John Allison

John Allison is an online comic artist who's been professional since 2003. He is the creator of scarygoround and Bad Machinery. What john did to introduce and show us through his career was a complete timeline, from when he finished university up until present day. At first it started slow, he sent his work out too various comapnies, had positive replys and put some work online, but by the next year he was working on magazine covers. in the year 2000 he had 1000 readers which had been slow, but numbers were now at a good level , he now put effort into making quicker comicsusing illustrator. He later tried to make it look more professional, but changed it too much and lost some viewers. He was made redundent and made slow progress and experiments for the next 6 years, untill he tried to refine it using Manga Studio and a Simtec Wakon, but his heart had gone out of Scarygoround. Made a new story about children but not for childern and had his first experience of buying a font. finally he went though a stage of narrowing down his ever expanding characters and in 2012 he's at the stage of signing a contract for book.
Badmachinery:-
http://scarygoround.com/

Dont be shy here is why?
dont have taste or you wont show people cuz of its fault his example of this shown one person whose work wasnt great being sold just because he promoted it so well.he also advised that you go to conventions make and sell your own comics there. but when doing this you have to be realistic you have to work your way up

other successful online comics

http://harkavagrant.com/

 http://achewood.com/

http://nedroidcomics.livejournal.com/

anything you can do yourself do yourself sell tshirts and merchandise but only to a tenth of the viewers you have so make sure your not stuck with lots of products. and importantly advertising is a nice bit of money but do not do it at first because it is off putting to begin with. when at conventions make sure you catch interest invite people in. an strategic way of doing work that he suggested was to do free lance to pay for the things you love.
in his opion although told otherwise exposure is meaningless all work is worth smething even a little. another interesting piiece of advice is to watch out for lower or budgetted price comissions they will be a more difficult clientwhile if they pay £1000 they probably have more.

Review

I found his detailed career time line very useful not just to see how he got to his current successful career. I also found it useful in showing how possible it is to make a webcomic and it made someting that looks daunting with no idea where to begin an actual possibility. He gave down to earth opinons on every decision he dmade or should have made this it made learning from him very easy. It was also very good to hear where someone from a very similar situation went after university and were it ended up.The discussion of important key points afterwards were also of much value, such as audiences and contacts.It was good to see all his advice was to learn from his mistakes that he prooves he has made this openess about the good and the bad realy made the lecture very effective.I now have a much greater insight into the construction and development of online comics, as well as knowledge of important "do's and dont's" that make a web comic now feel possible to achieve.

My own research 

Once i looked into it there are a few websites that give other hints and advice on making web comics. It is good to know if i ever needed support in making a comic there are lots of places i could look too.


http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Webcomic 

http://www.applegeeks.com/articles/051904/ 

http://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-Web-Comic-Drawing-the-Comic/