Fun for the Holidays: Suggestions and Lingerie
Dec05
It was always our intention here at Cosmic Hellcats to feature the real life Hellcat models in conjunction with the fictional strip. But lack of time and other commitments have gotten in the way and I haven’t been able to get as many shoots up of the girls as I would otherwise like.
Well, that clearly has to change. So I decided that since the Christmas Holidays are coming up and its so cold outside, I’d help all of our fans warm up with some Out-of-character (and clothing) pics of the girls.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before I have time to put even more shots of them up.
In the meantime, I’m looking for suggestions from you the readers. What do you want to see, both in the strip and on the site? Lots of people have asked for us to introduce more characters, and that will be coming after the current story arc ends.
But what else are you looking for? What do you like? What do you not like? Do you prefer our storyline driven scripts or do you like it when we go for more humor oriented stories? Do you like when we stick with one character or subplot for several strips in a row or do you prefer when we jump around and let you see a little of everybody? Who are your favorite characters? Who do you want to see more of? Or less of?
And out of the strip, what other things should we be adding to the site? We’ve considered contests, more merchandise (t-shirts, and the like), a series of “serious” text stories featuring the characters. Guest strips. More “Ask Sarah!” advice columns? But what would you like to see?
Any suggestions or comments you may have, please leave here or send them to us at feedback@cosmichellcats.com. Also send us mail there if you have any fanart or pics and we’ll get them posted here as well. Hope to hear from you soon.
Happy Holidays,
-Mav
∑8x)
I definitely prefer storylines to humor. I would not miss some of the
characters “charming” quirks if they evolved into more real and
interesting characters.
I don’t think you specifically asked about the artwork, but I’ll give
you my opinion anyway 😉 It’s too flat, especially in the
backgrounds. The backgrounds are almost entirely non-specific washes
of color. Characters are rarely shown standing on anything.
Perspective is often missing entirely. This style damages the
narrative because there is little sense of place. One location looks
much like another, and no location resembles much of anything specific.
Are they on a spaceship? A planet? In a Dr. Strange-like alternate
dimension? Underground fortress? Why do the exterior shots of the
strange planetoid look like a suburban house and the interior shots
look like random splotches of orange and gold lines — I had to read
backwards to remember that they were all hanging out in the house, and
the giant stole swiggy from there, and took him, um, somewhere else
undefined. That was established in July. It’s December! My brain is
tiny and can’t be expected to remember stuff like that when we’ve had
sex scenes, karaoke, pacing robots, tea parties, and wandering
aimlessly through the wherever-we-are since then.
I definitely think you should have more alternative features like Ask
Sarah and photoshoots. They add interest, and fill the days when
you’re not publishing the strip. (In fact, I would have saved up the
four pics you lavished on us today, and spooled them out over several
days with teasers…)
I think this whole project is actually extremely ambitious. If you
look at mainstream comic strips, very few try to be funny and
plot-oriented at the same time. Humor strips generally have little
ongoing story at all — mostly, they have either no ongoing story or
very short arcs that last only a few strips. For a sense of
continuity, they rely on recurring themes and characters, not plot.
The plot-oriented ones (the “soaps”) generally aren’t funny at all (or,
if they are, the laughs are entirely unintentional). They also move
glacially slowly, and are fairly frustrating to read. Combining the
styles is pretty hard — who does this successfully? Goats? I got
confused and annoyed by that strip long ago… You also labor under
the handicap of only producing a strip twice a week. That raises
expectations — it should feel more like a Sunday strip than a daily,
and it means your readership may have forgotten what was happening
yesterday. You also have a habit of jumping back and forth between
characters and locations, so it can actually be a couple of weeks
before we pick up the action again from where it left off. Coupled
with the nonspecific artwork, and your apparent allergy to “Meanwhile,
back at the ranch…” narrative boxes, it’s hard to get “sucked in” to
what’s going on.
Okay, I’ve complained long enough, but I know how you love crotchety
comments 😉 (Oh, and who wants *more* characters???? That’s just
going to make your job even harder and make it more confusing for the
readers. I want the current characters to be more interesting!)
thanks for such in depth commentary. I’ll try to hit everything.
