Somebody commented about the images that appear in the sidebar on the desktop version of the website and how they didn’t know that Jo’s is a link to someplace. Since the site has been basically unchanged for ten years or so most people are blind to anything apart from the pages, and sometimes the blog posts. Nina’s image is a link to Patreon & Jo’s is a link to Top Webcomics. I actually have no idea how many people still use TWC. I haven’t heard anyone talk about finding new comics in so long I don’t know how new readers find anything. Years ago I used to actually buy an ad spot on some other site, but I actually can’t remember what it’s called now. I can see it in my head, but everything else is void. I think it was loosely connected to what is now Hiveworks. In fact it may still exist. I haven’t spent actual money to advertise since Project Wonderful closed. All other advertising on the internet has basically been gutted or ruined by Google & facebook. What little gets past ad blocks is barely worth the money. How I manage to gain new readers is a mystery to me. In fact, I haven’t looked at the site’s stats for about a decade, if not longer. The only readers could be the thousand or so who support me on Patreon for all I know. I found that knowing stuff like that didn’t really help me at all. It just added to the feeling of being overwhelmed. So I quit one day and never looked again. Patreon kept growing so I figured it was good enough. The world has changed a lot since then, while my little part of the internet has stayed sort of locked in a time that now doesn’t really exist anymore. We all know what happened to stores like Megatainment. The people who used to work at them are out doing other things. Except for the very few places that survived the coming of Amazon & Netflix.
I hated my time in retail, and yet I look back on parts of it fondly. It was the last time in my life when I saw friends every day. It was the last time I made new friends. At least ones that I actually saw face to face. As much as I appreciate the spirits I met online over the years it’s not the same as someone you can hug. The rest of the world got a nasty taste of my everyday life over the last 2 years and change. It wasn’t easy, was it? Imagine that for twice as long. It wears you down. Of course so does being around people, so it’s your choice of poison really.
Through all the things that happened to me, and to the world outside, my little made up world has remained as a little island of sanity. A place where things didn’t fall apart. I just let it be that. Changing slowly if it changed at all. A place where things could be red. blue, and yellow.
I might be writing one of the most successful webcomics no one has ever heard of as far as I know. I never hear anything about any other webcomics now. If there is a culture around them I’m not part of it. I can’t get along with other creators most of the time, or people at all really. I just spend my days making my owl coping mechanism & hoping people will like it enough to keep paying me to do it. Thinking about it might shake my faith in it, so I don’t. This comic is my purest expression of faith in anything. People will come and love it because I love it.

I know some of you love it too. Thank you for helping me make it.

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I still try to use TWC, but I will say, that doesn’t mean I see a lot of new comics I care to read and some that I do are not heavily voted on. Like League of Super Redundant Heroes. :)

Yea, I don’t know if its bots or weird fans, but the voting ranks are sometimes super weird. Some of the top 200 have dead links.
You would think that LoSRH would be in the top 50, but nope.

I am also curious about how people find new webcomics these days, cause it’s been a long time since I got into a new one. I’ve never been one to click on ads EXCEPT for Project Wonderful, found so many good webcomics through them.

Used to prefer The Webcomic List to Top Webcomics though.

I used to hear people talk about webcomics in random places pretty often and haven’t for almost a decade.

I found this comic through ads in Project Wonderful or Hiveworks, but don’t remember which anymore.

I think all the webcomics I’ve picked up for some years now, I’ve found through reader or creator recommendations in other webcomics.

I know you meant to say “my own coping mechanism”, but now I want to see your “owl coping mechanism” :D

I’ll bet it’s better than Professor Farnsworth’s. :D

Maybe should have been “owl copying mechanism”?

That’s how I first read it, then I thought “WTF?”, then I realized it was the “owl” part that was probably wrong.

Service like comic Rocket are indexing this, so people can find it easily. I get a message whenever there is more content and then I drop by.

I used comic rocket until their Android app stopped working.

I was just doing my more or less daily vote on Top Webcomics for Between Failures.

Jackie, you’ve shot up considerably in the rankings in the past day or so! You’ve passed XKCD, which was usually 10, 20, or more places above BF!

So all this talk here about voting has done you some good!

(XKCD is another webcomic I follow. Published MWF. Self described as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” Can be a bit cerebral. A good test of your knowledge of many topics arcane. If you don’t understand a strip, see explainxkcd.com , an independent wiki, for an explanation.)

