On Maintaining the Integrity of Webcomic Archives
I'm at this weird point where I simultaneously want to promote my website, and am also a bit embarrassed by it. You see, there are a lot of comics on there that aren't very good, mixed in with a few that I quite like.
I was thinking about making a few cuts from the archives. I went through the list and picked out the comics that I thought were the worst... the ones that were too opinionated, too topical/dated, or just plain unfunny. But I ran into a problem: It turns out that I have a habit of CONSTANTLY referencing my older comics within my newer ones. Removing the bad comics would require me to remove a lot of good comics as well, in order for everything to remain sensical. This continuity thing cascades down and ends up affecting more than half of the comics on the site. So simply removing individual comics from the archives doesn't really work.
So the next idea I was throwing around involved releasing a kind of "director's cut" of the archives. The good comics would remain intact, the terrible ones would be removed, and the remaining comics would be edited as necessary to continue making sense. Some of the bad comics have good moments, and I could maybe salvage some of those while adding better punchlines or pacing, to keep the character development intact while improving the humor overall.
Thing is, there seem to be a fair number of people out there who frown upon editing older works. One of my friends is adamantly against the idea... she says the bad comics are "part of the experience". So I'm not really sure what the best thing for the website is. (Though I should point out that around 2009 I did go back and make minor revisions to most of the early comics.)
Maybe I could just have two archives. An "Old" archive, for unaltered comics, and a "New" archive, full of whatever changes I feel like making.
My original plan was to give the comic a proper stopping point within the next twenty strips or so, but at the rate I'm updating right now, it could be awhile before that happens. It seems that for the forseeable future the oldies will have to remain where everyone can see them.
I was thinking about making a few cuts from the archives. I went through the list and picked out the comics that I thought were the worst... the ones that were too opinionated, too topical/dated, or just plain unfunny. But I ran into a problem: It turns out that I have a habit of CONSTANTLY referencing my older comics within my newer ones. Removing the bad comics would require me to remove a lot of good comics as well, in order for everything to remain sensical. This continuity thing cascades down and ends up affecting more than half of the comics on the site. So simply removing individual comics from the archives doesn't really work.
So the next idea I was throwing around involved releasing a kind of "director's cut" of the archives. The good comics would remain intact, the terrible ones would be removed, and the remaining comics would be edited as necessary to continue making sense. Some of the bad comics have good moments, and I could maybe salvage some of those while adding better punchlines or pacing, to keep the character development intact while improving the humor overall.
Thing is, there seem to be a fair number of people out there who frown upon editing older works. One of my friends is adamantly against the idea... she says the bad comics are "part of the experience". So I'm not really sure what the best thing for the website is. (Though I should point out that around 2009 I did go back and make minor revisions to most of the early comics.)
Maybe I could just have two archives. An "Old" archive, for unaltered comics, and a "New" archive, full of whatever changes I feel like making.
My original plan was to give the comic a proper stopping point within the next twenty strips or so, but at the rate I'm updating right now, it could be awhile before that happens. It seems that for the forseeable future the oldies will have to remain where everyone can see them.
Comments
I'm not sure what powers your archive, but if it supports tagging or categorizing, you could put a "featured" tag or something similar, then promote the site using an archive of just featured comics. That way all the old ones would still be in the same places, in the same sequences, and still be part of the whole (I agree that it's important to keep the older stuff with the newer, despite/because of changes in quality), but you would primarily present an alternate archive with the best examples. You could switch your archive link to only point to the featured list, and maybe include a separate link for "all comics/old comics".
The site isn't really powered by any sort of content management system, though. I mostly maintain it by hand, with a little PHP/database magic to speed things along. It's sort of become the place to try out whatever cool HTML tricks I've learned lately. Like, right now the tiled background image scrolls parallax style as you go down the page, for no reason other than that it's neat.
In your case you'd probably almost need an entirely separate archive set. It could be possible to build in some sort of system of interconnections to bounce between the updated archive and the old versions or something. I'm not too sure.