I think I pace my comics very strangely. I blame Alan Moore, because I might as well blame the best.
In Moore’s Writing for Comics, he talks about one particular story he wrote, a 40-page Superman tale with two interlinked plots: first, Superman’s hallucination of living on a non-destroyed Krypton, and second, a more action-packed story about Superman’s friends attempting to free from this delusion. Moore packs a stupendous amount of information into his little pamphlet, and I somehow got it into my head that that’s how comics should be written: they’re about 40 pages long, and they have an A plot and a B plot.
Of course, most conventional comics are 22 pages long and they don’t have plots; they just have scenes. (We’ll leave that rant for another time.) What I’ve been trying to write, in my own confused way, is a television episode. I have no idea if this is a good way to produce a comic story, since I’m much too close to my plots to tell how well they flow, but at least I’ve learned this: having stories of a roughly fixed length keeps plots from attenuating forever. Quite a few good dramatic webcomics are suffering from Zeno’s Paradox plotting, as they approach but never quite reach the resolution of one or more major plot points. Forcing upon myself cutoff points after 40-50 pages clears out the underbrush of subplots and prevents my stories from calcifying.
Yes. Stories, like water, have to be kept moving in order to be consumable. I imagine some writers get afraid of ending a successful plot.
Publishing bit by bit must give you an enormous amount of data (or pseudo-data) about which characters, scenes, stories, styles resonate with readers. It must be easy to get superstitious about it all. “Every time the main character wears green, I get more hits!” and so on, which can quickly become fear of any change in those supposedly successful elements. But a good writer should ignore this bobbing of the cork, focus instead on the motion of the currents, and trust that they’ll have more stories to tell once the first one’s concluded.
And also to trust your readers to pick up the further issues, if they enjoyed the previous ones. I’ll put down a story, be that a comic, TV series, or any other form of serial entertainment that seems to be going nowhere. If I can trust an author to properly end a story, I’m much more likely to continue reading.