XKCD is so old that anyone who has been around webcomics is familiar with it. I used to like it but it started to feel deliberately obscure.

Thought it stopped.

I’m not certain, but I feel like xkcd has always been deliberately obscure. It’s just deliberately obscure on a wide enough range of topics that it’s occasionally close to home to a lot of people. So many of us have knowledge about some obscure thing or another.

At least it’s not Oglaf. Deliberately obscure cerebral porn is at least incredibly niche.

Randal won a webby, so xkcd itself is not obscure any longer, even if it’s content pretty much always is.

Webcomics are certainly a strange world. I’m now mostly caught up with Dumbing of Age. I’m shocked that it’s still there.

Honestly, I’m shocked webcomics in general are still there. But I’m glad for them. Some of them are getting weird and political–see also the ongoing train wreck that is Sinfest–but then there are some that are just their characters in their own world. Like here. And I’m glad for that.

I also find myself increasingly missing retail. Having a good walk around a store was always nice. Seeing what’s available, interacting with it personally…it’s better than ordering it off a web page and hoping it works as good as it looks.

Patreon, for all of its faults, is the lifeblood of many comics. Some of the authors and artists I patreonize make more than I do.

I’ve looked at Patreon’s competitors. They all do one thing worse: they farm out their payment processing to a company that has placed itself such that most of the people who aren’t its customers are deliberately choosing to not be its customers. That is, it’s my impression that more people deliberately avoid using Paypal than don’t know about Paypal.

That feels like a market that could be tapped into. Unfortunately, I know just enough about the payment processing business to know that I want to not have any part of it.

I do not miss having to go places to get things. There are some days when I’m feeling well enough to get to the store. I went shopping earlier this year once. It felt good. Unfortunately, if we’re not careful, I worry that also might not be possible after a while. Not all of us are able to do it every week. But at least the store I went to looked like they were busy enough to keep going.

These days I mostly find new webcomics through Webtoon or by following the social media of creators of projects I’ve enjoyed so I know when they start something new. Occasionally I do see an ad for something that looks interesting on a comic I already read. Or one of my friends/people I follow recommends something they like and I check it out.

Webtoon is pretty much 90% of my webcomics now. I’m not sure how it exactly works (other than sometimes you buy coins to get ahead in the story if the artists aren’t doing them the same week they are going out, and those coins pay the artists) but they have so much over there that it’s now basically manhwa (Korean comic) land. No sex but there are a lot of violent, bloody comics on the site.

I guess Jackie could look into that, but I don’t what the application/payment process is for Webtoon. Just that almost all the independent comics I used to read are going there now.

About the only way I pick up new comics is through Webtoons and that’s mostly because a tumblr comic I liked posted there as well, and I hate tumblr’s formatting. Sometimes something gets suggested when I catch up on what I’m currently reading, and I give it a few page try to see if it’ll hold my interest and make me feel something.

I found your comic through my BF, a long while ago. Around a decade ago, I think.

I still hit the vote button every time I look at the comic. I’m not sure how much effort TopWeb Comics puts into it though. There are a lot of dead comics, many of which don’t even have an active link anymore.
As for corporate spies and or watchdogs. “I checked them out and found noting wrong” said no spy ever. Those folks are going to justify their existence. My experience with such things is that they are beneficial in the beginning but once the big problems are resolved they keep sifting finer and finer while still insisting that they are still relevant.

Your comic’s reputation is likely spreading by word of mouth.
I certainly recommend it to anyone who seems to be interested in what you offer.

I have loved this comic since I first found it and you were publishing the first haunted hunting arc, so that long, but just recently joined in your patreon, and caught back up. I went through some crap, and decided to start reading it again from the beginning, and now recommend reading it to anyone who asks me what I am doing. I hope to keep reading it long into the future.
Love your work, keep it up.
NHW

It really does wear you down being in self-isolation for so long. But it’s also so incremental that it’s not really noticeable until it starts spiraling faster. But it was wild when around mid-2020 I would be talking to people and I’d mention the drawbacks of never going out of the house, and they’d respond with “yeah, the last few months have been tough, haven’t they?” Sure….months, let’s go with that

The backstory! Feels!

I have my bookmark in a folder labeled TWC. So I know I found the comic on there.

