If you make a webcomic for a few years, you (hopefully!) improve so much that it can be impossible to look at your archives the same way again. Lineart, understanding of flow and panel layout, speech bubble placements… sometimes your archives tells a more interesting story about how far you’ve come as an artist than the actual plot of the comic. It can be beautiful… but also lead to some really awkward beginning pages that could do with an edit pass.

One solution to this is to have a detailed outline or script in text and do your edits there. Some creators also created large months-long buffers of pages so that they have time to see how the scenes combine together and add/edit/delete scenes before it was time to publish them on the web.

And then there’s me, a feral goblin who doesn’t work with scripts and wants to post everything immediately.

Thankfully, there’s hope for us feral goblins. Editing a webcomic after it’s published is as simple as replacing a JPG, so it’s technically easier than almost any storytelling medium to make edits!

But should you?

With over 350 pages under my belt and three completed story arcs, I was itching to run a Kickstarter to bring the first chapter to print. And even though my loyal readers appreciated my rough beginnings, their recommendations to others would often sound like this.

“You can hop in at any chapter and it still makes sense.”
“I tell people to skip the first 170 pages and start in the second story arc.”
“I was often confused as to what was going on and why.”

Those were too many red flags. Something was wrong, and I couldn’t depend on people slogging through my confusing beginnings.

When you ask the question around comic circles, “Should I redraw my archives?”, the answer is almost universally “No”, for these reasons:

• Moving forward is more important than moving backward. Don’t take time away from your update schedule to fix things.
• Your readers got into your comic for a reason, so there must be something there that somebody liked. Tweaking the dials might change that experience.
• You’ll burn yourself out and possibly not finish updating your archives, which will look even worse than a natural progression of style.
• Comic readers have an understanding that when they’re following a long series, the art is going to change, and some folks actually appreciate seeing the artist is a human just like them and learning as they go.

They’re good reasons and should absolutely be considered. But in the end, it’s a very personal question. And the answer I came up with is that I couldn’t justify printing with a confusing and lackluster beginning, it was only going to make getting into my series harder.

Plus, I couldn’t move forward with my plans to expand my comic to conventions without printed books, and books are not something you want to reprint after you’ve made hundreds of them.

I needed a retcon. But I also needed rules.

1. Change any part of the story that made it confusing who the reader should care about.

If the reader doesn’t care, the reader won’t keep reading, period. In my case, this meant adding more exposition about the main characters and their motives, and removing/reducing the roles of side characters. Writing the same characters for years also made me get to know them more and add more of their personality into a second pass than they might have had before!

2. Remove story segments that didn’t advance the main plot.

Because I had a few more years of writing practice and a little space away from the story arc to look at the whole thing with fresh eyes, I was able to tighten the jokes and nix the fluff. My fear was that people would get mad if I took away content, but my experience is that as long as it felt the same, readers didn’t even remember what I cut afterwards.

3. Stick to the content in the book you’re about to print, and don’t edit anything beyond that until you’re ready to print again.

If you don’t intend to print, you can put similar limits on yourself with “only pages from two years ago” or something like that. Just as long as you have limits!

4. Unless it affected how people understood the story, don’t touch the art.

This one was hard to avoid in my first book, because I knew I was capable of making some drastic changes for the better. I actually DID end up completely redrawing about 100 pages of art for my third book (my template wasn’t set up correctly and I drew the pages too small OTL), and pushed back my timeline to get it into print by 5 years just trying to find the time to do it without stopping my forward progress. So… watch your time. THIS is the part that can stall you out.

In all of these cases, you’ll notice that the focus is not on improving my technical rendering or cool new plot ideas so much as making the existing story easy to connect with and understandable, and this was not something I could do alone. Trusted beta readers gave me essential feedback along the way, and were able to help me pinpoint what they could understand and what was still too obscure.

It can be a humbling road as well, because you might feel cringey as you look through the old stuff. But just know that almost every fiction piece in other mediums you’ve watched or read go through multiple drafts, with multiple writers and editors, because it often takes a lot of work to figure things out. It’s a very normal part of the process, and the more you embrace it, the more of a chance you’ll be editing in a constructive healthy mindset rather than a guilt- or shame-driven one.

Whether you decide to edit or let it ride, I wish you the best of luck!