So starting with the backgrounds. They’re actually composed to give an
idea of location without making the art so complex that we can’t get it
out on time. When we started the webstrip, it was our goal to make sure
we had an episode up consistently every Monday and Thursday, and so far
we’ve actually managed to keep that going. But really, the whole
process is a much bigger job than we ever thought it would be. Our goal
is to get every strip posted at midnight, and I’m frequently still
tweaking the art at 11:58.
That said, generally the way we compose the backgrounds of the strip is
to give an establishing shot of the location the first time you see it,
and then kind of hint at it from then on. If a character changes
locations, then we use another establishing shot. This is actually
pretty consistent throughout, but perhaps not obvious enough. Thus far
there have been 7 main locations shown in the strip: The bridge of the
Hellcat ship (Fluffy), The surface of the 4d world ship that Jessi and
Junior live on. Fluffy’s airlock. The inside of the toy dreamhouse that
the bears were in when we first encountered them (two sets here, the
living room and the bedroom), the interior of the world ship, and
recently the worldship trophy room that Chaste escaped to, and the Bear
ship engine room that Riley and Sarah are currently working in.
The Hellcat paper comic has much more complex settings since we had
longer to work on each individual panel there. We hope to do another
paper comic soon as well, which would have these things again.
Speaking of the paper comic, (still available in the Hellcats
Bookstore), it was always our intention that that is our storyline
oriented project whereas the webcomic really is more of a joke/humor
project. You’re right, honestly, in 62 strips, not a whole lot has gone
on, and that’s actually kind of intentional. We’ve been making a
conscious effort to pace it like a comic strip rather than a comic
book. As far as I can tell from reading our logs, most readers don’t
actually check out the whole story. They surf around and kind of just
read random individual strips. That’s kind of why I posted this
question here. I can tell there are people reading the strip. I’d
estimate around 100-150 people check us out fairly regularly. And then
another couple hundred check us out a lot, but randomly. So as a result
of trying to please everyone, our storyline does kind of move slowly.
It’s been a careful balancing act. One that I’m not necessarily always
pleased about.
Speaking of pleasing the people. The limited feedback we’ve gotten (and
I really wish there was more) has shown us that different people have
quite varying ideas of who the most interesting characters are and who
we should be following. If we happen to be centering on your favorite
characters for a while (like we did during the sex arc with Sarah and
Kennedy) their fans will be very happy, while fans of all the other
characters feel left out. So I’ve tried to jump around a lot more to
keep everyone happy. Once this main arc is done and we move on to the
next we’ll be shutting down several of secondary characters (at least
for the time being) and centering more on the main girls and new
secondaries. I’m really looking forward to seeing how that goes over.
Max has been talking about changing up the art style and layout to a
more traditional three or four panel linear strip. This would mean more
time to do a lot of the artwork and could translate to either more
detailed artwork or more strips per week, but doing so would represent
a large shift in the storytelling style and pacing, so if we do decide
to go with it, we’ll be waiting til after this storyline is done
(probably early in the new year).
Now on to non-comic related business.
We do want to have more extra features. But in order for them to happen
we need the help of the audience. I actually find the Ask Sarah column
to be one of the most enjoyable pieces on the site, but we actually
don’t get that much mail for it. In fact, she’s now answered all of
them, so that really doesn’t leave her much to work with. It’s a
similar problem with fan art. We actually had quite a lot at first. But
now we’ve posted it all and no one has sent in a drawing or a cosplay
pic in a while. Which is a shame, because we’d really like to do more.
In addition, our logs show that the extras aren’t visited nearly as
much as I think they should be. I actually always like the extras that
a comic site has. But then I’m the kinda guy who likes the bonus
features and deleted scenes on the DVD. But it appears I’m in the
minority here. I’ve been really wanting to expand the bios section to
include all the secondary characters. Whenever I discover a new
webcomic that I like, the bios section is always one of the first
things I read. But since most people don’t seem to check it out, I’ve
just felt that any extra time I have should be spent on the comic
itself.
So anyway, I hope I answered most of your concerns, and I hope other
people write in and let us know what they think as well.
Thanks for reading and for writing,
-Mav
∑8x)