Time for another web comic recommendation! Whoo! [Everyone is excited.]
Today's comic is Nimona by Noelle Stevenson. In a somehow very hightech medieval fantasy world, the plucky shapeshifting lass, Nimona, wants to team up with infamous science villain and ex-knight, Ballister Blackheart. Together the duo tries to destroy everything/ discredit the evil government, respectively. The two end up developing a sort of father/daughter, bloodthirsty maniac/ honourable antihero relationship. Ballister's super-shippable nemesis Sir Goldenloin and the secret behind Nimona's shapeshifting spice up the plot, and yadda yadda, just read the dang thing.

That actually looks pretty awesome. Thta last comic goes righ for the feels...so glad to see that its not only got humor to it but a tone of seriousness.

I was just thinking the other day "I need to find another webcomic or something now that Homestuck is still Gigapaused and I've finished most of the others I was reading..." and lo and behold, something like Paranatural shows up and totally rustles my skivvies. (No, I do not know what I mean by that.)

You forgot the link.

You know what I've realized the hallmark of a good comic is?

Reliable updates. It doesn't even matter if its only once a week. The comic actually updating on a regular schedule is more important than anything else for holding my interest. That way you know exactly when you can go there for new content, and the comic actually gets updated.

For example, Sequential Art is one of my favorite comics still, but the dude updates completely randomly and there is no way to know when. In addition to that, he didn't update from November 28th to January 6th. That wasn't fun, and it's made it harder to read it because random stuff like that seems typical. His other 2 comics that I read? One hasn't been updated since GTA V came out, and one of them only gets updated at 1/10 the rate that Sequential Art sees.

I disagree. Completely.

You know what the hallmark of a good comic is? Being a good comic rather than lowering its standards to churn out panels on a certain schedule. Dont get me wrong, I follow several comics that release new strips either weekly or twice weekly, but I'd rather the content creator put out a solid product rather than a quick product.

Rich Burlew, the author of Order On The Stick recently had a conversation on Twitter about this actually. Someone was complaining that strips werent coming out fast enough and Rich kindly reminded that person that its about making sure the comic continues to be what he has in mind for it rather than dropping to simply being something thats available. A webcomic is a creative work of its author and should be in the direction and quality that they see fit and as far as I'm concerned they can take as long as they want to provide you with the free service that they're putting out there to make sure that its what they want out of their comic.

Order of the Stick is awesome and I really need to clear some time off my busy busy schedule and catch up on them.

This. I'm not normally one to just basically 'up-vote' a post but this is worth taking note of. I understand it can be frustrating waiting for new updates but that should never come at the cost of lowering other standards across the board. I would take 1 quality page a week over 4 clearly rushed pieces a week any day.

Agreed.

Whatever Rich is doing, he's doing it just fine. As seen by his hugely successful comic, website, and huge fan base. The boards there even have entire sections devoted to conversation about his comic and sections for making avatars in the style of his artwork. Hardly something to bat an eye at.

I disagree with mjack for completely different reasons. If a comic updates frequently, I find I get too overwhelmed and the typical content per strip/page/whathaveyou usually isn't enough to keep my interest until there's enough of a backlog for me to read straight through quite a few (see: Gunnerkrigg, Homestuck [admittedly on a gigapause], Go Get a Roomie!, etc.).

What usually sells me on a webcomic once I've started reading it is: an engaging story // good humor // great art, at least one completed story arc, and enough of a backlog for me to take at least an hour reading. I can't recall all the webcomics I recommended, so let me click back a few pages and either edit or post again with specific examples.

So, EDIT:
It appears what I like most out of webcomics is a good story, since I don't appear to have any gag-a-day saved or recommended, and of the ones I have read from what was recommended (very few, admittedly), I've only stayed with those with a nice story arc rather than being a gag strip. Like, even Exterminatus Now, which has probably had more random gag strips than story ones, I keep my eyes on it for the connected story ones rather than the one-offs.

@garren, You guys seem to have misread a little. I'm complaining about once or twice a month with no regular schedule. So that I can come back every day for 2 or 3 weeks and see no update at some points in time. 1 page a week is perfectly fine.

Amd the thing is though, you can update once or twice a week and still have quality there. The ones I read do both.

I think I was too specific when I said the hallmark of a good comic. There are probably several of them. But I still say devoting at least some time to it is one of themm.

So far there really isn't a case where I can support updating once or twice a month. If your comics only have 3 or 4 panels a piece, and you are using the standard pacing per page, 25 or less comics of 1 page per year proceeds at a glacial pace. I don't care how good the quality is at that point. If I can leave for 5 months, come back, and read all of the new stuff in 3 minutes, then there's probably a problem there. Because there's nothing to hold interest.

