Man versus Social Media.

I love social media.  I think it can be a great way to share moments in your life with friends, family, or admirers.  It’s a handy way to keep in touch with distant family and friends, simply by letting them (and everyone else) know what you’re up to and how you’re doing.  It’s a quick way to share the ridiculous things you stumble across on the internet.  I love the benefits of social media and how it’s brought people together.

Social media is also a great way to promote your webcomic!  You can use it, like we do, to remind people that new pages have been posted or blogs have been written.  It’s a basic practice that I’ve readily subscribed to, and it’s helped STAR POWER a lot.  But there’s something other webcomickers do with their comics on social media that I can’t bring myself to do, and that’s post entire new comics there.

I get it.  Instagram and Twitter have huge webcomic presences, and artists who post their full comics there can potentially gather thousands to millions of followers, if their content is appealing enough to a broad audience.  You want people to see your work, you put it where the people are, and most people idling around on their phones are scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, and so on.  It’s a great, easy way to get eyes on your comic, if you can get lucky enough to go viral or figure out the right combination of hashtags.

But I can’t do it.  I’m too entrenched in the old-school webcomic ways of convincing people to come to your site.  I want people clicking through our Archives to see our body of work, not scrolling through some other company’s social media format.  I want to own my corner of the internet instead of leasing space on some other company’s property.  I feel it also adds to the growing problem of “the centralization of the internet.”  It’s something some content creators have complained about lately, where everything creative and fun is expected to be uploaded to a handful of social media sites instead of growing in its own online space.  I’ll fight against that as best I can, because the internet is big and (mostly) beautiful, and two or three sites shouldn’t own the fun stuff to be found here.

Is it bad business to resist the tide of change like this?  Am I being too stubborn?  Probably a little bit of both, but I’ve done well enough these past fifteen years ignoring trends that I disagree with.  You folks know to come here to get your fix of STAR POWER, and as long as you’re willing to come around to our corner of the internet, we’ll make your visit as entertaining as we can.