Hey, everyone! It’s Pyra, your friendly local Cartoonist.
I have a few announcements related to changes that will be coming to the world of Noah Thorsen.
First, the TL;DR version because I know everyone’s busy:
- I’ll be phasing out the digitally-made version of the cartoon in favour of hand-drawn cartoons.
- Said hand-drawn cartoons will now be posted twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays.
- Said cartoons will also be one-off gags rather than longer story arcs due to algorithmic reasons.
- Longer arcs will be turned into graphic novels in the future.
- I will be starting a Thursday night Thorsen livestream in which I will be working on Noah’s Archipelago-related projects including said graphic novels, so come on by and say hi. (Link will be below, way down at the bottom.)
OK, so those are the main beats, here’s the details and explanations:
Digital vs. hand-drawn
There are a number of reasons for this change, not the least of which is I’ve had more and more issues with bad ergonomics with digital work.
Twenty years ago when I started my first comic, Zamo the Destroyer, it was pen on paper drawn flat on a table. Which I know people say you shouldn’t do and you should use a slanted drawing board instead, but I’ve never been able to get used to drawing on a slanted board and I rarely if ever had issues drawing flat on a table or desk.
Hell, I started livestreaming inking sessions in January, working on my other project’s graphic novels (Ricky B. Goes to Sea & Myles Maarav’s Pursuit of Happiness) and have thus done more inking work in the last 3 months than I had in the couple years before then and the only ergonomic issues I have by the end of a session is my butt aches because the chair I sit in has minimal padding on its seat.
It’s just how I’ve always worked.
But when I started this comic in 2022, I wanted to do full color and I had heard about Procreate so I bought a new iPad (the one I’d had for almost a decade having crapped out not long before then) and an Apple Pencil and so I’ve spent many hours hunched over that stupid iPad and it’s causing more and more neck, shoulder, and back issues.
I do have a small Wacom tablet and Clip Studio on my iMac, which would get me somewhat better ergonomics as I’d at least be somewhat upright, but I have yet to figure out brushes in Clip Studio that would allow me to get the same style as I have on the iPad in Procreate.
I firmly believe this is a me problem, not a Clip Studio problem, as I’ve seen amazing work other people have done in Clip Studio with a drawing tablet. Part of it is I just haven’t had the time to work with Clip Studio enough to figure things out but then for the last 2 years I haven’t had time to figure that out because I’ve had too many scheduling issues, so I’ve just kept doing Noah’s Archipelago on the stupid iPad and paying a price for it.
In theory for a simple single panel, I can finish an NA comic in an hour and a half, because I have done this several times whilst on the ferry to and from Vancouver, which is an hour and 40 minutes and I always finish with time for a bathroom break on my way back down to my car at the end. But at home, it’s 3 hours… 4 hours… sometimes it’s dragged out to 6 hours hunched over the iPad.
Meanwhile, experience on the livestreams has taught me I can ink a full-sized comic page using a dip pen and India ink in about 45 minutes. Maybe an hour if there’s lots of detail or I get distracted talking to the folks in my live chat.
I learned during February’s experiments with vlogging when I was still doing The Diary of Noah Thorsen every Tuesday that a full-sized marker sketch comic takes a maximum of 45 minutes. (Because I’d film myself doing it then make a clip for the vlog.)
Now, I have done other marker sketches for this comic before, usually when I’ve run out of time, and I’ve always kinda felt like a lazy shit for doing so, but at the same time, I think there’s an immediacy to them that I find quite charming.
Besides, part of the theme of the comic is the messiness of Noah’s life, and marker sketches or dip pen inked cartoons capture that much better than going digital, even though I’ve tried to make my digital work have some messiness to it. Trying to force digital to have that messiness is swimming upstream and it’s better to just change to a smoother medium.
My plan is to seek a happy medium: don’t do the new marker comics in a chaotic rushed way, make them more detailed and planned out. But maintain the speed and efficiency and the immediacy… and the lack of neck pain… in getting away from a digital workflow.
Schedule changes
Also when I first started this comic in 2022, I planned to just do 3 comics a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But by August, I was pushing it to 4 and eventually 6 days a week, then that became unsustainable and I backed it off to the Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday schedule that it’s supposedly been for the last couple or 3 years.
I say supposedly because I usually don’t make it all 4 days. And when I do, it’s a hard slog to get there and I find I cut bits out that then mean the story is impaired.