People didnt misread what you said. You apparently juts did a poor job of describing what it is you were going for. You made it out to sound like the only important factor was constant updates regardless of the quality of the work. Go back and look at your post, with comments like these:

Its no wonder people took it to mean that you want quantity over quality. You were even complaining about Sequential Art not having any updates from Nov 28 - Jan 6...without at all acknowledging that when it comes to online comics very seldom is the comic the sole point of focus in the writer's life. Most of them have a real job and work on the comic on the side, in addition to balancing family time and free time. You're complaining that one guy was too busy with other stuff during the busiest four weeks of entire year, Christmas Holiday, to update an essentially free service he's providing you.

Trust me I can understand being interested in a strip and wanting to see it updated timely and predictably... but the reality is there are a ton of factors involved that you're not taking into account mjack33. If it was a paid service and you had a subscription then you'd have every right to demand that things move a bit faster or more to your liking, but with your current argument you might as well be complaining that there aren't enough new threads being posted in the OTR to hold your interest.

In fact, I'd love to see how you handled juggling keeping a blog or comic strip not only running at such a rapid pace, but full of content that actually keeps people interested on top of still having time for work, family, and fun.

Once a month is a rapid pace? If I was interested in keeping a comic up, I could probably find time to put up a post at least once every two weeks. It takes about 6-10 hours to make a page. Spread out over 2 weeks, that's less than an hour a day. If I had to do it once a month......... assuming I was interested I could easily do that.

I completely understand that some people can't update their comics more than once a month. But that really does cause their comics to suffer. And when it's less often than that there is a point where it isn't worth keeping up with something like that, because a single minor scene can take multiple pages and thus several months. Not posting a page in December? Okay that's busy. What about February? I've stopped reading a comic recently because it hasn't posted since January. And it's not on hiatus. It would be the equivalent of MTG releasing one new set every 2 years and expecting people to stay interested. But slower than that, and a third the size. Or George R.R. Martin releasing 3 pages of his new book every month ad infinum. You can say that the author has other things to do, and that is perfectly fine. But their comic's quality still suffers from sheer lack of updates once the schedule gets that spread out. Because people lose interest. The comic having really high quality pages can't make up for it if they only post a 3 panel page once a month or even less than that. No matter how dedicated the person is.

It's not the same thing as delayed magic sets or slowly releasing a book in small chunks. Those things a services designed for profit and unlike most Web Comics are the primary focus of their creators.

I'm not saying your points a wrong, most of them are right to an extent. You just seem to be taking reasonable expectations and going beyond them...being awfully demanding of how and when someone else does their creative work and provides you with a free service.

If a slightLe slow schedule is enough to drive you away from an otherwise amazing comic ...well...

Pick you favorite comic. It can be any of them. Post the best 12 pages in a row you can find. Then defend how that is enough content for 1 year. Once you've done that, defend it for 2 years. Then defend the longest amount of time you think you can defend it for.

Whether or not the person gets paid or has other things to do is irrelevant to how good their comic is and how often they need to post to keep interest. As stated, I realize people have other things to do and post this stuff for free. Those two points don't suddenly make a comic better though. George making and releasing his next book for completely free would in no way keep people's interest if he tried to release it 3 pages at a time, once a month.

I will still say that there is no amount of quality in the world that can hold interest if you don't post at least once a month, at least 10 months out of the year. If someone can't post at least 10 pages a year, then it's not worth my time with the way webcomics are paced.

And if you post only once a month, it better be a really freaking good comic. I've only come across one monthly comic that's been able to hold my interest out of all of the ones I've looked at. The quality bar has to be set really freaking high at that point.

Indeed, update frequency is a viable criteria for judging a webcomic. Between two comics, equal in every other way, I will always take the one that updates more frequently. I have lost count of the good web comics I've given up on and forgotten because they updated too infrequently.
Quantity is not necessarily opposed to quality. Many great comics update frequently (El Goonish Shive, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal), and others have their installments handed out in dribbles (City of Reality, Dresden Codak). Schedule slip is sometimes inevitable, but it can be handled with grace- that's another component to updates. For example, between each chapter Unsounded takes a long hiatus, but this is announced ahead of time and a date is posted for the comics return. Other comics just promise an "update soon" and go dead for months. You check in every week for a while, then every month, then the comic slips off your radar entirely.
True, you can't demand an author to update more often, but they can't demand that you continue reading after periods of inactivity. Valuing regular updates isn't an indictment of the author.

Speaking of good comics, I'm liking Table Titans. I am not sure if its going to make the list of ones I check weekly (only 3 or 4 have stayed on that list), but it's an interesting read so far.

Edit: Should have waited. Comic was really good, but there are several time gaps I didn't get. Read Paranatural while I was at it, and that one was good too if not a little weird.

All good points, though I would be hard pressed to quantify the qualities of a comic; or to put another way, it would be very difficult to find two comics closely comparable enough to declare them "equal in most ways."

To make such a comparison, I would have to create a sort of "aesthetics of experience" or "of reading," to quantify your reasons for reading. In such a list, it would be easier to categorize and compare the webcomics which you enjoy and those which failed to capture your interest.

In my such a list, a frequent update schedule would be a near non-entity, since that is not what attracts me to content.

For context:

Anyone read Pain Train?