Halo 3 Webcomics

You’ve got a great comic idea, you’ve got the first handful of issues all made up, and you want to publish to the web. All you need now is a showcase for your comic so that people can admire your handiwork. Here are a couple of my favorite tools that will allow you to do just that. A word of caution, though – this solution requires that you have access to your own webhosting, and so your mileage may vary. That said, read on to learn just how easy it is to get started publishing your very own webcomic.

The place to start is by downloading the latest version of the WordPress blogging platform. Follow the directions provided on the site to get WordPress set up on your webhost. It’s extremely fast and easy to install, though the post-install configuration process takes a few moments longer, since you’ll want to customize the default settings to your liking. Of particular importance, make sure to rename your Uncategorized category to Comic (and make sure to change the category slug to ‘comic’, as well) and add a new category called News. Also, you’ll want to create three new directories in your WordPress root directory (the same one that contains your wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes directories). Call these directories archive, comics, and rss, respectively, and set the permissions for these directories to 777. It will be important to have this ready later.

Once that’s done, head over to the official ComicPress site and download the latest version (2.5 at the time of this writing) of the ComicPress theme for WordPress. Unzip the archive file to your computer. Inside you’ll find five ComicPress layouts. Upload all five to your wp-content/themes/ directory on your server and decide which layout works best with your comic. The base ComicPress theme is pretty bland, so it’s a good idea to modify the style.css file for that layout to suit your tastes.

Finally, I highly recommend grabbing the ComicPress Manager plugin. This is a very useful utility that makes publishing comics with ComicPress extremely easy. Unzip the plugin archive and upload the ComicPress Manager directory to your wp-content/plugins directory on your server. Go to your plugins page in your WordPress dashboard and activate the plugin. Once you do, you’ll see a new ‘tab’ in your Dashboard navigation menu called ‘ComicPress.’ You’ll use this tab to upload all your comics files and create the posts for each one.

If you hover over the ComicPress ‘tab’, you’ll see an assortment of sub-menus. Navigate to the ComicPress Config menu and make sure all your settings are correct. The ComicPress Details panel should show that Comics folder is ‘comics’, Archives folder is ‘archive (generating)’, and RSS folder is ‘rss (generating)’. If it doesn’t, check your directory names and permissions to make sure everything is configured properly for ComicPress Manager’s auto-detection script.

From here, it’s just a matter of going to the Uploads sub-menu of the ComicPress ‘tab’ every time you want to publish a new comic. Take note that your comic files need to follow the YYYY-MM-DD-post-name.jpg (or .gif or .png) naming convention in order for ComicPress to work. Select your comic file to upload, manually set the post title if so desired, enter any tags you want for that comic, and use the post body template field to enter any text you want to publish with the comic. Click ‘Upload image and zip files’ when you’re ready to publish and you’re off to the races!

I’ve been using ComicPress to publish Reclaimer for quite a while now, and all the comics on Halo 3 Webcomics use it, as well. I’ve found it to be exceptionally easy and fun to use, and it makes publishing comics a lot of fun. Hopefully you will, too.