I've been really curious lately as to why there happen to be very few serious sprite comics that seem to be very long or continue on the serious tradition, sometimes I don't necessarily want to read a serious sprite comic, and it ticks me off to look for one, and see one start off serious, then turn a left to funny, go with your initial plan or create a new comic please!!! I want to know what other DDers think about this subject, so I didn't mean to insult anybody if I accidentally skipped over you, but no one takes sprite comics seriously anymore!!!

feh... I'm trying to add both to the comic... but maintain comedy more-so than seriousness.

Sprites can't portray a wide enough range of emotions to keep up a serious tone.

LIZARD_B1TE
Sprites can't portray a wide enough range of emotions to keep up a serious tone.

I can try, can't I?

My brother makes an interesting one... It runs like a soap opera half the time.

http://therealn.com/

And they are flat, solid-colored stick people ninjas... ;)

Sprite people tend to stay around for only a month, or even less.

Cthulhu
Sprite people tend to stay around for only a month, or even less.

*cough*

He said 'TEND TO', that doesn't mean all of them DO. There are always exceptions, but most sprite comics are started on a whim by teenage boys who've been reading 8bit theatre or whatever, who lose interest after a short while of making something really awful and stop. That's not to say that there are no good sprite comics, or no sprite comics that run for a long time, or no sprite comics not done by boys in their early to mid teens, but generally, that's the situation.
Sprites are much harder to use for seriousness than comedy, because of the inherent goofiness of telling a story with graphics from old video games. But if you think about the games themselves, like Final Fantasy 6 for example, they may have been used for serious stories in their original form, so there's no real reason they couldn't be again. Part of the problem is that sprites aren't expressive, but there are ways around that; good dialogue, as demonstrated in the original games, can get around expressionless sprites, another alternative is, if you can draw, to do a 'Grandia' and have face shots you've drawn in the text to show expressions. Finally, it's easier to write a silly spoof of a game or just make up random humour, but writing a serious planned-out plot and giving the characters personality so people empathise is much harder.
Sprite comics are like any other comics. With effort, you could make them good. The problem is, the form attracts lots of those who don't want to put in effort, and it's made people jaded towards sprite comics in general.

Ms. Mongoose is right on the money, generally not alot of fore thought is put into a sprite comic. I know from direct experience that sprite comics usually begin with an "I want to share my humor with the world...but only have about fifteen minutes" ideology. My friend Ryan ran a sprite comic for a short period of time, and that was pretty much his approach. As such people don't usually think far enough into their story to maintain a serious tone, serious stories need to be outlined in advance to really have any weight to them, constant themes, and such. This was unfortunate for Ryan, because just as he was getting into actually making his product into something worthwhile he stopped doing it. (It was like far side, only with sprites, and really really dark.)

The other problem is when a writer envisions doing a serious storyline, that they put alot of themselves into, they rarely envision it as being a sprite comic. Sometimes a book, sometimes a comic book, but never something like sprites, where you have to tell the story from with blocky cartoonish characters from one angle, and a range of like 6 emotions.

I had a comic that was as serious as the film A Time To Kill. I've since decided to remake my comic, using the script from the film, A Time To Kill.

The sprites I used were all from Tetris.

I made a serious sprite webcomic once. It was fun.

It really depends on the maker.

Well, a good serious comic is not serious all the time, there are moments where you can interject comic relief. This is the exact same thing Shakespeare did, case in point...Romeo and Juliet.

I mean, look at my comic. It's, for the most part, serious and dark. But at times, i'll add a few jokes and some comic relief to add depth, and add some relief to the tension. People will take your comic much more seriously, trust me.

LIZARD_B1TE
Sprites can't portray a wide enough range of emotions to keep up a serious tone.

Have you seen Longshot Comics?

http://www.shanesimmons.com/es/longshot.php

Sprite comic folks should never feel intimidated by the constraints of their medium, after they take a gander at what Mr. Simmons was able to accomplish with Longshot Comics.

;)