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Past Themes
These are the themes that HNTRAC has explored. Remember, you are free to contribute to any of them.
Fittingly, this is the one that started it all. Show us the worst possible first strip to
go in your archives. What would drive you away from reading a comic? Here's your chance
to actually draw it without making everyone hate you.
Starting the comic with a flashback can be an effective technique. It gives readers a taste of
the action and provides insight into events to come. That being said, it can still be done very,
very badly. Instead of taking it out on your own comic, let's see your worst flashbacks here!
Characters make the comic. No matter how many funny jokes you can tell, or the amount of
action you can cram in, the characters are what people rememeber. Therefore, if you do a
bad job introducing your characters, your comic is pretty much dead in the water.
It can still be worth a laugh in retrospect, though.
At some point, most comics will introduce some sort of plot sequence. It might just be for a while
or it might last the whole length of the comic. What matters is that the plot sequences are what sets
your comic apart from all the others. Or lumps it in with all the rest of the garbage. Whatever.
An essential part of building a readership is to give them updates on some consistant schedule.
However, real life has an annoying tendancy to interfere with regular comic updates. Whether it's a big
school project, a sudden illness or a wave of apathy, some replacement for an update needs to be whipped
up on the double. Here's why people say you should take them out of your archive...
Essential to most drama-based comics, action scenes are often intense and fun to read.
However, writing a good action scene isn't just a matter of combining one part violence
with two part yelling. It takes knowledge of posing, timing, dialogue, and suspense.
Or you could just do a really bad job. Guess which ones are showcased here.
Violence warning: many characters will be killed in a variety of poorly-thought out ways.
Reader discretion is advised.
Come and join in the holiday cheer or whatever as we examine all sorts of poor holiday comics.
We apologize for any holidays that no longer seem fun anymore as a result of these sumbissions.
Romance is an important element of many stories, either as a side-plot or as the focus of the
action, and yet it done wrong so frequent. Stiff, inhuman responses as well as hyper-sensitive
overdramatization litter stories like so much litter. Very rarely do you see characters who really
capture the true essense of romance... and we'll be doing nothing to change that. We've collected
ridiculously bad examples of romances scenes to further disillusion all of you.
How Not To End a Comic
Eventually, all things (good things, bad things, ugly things) come to an end.
This is true for comics, as well. How you end your comic will determine how
your audience feels after reading it - from "woah, that was awesome", or "I'm really
going to miss this comic", to "why did I just waste the last 5 hours of my life reading this?".
Perhaps one of the most saddening things is that most comics never end at all: they
merely fade away.
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The comics displayed on this site are the copyrights of their respective creators and are used with permission.
'How Not To Run a Comic' respects the wishes of the comic creators and will remove any comics on request of the creator(s).
