Blue Milk Special

Yep. Dash Rendar took a break from being a 2-dimensional character by temporarily going all emo after being responsible for the death of most of Blue Squadron (see last strip). Well, that was the book version. By the way, please check out and follow us on Pinterest .

It’s not easy making a webcomic. I owe this article to all the other webcomic creators out there striving to share their stories with the world. I also owe this write up to a guy called Brian King who has done the world of webcomics a big favor in his personal time.

A Revolution in Reading Webcomics – Part 1

This is going to sound a little bombastic, but every so often something big for social media comes along. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr… InkOutBreak is the sort of revolution that the world of webcomics has been waiting for. Whether you only read Blue Milk Special, or if you read many webcomics, you should take a couple of minutes to read about and investigate the InkOutBreak site to see how much fun reading and discovering new webcomics can be. Best of all, it’s FREE and the only advertising is for other webcomics which are tailored to your personal tastes.

InkOutBreak.com is a hub site for online comics that goes a step further than most by allowing you to navigate from one website to the next on your reading list. Once you start following a comic through InkOutBreak, you can keep things in order and won’t have to miss any updates. It sounds simple, but that is not the only benefit to using Ink. Ink provides a lot more control and customization for the reader that makes it one of the most innovative ways to manage webcomic reading.

In practical terms, instead of going directly to the website of your favorite comic, you’d start your day by logging into Ink where any new updates will be listed. Participating webcomics, like Blue Milk Special, show up within Ink’s navigation menu that appears at the top of the webpage once you start reading. You still see our site, but now our site is tailored to your needs and part of a larger reading list that you control. As soon as you are finished with Blue Milk Special, you can use that menu to jump to the next newly updated webcomic on your reading list. As you navigate through numerous webcomics, rating them with thumbs up as you go, Ink learns your genres of interest from the trends and recommends new comics you might like.

Brian took a few moments to answer some questions that I thought would help our readers appreciate what he’s doing and give them a reason to try it out.

BMS: What inspired you to create InkOutBreak?

Brian: I started reading only 5 webcomics a day with my morning coffee, and it eventually got stale. I just wanted to discover more. I kind of followed the rabbit through the hole cause now I am on the other side of the fence knowing how many comics there are.

I knew there had to be a way to lure people in with comics that would be like the ones they are reading. So I developed ink to be something a bit like Pandora, I love Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd, The Clash so it would suggest music I would also dig….Stone temple Pilots, The Rolling stones… and maybe you know those already but every now and then you will hear something you never heard before and you’ll say “WOW What is this?”. That is what I wanted to create with ink. I am a huge fan of comics and have a huge respect for creators, so to be able to make something that helped them both out was huge.

The “ink bar” at the top system was made so that the creators would still get revenue and the chances to push merch and their content, while the readers would be easily navigating page after page keeping their place in the story. Which is HUGE for comics like The Bean, Spacetrawler, heh even some gag strips can go into a short series.

BMS: Although webcomic lists help, a number of our readers discovered Blue Milk Special through word-of-mouth, conventions, promo cards and through link sharing. The webcomic archive in InkOutBreak seems secondary to the navigation and the ability to have new comics recommended to you. It seems like the perfect way to stay engaged with a webcomic and to bring the medium out of the forgotten alleys of the internet.

Brian: Exactly, BMS for example has over 500 pages. A new reader may never know that. With ink you can click a button and you start back at page one. Then it saves your place so you can make it through the story at you own pace. This is huge in our day and age ’cause everyone is always busy. Life is not filled with 9 hours to read comics, I wish it was. We recently started doing full maps of comics so that users can read comics 100% of the way through. There are comics out there like PVP that have over 4,000 strips! Sometimes the worst part about the new features is I tend to use them too…. and read comics a lot more than I should.

BMS: There’s a growing community of users on the forums. What is the ratio like between readers and creators?

Brian: The forums have restarted 3 times now. It is an amazingly hard thing to nail especially with communities built on facebook and G+, but I feel with this version that is totally integrated into ink we are doing a lot better. There are ways to follow friends to see what comics they are reading, and if you are a creator or comic attender it will show with your avatar. This is great for when you are talking about comics and art.

It is a bit heavy on just creators, but I want to make it more of a comic / art forum. I am currently trying to get some community managers to keep it going in the right path.

Getting Ink off the ground wasn’t easy. In part 2, on Friday, we’ll talk about the struggle of developing Ink and finding support in the early days of the project.