Tantz_Aerine at 7:51AM, Sept. 22, 2019

Good point Avart & Usedbooks! Maybe it warrants another article!

usedbooks at 6:18AM, Sept. 22, 2019

Avart made a good observation about webcomic format. It's almost a fractal of story format in that you have to have an increasing progression of parts of a whole. Some webcomics are more like a novel/movie, others are serial (like a miniseries), and others are episodic. The whole story needs form but within that story are chapters (or episodes broken into chapters/scenes) which are broken into pages, which are broken into panels. Each panel should have interest and each page should end in a way that the reader wants to continue, amp that up for each scene, more intense for each chapter, and then each "act" if the story is written that way. A note-worthy cliffhanger can be at the end of an act or it can be the end of a "story" (if multiple volumes or sequels) with little mini-cliffhangers between scenes. Then you have the weird trick that ends a completed work with an "or is it?" which seems more common in horror and speculative fiction.

Avart at 8:17PM, Sept. 21, 2019

Excellent topic as always Tantz Aerine :) I used (and still use) the cliffhangers in a traditional way. I upload an entire chapter in other site with a cliffhanger if necessary, but here in DD I slice that long chapter into different parts (the last one gave me material for 10 weeks) and I try to make every sliced part as if it were a page, but that page must engage the reader to keep reading. Sometimes is funny to do it, but sometimes it can't be done, at least in a seamless way.

usedbooks at 5:21PM, Sept. 21, 2019

I dunno if I've done it before, but I kinda have something like that planned. (Not exactly epic, but it is a task completed in anticipated of bigger task.)

cdmalcolm1 at 2:34PM, Sept. 21, 2019

I don’t know if I ever done that in a comic. If I did it would have been with Heroes Alliance #8, the ninja issue. I don’t know if I could pull a “Cliffhanger with a view” with my comic. A few artist that I can think of is Jim Lee or Todd Mcfarland with some beautiful backgrounds and the intro title as to what’s the issue is going to be about. Yes I know there are hundreds of others that do this but those two are still my favorites.

Banes at 7:47AM, Sept. 21, 2019

I like that term. "Cliffhanger with a View". There is a difference between a cliffhanger that holds on a tense moment and one that has an ending to a storyline or arc but promises a push forward when the story continues. I prefer the "With a View" version, although there have been some phenomenal cliffhangers. In "With a view", the story might pick up right where it left off, or it might jump years forward (or backward) in time. It's much more open.