TopWebComics Booster Art (Patreon)

TopWebComics is a webcomics ranking website that encourages readers to "vote" each month to propel their favorite webcomics to prominence. Any webcomic that makes it to their "Top 100 page" is considered to be pretty well-known, since they have literally thousands of webcomics in their voting pool. Fans of various webcomics are able to log in once a day to vote for their favorite. 

Obviously, webcomics with a lot of fans (ie, they are already well known) have an advantage. It relies on loyal readers willing to punch in once a day  and click for their favorite comics (you can vote for more than one each day, the votes are tallied  on total number of clicks). 

BOHICA Blues is there but I have not actively promoted it much for a long time. I was spending a lot of energy on TWC but never breaking much past   the 400's page (100 comics per page). Out of a web page of thousands, that sounds impressive, but 85% of webcomics there just have a presence maintained with little or no active voting. On the other hand,  I know of a couple other webcomickers that swear that TWC generates a lot of traffic for them and it is an invaluable resource.

Anyhow, TWC encourages creators to do booster art and side comics to encourage votes (so it's a bit like Patreon, except free and "exposure" via votes... you see where that's headed) and every so often they come up with contests and challenges. One challenge was their team came up with three random words: One Place; One Historical Person; and One Animal. The result they came up with was--

HISTORICAL FIGURE: Hitler

PLACE: Gates of Hell

ANIMAL: Ostrich

Once past my "lolwut" response, I figured I could do this. Above was my line art, below is my finished color piece I ran in the contest:

...So of course I decided to make "chibi Hitler" the failed gate guardian of Hell, riding an Ostrich like the old-style videogame "Joust" (which was weird fun). 

They did another contest later; this one was "Place; Thing; Animal" and the result was "Gates of Heaven; Pumpkin; Hippopotamus". This was my result of that contest:

While the TopWebComics contests were sort of fun and forced me to think outside the box a bit, it in my opinion at the time was a lot of effort for little gain. It was also about the time I discovered Patreon, which seemed to be a better option, even though I didn't do much here for many years. Admittedly, when I did TWC I was also trying to publish BOHICA Blues three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) so that may have led to some of my sense of burnout at the time. 

The attitude over at TopWebComics is fun and friendly, and they do have a LOT of comics to choose from. You never knew there were so many comics being made by regular people! There are some famous people (such as Phil Foglio) creating comics over there, so his stuff tends to hover near the top, but it's worth a look.

Here's the link to TWC in general: http://topwebcomics.com/

Here's the link to vote specifically for BOHICA Blues if you wish:
http://topwebcomics.com/?searchterm=BOHICA+Blues