After much thought over the last couple of weeks, and after looking into what other cartoonists do if they’re not running a syndicated newspaper comic, I have decided to cut back to just 2 comics per week on Mondays and Thursdays.
I’m hoping that I can stick to that and make those comics solid and not rushed. If not, we will go to just one per week.
After all, I have to remember that I don’t currently earn a dime from this comic, so dedicating 20-ish hours a week to it isn’t really worth it, much as I love the characters.
There’s also another issue, that of diminishing organic reach on social media. When I look into my page insights, Facebook tells me they only show any given post to 18, maybe 20, and sometimes as few as 10 of my 1700 followers.
They also give me notifications advising me that for as little as $14 per post, they might deign to show it to up to 6 more people.
I’ve tried various things to get traction on social media but if anything I feel like I’m losing it. I have in the past even paid to boost posts but it always seemed that while I would get more likes on the boosted post, it never translated into engagement on any non-boosted posts and most of the new likes were from non-followers who I never saw again. Sometimes I would click on their profiles and they seemed suspiciously sparse… like… were those even real people or was Facebook taking my money to show my posts to bots?
I dunno. Hopefully that wasn’t it, but certainly I don’t seem to get any ROI from paying Facebook and without paying them they won’t show my content to 99% of the people who explicitly followed in order to become shown said content.
It’s infuriating because I think it’s a decent comic and in person people seem to really like it… and not just my friends and family members who are obligated to say they like my stuff. I mean, I’ve had positive comments from strangers who’ve seen me working on comics at coffee shops, I’ve seen classmates or people at unrelated events get a chuckle out of Noah’s antics before they knew the author was in earshot, etc. etc. and I have a few hardcore fans on social media, but if the algos won’t show the content to anyone, how is it supposed to get anywhere?
The most traction I have online right now is on YouTube.
Not that I’m blowing up on YouTube or anything, but I get much more traction over there with livestreams, so I have to weigh out whether I’m better spending time drawing on stream on a graphic novel that will eventually be a product for sale or drawing on my iPad for a freebie comic that won’t be shown to many people.
You know the old saying: work smarter, not harder. I’ve been working harder for years and thanks to algorithms and social media empire business models, I’ve been working dumber and dumber.
Also, I’m currently months behind on uploading the comics here to the website. Sorry about that. We will have more to say about the role of this website later, too.
Certainly part of the problem is I need to figure out some better marketing and promotion, and time saved from doing fewer comics and doing them in a faster analog medium will partly be spent on this.
Shorter plots
I’ve been wanting to explore some longer stories in Noah’s Archipelago, and have done so this year with a plot about Ursula having been tasked with a school speech project involving how to improve the world, getting the idea from her brothers to suggest replacing the school cafeteria with a Cheez E. Rat’s (a knock-off of Chuck E. Cheese), going to consult with Ricky B. The Rock N’ Roll Rat in a crossover with my other comic, giving the speech, getting in trouble for supposedly making up her expert research, and then getting sent out to play outside and going to complain at Ricky, etc. etc.
Honestly, it ain’t working in the current format. I think this would be a fantastic graphic novel, especially if I have Ricky and Ursula go off in search of Cheez E. Rat’s, but even if my social media followers were getting shown all my comics, it’s a bit too convoluted for comic strips unfolding over the coure of 3 months now, versus in a self-contained book.
To that end, any comics I post on social media from Monday onwards will be one-off comic gags and seasonal jokes. Which leads us into…
Longer plots will be used for book projects
At the moment, in the Ricky-verse, I am working on a 100-ish page graphic novel called Ricky B. Goes to Sea, which developed from a short story I wrote in the summer of 2023. It’s about 15% complete right now and I ink a couple more pages every Friday night. I also have a collection of short stories narrated by Ricky on the go which will have a bunch of illustrations. And I’m working on a book called Myles Maarav’s Pursuit of Happiness where the art is about half done… in the case of this one, I started with the art but there’s no plot as of yet so I think it will end up being a collection of short stories inspired by the art.
Point is, I seem to have that kind of workflow sorted out and I think there are a lot of stories I could write and illustrate surrounding Noah and his family. We’ve had hints that Noah and Glen used to be in bands together, and I have an idea about a graphic novel about their 90s band touring around Canada in a van until they abruptly fired Noah and booted him out in Thunder Bay, leading him to hitchhike and busk his way across North America for a couple years right after he and Adam’s mom Gigi divorced… not the sort of thing that fits with the comic strip as is, but would be great for a graphic novel.
