Moose River Regular – [02] Everyone knows everyone
One of the first things I realized I screwed up on when writing/stopping Moose River Regular was how quickly I felt locked down on a certain trajectory. The ability to revise older elements and inject new pages was something that helped me survive writing 203 pages of the main Moose River series, but that idea only came because of my experiences with Moose River Regular.
Specifically, the problem I had with many other webcomic was that their archives were set in stone… and if there was some bad element or terrible pacing issues in older comics… oh well, that’s it. At least, that’s what I thought was the case; you can see my terrible pacing by the fact that we immediately went from a story to the founder of Moose River to Anne and Avery sitting down at a cafe. No build up, no exposition… just here then there.
One other thing I felt like I was “obligated” to maintain was having a punchline in the last panel. As if that was some kind of rule for webcomics. I tried to stick with that with Moose River Regular, but you can see how poorly I actually utilized it.
As the comic progressed, these kinds of issues started building up, and it got to the point where the best thing to do was to just start over instead of trying to salvage the original story in any way. In the end I realized that I just wasn’t very good at following the rules of what I’m SUPPOSED to do, and ultimately decided to follow my OWN rules for how my comic is “supposed” to be like.