10/24: Feed Me, Seymour

Been too distracted to finish up that T-shirt stuff, and I'm making no promises about when it'll be done. Today let's talk about RSS feeds. Webcomics need 'em. There, that was easy.

It amazes me that a few top cartoonists have yet to absorb this lesson. Thanks to you readers, I know that it is possible to jerry-rig a feed for my favorite comics using Feed43, but I would much rather read a feed created by the cartoonist.

When I suggest this, some seem to think I mean embedding a strip's artwork in the feed and robbing readers of any incentive to visit the actual site. Not so! At present, some do this, and some don't, and the only difference it makes to me as a feed-eater is a single mouseclick. Some cartoonists embed self-promotional messages in the feed and some don't. I'm not sure who's right. I'm not sure what's savvy and what's overbearing, what's push marketing and what's pull marketing. I would have said it was a good idea to try to track your feed's usage, but then I started reading some information which suggests that feed stats are about as flawed as web stats.

The one thing every pundit seems to be agreed upon, though, is JUST GET AN RSS FEED ALREADY.

Other stuff:

New father Paul Southworth doesn't seem distracted by diapers: his unlikely combo of corporate espionage, comedy and romance is some of the most entertaining stuff he's done. Today, he's my favorite. Second place: the best Penny Arcade in some time. Third place: "I can help."

I doubt this unusual interface is really the future of webcomics, but it sure would be nice to see someone play with the narrative possibilities of the "magnifying glass."

Via Journalista: Japan asks America to help crack down on online fan-dubs. Wouldn't this also affect online scanlations?

Zuda has announced its opening lineup. Strongly weighted toward action-adventure, as expected, despite the bad fit between small weekly installments and that genre in particular.

I've compared Zuda to AdventureStrips before, but the comparison seems more apt now. Some of the titles on that site were impressive, but the only one that seemed to catch and hold an audience was, well, mine, and I think that's because the action was suspenseful, minimizing the problem of those weeks-long gaps between punches and gunshots. Even so, Rip and Teri was quite a challenge to make work.

Execution is more important than concept, and maybe the creators of the Zuda strips have thought through these formatting issues as well as or better than I did with R&T... or than I am with my submission-in-progress. I hope so. But I fear otherwise, so I'm not expecting an explosive launch for the service. I think it'll need time to find its feet.

Comixpedia.org appears to have recovered from its server trouble, so I'll be spending part of tomorrow setting up the Cool Cat Studio entry. Unless one of you readers would be a dear?

Comics made on the cell phone? That's a new one on me.

The really important angle to this last story is that I'M GETTING MONEY OH YES YES YES CHA-CHING CHA-CHING.

Okay, I won't give Joey grief he hasn't earned. I have already received what is probably the lion's share of my due earnings for my work with Modern Tales, thanks to a couple of advances. And Joey offered this kind of advance to all the creators who worked with him on his subscription sites. Nevertheless, the accounting issue has haunted Modern Tales, and that ghost seems to be approaching a final rest at last.