Publishing a comic

What readers get

A comic publication gets two things an ordinary blog does not. Its page shows a shelf of covers — your art, at trade-paperback proportions — rather than dozens of near-identical rows reading Pg. 1, Pg. 2, Pg. 3. And opening one drops the reader into the comic reader: a dark, chrome-free theater holding one page at a time.

The theater treats the whole publication as one book. Page numbers run straight through from your first page to your latest, so a reader who holds down the arrow key walks the entire run without stopping at the end of every issue. Arrow keys, space, Page Up and Page Down all turn pages; Home and End jump to either end; on a phone the outer edges of the screen turn pages, a swipe does too, and pinch-to-zoom gets a reader into a dense panel. There is a full-screen toggle on the f key. Past the last page is a back cover telling them they are caught up and inviting them to subscribe.

The current page lives in the address bar, so a reader can link someone straight to a page, and reopening the comic puts them back where they stopped.

Turning the comic view on

There is no “this is a comic” switch anywhere on the network, and nothing to set on Standard Reader — we do not host your publication. Two things have to be true instead.

1. 1
   Your publication has to say it reads forwards. That is a setting on the publication itself, in whatever tool you publish with — the one that says the work is read from its first post rather than newest-first. In the underlying record it is preferences.prevNextDirection set to ltr. Leaflet writes this field; if you roll your own records, see Publishing your site. Without it a comic is just a blog that happens to post drawings.
2. 2
   Your posts have to read as pages. We look at your 40 newest posts and count the ones that render at least one image and carry no more than about 700 words of prose. If at least 60% of them do, the publication is a comic. If they do not, it is treated as a serialized book — still read front-to-back, but as articles with an Up next link rather than as pages of art.

Both are re-checked as your archive grows, and the setting is picked up the first time anyone opens your publication after you change it — you do not have to tell us. Being read as a book rather than a comic is never a dead end for a reader: every route into the comic reader also links to the ordinary reading view, and an issue with no art falls back to it outright.

What counts as a page

A page is an image your post's body renders, and they are flipped through in the order they appear in the post. One image per post is the usual shape and the one everything here is tuned for, but a post carrying three images contributes three pages, in order — useful for posting a whole issue at once.

A post with no images contributes nothing to flip through, so it does not get a cover on the shelf and cannot be paged to: an announcement, a hiatus note, or a con schedule lives in the archive's read and unread views rather than in the book. If a text post matters to the story, give it a piece of art and it becomes a page like any other.

Naming issues and pages

Nothing in the format has a field for “issue 3” — the only place that number exists is your post titles, so that is where we read it back out of. Title your pages the way comics have always been titled and consecutive pages collapse back into the issue they came from, one cover per issue:

• Fray In The Veil #2, Pg. 7 — series, issue, page.
• FITV #1 Cover — the same, with a page label instead of a number.

The one part that is required is the hash before the issue number — a bare number in a title is never read as an issue, because too many ordinary titles start with one. After the number you can use a comma, a colon, a dash, or nothing at all; everything following it is treated as the page label and is not otherwise parsed, so write it however you like.

Grouping is all-or-nothing per publication: at least 70% of your titles have to parse before we trust the numbers enough to group by them. If they do not — a webcomic naming its posts Pg01, Pg02 has no issues to speak of — you still get a shelf, just one cover per post instead of one per issue. That is a fine way to run a comic; it is not a failure state.

A single post whose title breaks the pattern does not split an issue in two. An interstitial in the middle of issue 3 joins issue 3, and a one-off announcement will not start a phantom issue of its own.

Cover art

An issue is fronted by the page whose title says it is the cover — anything with the word cover in the page label. Inner cover is deliberately not treated as one, since it is the leaf behind the cover rather than the cover itself. When no page claims it, the issue's first page fronts it, which is what the reader sees on opening anyway.

Covers are drawn in a 2:3 frame — the standard trade-paperback shape — and art is scaled to fill it, so anything much wider or squarer gets cropped at the edges. If your logo or your title lettering sits near the very edge of a landscape cover, expect it to be trimmed on the shelf. The full page is untouched in the reader; this only affects the thumbnail.

The words beside the art

Most cartoonists write a line or two under the page — a caption, a process note, a word about next week. That writing is not lost in the theater. If a page's post carries prose, the note button in the top bar lights up and lays it over the art, in the theater's own type, with a way through to the full post. It closes when the reader turns the page, because it belongs to the page it was written about.

Pages with nothing written under them leave the button disabled rather than making it appear and vanish as the reader flips, so there is no penalty for a silent page.

Alt text

Alt text on a comic page is the page, for anyone who cannot see it — in the theater there is no surrounding article to fall back on, so whatever you wrote is the whole experience. It is also what your comic is found by in search.

One thing worth knowing: if a paragraph of your post body repeats a page's alt text word for word, we drop it from the note rather than showing the reader a description of the picture they are looking at. So transcribing your dialogue into the alt and again into the body does not double up.

How readers pick it back up

Read state is per post, and your posts are pages, so an issue counts as unread while any page in it is — a comic read halfway through is not read. Its cover wears the same unread dot an unread article does, and clicking it opens on the first page that reader has not seen, not back at the cover. Walking pages in the theater marks them off behind them.

In practice this means a reader who subscribes mid-run can come back after a month and land exactly where they stopped, which is the single biggest thing that keeps people reading a serial. Readers who have turned reading history off see no dots — nothing is tracked for them — and readers who are not signed in see the shelf as a stranger would.

When it still reads as a blog

If your publication page shows a list of titles instead of a shelf, walk these in order:

• Is the forwards-reading setting saved? This is the one that is almost always the answer. Check it in your publishing tool, and note that it lives on the publication, not on individual posts.
• Do your recent posts render their art in the body? A post that only links to the page on your site, or that carries the drawing as a cover image with an empty body, has no pages to flip.
• Are your last 40 posts mostly art? A run of text posts — Kickstarter updates, con reports — can tip a comic under the line until the art resumes.
• Getting a shelf but not issues? Then the setting is right and it is the titles: check that at least 7 in 10 carry a hash and an issue number.

If all of that is true and your comic still reads as a blog, tell us on the feedback board with a link to the publication — that is a bug on our side, and worth hearing about.