1. Introduction
2. What went right
3. What went wrong
4. Conclusion

The longest part so far for Robomeks has ended. Eight months. 102 pages. How has it turned out to be?

In this post I’ll try to dissect part 01 and pinpoint its best and worst aspects. Because there’s no way to really know what works and what doesn’t, each point is based on the success when trying to achieve my personal goals in that particular aspect and, to a lesser extent, on readers’ feedback. In the conclusion I’ll deal with the possible solutions and what to expect in the following pages of Robomeks.

Due to its length, I’ve decided to separate this post in several pages. It would have been kilometric otherwise. That also means that there’s little chance that very few of you get to read the whole thing. So, read it or not, you can use this post to comment below on what do you think about the recently published part 01 (I gotta crush (on) you). I’m interested to know about what worked for you and what didn’t, which areas do you think are OK and which ones need improvement, what’s your favourite character so far… and any other thing you may come out with.

Any feedback on this topic will be much appreciated.

POSTMORTEM

What went right

1. The change on art style and format

The change in the art style that occurred from volume 00 to the actual one has been really positive. With the use of new tools (SAI, instead of Illustrator) the art has gained on fluidity and gives a more natural feeling, almost identical to what I could achieve analogically. The decision of creating a more elaborate color, adding shading and extra lighting, has also proven to be successful.

On the other hand, the new horizontal page format freed me from some story-telling and panel layout techniques that I’ve been dragging along for a long time. The pages now have a more dynamic and catchy feeling in general and, while I’ve not been able to stay between the “6 panels per page” rule boundaries in all pages, it’s proven to be a good choice, particularly in the action scenes.

Overall, I think the art has been evolving positively and still offers a distinctive and quite unique style, still between the familiar American cartoon range.

2. Being able to deliver the story in a foreign language

As I’ve mentioned several times now, I was born and reside in Spain, so spanish is my mother language, English being my third one (second is Catalan, a regional language). One of the biggest challenges when I decided to publish Robomeks was (and still is) delivering it mainly in English. While there’s been mistakes and I’ve been restrained sometimes by my limited vocabulary there’s been no (or barely any) criticism on this aspect. In fact, most commentaries have been quite positive, even from people who don’t know my situation.

While I can never be sure that I’m “faking” it correctly, so far it seems that nobody has noticed or been bothered by my use of English in Robomeks, which is encouraging.

3. Creating the mirror in Drunk Duck

With the beginning of this part I decided to publish Robomeks in a free webcomic hosting and community site, Drunk Duck. That has turned out to be a wise decision. Right now, Drunk Duck readers are part of a small, but significat, chunk of the whole Robomeks readership and, thanks to an already established community, the amount of feedback every page gets has been significantly bigger than here, the main site.

That said, the amount of readers from Drunk Duck that drop the mirror for the main site is negligible at best, even when the Drunk Duck readers don’t get the latest update until the next publishing day. Anyway, that’s nothing I’m worried about, as the main purpose of publishing Robomeks there was to reach more readers. While the main site doesn’t benefit from it Robomeks as a whole does.

4. Investing on advertisement

This was one of the most important decisions to make. Not if, but when. It wasn’t until the start of Volume 01 that I decided that Robomeks was ready to be publicly exposed. Right after advertising on other webcomic sites through Project Wonderful, Robomeks started to get more readers than ever, up to the actual 500-600 ones, which places this webcomic in a satisfactory position after just one year of existence.

What went wrong

1. Length

This is the first time I didn’t create a written and/or storyboarded script of the whole part before starting it. What I had was a treatment (the script in a narrated version, as when you explain a movie to a friend), which contained details of the key scenes and the whole flow of the story, from point A (music museum) to point B (Kusher and his plan is revealed). Also other key elements (Cybertronics, Pulsar, Edgar) and all the intermediate steps (museum, chase, hideout) were specified. With that treatment, I created the storyboards in chunks of about 10 pages while I was already publishing the story.

While this gave me more liberty than I ever allowed me to have with the way I tell the story in Robomeks, it has its obvious drawbacks. The main one has, sadly, been losing focus.

I was expecting this part to be around 40 pages long, as this part was intended to be the one where the bad guys (Edgar and Kusher) and their motivations were exposed, in preparation for the definitive part 02. But the action scenes changed it all. From the whole 102 pages, 32 were used for the museum, 18 for the highway chase, 38 for the nanite waste facility and 14 for the epilogue. While the sequence in the museum took longer than expected, those 56 pages in the middle (the chase of Edgar) are the ones to blame for the extension of this part.

The chase could have definitely been shorter, and probably should have, but I was having too much fun to stop. Not to mention that it allowed me to deliver action scenes in a way and detail that I was craving to do for a long time now. On the good side, this time the action was story driven and not a gratuitous sequence, like the gladiator bots battle back in chapter 3 of volume 00.

In any case, I experimented with a more iterative scripting process this time. Now I know the good (mostly, flexibility) and the bad sides (mostly, losing focus) and I think it’s something I don’t want to repeat from now on.

2. Not paying attention to potential collateral damage

Although my intention was to keep the story as simple as possible, there were moments were it felt too simple for my personal taste, so I decided to introduce some of the most complex elements of the Robomeks world into it, without paying the necessary attention to be able to predict how that would affect reader’s perception on what the main story arc of Robomeks was about.

Things like Edgar using the Rebirth program for the first time here have affected my plan on how to deliver all this information in future parts. The subplot about advanced robots being still around was something I wanted to focus on once the main story arc (Dr. Kusher’s revenge on Diogenes Shape) was finished. Now, that’s something that will have to be present and developed, in a way or another, in the next part and forces the existence of subsequent parts, which was something I considered optional up to this point. If only he would have used one of his hacking bugs instead of Rebirth things would still be under control.

