Dave Kellett

Spring 2020 / Kickstarter;

This was a truly delightful little read that I absolutely plowed through in about an hour, while sending pictures of hilarious pictures of certain pieces to my best friend. It's a gloriously tongue-in-cheek commentary on all sorts of classic authors and it is designed to make you giggle, while giving you the inside the scope on author's lives, choices, and even calling some of them pretty clearly on the rug, here and there, for the not greatest things they'd done, too.

The title of How to Make Webcomics pretty much sums up what the book is about. It is not so much about cartooning per se, it assumes the reader is already familiar with the basics, and focuses on preparing work for digital distribution, and on the business side of webcomics.

Personally, I have no plans or desires for making webcomics, certainly not for commercial gain. I bought this book for the same reason that I listen to the Webcomics Weekly podcast by the same group - the creators are show more extremely funny people. The book, predictably, is more down-to-business in tone and has fewer of the hilarious tangents they tend to go off on when in verbal discussion, but I still found it entertaining.

Coming to it from that perspective, much of the first half of the book is not really all that interesting, being about drawing and image preparation and such things, but if you are interested in attempting to make a webcomic yourself, I think the information found here would be invaluable help for a beginner. Later chapters, about things such as web design, branding and monetising your work, a are more easily adapted to other endeavours, and so are of more interest to me. There is plenty of good advise crammed into this book, I was actually a bit surprised at how much ground it covered.

Each chapter is written by one of the four authors, but the other three will occasionally chime in with words of support or dissenting views via speech bubbles. This is my favourite aspect of the book, it is where it gets the most interesting, and most funny, as the authors debate, argue and joke about the topics at hand. In addition, regardless of chapter author, they have all written smaller sidebars on topics related to the chapter topics, which are scattered throughout the book. These are often quite interesting and funny as well, I particularly enjoyed Straub’s four points on embedding sound in websites.

I also quite enjoyed the “hot seat” feature, in which each of the authors present a couple of their strips for critique by the others. It is interesting to see professionals talk about things like these.

Speaking of strips, the book is littered with them. Series by all four authors are present, usually strips which relate in some way to the subject being discussed. As mentioned, these are extremely funny people, who all make very funny strips, and there are plenty of them in each chapter.

If you are interested in making webcomics, this book is probably a godsend. If you’re like me, without any ambitions of cartooning whatsoever, you will probably still find it an entertaining read. show less

I feel like this must be a reread (how would a comics collection come into the house and not get read?), but I only remembered about half of the strips, so maybe not. The Sheldon strip is hilarious, and this first collection is great. It reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes without feeling derivative.

Dave Kellett discovers poetry and fills the first half this book with his webcomic characters reciting it. Having flashbacks of when David Sim did this with his Cerebus comic.

Granted the material in here is funny and the webcomic is one that I visit everyday but all of the poetry put me off.

This work is available currently as a free download in *.pdf form:

http://www.sheldoncomics.com/forums/sheldontalk/8511/