Writing my Webcomic, Home on the Strange, has been like tasting soup. If you’ve ever been in a kitchen with a couple of cooks while you’re cooking up a big pot of chicken vegetable, you’ll know what I mean.

“Taste this,” someone will say, holding out a spoon. “Does that taste right to you?”

“Well, it doesn’t taste bad,” you allow. “But it needs something.”

The maddening thing is that you don’t know what it needs. Maybe some nutmeg. A sprinkle of cilantro. You toss around theories about what could turn this decent-but-unremarkable dish into a worldbeater of a soup… And God willing, someone eventually stumbles upon the perfect ingredient that makes the flavors flare into life.

I first realized that Home on the Strange was missing something vital during the Roleplaying for Karla’s Heart series, where a fair number of people said that they didn’t really understand the dynamics of what was going on. And it did feel rushed, even though putting in other, explanatory stuff felt like useless padding. Roni and I tried to figure out why the storyline seemed unsatisfying, even though the individual strips were funny.

It wasn’t until I looked at the punchlines for Something Positive that I began to realize that there were two different ways of writing a comic…. And I had chosen the wrong method for the stories I wanted to tell.

See, Something Positive – one of the biggest and best strips on the ‘net – frequently ends with a punchline that is almost unrelated to the subject at hand. If SP can be said to have a formula, it’s two characters walking around, discussing their lives, at which point the final panel arrives and one of the characters a) expresses their frustration with the world in a witty quip or b) insults the character they’re talking to in a witty quip.

Now, Randy’s one of the best at coming up with great insults, so he pulls it off with startling frequency. But there’s often nothing funny about what’s happening in the preliminary panels. There’s no lead-in to that final quip – and quite often, that final line could be applied to any number of idiots and/or situations. Compared to the intensely personal nature of the story, the actual gag is almost an afterthought.

That’s when I realized: Randy was engineering punchlines.

I doubt that he thinks, “Gee, I’d better come up with a good exit line”… But still, basically what he was doing was grafting a funny line onto the end of a very un-funny conversation to give it an artificial kick of humor.

And which point I wondered why he was doing that; after all, PVP didn’t. With rare exceptions, PVP didn’t show us anything that didn’t end on a gag. In fact, as I looked closer, if there was some sort of character interaction that didn’t end in a funny, PVP didn’t show it.

Which was precisely what I had done with the “polygamerous” storyline. And I realized that I had to be more SP than PVP.

The Ferrett Theory of Funny Comic Strip Writing states that funny comics can be broken down into three rough categories, of which I’ll discuss two: Gag strips, like PVP and Penny Arcade, and Soap Operas, like Something Positive and Questionable Content. To pull off a strip, I think you have to figure out what category you fall into and gear the writing for it.

(Incidentally, the third category is Random Gag Strips, like Perry Bible Fellowship, Partially Clips, and Chopping Block, where you have no plotlines, and frequently no recurring characters. But you never want to tell a story in those.)

Let’s break it roughly this way: In a Gag Strip, you’re going for the funny first and the emotional resonance second. In a Soap Opera strip, it’s the other way around.

Gag Strips
Gag strips can be defined in this simple way: if the interaction doesn’t end in a bonzo punchline, it doesn’t show up in the strip. Period. The point of the gag strip is to have the funny, and anything that’s not 100% comedy usually doesn’t make it to the page.

Gag strips are, by and large, the most popular comics: Garfield, Dilbert, Penny Arcade, are all gag strips that rake in the bucks. And why shouldn’t they? You can pick up a gag strip and get a damned good laugh out of ‘em at any time without having to know who’s who. If you’re looking for unbounded popularity, go with a gag strip.

Unfortunately, storylines in gag strips are like writing a play where the only time you could show the characters was when they were going to say something extremely funny in the next ninety seconds. If there wasn’t a laugh coming up soon, it could not appear on the stage.

That’s what writing a storyline in a gag strip is like. And it means that you can’t have any real romance, or any complex setups (because explaining things is Not Funny).

Without complex explanations, your characters have to be absurdly archetypical, because there isn’t time for fine nuance. In fact, in a gag strip you’re usually restricted to two styles of people, smart and clueless… And they’re going to be fairly one-dimensional, since they have to fit into whatever situation calls for the funniest gag.

In turn, your stories have to be short and sweet. Nuanced explanation isn’t funny, so you have to rush forward in huge leaps to get to the next punchline. You’re basically hitting the “FF” button on your DVD to get to the next big laugh, skipping over everything in-between, so it’s hard to establish a plot that feels coherent. Unfortunately, you can skip over the reasons why characters are doing these wacky things.

And confusion is the enemy of humor. If people aren’t clear on what’s going on, then it’s going to cause problems. Your storylines have to be simple, and the relationships between people have to be restricted to a clean “Loves/Hates/Tolerates But Secretly Likes” so nobody gets lost.

(That’s not to say that all Gag strips end on a funny; PVP recently did a heartbreaking series of strips where Brent tried to figure out whether he would be a good father. You can occasionally step outside the boundaries, just as most Soap Operas occasionally churn out ludicrous one-shots.)

