Posts Tagged: comic hiatus

The Webcomic Graveyard

Hiatus.

That is a word that evokes certain dread in webcomic readers. Updates that mention an impending hiatus often get more comments than usual, specifically in response to the hiatus rather than the actual page. Why? Because they fear what’s coming—death.

Webcomics get cancelled and abandoned more frequently than most any other type of literature. There is a veritable cemetery of forgotten stories that will never be completed wasting away in cyberspace. Sometimes a creator will reboot or hand the series off to someone else, but this is atypical and not always successful. Is any of this a surprise? Not really. Webcomics aren’t usually a lucrative business and with no deadline, contract, or material gain to look forward to, the motivation to continue making a webcomic has to come from within the creator. That alone is a rare discipline, but even the most motivated writers find themselves in a predicament where they cannot complete their work. Life gets in the way, there’s a dispute in the creative team, or perhaps the writer simply no longer has the resources to continue. There is a trove of unfortunate circumstances buried beneath the graves of dead webcomics. If these lost tales had epitaphs, what would they say and what lessons could both readers and creators take from them?

(more…)