Because of the “open-end” format of webcomics, I’ve seen many creators fall into the trap of not feeling they needed to pace their strips at a rate that would keep readers interest.

Just because you don’t have the “32 pages of story” requirement attached to a comic book doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep action beats that the comic medium works best with. Looking at how manga paces itself is the first step, given that manga reads at a different pace than most American comics. Webcomics SHOULD push the boundaries of how we interpret storytelling, but they need to be entertaining first and give the reader rewards for sticking with a complex concept build session.

Your comparison to Carla’s work was a good point; Carla is shifting CONTINENTS of content in her stories, with arcs that would make Chris Claremont shiver in his X-boots. But Carla still knows how to keep you at the camp-fire, listening to her tales for a really long time. She knows when to wrap it up, and she knows when it needs to be stretched out and gone over with a fine tooth comb. With the story she’s telling, lack of such a strong storytelling discipline would crush FINDER under its own weight. More testament to Carla’s skill as a storyteller.

Personally, I did lose the train of storytelling despite the good content and take it out of my webcomics-to-check-regularly list, literally (the Opera 9.6 browser lets one open a whole folder of bookmarks at once :) ).

If the content wasn’t so good, I’d dismiss the strip in a heartbeat, but I do wonder whether less dedicated readers might lose the train of storytelling on the strip given how it moves. As I said elsewhere, my main gripe with most webcomics is pacing issues in the storytelling, and as so much of what Spike does is genius, I hate seeing the storytelling mechanics get in the way of what she’s creating.

[...] Draper Carlson reviews two print versions of popular webcomics, My Poorly Drawn Life and Templar, Arizona, at Comics Worth Reading, and concludes that both work better as [...]