I wasn't totally sure as of where to place this post, but I decided it's something I could ask to the whole community, since we all came here for the comics in the first place. (if I'm mistaking posting place, please move to the correct one)

ANYWAY, I've been looking at some of my favorite comics and wondered a lot about the time it takes for a new page to appear. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wished all our favourite comics to be updated daily. But then I came to the logical reasoning, considering that, if the comic is updated daily, then the author would have to speed things up and, therefore, derease the quality of the new page.

Let's be logical about this: hardly anyone of us draws comics for a living, so we create the new pages whenever we can. Having this in mind, I ask you all: If you could be allowed to choose STRICTLY one of these two options, which would you prefer: quick updates or quality ones?

It's very simple. Speed means that you get to read a new page each day, but the drawing would be rather poor and simplistic. Quality means really beautiful art in each panel, but that takes time and so every new update is released with a LONG gap of time, e.g. three or four weeks.

So, what's your choice? Speed or Quality?

Heh, may as well leave this here. ^_^

I like something I can read daily, or at least weekly on a regular basis. But I've come to realise that I don't mind waiting for quality work. There are a few comics I'd quite happily wait a year for them to update a single page, just because I know it will be worth it. The only trouble with that is I tend to forget about them after a while.

"People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day"-Illiad of 'User Friendly'

This is something I've learned over the past two years.

Eirikr
"People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day"-Illiad of 'User Friendly'

Having read User Friendly, how very appropriate.

It's really not that hard to create a balance between the two you know (look at Sam and Fuzzy or Dr. McNinja). There's this wonderful technique used only by the top artists, who have been trained by monks deep inside a mountain on the Moon. It involves drawing pages before the day you are due to update.

It's a secret though, so shush!

Yeah I try to balance it personally. I don't like simply drawing. I like drawing events that are occurring in session with each other. And usually as soon as my pencil hits the screen I want to start the next page.

I wouldn't say I rush everything. Because my pages take longer and longer to draw out now. I try to refine things much more and build speed + quality.

But as a result I do have off days, where if I waited and came back/restarted the page it would look better.

The longer I sit on a page however the less I want to work at all. So I sometimes render it to the best I can even on days I don't really feel it and then hope that one day, the next leap, will be the leap home.

Balance. How many artists here have an Art Director and a client breathing down their neck to finish their piece yesterday? :( (These days I go out of my way to have very understanding clients)

I can wait. As long as the story is good I can forgive a lot as far as artwork goes. After all my own talent and skills are non-existent. :)

bravo1102
Balance. How many artists here have an Art Director and a client breathing down their neck to finish their piece yesterday? :( (These days I go out of my way to have very understanding clients)

Eh, not for my comic, but for my graphic design stuff. Funnily enough though, I'm a very fast worker on that.

Well, from what I've heard, to make a fully drawn, well backgrounded'd comic, it takes about 8 hours or so.
Surely they could atleast get one done a week.
Unless they have one of those mythical "Social lives"...

But seriously, I don't really care about art. As long as they're not taking the P!$$ and actually try.

I'm not picky.

Since the comic I'm doing now is more about improving the quality of my art, I'm trying my hardest to put every detail I can into each panel and page.

I have a few ideas for good stories floating around, when I decide to act on that and make on I'll probably spend less time fine tuning every aspect of my drawings and just concentrate on churning them out and advancing the plot.

I say it really depends on your comic: If you have a brilliant story but little to no art skills, you're obligated to make every page as fast as possible, if you just want to show off what your arts degree has granted you, then you can take your time to make it perfect, even if it takes a months per page.

of course if you have a balance of art and storytelling, try to balance the two, you can't hold anyone's interest if you only make one page per month.

A balance of both would be nice, but I'm all for quality.

"Quality over quantity"

I don't like rushed comic pages. I feel all comics should be drawn to the best of the creator's ability. If you're doing a comic to improve your skills, it defeats the purpose if you're just going to half ass it.
Whenever you rush a page, it shows. If it takes an extra 4 days to draw that background, you and your audience will appreciate the effort spent on that background as opposed to just pasting a photo into the scene to save time.

Daiconv
A balance of both would be nice, but I'm all for quality.