I’ve also been sitting on the concept of a series of kids’ chapter books starring Ursula, kinda more dysfunctional Ramona for the current century, but haven’t had time to actually write anything.
And there’s the matter of releasing anthology or collection books of the Noah comics I’ve already done. The first of these is nearing completion and I hope to self-publish it this summer.
It may even be that the entire future of Noah’s Archipelago is in book projects and not comics as I’ve been doing them or even twice-weekly marker sketch comics as I now plan to pivot to, but it’s too soon to say for sure and I do want to take the summer on the new schedule and to start working on Noah graphic novel to see about that.
In any case, I think pivoting to graphic novels will allow me to do much more for these characters than I currently am able to in the existing format.
Livestreaming
Those Ricky and Myles books? They’re worked on almost entirely on-camera in my Monday and Friday livestreams. I’ve thought for a month or so about doing the same with Noah on Thursdays but didn’t want to be bothering trying to do screen-capture livestreaming of working on it in Procreate, plus I already find it drawn-out enough without another distraction. But changing my workflow and medium opens up the possibility of streaming for Noah stuff.
I’ve already done some inking of bonus cartoons for that first anthology on my Tuesday miscellaneous work livestream:
So, I will definitely be starting a “Thorsen Thursday” stream in April. As I haven’t had time to sit down and write/storyboard a first NA graphic novel yet, I think we shall start with another project I haven’t had time to start yet: an adult colouring book based on Noah telling Ursula the story of all the various random jobs he’s had (she’s most interested in the one that was a taste-tester quality control officer in a candy factory, but he refuses to elaborate on it or tell her how to make that her own career).
I’ll try to keep on top of posting links to the individual streams on my social media accounts, but you can always book mark this link for the latest: https://www.youtube.com/@PyraDraculea/streams
As I said earlier, I’ve gotten more work done on my graphic novels and other projects since I started streaming in January than in the couple of years prior to that, and I hope that adding a night for Noah to my schedule will have a similar positive effect on this IP. It’ll just be a new format.
Lastly: this website
As I said above, I know I’m months behind here in posting comics. And many of the old comics that are posted here just have the image slapped up with nothing for SEO and no description in case the image link gets broken, etc.
I’ve been meaning to fix that, but it’s kinda gotten out of control. At best it takes me 15 minutes to update the SEO on a given comic or post a fresh one with proper SEO descriptions, etc., and I think I have about 300 in need of either updating or posting from scratch, so that’s at least 75 hours of SEO updates or 2 weeks full time of doing nothing but working on just site updates here.
On the other hand… I noticed Crabgrass has nothing but links to buy the book collections of the comic and the archive is on GoComics… of course, dude’s syndicated so I assume part of the syndication deal is not posting outside of the syndicate’s archives.
XKCD has comics but the comic pretty much doesn’t have a description per se, rather the description on the image is an extra punchline and the alt text is just the title.
Sarah’s Scribbles is kinda on hiatus so posts now are random and are more collabs she’s done, plus there’s links to her shop, books for sale, and Patreon.
It kinda does seem like many of the big hitters in the comic world have sites like that, plus at a certain point maintaining a web archive of comics becomes a beast to manage.
Maybe I’m just making excuses, dunno. But while I have been dealing with burnout for the last year or so, and have really cut back on club involvement and volunteering etc., keeping the Noah site updated and trying to have some level of SEO on it has been a struggle all along, not just the last year. And I don’t see where I get much traffic to the website for my efforts anyway… which is a vicious cycle because without proper SEO I won’t get traffic.
Prior to the first book being released, I think I do need to majorly overhaul this website and I wouldn’t rule out really stripping things down… whether that would be in a Crabgrass-ian kinda way with just sales links or in an XKCD kinda way with just the images and not worrying about SEO or whether I would spend a couple weeks of 8 hour days getting the site updated with proper descriptions, links, and SEO the way I wanted to do it, I dunno.
Problem is, I have done those kinda site updates before and I always just get behind again so it’s clearly not working and I need a new approach that’s easier to maintain.
So, right now I dunno the answer, but I hope the changes I’m about to make are part of the answer.
Can’t hurt, and I can always expand my upload schedule down the road anyway.
Thanks for reading,
Pyra
