Hosting Solutions

These are sites that will host your comic for you and handle maintaining your archive. There are free and pay versions depending on the service you use and how much control you want over the design/advertising on your site. There’s the benefit of belonging to a community but there’s also the concern of getting lost in a sea of similar sites.

Comic Genesis – Formerly known as Keenspace, one of the longest running free hosts available. You edit template HTML pages with specific tags and FTP your files to their server. Fairly large forum community of fellow creators. I used them a long time ago until I deleted some file and broke my site.

Drunk Duck – Similar to Comic Genesis with a community of fellow creators. Major difference is everything is browser-based which makes it easier to start/edit multiple projects though this probably limits design flexibility.

Webcomics Nation – Built by Joey Manley, the fellow behind Modern Tales and it’s family of sites. Also mostly browser-based in design.

PanelFlow

Comic Dish

Smack Jeeves

Stand-Alone Scripts

These are scripts you can upload to your site to dynamically cycle through your comics. Some have interfaces to manage certain things depending on the system.

Walrus – One of the first archive scripts I ever used and learned to edit with. If you’re looking for something simple to build from, especially if you’d like to pick up some rudimentary PHP skills, give this one a shot.

ATP Autosite – I used this one for awhile after I got comfortable with Walrus. It can handle dropdown menus and since Walrus only supported one image filetype at a time it was a nice upgrade. Don’t think it’s under development anymore though some sites still use it.

Web Comic

iStrip

XComic

Comikaze

ComicCMS

SomeryC

Netsaha

Comic Update Script for PHP (CUSP)

Autokeen Lite – Free archive script from Keenspot. It’s CGI, which is good for hosts that don’t offer PHP. I tried it a long time ago but there was a loop that caused trouble on a Windows server or something.

Comic Gallery

Schlabo’s Comic of the Week (COW) – Sort of built around a Pic of the Day system but I never got it to work too well when I was using stand-alone scripts.

Integrated Systems

These are updating systems that are part of something bigger. They’re basically themes/plugins for existing blogging software to give them comic managing abilities.

Comicpress and Comicpress Manager – As far as I know this was the first real plug and play system for using Wordpress to power a comic site. (Which makes an incredibly robust system for handling blog posts/searching and managing an archive) There were sites which offered guides/hacks for doing it before but Comicpress was the first prebuilt theme for doing it. Comicpress Manager is a handy plugin for getting the most out of the Comicpress theme. I used this system early on but over time it became harder to edit as design elements got spread over various files. You can find various tutorials online and even videos.

Webcomic & Inkblot – Similar to Comicpress and Comicpress Manager except here the plugin (Webcomic) handles the archive management while the theme (Inkblot) deals with how it displays. It also supports converting existing Wordpress themes to work with it. This is the current system I use because of it’s flexibility in editing and ease of use. Also has a series of tutorial videos.

stripShow – Another Wordpress webcomics solution that started around the same time Comicpress did.

WPComic – Wordpress them for webcomics

Manga+Press – Yet another webcomics solution for Wordpress

So yeah. What is this thing about? Well it’s a story about humans living on an alien world. On this planet the dominant species is gigantic. They keep some humans as pets. Others are seen as pests and are exterminated. It’s a very strange sort of science fiction. There are some insanely imaginative visuals going on and just when you think you understand the logic behind some of what’s going on something weirder happens. It’s an interesting effect. The world we’re shown is truly alien and strange which gives us this uncomfortable feeling – the same as the humans in the film feel.

It’s not so much a “humans must rise against” kind of movie like Battlefield: Earth. It’s message is more about learning to co-exist rather than forcing dominance. It certainly has the look and feel of a 70s animated film with a style that reminds me of Yellow Submarine or Monty Python. I really recommend checking this one out for yourself and seeing what you can take from it. It’s easily found online but as always I encourage legit viewings of good films to support them.

The Time Machine (2002)

and Time After Time (1979)