Born Anew?

You’re no doubt aware that a lot of people make all sorts of New Year’s resolutions in December to begin acting on in January. Some people try to lose weight, or stop smoking, or learn a new language, or… What inevitably happens, too, is that webcartoonists take stock of their comic output and notice they haven’t made an update in months, so they make an effort to get back to their strip. Also inevitably, many of these cartoonists will make a handful of updates in pretty short order, then slow down their frequency to something they think might be more manageable, and eventually they realize it’s December again and they haven’t made an update since March.

That’s one of the reasons I subscribe to webcomics’ RSS feeds: they’ll catch whatever updates come through regardless of how long it’s been since I’ve actually check in on a comic. And having read a large number of webcomics for some time now, I’m used to seeing a bunch of comics update in early January every year.

What's striking, though, is that many of them seem to come out of nowhere. It's not just the comic that hasn't been updated since August, but comics that haven't been touched since 2016! Stuff that I'd entirely forgotten I had put in my feed reader years ago. Not only could I not remember what happened in the last installment, I couldn’t even remember what the comics were even about!

My first question is: what am I supposed to do with that?

Yeah, some of these are gag-a-day type strips, and whatever happened before was more or less irrelevant, but the ones with serial continuity make no sense without context. Sure, I can go back to the previous post from multiple years ago, but that far back into the rear-view mirror requires more context than a single installment. Are the creators expecting readers to remember the story that long and/or wade back through the archives again to refresh themselves on where things left off? There’s a reason why old movie serials and comic books often start with a “When we last saw…” type of introduction, and those are rarely more than a month apart in installments. I think it’s more than reasonable for a reader to expect a summation of where the story was after a long hiatus.

But that’s only part of the problem a webcomicker faces. They’ve also breached a level of trust with their audience. They promised updates on a regular schedule — whether that was weekly, Monday/Wednesday/Friday, or whatever — and introducing a long, unannounced, evidently unplanned absence makes the reader question the commitment the creator has to the project. Now the creator may well have had a completely valid and justifiable reason for not updating for an extended period, and those regular updates can be very, very hard to keep up with for months on end but, whatever the reason(s), the viewership now has seen that the creator could drop the comic at any time. They now have to question whether they want to invest their time (again) in catching up on a comic that might simply stop in another month or two?

These aren’t obstacles that a creator can’t overcome, but they should be very aware of them when they’re returning to their comic after a long break and they should directly address these two questions readers have, whether the readers themselves openly ask them or not.

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