The Gigcast: Cramming a Megacast of Information into a Gigacast

Bill Gates and His Hobo Friend Are Here To Talk To You About Webcomics.

There are a lot of podcasts out there. There are even more podcasts about webcomics. That doesn't make mathematical sense, and yet, it's still true. Everywhere I turn, I trip over another webcomic-related podcast. And they're all terrible. Honestly, I'm not sure there exists an amateur podcast that is done well, and I'm not really willing to review every terrible webcomic podcast, if they're all the same kind of terrible. However, I have tripped over a webcomics podcast that is a NEW kind of terrible, and that is what I'm going to discuss today. After all, if I keep reiterating the same points over and over, no one is going to learn anything new, and the perpetrators are unlikely to pay attention anyways. Hopefully this isn't the case with The Gigcast, because it's terrible enough to rival even Nickelback as the most terrible thing to penetrate my ears.

I first noticed The Gigcast by watching my referral links like a hawk. I generally do this to find humorous search terms that find me, because I do get some weird stuff (the most popular search term is some variation on "betty and veronica porn," and I'm starting to regret reviewing Menage a Three now). The Gigcast had shot me a pair of links comparing me unfavorably to the now-extinct "Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad" blog, which was my first indication that this podcast is the product of two oblivious idiots who couldn't discern an apple from a federal bailout.

The two hosts, JT (A 40 year old man who plays a ukelele and as far as I can tell, does nothing else) and Scott (who does a vapid webcomic with dull art and poor writing) run the show as though it were a weekly lecture on the importance of bread in a post-modern society, which results in a podcast that is unnaturally extended to fill a whole hour. Both hosts give the impression that they are just watching the clock until the show is complete, filling the space with awkward conversations and off-topic murmurings. Unlike other podcasts I've punished myself by listening to, the guys on The Gigcast actually go in with a bulleted list of topics to bring up, which puts them a leg up on the rest of the competition. Unfortunately, this is still inadequate since after the first few sentences, the discussion meanders away into something unrelated to the initial topic, and more than likely, regards some self-centered bit of information, such as what the hosts are doing at some upcoming convention.

The first ten minutes are generally occupied by a segment known as "Shallow Thoughts" which is basically just co-opted from another podcast to fill time. It has little to no relevance to "the industry" and therefore has no purpose in this podcast. In addition, it's just a cheap knockoff of the old "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey" segments from Saturday Night Live, but with less humor. Next is generally a segment where the hosts spotlight comics submitted by someone named Brian Anderson. These spotlights are generally just brief descriptions of a comic's about page, which really isn't much to go on. If the same amount of time was devoted to a single comic, the results would be a bit more detailed giving the listener a greater impression about what is being shilled. That is, assuming The Gigcast's writers could craft a decent evaluation.

By now we've been able to eat up a good ten minutes. Solid! But now we've got another 50 to kill. The next step is to start talking about the parent company Nightgig Studios and shilling its other products. This is actually expected, since this is the whole purpose of a "collective" but it could be done so much less blatantly. Unfortunately, I think this would require that JT and Scott knew what the definition of 'subtle' was. I don't think they do, which is why they cover all their bases quickly and fully, instead of working them into other topics that they bring up later (which they also do, just to be sure).

As JT runs down his bullet-list of news items, Scott will often chime in with some irrelevant comment that steers the conversation onto a meaningless track until they run out of gas. Then with the next list item, the cycle repeats itself. The overall effect is like listening to two cut-ups in the back of a classroom, taking cues from the instructor, then moving their own discussion onto a tangent of a tangent of a tangent, until the instructor raises his voice to speak over them, resetting their attention to the topic at hand.

The Gigcast will also feature a guest sometimes, which, if I understand the formula correctly, is whoever is buying the most ad time via Project Wonderful. The guest does very little for the show, since he's neither the centerpiece of discussion, nor a fresh voice for the show. Instead, they generally tend to be in the same vein as Scott and JT, i.e. meandering and self-serving. Either give them more weight to the course of the show, or shorten their appearance time, don't drag them through the entire hour if they're not going to affect the outcome.

As the show draws to a close, our intrepid hosts have a tendency to note how close to the end of the show we are, and how many more minutes we have to fill. Here's a tip, don't draw the audience's attention to how much or little time they have actually spent because it detracts from the enjoyment experienced. Not that there's much of that involved in The Gigcast. Try to fit as much significant content into the hour, instead of dragging things out to fill the whole thing. If you can't fill an hour with substantive content, then you shouldn't try to go for a whole hour.