In general, the long storyline is death for a Gag Strip. Long storylines get so convoluted that you spend more time on setup than funny. You can usually tell about six strips worth of story before people get antsy to get back to the goofy “fun” strips, which is why you can’t get too ambitious.

Gag creators frequently want to tell big stories, so they start something that’s geared towards a climax that could only work if the characters had more depth, and then end the story in a quick collapse when they realize that it’s not going to work.

Gag strips also have two hidden problems that are particularly hard upon the creators: the first thing is that lack of continuity. Since nothing important ever changes, there’s nothing to keep people coming back on a daily basis. They can just drop by every three months and trawl the archives. If traffic’s your goal, the gag strip makes it much harder to get that.

Then there’s the punchline. Since your entire strip lives or dies by that final panel, if you’re not good enough to provide that with mechanical consistency, you’re going to encounter problems. You have to be funny all the time. That’s tricky at best.

But if you can do it, the world’s your oyster.

Soap Opera Strips
Now Soap Opera strips have a different challenge. As opposed to Gag Strips, they have characters who grow, and there’s a continuity that matters. If a character has a Big Emotional Realization, that’s going to affect things going forward. There is an overarching plot, and usually a long-term climax somewhere in the works.

The good news about Soap Opera Strips is that they’re easier for the start-up comic. The storyline pulls in people almost as much as the gags do; end a strip with Freddie putting a shotgun in his mouth, chances are pretty darned good that people will turn up the next day to see what happens.

Plus, Soap Opera comics are the brainchild of the Web; aside from For Better or For Worse and Funky Winkerbean, most newspaper-based comics are too small to hold an ongoing storyline. It’s only in the free, big-panel ranges that you can tell big, sweeping sagas! That’s why you did the Webcomic thing, right?

(What? You did it so you could swear a lot and tell fart jokes? Well, I guess I can understand that.)

You also get a lot more “bounce” in a Soap Opera Comic. Because people are tuning in largely to see What Happens Next, you get a little more slack on The Funny. People understand you’re trying to tell a saga, and they’ll endure a couple of low-key laughs in service of a larger plot.

The downside is, of course, being funny. The slack doesn’t mean that the Soap Opera Strip isn’t obliged to provide a funny ending. But when you’re dealing with characters who are undergoing life changes, it’s often hard to find the funny spot, which is why Randy grafts on punchlines.

If you don’t come up with something sufficiently entertaining, you wind up with the “First and Ten” syndrome, where it degenerates into a bunch of whiny, angsty characters who aren’t funny and yet aren’t sufficiently compelling to have people stick around.

A second issue you deal with is complexity. It’s very easy to tell a big story, but you can make something so continuity-clusterfucked that nobody can follow it. I am a regular reader of SP, and quite often I’ll have to go to the LJ feed and ask, “Who’s that guy again? His ex-girlfriend’s dead dad’s gay lover? Oh, okay.” Schlock Mercenary actually had to create an intro section, which isn’t a bad way of handling it after a year or two.

The bad news is that soap opera strips have an upper limit. The good news is that limit’s still workable, and there are a lot of Soap Opera strip creators who make a living off of their strip. (Not me, of course, but I know they exist.)

Where Did Home On The Strange Err?
The missing soup ingredient was that I was trying to write Soap Opera plotlines in a Gag Strip format. Basically, I set up a situation where Karla and Tom, the married couple who are the core of the strip, had an argument because the GM was macking on Karla in-character and Karla was responding, which Tom found disrespectful and distressing.

As a Gag Strip, I did the proper thing; I found the three funniest moments in the story, pulled them out, and ran them past Roni. And if that was a Gag Strip-friendly storyline, it would have worked fine.

But it didn’t. People were confused by things; why was Karla responding to Seth? Was I trying to say that Tom and Karla’s marriage was in trouble? Was Tom whipped for putting up with this sort of thing? Is Seth really, seriously trying to get into Karla’s pants, or is it just part of the game? When you have such big questions flying around, it’s hard to decide whether you can laugh.

Tom and Karla had an argument about it, which ended on the exit line. But really, I should have had more strips devoted to precisely what the conflict was about, and where the characters were coming from. But you can’t do that in a Gag Strip, so I forged ahead… And, ultimately, failed at what I was trying to convey.

I should have found the emotional heart. Instead, I found the heart of the funny, which was ironically not as funny.

Starting with this week’s strips, Roni and I started to have much deeper conversations about how we wanted Home on the Strange to be… And realized that we both wanted to spend a little more time going over what the character reactions are. A punchline’s a punchline, but sometimes the denouement will tell you more about the character than any one-liner ever could.

Last week, we inserted a couple of strips that weren’t originally present to clarify where the characters were coming from… And starting this week, we really took it out, taking the “Date With Density” storyline and fleshing it out as if it was a chapter in a novel, not a series of funnies. The following story, “Gotterdammerüng,” is a month-long storyline that deals with the repercussions of the HotS gang when Izzy starts roleplaying.

There’s nothing wrong with Gag Strips, mind you, and we’ve had some funny moments thus far… But the Gag Strip framework isn’t conducive to the story we wanted to tell. So I’ll invite you into Home on the Strange once again, and tell you that there are gonna be some interesting fireworks coming up.

Drop on by. It’s a learning experience for all of us.

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