FOUR WOLVES- A POST MORTUM
Last year, I attempted to start a webcomic, in hopes of gaining a larger online presence for my graphic novel, WolfBound.
Four years into writing, Wolfbound when I became near to start lettering, I started to research the ways of being published as I wanted to be published by graphics. I found that you need a literacy agent and it was very helpful to have a readership in order to be successful when published. I researched how other comic artist became published, such as ND Stevenson who started a web comic, before his graphic novel naimona. However, I had done it the other way around. I had written a graphic novel and hadn’t written a webcomic. So I thought I must make a web comic in order to gain a readership for my graphic novel wolfbound. So back again 2023 I started to focus on growing my Instagram account so I could have more reach and more people who would be interested in wolfbound when it was published. However, I didn’t share much of wasbound as I didn’t want the idea or pages to be copied. Since wolfbound had wolves, I decided to focus more on drawing wolves and practising the anatomy on my Instagram. Over the year I gained an audience of people who were interested in Wolves and comics. Since I had then gained an audience, I decided to try and reach even more people by attempting to start a webcomic separate to wolfbound in order to gain a readership and literacy agent. However, this wasn’t good for me for many different reasons.
- The nature of creating a web comic is making the page week by week as you go, only ever planning out the story per chapter. I found this extremely difficult. I love how when you make a graphic novel you can plan out the whole story in one go and you do it in sections. For example you sketch all the pages in one go. Then you ink all the pages in one go and then you colour the pages all in one go. I think this is better because the art stays mainly consistent throughout the book rather than changing drastically as the person changes as such happens usually in webcomics as the drawing and colouring from page one might be several years away from the most recent page. I found this very stressful not knowing where the story was going and it felt a lot harder than just doing everything at once. This is probably the reason why four wolves webcomic only lasted 2 months.
- I targeted this webcomic at people who liked wolves as this is the majority of my following. However, I soon realised that this is a very niche group. I want to appeal to more people and by having humans you can appeal to a larger audience than people who just like wolves. My graphic novel wolfbound is mainly following the protagonist who was a human but can transform into a wolf, whereas the Four Wolves characters were just wolves. I want to appeal to more people by having humans and I also disliked drawing just wolves I prefer to spread out and try lots of different things then getting stuck down on one animal species.
- The audience which I gained from four wolves was not the audience I wanted for my graphic novel wolfbound. People who were interested in reading the webcomic were interested in reading comics that were for free. And also we’re all the target range from 19 to 20 as they had Instagram. I want my graphic novel to target eight 12-year-olds and children that young weren’t really on Instagram online and weren’t very interested in reading webcomics.
- Having to post one page a week made it hard for the people to get the full story and get the pacing. Reading a graphic novel in one go makes it easier as you can change the tone and pace of how slow or fast the reader reads depending on how the panels and pages are formatted. You lose this power when you make a web comic because there is never a flow of reading. It’s just reading one page at a time. This means the story has to be simpler because otherwise people can’t remember complex things that happened 20 pages ago, but if it was a webcomic that would be 5 months ago.
- Web comics usually want to be formatted for phones as well as comic pages so people can read it on their mobile. This means the comics are usually shown one panel at a time rather than being drawn into a coming page. I found this really difficult to do as I really like drawing a comic page and using the panels to reflect what is actually happening in the story. For example, if you have a page with lots of small panels it can show a back and forth conversation happening quickly or a really long drawn out time as it takes the reader longer to read the page. On the other hand, you can have fight scenes where there’s only one or two panels on the page and it makes it seem very dramatic because you have to focus on all the little details as if time is being slowed down. You lose all of this when you use a webcomic because all of the panels have to fit within the phone, the reader can only see one at a time and you don’t get to see the whole page and how different panels complement each other.
- And finally the webcomic wasn’t really sustainable. Instead of walking towards one goal like getting your graphic novel all inked you’re just working on finishing one page. It makes it very hard to see the ending and see what you’re actually working towards, which I really dislike.
Four wolves only lasted 2 and 1/2 months for me as I found it really difficult to sustain it. During one page a week was very stressful as you have to start and stop things and it makes it hard to keep the colours consistent if the last time you did the colours was a week ago rather than yesterday and the stress of having to get a page done in the same time every week rather than spending more time on one page and less time on another meant that it was hard to put effort in making the pages last details and the portions more off which I strongly disliked. After only trying this for a few months, I completely stopped it and decided to focus on other ways to get a literacy agent such as creating a website and writing and sending query letters.
The one thing I learnt from this is I really really enjoy making a full-blown graphic novel project as it is much more rewarding in the end and satisfying to make.
I decided to pursue other ways to find a literacy agent, but at least I have some of my work out there and some people from my audience still seemed interested in getting wolfbound when it’s published, although the target audience is for people younger than them.