"Quality over quantity"

I don't like rushed comic pages. I feel all comics should be drawn to the best of the creator's ability. If you're doing a comic to improve your skills, it defeats the purpose if you're just going to half ass it.
Whenever you rush a page, it shows. If it takes an extra 4 days to draw that background, you and your audience will appreciate the effort spent on that background as opposed to just pasting a photo into the scene to save time.

totally agree.
I have seen some artists either fall into a status quo or overcomed by the numbers on pageviews and as a result their art is found wanting. I like a great stroy as much as anyone but art is just as important.
Quality over quantity, for me.

When I had finally settled on putting my comic out as a webcomic, the next big issue was... how often. This was a tough one to come to grips with. For me, and this being a story, the natural thing to do would be woodshed it for a bit and then put out a 5-or-so page chunk, lather, rinse, repeat. I was advised against this because in the long period in between, people would lose interest or forget (though to my mind it was like, "and only reading one page at time is INTERESTING?!?!")... Okay. It was also argued to me that putting pages out on a regular basis is the "norm" and a "convention" of webcomics, and while going against convention is nice and all, its probably not the greatest way to grow a readership. Reliable regularity has become my goal.

Once I got over that hurdle, I just had to be very realistic with myself about what I can accomplish and promise on a regular basis. At this point in my life, that turned out to be 2 pages a week. Right now, I'd guesstimate that It takes me 4-6 hours to complete a page (well the pages i'm working on these days, not the ones that are posted...I'm putting more time into it now), so thats as much as 12 hours a week devoted to the drawing end and then a few hours sprinkled here and there for managing the site and whatever other various related things i need to do. (not bad for a guy with a full time job and 3 kids at home).

Beyond that, like someone said, I made sure that I had a month's worth of pages completed before I even launched my comic, that way I'm always a month ahead, and if for some reason anything comes up, I've got a nice buffer there to keep the public from ever knowing there was a problem.

But this is just me saying this. I've only just begun, so take it for what its worth. I did, though, do a lot of research and talked with a lot of people before I even started in order to start out well. Yep!

Daiconv
A balance of both would be nice, but I'm all for quality.

"Quality over quantity"

I don't like rushed comic pages. I feel all comics should be drawn to the best of the creator's ability. If you're doing a comic to improve your skills, it defeats the purpose if you're just going to half ass it.
Whenever you rush a page, it shows. If it takes an extra 4 days to draw that background, you and your audience will appreciate the effort spent on that background as opposed to just pasting a photo into the scene to save time.

Is that directed at me? Because I didn't paste the pictures onto the background, flash kept crashing on me as I tried to draw the backgrounds, I'm going to reinstall photoshop and see if Adobe can do at least one thing right.

Ditch
Is that directed at me? Because I didn't paste the pictures onto the background, flash kept crashing on me as I tried to draw the backgrounds, I'm going to reinstall photoshop and see if Adobe can do at least one thing right.

Oh no, that wasn't specifically directed at anybody in particular, I was just speaking in general terms. Sorry, I should have read your post before I posted that.

well, that depends on how poor the quality of the 'speedy' page is, and how long a 'quality' page takes to make!
i try to keep a balance, but a page can take me anywhere between an hour and a half and a couple days, depending on how hard my artistic mojo is working!
i don't consider my comic very high quality but i try to keep things neat and nice to look at.

i actually prefer a comic that's neat and simple to one that looks like it took all of several weeks to complete. i tend to forget about comics that don't update often and, yeah, the pages are nice to look at, but all in all it takes probably half a minute to read a comic page, no matter what the art looks like.

Heheh... don't knock photo-pasted backgrounds. This page of mine has photo-pasted backgrounds:
http://www.drunkduck.com/FIGHT_2/index.php?p=388711
I know there's a huge stigma against it, but I feel I'm getting good results. I just hope I'm not fooling myself simply because I have an amateur's blind spot.

mlai
Heheh... don't knock photo-pasted backgrounds. This page of mine has photo-pasted backgrounds:
http://www.drunkduck.com/FIGHT_2/index.php?p=388711
I know there's a huge stigma against it, but I feel I'm getting good results. I just hope I'm not fooling myself simply because I have an amateur's blind spot.

You incorporated perspective around the background, it's nice. Most people who do that just take a picture and rotoscope it than paste premade chracters into without bothering to at least cover up the gap between their characters and the background, it doesn't blend well and usually looks half assed. You managed to pull it off flawlessly.

mlai
Heheh... don't knock photo-pasted backgrounds. This page of mine has photo-pasted backgrounds:
http://www.drunkduck.com/FIGHT_2/index.php?p=388711
I know there's a huge stigma against it, but I feel I'm getting good results. I just hope I'm not fooling myself simply because I have an amateur's blind spot.