The strange thing is that there is often a blog post that coincides with each podcast, full of bullet items which could easily be used to fill the space on air. It's already in the same format as the bulleted list used for the items they talk about already. Of course, without more structure for the ones they DO use, this would just extend the show by hours into conversations about how JT and Scott each spent Christmas in 1995.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with The Gigcast is the inability to focus on the topic for the entire duration. A lot of chaff in a podcast is a recipe for disinteresting the listeners. If you find yourself looking at the clock to find out if your job is done, then you might want to rethink your format. Putting more preparation into the news items being covered will result in more structure and a greater adherence to the topics being discussed. The hour will be filled more substantively and the result is appropriately sized content for an appropriately sized show. As it stands now, though, The Gigcast is just too small for its britches. Read more→

Psychedelic Treehouse: Tips on Shoddy Craftsmanship, From the Expert Shoddy Craftsman

How does a webcartoonist improve himself? Practicing alone might seem sufficient to some, but without direction, most will just practice themselves into a hole. Rote learning can make you more efficient, but not necessarily better. There are websites which can guide an artist into developing his skills well, by giving good examples and exercises, and lead to a greater understanding of anatomy, and higher quality art. Likewise, there are aids for the writers out there who want to escape terrible characters, awful pacing issues, and atrocious plots. But aside from the art, what is out there to help you present your webcomic? I have yet to find a good site about webcomic production, but I am knee deep in bad ones.

Psychedelic Treehouse is yet another webcomic site by Ben Gordon, aka scartoonist, in which he attempts to combine information that he feels is useful to webcartoonists who wish to improve the business of their webcomic. The first thing anyone will notice, however, is the terrible page layout of PT. The first textual paragraph is a bunch of metatags, presented as a jumbled mess of phrases, some of which link to subsections of the site, while others do not. The purpose of this section puzzles and confuses me. It is an ugly site feature, and will repel users looking for a more professional site to give them advice. After this massive text chunk, Gordon gives two substanceless taglines, followed by a link to a useless "list" style website. By the time the reader reaches any true substance in the Psychedelic Treehouse, he or she is already fatigued by all the empty content they've had to wade through.

Down in the bowels of the front page, PT turns into a two-column format, with the left column being a left-justified list of various categories and subsections, with no organization or formatting cues. The right column is a centered list of site credits and contact links. The formatting wraps lines in odd places, creating lines with two words, followed by a line break. All the credits in the right column are chaotically arranged, and the reader's eye bounces all over the place, instead of following the list cleanly. The left side is only slightly better, with section titles and descriptions having various assortments of font styles and sizes, with very little consistency among either.

But what kind of substance does The Psychedelic Treehouse actually offer? Perhaps it is a diamond in the rough, an object of immense value with an ugly presentation. And perhaps Jesus himself will swoop down on the back of a giant rooster and smite all the terrible webcomics. The majority of sections found on the PT are simply lists of things. A list of webcomics, a list of webcomic collectives, a list of comic portals, blogs, publishers, award winners, podcasts, books, and commission-taking artists. There are even three whole pages of 'miscellaneous' link lists. The most useless of these 'lists' is a gallery of webcomic logos. What is the purpose of these lists? A collection of information is useless if the average reader still has to digest and analyze it himself. These lists are simply pure streams of data, with no evaluation provided by Gordon, thereby making it about as useful as a list of quantum physics equations to the average kindergartener. Ben Gordon is apparently incapable of giving the necessary commentary on the lists he provides, since he has not done so, but with the quality of his writing, I'm not sure I'd want to see it.

A few sections attempt to be more significant than just a meaningless pile of lists, which is what I'd expect from topics such as Site Design Tools and Networking, topics that Ben Gordon has obviously neglected himself. Of course, they're merely lists of links accompanied with a summary of the link, which I suppose is an improvement, but ultimately, it's not enough. Many subsections again devolve into mere lists. One section on Fonts is prefaced by an amazingly inaccurate assessment and analysis on the use of fonts, making the claim that "If you use an exotic font to letter your comic, many people in your audience will see whatever their search engine thought was the closest match." How is your browser supposed to alter the comic image to change the font used, I'm not sure, but Ben Gordon has asserted that it happens, and presented it as fact. The presence of patently idiotic statements detract from the validity of Psychedelic Treehouse as a webcomic resource. It also doesn't help that the font chosen for the page header is Comic Sans.

