GTS – Page 65 – Kidd Commander!

GTS – Page 65

by Aria on February 14, 2021 at 3:03 PM

i’ll eat you whole i love you so

Those of you who know me know I despise Webtoon with every fiber of my being, but through a complicated mix of frustration, effective borderline therapy, and a burst of I Am God mania I have decided to start using it as a way to try and get more eyes on the comic (and on this site eventually). KC there is like 90% less soul, which pains me deeply, but times are what they are and there aren’t a ton of options for little folks like me at this point.

To be clear: only older pages will ever go up there, and if you only read it on webtoon you miss out on all the cool extra stuff and this neat treehouse/junkyard fire of a website where I work very hard to maintain an appropriate ambience; if you’re reading this here you’re already getting the best I have to offer and I have no fun incentives for using their site. But making those numbers go up helps me in their horrible algorithm, so subscribing and liking the pages when you think of it is an easy and free way for you to help me out and make sure I get to keep making this comic as long as I can. You can find the series page and the first “””””episode””””” here.

like listen, listen, i know i’ve already been up on this soapbox for the last seven years but this is my space so i want to say it again here because i can

I think we owe it to ourselves and webcomics as a medium to not sand off rough edges. The whole reason webcomics happened in the first place was because we needed a place for all these weird artists and their weird unpolished stories to live and be able to reach people who needed them. The era of cool creator run websites where the aesthetics changed depending on the plot or where people posted playlists or hid meta stuff in the cast pages was pretty much over by the time I got here, so I know doing this sort of stuff is mostly a lot of work for nobody. That’s a fine thing for us to disagree on, things change and I know I’m stubbornly clinging to outdated methods and making things difficult for myself. But the way operations like theirs actively try to erase the fact that real humans make these things, try to sterilize all the heart out of everything and reduce indie comics to a way to get ads in front of eyes is viscerally upsetting to me. I hate that this is how most people are being introduced to webcomics now and I hate that I have to use it if I want to get anywhere. We’re better than this and both artists and readers deserve better god dammit.

ugh. comics are frustrating yall.

thank you for reading and also tolerating me being angry for 750 pages. happy valentines day lmfao

Withalwhere

I just finished reading the archives over about…uh…three days? Love it. So incredibly my shit. Agatha and Ulrich are super cute here, I love the casual lean. Q.Q
- Aria
  
  Thanks so much!! I’ll try to remain entertaining hehe
  
  god i LOVE Casual Intimacy with these two i’m so excited to finally get some in the comic
  - Withalwhere
    
    Yesssss. Casual platonic intimacy is a sorely underserved sector of the schmaltz economy. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these doofuses.
Firebee

Honestly I agree on the webcomics thing. I’ve always always preferred sites like yours for comics, and the only thing i like about stuff like webtoons and tapas is that they made it easier to keep track of the 300 comics I read as well as easier to find new ones. But I much prefer the custom sites. Theres something special about them. They have so much more life, living in their own little corner thats designed to enhance their tone and I really miss it. Its something that made me real mad about the way smackjeeves went and turned into a trash fire before self combusting, because it felt like a good middle place. Comics still had custom layouts and coding but they were easy to find. Bah. Fuck consumerism and the way it sucks the soul out of everything.
- Firebee
  
  ALSO I REALLY DONT LIKE THE SCROLLING FORMAT FOR LIKE 90% OF COMICS CAUSE ITS JUST NOT NICE AND PEOPLE DONT USE IT TO DO ADD ANYTHING THEY JUST PUT GIANT SQUARES ALL OVER AND IT ANNOYS ME THIS HAS BEEN AN ANGRY CLOSING THOUGHT
  - Aria
    
    okay okay i wasn’t gonna get into this but SINCE YOU BRING IT UP
    
    I try really hard to separate my bitching about Webtoon As A Business and The Vertical Format because like, while this specific website’s format is DEFINITELY just this business trying to wring money out of artists as fast as possible, I’m also aware that the reality is that people ARE reading comics on their phones a lot now. It’s “easier” if you can just scroll vertically, like that’s an objective fact lol. Also lots of people are making perfectly good comics within these constraints and I don’t want to shit on them!! I think it’s really cool that digital comics can look like anything, the infinite/nonexistent canvas is an asset imo. Just because I choose to limit myself to a traditional book page format doesn’t make it better.
    
