All PostsJoey Manley mentioned my post in reply to Joel Fagin’s post:
For what it’s worth: my thinking, on a subjective level, tends more toward Derik Badman’s position — he seems like he should be right — but there’s no denying that, objectively, gag strips tend to do better on the web than others, and there has to be a reason for that.
I’d hazard that partly it is due to a desire to not get involved in anything complicated, a lack of interest in committment. A gag strip is easy to follow, and if you miss a day or two or a week, you can still follow along and laugh at the jokes. A comic that is more serialized takes a committment to follow along and pay attention over a period of time.
One could compare it to the extreme popularity of police procedurals on television. You don’t have to follow along week to week, you can watch one episode and everything is self-contained. Compare that to something like Lost or Battlestar Galactica which require continued viewing over time to make any sense (and in the case of Lost very little sense).
On the other hand, we could also argue that gag comics require less in the way of visual skill. When the gag is the important part, the art can be minimal, sub-par, or outright crappy. It’s harder to follow a “serious” story if the art is cookie cutter simple, unskilled, or mind numbingly repetitive.
It might also just be a lack of good serious webcomics that will appeal to a lot of people. Gag comics have an advantage of finding a niche market and attracting people that don’t normally read comics but will read a three panel gag everyday for a quick laugh. Getting someone to read a daily or weekly or twice weekly story is harder. You might also consider that most of the webcomics out there that are “serious” are crap and finding the good stuff is hard. Even if you go actively looking for good serious webcomics you have to plow through hundreds of fifth-rate manga clones and fantasy comics.
Though I can think of exceptions to any of these cases.
I think it depends on what goal you have for how often you expect your readers to frequent your site. If you want them to come back every time you update, then a gag-a-day will do just that. If you’re making a longer-format story that is available via the web, maybe you can be satistified with readers coming back once a month and reading 24 pages of comics. The things with newspaper strips, is that people usually buy news papers for other reasons than the comics, but might also enjoy the comics in the paper. The news brings people back to the comics daily, while on the web the comic is the sole reason people come to the site.