Bored Panda reached out to Ryan Rds to ask him a few questions about his recent work. We wanted to know how the artist's style has evolved over time, and what factors influenced these changes. He shared with us: “When I started out, I was doing a daily comic so it was more quantity over quality at that point. Over time I’ve focused more on the quality of the artwork with shading & color as well as the delivery of the writing. The biggest change was visiting a local comic con & seeing how other people could make comics their livelihood & the only thing stopping me was my own personal drive and, well… time. but I can only work on one of those.”
Asked to tell us more about the most challenging part of creating a comic, Ryan Rds said: “The most challenging part I would say is when I dig in my ‘comic ideas’ notes and it's a super vague concept like ‘NFT=BLT’ instead of an actual written joke. sometimes the concepts are fun to play around with and you eventually find it, but other times you might wrestle with a concept over 2 or 3 different rough drafts, and it's fighting back every time. I might shelf it and try to revisit it later.”
Next, we were wondering how Ryan Rds balances the creative aspects of his work with the business side of things, such as marketing and promotion. The artist told us: “Lately I've been drawing my comics in monthly ‘batches’ which has really split my month into 2 weeks of drawing and art things and then 2 weeks of admin/planning things so its actually been a pretty solid balance. Collaborating with other artists is also really helpful because then the ‘promoting burden’ doesn’t just fall on a single individual.”
Many aspiring webcomic artists look up to Ryan’s work. We were curious about what advice the artist could give to those who want to succeed in the world of online comics. He kindly shared with us: “Oh no, they do!? LOL, I'd like to first apologize for roping you into this life. But in seriousness: after you've drawn a comic that YOU like (try not to cater too much to what you think OTHERS will like) my biggest advice would be to post it everywhere!
It might be one of the biggest pains of webcomics, uploading the same comic, title, description (don't forget the self-promo link!), and hashtags over and over to the multitudes of social media sites but it has been the biggest thing that helped my own comic grow. That and consistency, a set posting schedule can go a long way.”