    THAT SAID
    
    fuck dude i hate vertical format so goddamn much lmaoooo
    
    I’m sure it’s different if you think that’s all comics ARE but good fucking god. oh my god it’s a disaster. jesus christ. i want cool layouts!! i want PACING AND USING THE FORMAT AS A STORYTELLING TOOL!! The argument for framing them like films can be made but why the fuck would you WANT to use the same exact single rectangle view for 800 pages i’m so BORED
    
    If you read manga or western comics or even newspaper strips you’ve been trained to think about gutters (the spaces between panels) and panel sizes as a way to simulate the passage of time.
    
    so
    
    reading a
    
    vertical
    
    strip
    
    feels
    
    like thi
    
    s
    
    .
    
    it’s like reading an entire novel with one simple sentence on each individual page i can’t do it man hh. It’s the same issue I had with the trend I used to see where people would post like, individual panels as updates on their sites then you had to scroll through them one by one reloading the page between them? But they weren’t even whole beats, it was like someone cut each panel out of a regular sequence and drip fed it to you. Good God.
    
    To be fair! I still don’t think it’s a failing of a vertical orientation by itself. I’m showing my age here but BACK IN THE DEVIANTART OCT DAYS I really loved Unkown-Person’s vertical comics, and those older horror comics that used to get passed around were brilliant uses of the format. It can be done! But when Webtoon’s handbook literally encourages people to draw a single panel and zoom in on it in different ways to artificially extend the amount of time people are scrolling, of COURSE you’re going to get these weird stunted things. I’m so frustrated!!
    
    ANYWAY I feel like this particular whine of mine is much more subjective than the one I put in the author notes, so if you are a third party reading this comment and disagree with me that is fine. I’ve accepted I’m an old man yelling at a cloud about some things so please don’t let me make you feel bad if you like stuff that I don’t; I’m glad you like things and you should continue to like them haha.
    
    On the bright side, I’ve actually heard from a handful of folks who have a lot of the same issues I do with the webtoon thing, which has been very validating. I really appreciate y’all and it’s nice to know there’s still an audience out there for stubborn people like me lol
    - Firebee
      
      I agree with you so much. Like theres a few comics I’ve seen on webtoons that sue the vertical scroll AMAZINGLY. But then theres so many that dont. And I hate hate hate when a single panel is BIGGER THEN MY ENTIRE SCREEN. Like i dont want to have to scroll to see some ones entire face thats awful why would you do that? I know its so much personal preference but it just feels Bad and i want it to change so much.
      
      I honestly think the popularity of webtoons is in spite of its layout choices and not because of and it makes me sad
Andreas

I read a lot of webtoons, but I think I’ll stay here. I like the sunflowers. 🙂
Love the story by the way, thanks for all the work you put into bringing it to us!
- Aria
  
  Supporting indie folks in any capacity is a good thing! My issue is definitely with the business side of things, not the creators or readers trying to navigate it; I just wish everyones’ options weren’t quite so artificially limited.
  
  In any case thanks so much for reading! Very glad to have you 😀
Sandman366

…..sooo….I wonder what interesting “lesson” is probably in this noonday tale that we won’t hear about for another half a storyline….
(Wait. I just…is there also intentional wordplay/reference/whatever it’s called that the ship is Lucky Noon, he’s reading a Noonday Tale, the character shares a name with his ship’s captain, and one of those stories is potentially for/about someone who can probably know if someone’s reading “that” particular story that’s supposed to be “for” him? Is that even really for him or is that just coincidence?)