It looks great! It's a great page. :)

I wonder why you couldn't have drawn that though? It's simpler than the work on your characters... But anyway, it's fine, I see no issue with it.

At the moment I'm personally going for speed. Not because I truly want to, but because in a way, I'm a bit forced to. With such a simple comic there's really no point in making people wait for days to get a page that doesn't need days to be worked on, and I rarely have much more than 2 or 3 hours a day to do a page, so I try to select jokes that don't need a lot of background work or whatnot on the days I know I'll be short of time and whenever I have more time I try to put more into it and make it look better with more detail, background, experimentation, etc.

The big reason I do it, is to have something to draw every day to keep my sanity from being forced away from art by my job and life so to me it's all about producing something consistently rather than making the next Mona Lisa.

ozoneocean
I wonder why you couldn't have drawn that though? It's simpler than the work on your characters... But anyway, it's fine, I see no issue with it.

This is a photo vs hand-drawn tangent... but here's my answer.

I do draw it too, but what happens in my style of grayscale comics is that, like a color animation cel converted to grayscale, everything kind of blends together because it's all gray (I don't use too much heavy blacks). So I've learned to use textures rather than contrast to separate foreground from background. So I use lots of blur/filter/gradient; that's my current technique.

For example http://www.drunkduck.com/FIGHT_2/index.php?p=315140 panel 1. I draw the background then filter it, to mimic camera lens focus. I also mix the 2... http://www.drunkduck.com/FIGHT_2/index.php?p=313754 This background forest is both hand-drawn and a filtered photo. From that progression, I realize: if I filter a photo correctly, I can get the same visual result... so, why not?

That goes back to speed vs quality. I'm achieving the near same quality, with better speed.

Of course, whenever I'm showing any setting/background that's not going to be blurred/filtered to unrecognizability, it's always hand-drawn.

Answering strictly according to the question -- speed OR quality -- then I'd vote quality. Personally, I prefer regular updates. So even if it only updates once a month, as long as I know for SURE that every month there will be an update, it's worth looking into. Naturally, if I have to wait once a month I want some awesome quality too.

ozoneocean

bravo1102
Balance. How many artists here have an Art Director and a client breathing down their neck to finish their piece yesterday? :( (These days I go out of my way to have very understanding clients)

Eh, not for my comic, but for my graphic design stuff. Funnily enough though, I'm a very fast worker on that.

My point exactly with no art director or client you can take all the time you want to make it the best you can.

Set a goal. How many pages do you want to do in "X" amount of time? How many can you realistically do in "X" amount of time?

Right now I'm only re-editing work I did two years ago and of course since it's photographic I'm behind the 8-ball already. Once I start having to do fresh photography and set building forget about it. I'll be lucky to do a page a fortnight.

Quality wise my art wouldn't really look much different if I spent 8 hours or 28 hours on the same page.

More time does not always mean better quality IMO. It's about how you feel when you are drawing. If I'm in the zone and really digging the image I am drawing then it will come out awesome in a manner of a few hours.

In fact, it's only because I don't really feel the page as to why it would take me longer to draw it.

I honestly don't know how some comic makers can continue this. I guess most people don't have many stories they want to tell so it's easier to only want to focus on art. I only focus on art to tell the story better. Without it I have no drive to improve 'just the art'

I love looking through quick sketches and doodles. And such things can still be of quality.

Likewise, you can do a really lazy comic page of poor quality regardless of the time it takes to produce it.

So what I'm saying is - when reading comics (and when drawing them) - I want to look out for wit, style, originality, skill, creativity; and these don't in my mind correlate directly to "speed".

If you see what I'm saying.

After reading the question again and seeing the responses, maybe some rephrasing would help. I think it was originally written with the reader in mind, so let's put it this way:

How much quality would you be willing to sacrifice as a reader in exchange for more frequent updates? I'm going to take two comics from my favourites that just updated today, as well as my own Super Temps, and use them as for an example.
Comic #1: Gnoph (http://www.drunkduck.com/Gnoph/)
Comic #2: The Nineteenth Century Industrialist (http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Nineteenth_Century_Industrialist/).
Comic #3: Super Temps (http://www.drunkduck.com/Super_Temps/)

All three comics are in colour. Gnoph is a serious story, full-page layout, and beautifully done by hand (I know 'cause Mina_Lunga did an expose on it). The Industrialist is also a full-page layout, although I don't know the techniques behind it. Super Temps is sketched by hand, scanned in, then inked, lettered, and coloured on the computer. Let's say for simplicity, all three comics update once a week.