The remainder of Psychedelic Treehouse's content consists of extremely short 'essays' about webcomics (as well as interviews and reviews crossposted from his other sites). The problem is that these essays are written to push Gordon's concept of what cartoonists should be doing, whether he has any factual basis for saying so, or not. This checklist is full of minor and inconsequential things that only matters to Gordon, but he has presented it as a definitive checklist for new webcartoonists. The truth is, I'd trust his advice about as far as I could throw him. He puts more emphasis on how to make money from a comic, as well as shameless self-promotion than he does about any kind of substantial improvement in quality.

Ben Gordon provides very little ethos when talking about building a better webcomic site. His own sites are so jumbled, scattered, disoriented and downright terrible. Trying to pass his Psychedelic Treehouse off as an essential resource for webcomickers is laughable. It is essentially a Webcomic Junkyard: Massive piles of junk with a single potential nugget of value contained within. He makes no effort to sort the wheat from the chaff, and as a result his information becomes massive and unwieldy. Anyone looking to improve their webcomic should avoid this site like the plague, since you will waste more time digging for gold without a map than you will spend applying the useful advice to your own product. If Ben Gordon built this Psychedelic Treehouse with his own two hands, then you should think twice about turning it into a clubhouse; the shoddy craftsmanship will fall apart on you at the worst possible moment. Read more→

Webcomics Beacon: Dogs Don't Know It's Not Beacon (4 of 4)

As I stated yesterday, Circle Jerks in webcomics lead to artistic stagnation and undue popularity. It doesn't take a lot of talent to provide meaningful criticism, but webtoonists are often blind to their own faults. This excuse does not work when the creators regularly work with other terrible webtoonists to provide criticism to OTHER terrible webtoonists. Like the crossover I discussed yesterday, running a podcast is another great way for atrocious webcomics to Circle Jerk. The Webcomics Beacon is run by some of the most terrible webcartoonists I've covered with this blog. In fact, I told you those stories so I could tell you this one.

First and foremost, this podcast is way too long. Each episode is over an hour long, and if you're talking about webcomics for more than an hour, the evidence indicates that you just like hearing your own voice. I do like that these amateurs don't talk about one webcomic for the whole hour, but rather a certain trend or meme among comics, but the topics are still too broad and general. The hosts also have a tendency to go off-topic often, which contributes to the excessive dragging-onnery of this podcast. Additionally there is a lot of dead air and simultaneous talking, all of which could be remedied with a structured program and pre-planning. Having a set rotation for asking and answering questions would definitely cut down on the confusion, and figuring out what the best questions are and focusing on those would probably cut the runtime down to a reasonable half-hour.

The bigger problem is that the hosts may or may not be giving good criticism, but the comics made by the hosts undercut that criticism by being so terrible. The idea is, "If they can't use their advice to improve themselves, why should anyone else do so?" Of course, I completely agree with this argument. A better use for a group such as this would be to turn their critical eyes inwards, and utilize each other to improve themselves. Of course, since the entire point is to increase readership for everyone involved, the hosts are not going to turn too critical an eye (least of all towards their guests) resulting in a shallow and unchallenging show. The only criticism being offered is towards those who aren't on the show, giving off the impression that the Webcomics Beacon is used to signify an impending circle jerk.

The actual website is also a mess, and has so many circle jerking links that it overloads the reader with too much irrelevant information. There's an entire section devoted to Webcomic Milestones which just tells the reader which webcomics have completed an arbitrary number of pages or existed for an arbitrary number of years, with no discretion based on quality, consistency or continuity. Another section lists every single site mentioned in the week's show, no matter how passing the reference. While nice for those who find themselves asking "what are they talking about?", reducing the size of the section to only those sites talked about in depth would keep it from being overwhelming.

It is human nature to want to promote your creations, and the Internet is an easy way to do so. However the act of self-promotion often leads to introspection and growth after being rejected. When artists take the easy way out by promoting themselves through others and cutting quick deals often end up being screwed over by a bad deal. Some might get lucky, sure, but the best works are going to come from those who aren't relying on finding a great bargain, but instead put the effort into themselves and their own works. Creating new assets to bargain with, such as a podcast, are only indicative of desperation, and it almost becomes a spectacle to watch and see just when someone gets burned. While those who wish to build themselves up through their own merits should stay away, the Webcomics Beacon signals to all those who wish to dash themselves upon the jagged rocks. Read more→