Welcome to Gaia! ::

My advice? Don't try anything to ambitious and begin with a clear ending in mind. I'd rather read a nice but short comic, as opposed to a long epic that you stopped working on half way because one of you lost interest/got a job/lost your hard-drive. (Or in a particularly tragic case, a nice epic that never got the last five pages finished. I'm looking at you RPGworld. I'm looking at you).

Don't worry about the art so much. You likely aren't going to be able to outdo Girl Genius, or Schlock Mercenary, or It's Walky. That's fine. As long as the visuals can communicate to me what's going on they're good visuals. Even a comic with a very minimal approach, like Last Days of Foxhound had a fairly large following. (You should probably look all those examples up, by the way).

If you want to grab my interest, have a solid cast of characters, and a good story. Don't pad anything out. Nothing makes me quit reading a web-comic faster then when I see that the author has about 7 bajillion pages of filler and never wraps anything up. Oh, and don't ever say "it gets better later on". I actually have seen that excuse used before, and it works about as well as you'd expect. As in, not at all. If you have a slow beginning, consider just cutting it out, and starting at the exciting bit. You don't need to spell everything out - don't underestimate your reader's imagination!

Don't worry too much about criticism. No matter what you do, you aren't going to be able to please everyone. That's not to say that you shouldn't listen to feedback, but if you change one thing, and half your fanbase complains, then you change it back, and the other half complains, you should probably just go with your own intuition, and not just try to please everyone.

Keep a fairly consistent update schedule. It's totally fine if you slip up once in awhile - it happens. Don't make a habit out if it, and if you need to cut back (say, instead of making one strip a week, scaling down to one strips every two weeks), make sure to tell your fans in advance. They'll still grumble, but not nearly as much as if you just did it without telling them.

Oh, and one final thing. When you make, well, anything at all, whether it succeeds or not really does depend on how much everyone likes you. It's not really a popularity contest, but getting your work exposure is a very political process. If someone trolls your work, don't get angry, just ignore it. If someone posts a detailed critique of your work, thank them for it, even if they did not give out a particularly positive score. Even if you think they're completely wrong and just doing it out of spite because they hate you, even if it makes you die a little inside, thank them. It will make your life a lot easier in the long run. You do not want to be the Gaia version of Max McGee.

I do read a lot of WebComics, so if you have any questions about anything in particular feel free to ask.

Okay, good luck!

Hmm, I take you plan on hosting this on Deviant Art? I've never had any reason to use the site myself so I have no idea how feasible this is, but you should have some sort of archive feature. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, but an archive button is a must have in this medium. Might also help if you give your strips individual names, in addition to numbers, just a thought.

Do you plan on making a drama, a comedy, or something in between? If you like, I can go over some of the pacing techniques.

Okay, then deviant art should work fine. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean, it's a lot easier for one of your readers to find a specific strip if it's named something other then #87. Generally the title should be something that makes sense in the context of the strip. So, in the update where everyone goes off to Mars to fight aliens or whatever could be called #87 Knights of Cydonia or something (Cydonia happens to be a region on Mars, if you didn't know that already).

Anyway, if you're writing dramatic story, that means that the majority of your strips will not be based around gags and punch lines. That actually makes it a lot easier to write, seeing as how you won't need to balance telling jokes, with moving the plot along. You do need to decide on some sort of structure though. The biggest thing you need to worry about is how much you want to do off panel, in between strips.

Yeah, that looks pretty professional. Good work! Don't be shy about experimenting with different page layouts, and don't worry about the length, you can go as low as three and there's really no limit to how long to can go. (if you care about Metal Gear spoiler's don't click that last link).