Comics Length, Amount of Sex, Hanging Plotlines

BUXOM BRAWLER, DAY JOB, HOW LONG SHOULD A COMIC BE

Buxom Brawler coming in for a landing!

I just finished a comic and posted it as the latest update to strongandstacked.com.  It's the second issue of Buxom Brawler.  Working on it over this past week took longer than I had hoped.  Mainly because of the interference of external things, foremost among them being the demands of my day job.  I'm a software engineer and this week there was just a lot going on at work.  My dream is to be able to quit that job and just focus on my websites and doing some other programming that I would find more fun.  But that's way out on the horizon.

For now I'm trying to carve out more time for working on the websites and I hate when my day job gets in the way of that.  At any rate, I was using my quadcore to create Buxom Brawler Issue 2 and I went ahead and tried out a simple scene to use for full fledged raytracer rendering rather than a flat background or the backdrop prop I'd mentioned in some previous posts.  My hexacore would be able to do this no problem, but the quadcore kind of struggled with it.  Given everything that was going on this week, I managed to output about 10 images per day.  My method was to have the quadcore running and then go through this process:

1) Set up a pose and camera angles (typically takes maybe two minutes or so)
2) Click button to start rendering using raytracing (typically takes about four minutes to complete)
3) While quadcore is grinding away raytracing, switch to hexacore and do some work for my day job
4) After four minutes, go back to step 1.  So the whole sequence takes roughly six minutes to create one image

Now mind you, I'm not sitting at my day job in the office cranking out pictures of big boob muscle women :)  But I usually don't leave for work until fairly late in the morning to avoid traffic, and so I work from home a bit until around 10am. During that time is when I'd be able to do the above sequence over and over.  From about 7 am to 10 am.  Given that I also have to eat breakfast, shower etc let's say I get about 2 hours with the above sequence to create content.  That means I'm creating an image every six minutes for two hours, so 20 images every two hours.  But I forgot to add that there is an occasional step 2b with the above work which is : Daz Studio crashes with out of memory exception every so often.  So let's say really I create 15 images every two hours.  And with all the work for my day job last week, that's about all I was able to do.

Ginger Guns. To Be Continued. Hopefully.

The format of the comics I create is that they have two images per page.  I have tried to shoot for creating comics that are 20 pages in length, and it would be interesting to hear from people whether that size seems about right for an update.  It means that at the pace described above, it takes me roughly 3 days to create a single 20 page comic.  Now actually, that's just cranking out frames.  There's another piece to this, which is initial scene set up.  So that might take a day.  So let's say 4 days for a single 20 page comic.  That is a fair chunk of time.  And, as described in previous posts, I am working on speeding things up by starting to use my hexacore and some other things.  So maybe I can get things down to 3 days per comic

Does 20 pages seem like the right length for a comic?  I could create shorter comics and have more frequent updates to the website.  Is that a trade off that people think is worth doing?

HANGING THREADS IN MY COMICS, HOW MUCH SEX SHOULD THERE BE

When I'm working on a comic, there comes a point where I start to feel the time pressure of not having updated the websites in a while.  And what often happens is that I'm getting close to the 20 pages mark for a comic, and realize that ok I need to get something up on the site. That moment doesn't always correspond to a nice stopping point for the plot of the comic.  And so there are many times where I get to page and then hastily try and drag the plot to some sort of either cliffhanger or stopping point of some type and slap on the bottom of the page "To Be Continued..."

Another To Be Continued That's In Limbo

The problem is, sometimes, many times actually, I don't continue.  When I start working on the next comic for the site, I switch over to something brand new or else I pick up a thread of a comic series from a long time back that I hadn't worked on for a while.  The result of this is that I have a whole lot of "To Be Continued..." state comics on the site.

So one thing I wonder is whether people would rather that I try to tie up those story lines instead of cranking out new characters and new comics.  There are some series that did get a healthy number of issues.  Miss Titz.  Ms. Muscles.  But there are plenty of other comics where I wrote one or maybe two issues, never really brought the story line to a conclusion, and left them hanging in limbo.

When working on a comic, my rough thinking is something like this.  If the comic is an issue number one, it usually starts with a woman who is not yet extraordinary in her boob/muscle size.  I don't want to have too many pages go by in the comic before she starts to get bigger, only because I think people don't get fired up looking at skinny flat women for too long in the comic.  The name of the site is "Strong and Stacked" after all :)  (Or for Begiantess, I don't want too much of the comic go by before giantess growth starts happening).  Once the growth starts, and she gets bigger boobs and possibly muscles, I try to steer the comic toward a point where sex can happen.  My websites are supposed to be sexy sites after all.  I don't always get to that point before I hit page 20.

Which actually brings me to another question I have.  How much sex do people want in the comics?  Is growth the big thing and actual sex in the comics is a nice to have but can be infrequent?  Do people want a lot more sex?  Sometimes I get to the sex portion at a point well before page 20, and then there's a lot of sex.  Sometimes I don't and there's only a bit of sex. Other times there is no sex at all in the comic if I don't get to it before page 20 hits.

So I do wonder about these things.  Should I spend some time going back and writing sequel comic issues to try and tie up and resolve hanging plot threads in old comics rather than creating new characters and new story lines?  Should I try to get more sex in the comics than I have now?

WHAT IM DOING THIS WEEKEND

It's Friday and today I actually have a day off from work.  So I'm planning to kick off my early starting weekend with these goals for stuff:

1. BEGiantess Update.  I need to do an update for begiantess.com.  It's been too long
2. Animations!  I am going to enlist the use of my hexacore in this.  It's been wayyyyyyy too long since I've posted animations so I am going to try to do some of those this weekend
3. My Final Commission.  I mentioned before that I'm not going to do commissions any more. But I have one in the pipeline - the super sized tits one. And I need to do that.  I may be able to combine this with number 2 above, because it is an animation.

Ok enough blogging.  Time to start working on this stuff.  I may blog a bit during the weekend too. That's all for now