Now, as a reader: How much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to increase the number of updates, regardless of the author's feelings on the finished product?

For example, would I sacrifice Gnoph's colour for two updates a week? No; the colouring is part of the reason why the comic is good, because it sets it more apart from other comics. Would I sacrifice some of the detail? No. Anything? No. Gnoph's style and storytelling is too unique to muck with just for the sake of a more-rapid update schedule.

How about the Nineteenth Century Industrialist? For a second update a week I might sacrifice colour, but I think I would trade colour for three updates a week (all else unchanged). There's not much else I think that could really be traded off without "breaking" the comic.

I can't speak for what I would trade off for my own comic as a reader, but I can say that writing and penciling takes about 30-50% of the time depending on how 'hot' I am, basic black-and-white inking takes about 2 hours, colouring can take 2 to 4 hours depending on the complexity of the background and number of characters per frame, with finishing taking about an hour. So killing the colouring might allow me to do an extra update a week. If I simplified the design -- reusing as many drawings as possible instead of doing everything from scratch, minimizing the backgrounds even further, and stuck to really easy angles, I could probably churn them out even faster, although it would also mean the comic wouldn't improve quickly either. I could probably further improve the comic if I didn't set a strict once-a-week schedule, but then I wouldn't learn speed techniques either.

If I had to give one answer for all my favourites, I'd just as soon the authors do it RIGHT over trying to churn out as many updates as possible.

For me it's about Quality, I try to get the pages as close to what I want as possible.
But I also tend to pick my battles. Not every page needs to be a money shot. Pages with little action and lots of dialogue I will rush a little more, then spend some extra time making the dialogue snappy.

I also feel as an artist you get better by pushing yourself. If you continue to use the same bag of tricks for every page because you're in a rush to post them, then you're not really going to improve that much.

You definitely need to find a balance between the two.

http://www.drunkduck.com/Surfboards_and_RayGuns/

smkinoshita
After reading the question again and seeing the responses, maybe some rephrasing would help. I think it was originally written with the reader in mind, so let's put it this way:

I answered as a reader. Honestly, with my own reading tastes firmly in mind.

I don't mind addressing it again though, as it was originally.

Frequent updates are good, but the downside is they burn out quicker or the work becomes stale quicker. No matter how good it started out. I've found that with all of the daily comic I follow, but I still appreciate daily reads (even stale ones), as a kind of comfort thing. They're just a nice part of the day. :)

Infrequent updates are fine as well, but those are for comics that I look forward to. I'll always go back to them and treasure a new page no matter how long it takes because I know that it will be worth it. That's why I'll always go back to Alejkhan's Jump for example, or Silus's Melaines Choles Choles. And lots of other's feel the same which is why comics like Valkyrie Yki, Jack, and Charby the Vampirate retain such devoted followings.

lastly, I love the Gods of Arrkelaan, but I' addicted to the print version. The pint version of the latest series won't come out till next year but I'm perfectly willing to wait till then, keeping away from the online version to prevent spoilers. ^_^

Ozoneocean: Heh, I know some people answered as a reader, but there was enough fuzz that I thought I'd try to adjust the context.

Anyhow, I know what you mean when it comes to frequent updates, but I think that's just human nature. Either you get accustomed to the content, or the creator gets a bit burned out and things get stale. I think the only way a frequently-updated comic could actually avoid both would be to have a good sized buffer made up ahead of time as well as a comic with a continual evolution. I completely agree with you on the aspect of comfort; there are a number of comics that sort of just run in place but I read them out of habit and because I just enjoy the 'presence' of the comic itself. Usually happens when I like the style of the writing or artwork, so even if the material of the comic itself isn't that entertaining anymore, I just like to look and read it. You get a feel for the creator, you like this person, and it's like seeing a friend.

Speaking of frequency, I really think the minimum frequency is once a week. Any less and it just falls off the radar.

Anyone who has ever read my comic knows I prefer speed to quality. We were cranking out 3-4 pages on our update days. That being said, we've been training for four months now to improve the quality of our rush-jobs so that it still turns out nicely. So maybe a good balance is best. But still, I could care less about art if the story is good or the jokes are funny. There are actual Marvel comics that I LOATHE the art in them, but I'll read them anyways because they are written well. But I'm a fan of the written word more then anything so I'm biased.