If you don’t have anything nice to say…
You know the old saying “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?” That philosophy may be a bad one in the real world, but in the world of webcomics I believe it to be downright damning.
Bad reviews are necessary for things like books, movies, comics and video games because they serve to warn us not to spend our money on something that’s crappy. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve been swayed away from buying a comic or a movie ticket because “I heard it wasn’t supposed to be very good.”
That sort of thing doesn’t work in webcomics because a bad review is still a review, and a review of any kind directs attention to a webcomic, and attention is what webcomics need to survive. With a metric ton of webcomics floating around the internet it’s so very easy to go unnoticed, but with someone going out of their way to single you out and talk about your work, good or bad, it generates interest. Most bad reviews of webcomics provide links to the strip they’re trashing, and it takes very little effort for someone to just drag their mouse over the link and click it, and with every visit that webcomic has a chance to get a new reader. Bad reviews may actually be helping webcomics in that regard.
Ninety-five percent of all webcomics are free anyway, so there’s no money to be wasted in checking out a bad webcomic. A bad review isn’t going to deter someone from at least reading it. It may prevent people from buying merchandise, but there are lots of webcomics I love that I’ve never spent a dime on.
If you really want to deter people from a webcomic you think is awful, don’t say a word about it. Lack of interest on the internet is death. If there are no links, no mentions of a name, no nothing, there will be no readers. I’ve been doing Dominic Deegan for five years and I have a pretty substantial audience, and hearing “your work sucks!” doesn’t hurt at all, but hearing “I’ve never heard of you” can be discouraging.
Stumble it! Explore posts in the same categories: Internet, Mookie
October 17th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
October 17th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
I’m going to agree with you wholeheartedly - and not just for online comics. My comic is primarily print-based (yay student newspapers), but it doesn’t hurt me at all to hear some random person say “you know, I thought your comic today sucked”. I’ve been running in the paper for three years now, so what hurts is when I introduce myself as the artist of that one comic, it hurts when people haven’t heard of it.
Now outside of the university community, it’s what I expect. But it makes me sad to know that there’s a whole target audience out there that doesn’t even know I exist… it won’t kill me; I’ll have a comic as long as there’s a paper. But it takes a chunk out of my motivation.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
*puts on official business professor hat* But what an amazing opportuntiy to tell people and get the word out!!!
October 24th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Pass along a story from myself. About 4 or 5 years ago a local newspaper ran a story on webcomics. I picked it up… read through it… and went huh? No mention of Keenspot. No mention of Keenspace. No mention of Megatokyo, Sluggy Freelance, Freefall, Schlock Mercenary, Mac Hall, Lethal Doses, GPF, or any of the other pioneers of webcomics. There was no mention of Scott Mcloud, Penny-Arcade, or Userfriendly either. Rather, the story simply covered a couple of graphic novels (literally, two graphic novels) that had been placed online.
Yeah, hearing something like “I’ve never even heard of any of those” hurts a lot. Sure, I never wrote or drew anything for any of those comics, it didn’t change the impact of wondering how somebody writing about “webcomics” could possibly miss the pioneers.
Sometimes though, a bad review is the way to get introduced to webcomics. I started reading Dominic-Deegan because some person started ranting about how bad it was, and how awful the puns were… so I went to check it out myself, started reading, and got attached enough to the characters to threaten to find Mookie at a con and dress him up like Sailor Moon if Pam got hurt.
So, yeah, let the bad reviews flow. It’s still better than not saying anything at all.