The Package - flash comic using bitpass

colin white · Post by **colin white** » Mon Oct 20, 2003 5:54 pm

Hi

Not very good at the shameless self promotion stuff, but just wanted to post about my new (and first) BitPass comic called The Package.

http://infantshout.com/package.html

Whats it about? Well basically about a character whos too "well endowed" for his own good, and his friends solutions to help him out of various situations. Hillarity ensues.

colin
http://infantshout.com

Wikkit · Post by **Wikkit** » Tue Oct 21, 2003 5:40 pm

I've been underwhelmed with BitPass so far. I'm a huge fan of the entire micropayment concept, and I bought your comic yesterday. It just didn't seem to be worth twenty cents.

I'm not the type who buys comic books, so I may not be the intended market, but it looks like I won't be micropaying for any comics by authors that I don't already read. I also bought the so-called "Geeks in Love" animation that Scott linked to, and I was quite unimpressed with it, both technically and creatively.

colin white · Post by **colin white** » Wed Oct 22, 2003 2:44 pm

so what would you have paid for The Package?

to give you some perspective i've put, roughly, about 40-50 hours of work into that comic.

and i thought geeks in love was well worth the quarter.

thanks for the response,

Wikkit · Post by **Wikkit** » Wed Oct 22, 2003 5:22 pm

Anonymous wrote:so what would you have paid for The Package?

to give you some perspective i've put, roughly, about 40-50 hours of work into that comic.

and i thought geeks in love was well worth the quarter.

thanks for the response,

How much of that time was the architecture, and how much the actual creative part?

Had it been a read now, pay later situation, I probably wouldn't have paid.

colin white · Post by **colin white** » Wed Oct 22, 2003 9:22 pm

most of the time was spend writing, drawing and coloring it. the flash setup took only a few hours.

Post by **Greg Stephens** » Thu Oct 23, 2003 2:55 am

I think this is part of what micropayments are about. The payment of 20 cents isn't really too much to satisfy your curiosity about the comic, is it? Maybe you ultimately didn't like the comic, but you were curious enough after the first couple panels to pay the fee and read the rest.

colin white · Post by **colin white** » Thu Oct 23, 2003 10:40 am

thats exactly it - you may not have enjoyed the comic, and therefore it wasn't worth the 20cents to you.

its not like, for example, going to the films these days where you pay 10-14$ just for a ticket and most of the stuff on the screen right now is utter crap!

one thing i was thinking about the micropayments / read the comic in advance thing: when you're in a comic book store and say looking at a graphic novel, you can flip through all the pages, look at all the illustrations, read a page here and there, another panel here and there, and then make your desision if you're going to fork out $X for the comic. on the web i havn't seen that done - most people can show you the first couple panels, then you have to make a desision. i wonder if there is some way of having a reader browse the entire online comic but not actually have full access to it until they pay the micropayment....

DecafSilicon · Post by **DecafSilicon** » Thu Oct 23, 2003 11:40 pm

Hell, call me tasteless or easily amused; I felt well rewarded when I bought "The Package" and "Geeks in Love." Colin, your three-panel combos most interested me -- the ones where one panel slightly changes twice before the first two iterations pull away from the third.

Was that completely foggy, or do you know what bits I'm clumsily referring to?

Anyway, I like to browse through the artist's free work before buying a pay comic.

I'd rather buy a Chuck Palahniuk book blind after reading four from the library than flip through a book and buy it the first time.

I usually find comics through recommendations of comics authors, whose advice is gold to me. That trust in my referrer also encourages me to spend on an artist I don't know.

colin white · Post by **colin white** » Fri Oct 24, 2003 2:32 pm

DecafSilicon,

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it... I know exactly what you mean about the 3-panel sequences. Did you look at other comics on my main site? Theres one "application to LCP" which is the first one I did in a flash format, and has some similar experiements with panels in it...

I think my preferance for a comic site is to have a healthy moderation of both free and micropayment comics.

And graphic novels can always be read in the library - you're right... it's not like you always have to fork out the 20$ for them. The internet simply dosn't work like that... we don't have a public place we have to walk to to read comics like a library. The internet makes it too easy to get free comics perhaps

Tim Tylor · Post by **Tim Tylor** » Sat Oct 25, 2003 6:54 am

colin white wrote:i wonder if there is some way of having a reader browse the entire online comic but not actually have full access to it until they pay the micropayment....

Maybe if there was a system that allowed you a free view of, say, five pages from anywhere in the comic. I've absolutely no idea of whether that could be done.

colin white · Post by **colin white** » Sat Oct 25, 2003 12:31 pm

Hmmm... Perhaps you could do something like that?

I was also thinking like you could view the entire comic but it would be one long movie, that "flipped pages" every couple seconds. so could could get a feel for it, maybe read a panel here and there, but never have the images on the screen long enough for people to find out 100% of the story. if they are interested enough after that, they could pay the few cents.

or... have the entire comic usable, but with like a "white transparancy" layer overtop it so you would have a really ghosty type comic, and only when you paid would it be full color & punchy.

both of those ideas might work...

DecafSilicon · Post by **DecafSilicon** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 4:22 pm

I dunno, I'd go with my library metaphor (that I laid out so poorly) -- after reading some of your other work and seeing a preview of your new work, I get a feel for expectations.

The issue, if I've sussed it, is the ease of copying anything from the web. Anything you can browse on the web, you can also keep. So the old concepts of a flip-through cannot apply, since the limits of time and space don't apply.

I guess I'm spouting what David Weinberger said in his book "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" -- We have to rethink everything because the web is about places (I "visited" a site and "went around" before "leaving" the site and "jump" to another) but not really about space. Nor is it about time, cuz I can post this message, you can reply tonight, and I can read it all tomorrow and reply as if the convo had only lasted 2 minutes.