There’s also the nanite thing, which almost gets out of hand too. The main purpose of introducing this element was to create a precedent for a potential new series (Ecathon) based on the same universe as Robomeks, and to add more color to the backstory of their world. Some readers, though, started to get too excited about this new element, which was supposed to be just secondary, and I don’t blame them. Once the nanite waste played its part I tried to make sure readers comprehend that nanites won’t be a problem anymore, as the potential repercussions of reactivated nanites in Robomeks would have been out of the scope of this whole volume.

Most of those elements have forced me to explain a lot of things in the epilogue, which has turned out to be extremely dense and dialog heavy, having to explain quite complex subjects in the simplest way possible earlier than I was planning. It wouldn’t have been a problem itself if it wasn”t because I wanted to follow the K.I.S.S.principle for this part, which was centered around Ace. In other words, it was supposed to be simple and with plenty of action. Which it was, up to a point (simple, I mean).

3. Foreshadowing. A lot.

I like foreshadowing. This shouldn’t be a surprise at this point of the story. But I’m not sure I’ve done it too effectively.

The main reason this hasn’t worked as intended is the medium itself. Delivering the story three pages per week changes the way the reader absorbs the information given. This periodicity restricts his/her ability to remember past scenes and affects the clarity of vision of the story as a whole. In other words, creating a foreshadow and expecting the reader to remember it eight months from now is definitively expecting too much.

This also leads to other problems, like the reader (understandbly) assuming that what’s been presented in the story so far is all there is or that an element of the scene is random or improvised (not that this doesn’t happen, but in Robomeks it happens less than usual). It also makes it more difficult for new readers to catch up or understand what’s going on, as key information has been fractioned and placed several pages, weeks or months apart. The only option the reader has is to trust on the author’s ability to explain all that later, which I understand can be seen as expecting too much, particularly from the most casual readers.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that will hunt Robomeks until its conclusion, as most foreshadows are already established and need to be concluded in what’s left of the story.

4. General inconsistency

While this is listed on the bad side, it’s also something I was aware and, in fact, forced myself. I’m talking about inconsistency in art style, page format, story and tone. With the start of this new volume I decided it was time to adapt some of those aspects to the webcomic medium, trying to make the most of its possibilities. An update to the character designs was already in order, as those were more than 10 years old and the way the story was developing and tastes changed (mainly mine) pointed to a new direction. I also decided to focus Robomeks on the action sci-fi sub-genre, leaving the most introspective aspects in a secondary place.

All this inevitably affects the reading experience of new visitors and can potentially create some confusion (which some readers have already manifested). There’s little to do on this subject, as not only is based on deliberate decisions, but can only be fixed by removing the whole volume 00, which is something I’m reluctant to do at this moment.

5. Adjusting a long form webcomic to its periodicity

For once, this isn’t a problem that only affects me, but also does affect the rest of webcomics that are based on long story arcs (also called long form webcomics). So far, none that I’m aware of does it effectively. I’m not sure if that’ll ever be possible anyway.

The only solution that I can come with (as I exposed in another post near the end of volume 00) is to divide the whole story arc in a series of short stories, each one auto-conclusive and, as the name implies, short. Unfortunately, this is something I’m not able nor willing to do with Robomeks, as the implications both for the story and my work-flow would be tremendous, requiring a huge amount of time and effort without the guarantee of a successful result.

6. Limited navigation abilities

This part also brought a new design for the website. While it’s been more consistent and easy to the eye than the previous one, it lacked most of the navigation features that the old, ugly one, had. The main reason being that this time I wanted to concentrate on the design and avoid tinkering with the WordPress theme too much, as it’s quite time consuming. That meant that the only options available this time to navigate through the archive were the arrows on the menubar and navigation links with further options just above the leaderboard ad that appears under every comic page. Unfortunately, those links have been undetected by some readers, leading to some frustration. Separating those navigation links would probably have helped.

Conclusion

Four positives versus six negatives. That’s better than I was expecting.

Now that I think I have my main concerns covered it’s time to think about ways to solve them. The length of the story can be easily fixed by working again with pre-established scripts and storyboards, as I was already doing in volume 00. That will ensure that I’m not only telling the story I want to tell, but in the way I want to tell it and in the best way possible for Robomeks as a webcomic. Collateral damage can also be solved this way. Foreshadowing, though, is going to be a hard one. While from now on I’ll try to use that technique between the boundaries of a single part, so far there’s quite a bunch set as soon as chapter 1, volume 00 that need to be concluded.  Inconsistency is an assumed problem, as I was (and still am) evolving Robomeks in all its aspects. The webcomic thing, that’s a losing battle, so I give up for now. And the navigation issues, well, that’s something that not only will be fixed, but improved in several ways with the new site design. Being a long form webcomic, navigation is key for attracting and keeping new readers, so this aspect will get extra love. In fact, Robomeks will have one of the most (if not the most) complete array of navigation options of any webcomic available, recovering some features from the first site design and adding new ones.

Thanks to those of you who have had the patience to read all this. For the rest, no problem, this post has been mainly done for personal reasons, and so far it has helped me to think carefully about some of the issues and has lead to some decisions that will, hopefully, improve Robomeks in this new stage. You can see some of them in the comic pages as of now.

And, finally, excuses to those among you who were politely waiting for me to publish this to comment on this whole part. This post soon turned out to be too long, and was threatening the time I needed to prepare and publish the comic page, which has priority, as you probably understand. That’s why it’s been published later than I announced.

Just don’t forget to comment below if you like.

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