I think I found Between Failures through a link on Reddit, but it’s been a couple years so not really sure. Most of my new webcomics come from reading one, and then the authors are giving a shout-out to another comic that they are reading or are friends with the creator of, or through collections like the Collective of Heroes.

The most recent new spurt of comics though has definitely been on webtoons, since the webtoons folks link to other webtoons.

Dunno if you’re still living in Kansas, but the phenomenon of what happens to the big stores here in the heartland seems to be still dragging its feet. Had a Kmart in my college town still open 5 years ago (thought really empty still), and a lot of the big anchor stores are still going through their death throes. Nebraska Furniture Mart, on the other hand, seems to still be thriving.

Yes you are still up on Hiveworks. The little thumbnail square banner reel has you there still at least. That ‘jump to another comic’ one with Carol grinning at Thomas.

Actually, I found this Comic through TWC about a couple of months ago. Binge read in one night and started following it.

I still use TWC fairly regularly. Its highly likely that it is how I found out about Between Failures. Its still a great place to find new webcomics. And one of the few places to find independent webcomics.

Now the Wild West has been tamed and most everything has gone to Webtoon and Tapas. Keenspot kinda tried a similar thing back in the day but is now far more humble.

And South Korean webcomics, holy crap, its nuts.

I like Amarillo!
(Yay!)

Here’s the [1970s?] song, “Is This the Way to Amarillo”, by Tony Christie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLjTP4lL0tA

Sadly, the internet in general has gone to pot. Invasion of the normies. But seriously, I miss the days where hanging out on the internet meant browsing zillions of bookmarks, all sorts of low-budget, simple sites, from basic chat rooms and forums to webcomics to fan pages to tons of video hosting sites (all in 240p and very short lengths). I don’t object to online services and shopping, but the domination of social media, and Google reaching a point where they basically get to choose who lives and dies on the internet, has really ruined it. With things like geocities and blogspot, people made stuff just to make stuff–even YouTube was once like that. Now it’s dominated by the need for clicks, making stuff for mass consumption, even though we already HAVE mass media and the internet is perfect for, you know, the opposite of that. It’s so stupid that Pewdiepie had his own music videos, performed by him, claimed by a third party claiming to be acting on his behalf, and his appeal was rejected. Twice. That is how trash the system is now.

And yes, there’s the “politics”. But not really the politics, more a different culture. Things aren’t allowed to just exist; creative endeavor for it’s own sake, with any lessons or messages being secondary. Now it’s all “message first, content second.” Or just communication for it’s own sake; let people express whatever batshit crazy ideas they have–there just might be a nugget of truth in there somewhere, or at least we can laugh at them, at the banality of evil. Now it’s all, again about clicks and ads and mainstream appeal, so it all has to be sanitized and permissible for public consumption. Tumblr banning porn, when that was not only a huge venue for it but was also a place for forming communities on such topics, that even prided itself on it’s population of LGBTQ groups and very progressive views on sexual issues, was really the death knell, for me, of the internet I once knew and loved. Sure, you can go way out to the most fringe sites on the web, but with American agencies outright investigating half of them as “domestic security concerns”, I’m going to wind up on a watchlist just for wanting conversation not censored by power-mad little dictator mods.

So I can’t say much about webcomics these days, I’ve really given up on most of the web. Seems that weirdos like me, who were pushed to the web, are now being pushed off of it by the same folks who wanted me there instead of polluting their real-world space (sort of like people who never liked nerd culture deciding they like it now, BUT it has to change to cater to them). I’ve seen alot of promising webcomics but they never last; the ones that do are preachy, or half-assed, or they lose their own plot and just sort of meander, or can’t update consistently because the creator quit their job to make the comic fulltime even though it had no income and so spends all their time on commissions, etc. It’s sort of like YouTube, in that way; once becoming a content creator became a paying job, we wound up with 20 folks looking for an easy pay day for every 1 legitimately talented, hardworking person making unique content (if I’m generous). I think I just outed myself as an internet hipster, goddammit–maybe I should have empathized more with hipsters who complained about their favorite bands “selling out”.

I try to vote daily for Between Failures on Top Webcomics, hoping it (still) helps (if only a bit) B.F. to gain more readers. …It’s the (véry) least I could do, since donating money is unfortunately nót an option for me. (Sorry!)

2410 Regular Sized Alien.

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