Good sites to host a web-comic

[Dodsy]

Hi All,

Could anyone suggest a good site to host a web-comic me and a friend have been working on? Were almost ready to go public but still need somewhere to host the thing.
Ideally the site would have a steady flow of visitors with a good community but I'd also like to be able to seperate the comic into issues but under the one banner. For example:
Title
Issue 1 > 5 pages
Then a new like to issue 2 > 5 pages
etc

Any help of suggestions would be really appreciated

[CrazyFoxMachine]

Tumblr
Deviantart
Blogspot
Wordpress
Weebly

[Simud]

Wordpress can give you a very professional look if you are keen on exploring tools and know some basic html. Blogger is great for the lazy ones (like me). 

[Professor Bear]

Blogger lacks any tools for grouping content - which is invaluable for ongoing online comics - beyond basic tags, ditto Wordpress.  Neither are much good for comics hosting 'out of the box', and you'll have to invest some time in building your own site.
Be warned, though, the explanations on how to do this are baffling unless you are a member of the Borg - it took me half an hour trawling through various "made easy" posts on comic website building just to discover that there are two different kinds of Wordpress - a site you can customise or a basic blog - which is something a lot of people seem to take for granted that you'll already know.  Be prepared to invest a lot of time or to throw money at people who can do the legwork for you.

[NeilFord]

I wonder if there is any interest in developing a 'web comic' theme for wordpress? Could have all the basic archiving of content most web comics would want obviously, but we could perhaps develop a theme that used  media queries to respond to whatever screen aspect/device was accessing the comic?

Be interesting to see if we could develop a way of tagging panels for zooming too... hmmm, might try that. What other features would be cool to have?

[DoomBot]

It's a few years since I looked at Wordpress properly, but I found Drupal much more flexible for building websites with images. My site (doomritual.com) is built on drupal, but building themes and bespoke sites requires a lot of know-how and investment in time and effort which diverts you away from doing what you really want which is drawing.

[NeilFord]

Yeah I like Drupal too, www.neilford.net is built on drupal, indeed it's how I make cash, drupal theme/module development.

I know WordPress well too, made a ton of bespoke themes over the last 10 years for many platforms. I've been thinking for a while about how web comics might improve, particulry in how they handle panel zoom and text zoom. Also quite interested in how the lettering might be made more 'accessible' , delivered as proper text instead of flat images.

Most of all, I think there is a real problem with propriety formatting for each iterpratation of  what a 'comic reader' can do/read, I imagine HTML5 has something interesting to contribute to that discussion, and it is of course an open standard, accessible on almost any modern device.

[DoomBot]

definitely agree that a better way of handling text in images is needed. Sounds like you just set yourself a challenge. Let me know when you've done it 

[NeilFord]

Ha ha! Was hoping for a more collaborative exploration...

[DoomBot]

Ha ha! Was hoping for a more collaborative exploration...

Indeed, though I only dabble. Not sure I could bring a lot to the party but I am interested in this.

[Jared Katooie]

Not to sure Dodsy.

I hear Comic Genesis is good - plus it's free (at least as far as I can ascertain).

Comic Genesis

[Dodsy]

Thanks for all the suggestions people I'm checking them all out now. Jared, 'Comic Genesis' looks exactly like that thing I was looking for, Cheers