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Petra’s Call Episode 2 Commentary – Weekly Episodes as Scenes

There are many schools of thought on when and how you should publish your webcomics.

– Post 1 page at a time (daily, every 2 days, weekly)
– Post a set amount of pages a week (FreakAngels 6 pages/week)
– Post entire chapters when they are ready (many Zuda series as well as the short lived Dark Horse/MySpace comics project).

With Petra’s Call, the episodes are broken down into either full scenes, or in the case of long scenes, into the key story beats of that scene. For me, this is done for a couple of reasons.

1. I like the reader to have a solid, contained experience that doesn’t shun new readers and has a bit of a cliffhanger to bring readers back next week. (comic nerds have been getting a dose of this with DC’s new Wednesday Comics).

2. I want each episode to welcome people with open arms. You don’t need to remember exactly where the story was last week. It doesn’t take much to remind people that last week, Petra said she was going to ride a T-rex.

For me, this is a fun way to publish and also suites the comic itself.

One of my favorite webcomics, Warren Ellis’ FreakAngels has moved to more self contained updates in the past 4 episodes and I’ve found it to read a lot better.

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Petra’s Call Episode 1 Commentary – Pacing and Control in Web Comics

I’ve had a few people ask me why I don’t go with motion comics, or with traditional jpg comics (to be reprinted later in a collection) or Scott McCloud’s infinite canvas. When I started working on the interface/controls/layout for Petra’s Call, the amount of control the reader had was sort of a big deal. I wanted the user to control the pace and tempo of the comic. I didn’t want them to have to wait for an animation to play, or a narrator to introduce a scene – and this goes against a lot of the thinking in the web-comics space right now, especially with serialized adventure comic.

My reasoning behind this is simple.

Comics are about pictures and words – seeing and reading. Reading is something everyone does at their own pace – this is especially the case when they are accompanied by pictures.

The pace at which you read a book is different from person to person – the pace at which a person reads a COMIC book varies even greater.

It doesn’t make sense to me that a comic would take that control from the reader. I believe we should let the reader go through at their own pace. Click on a button, go to the next moment – click back if you want to step back.

This becomes especially important on consecutive readings.
Oleksyn Valley

Take the establishing shot from panel 1 of Petra’s Call. On first read – you’ve got the Oleksyn Valley. What is this valley? Where is this valley. An eager viewer might mouseover the title and click through to the wiki for more info, but that’s not likely (it’s “hidden treasure”, I only expect the hardcore will find it)

If a reader is going through the comic a 2nd or 3rd time, it’s very unlikely they’ll stop and study this panel. They know the valley, they know what’s coming up, they want to get on with the action, they don’t want to wait for me to play an animation, or have text fade in, the readers want ‘next’.

So I let them click for ‘next’.

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Petra’s Call + Google Docs = 1 man agile development

Petra's Call Backlog
Petra's Call Backlog


In my day job, I am a project manager/producer type. That means that spreadsheets and schedules are a large part of how I spend my day.

When I decided it was time to get it in gear and start working on Petra’s Call, between making the comic, setting up the website and learning all of the Flash, I realized I had A LOT of work to do.

Being the project management nerd that I am, I adapted my favorite agile project management system, Scrum, to a solo operation.

I broke all of the things I needed to do into small steps and estimated how many hours it would take to do each one. Then I prioritized everything that needed to be done and set up a series of 2 week ‘Sprints’ to get everything ready for launch.

Every day, I update the doc with what I’ve done, and if something is taking longer than expected, I update the hours on the doc. If something new comes up, unless it’s an absolute EMERGENCY, I add it to the ‘backlog’ of work that is remaining and keep focusing on my 2 week Sprint.

For me, it works wonders. It gives me a place to throw ideas for new features in the browser/website, let’s me break all of the different things that I need to do into individual steps and makes sure that I stay focused.

If you want to check out the how I do it (with a clear look at some of my future plans for NRD/Petra’s Call), I have made the doc public.

If you have any questions, comments etc on the process, please ask away! it works great for me and I’m sure it’ll help other people overcome chronic procrastination.