have to put even more effort to keep good and high quality/consistency since it will also be printed and not just a web comic.

kyupol

Remaking/Revising Old Pages

I'm against this.

This is pretty common though among the more artistic people. They are too nitpicky about their art that they just wanna keep on repeating it. :(

oh is it ever XD yeah, I redo some of my old pages... ok a LOT of my old pages, because a lot of my old pages are just line-art I had every intention to clean up once I got software (well, I got the software but I was too lazy to do them after lol!) anyways yeah I really prefer to do newer pages and get my story up and out but some pages I look at and just go "ULGH!!! THAT'S DISGUSTING!" and I redo a couple pages in one section at a time, one friend described it as 'rather jarring' going from line art to uber polished and then lineart again XD

I think it largely depends on the reasons.

I'm personally redoing all of Shifters. I have many reasons for doing so. One is that I got a publishing offer, but I couldn't publish it in the previous incarnation because I didn't have a lot of the original artwork and nothing high rez enough for dead trees. The second reason is that much of the art was getting on to 8+ years old and was unreadable in the beginning and was actually turning readers off the new stuff because it was so bad. And the third thing was that I was sick of taking flack for the writing ( which was only partly mine, only no one seemed to recognize this...). So I decided to redo it with a cohesive story, with only my writing and with a much higher level of art. But its not just redoing one or two pages, its a complete overhaul. I also redid the prologue for Brymstone, mostly because I didn't think the original had enough hook.

If you are looking in terms of a pure webcomic and don't really care about things like printing, or having people see your progression or you don't want to take time away from new story to fix old problems, thats all well and good.

But sometimes, eventually, you get sick of your old mistakes hounding you around and you decide you have remedy them, no matter what the cost.

I redo my old pages. If I can think of a better joke for an old page, I'll add it instantly.

My comics are awesome.

Actually, I'm in the process of remastering The Denim Avenger right now,but that's really only because the origional issue 1 pages were so rushed, sloppy and unfinnished that they absolutely begged to be reworked. In all honesty I find the origional pages embarrassing, so redoing them was the right thing for me.

However on the other hand, if you (unlike me) put an authentic effort foward in your old pages, your should keep them. It's good to let people see how you've improved over time, and there is something to be said for perserving the integrity of the origional work.