Potato is yum

One of my favorite webcomics of all time is Nano Machine which has been getting shorter and shorter over the past year. But actually, has it been getting shorter? The average number of panels is less than at the beginning of the series but not by any significant quantity. So why do people complain about the chapters being short after the number of panels have been down for months?

It isn’t uncommon for a webcomic to release shorter and shorter chapters as the buffer publishers build up are depleted. Typically, an artist and author along with their production team finish 30-40 chapters before even the first announcement for the webcomic is made. From there it depends on the studio how many chapters are completed and the rate in which they are published.

Currently, Korean publishers mostly follow weekly and biweekly releases while Chinese publishers follow 2-3 releases a week. If you actually sit down and think about it, it means these teams sit down every week and finish hundreds of full drawings a month. The only way this is profitable for publishers is for artists to get paid almost nothing for their work and it is actually fairly well known and well documented the state of living for artists in Korea, Japan, and China. When you consider this, the shrinking chapter size after the first 30-40 chapters is a pretty obvious result of how these stories are published.

So we have a little bit of a shrink in chapter size. That explains a large majority of “short chapter complains” So what? Why do people think the size of each chapter has changed so much even though the quality and length for a webcomic like Nano Machine really hasn’t changed. Well, when you read a webcomic you aren’t just reading words. You’re reading art. So many people scroll past all of the incredible art without realizing how much time and effort goes into the art rather than the little text bubbles. If you just read a webcomic for text bubbles you may as well go read a book instead. The whole point of a webcomic is to leverage a more direct form of visual media to paint the picture of a scene faster and more effectively than a book could ever hope to show.

So, next time you come across a “short” webcomic try to enjoy the media for what it is. A comic.