Whoops...

Forgot yesterday's favorite of the day:

"And that's when I truly understood how being a cartoonist is the most rewarding job in the world."

10/23: TV Comics Worth Watching

I was still grumbling about Heroes webcomics when this caught my eye: a report on the unqualified success of Joss Whedon's Buffy Season 8, and how Team Comics plans to follow up on it.

Well, okay, let's qualify that success a little. Buffy is sliding down the long tail here, wringing more money from a smaller audience. Audience numbers that make a smash hit in the direct market are laughable on network television. But whatever your business, a hit is a hit.

Money quote: "I think Joss physically opened up the idea that fan-favorite TV shows can have a renewed life if done the right way by the original creators."

Note the phrase "renewed life." Though the writer shoehorns Heroes into the article, most of the examples concern TV series that are not currently being broadcast. Unlike Heroes comics, these comics are not supplements but continuations to a story that would not continue any other way.

Of course, that works better for some series than for others. Few "original creators" in television have done as well for themselves in comics as Whedon has. But hey, let's dream for a second:

Crusade scripted by J. Michael Stracynski. Or, if he'd rather, another story set in the Babylon Fiveiverse.

Star Trek scripted by Peter David. Not "The Original Series," not any of the other series, just Star Trek, straight up. Give David that whole fictional universe and see what he does.

West Wing Season 9, scripted by Aaron Sorkin. No, I didn't like Studio 60, and it's madness to think Sorkin would swallow his pride and pick up with a new president created by the writers who replaced him. But I'd love to see him try it. And if Ex Machina can make it in this marketplace...

Batman Season 3, scripted by Adam West. Because sometimes readers should SUFFER.

---

PvP gamerpics and themes hit the XBox 360. Savvy. This seems like another step toward the integration of popular gaming strips with gaming software, not too far behind the Penny Arcade/Valve deal earlier this year.

Clickwheel's iPod/iPhone emulation technology is really humming along.

According to my e-mail, the Zuda launch party is scheduled for my birthday next week (October 30) in New York. From 5:30-6:30, the staff will be reviewing pitches "live" at Lansdowne Road, 599 10th Avenue (between 43rd and 44th Streets), New York, NY 10036. Newsarama quotes the e-mail in its entirety, but I can't find any mention of this event on Zuda's own site yet. If only there were some sort of online log where Zuda could put these things!

Odds and Ends

Penny and Aggie is on Tokyopop's site now.

Brian Clevinger gives a brief interview about his new direct-market series, Atomic Robo.

Favorite comic of the day: seriously, just start reading Octopus Pie regularly.

10/15: Monkeys Make Everything Better

I've never met Chris Onstad before he accepted his all-but-inevitable Ignatz for "Best Online Comic." He didn't look anything like what I expected.



(Pic via Comixtalk and Joe Zabel.)

Joey Manley has proposed a massive initiative to help Webcomics Nation cartoonists track (and presumably improve) their performance. Joey also continues to drop vague hints, like "a team of developers," that indicate he's got more resources than he did for his last major programming push. This stuff looks better than Google Analytics, seriously.

Happy birthday, Cat Garza!

Condolences to Chris Muir on the loss of his sister, Catherine M. Forsythe, to a cancer-related stroke.

Sayanora, Yirmumah.

But what about centaurs on motorcycles? Via Simulated Comic Product.

Rob Liefeld as T-Rex is, without a doubt, my favorite comic of the day.

Found via Keenspot ads: the producers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are back... and they're riffing The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek, Star Wars and more.

Brian Warmoth: still interviewin' good webcomickers.

Finally, HOLY CROW IT'S BILL WATTERSON. And he LIKES the Schulz book!

10/12: It's A Big Jungle Out There

If anything does keep me doing in-depth blogging, it's going to be the raw ego-boost of the links thrown my way from a few people who are much better bloggers than me. I've been giving Gary a hard time lately, but he's on that list. So is Dirk Deppey. Yesterday was a massive ego-stroke, because I actually made the title of yesterday's Journalista post, "A Better Breed of Publisher." Deppey's response to my thoughts on the Zuda contracts are worth reproducing in full:

Publishing contracts fascinate me. During my time printside with the Journal, I never missed an opportunity to quiz publishers and creators about business, and while I'm by no means an expert on the subject, I can tell you the following about the sort of contracts offered by the more reputable indy publishing houses:

1. They don't require you to sign away your copyrights or trademarks.
2. They usually offer royalties of somewhere between 12-18% of the cover price, after advances (if any) have been recouped - which is to say, once the printer, distributors and retailers have taken their cuts, the remaining profits are split pretty evenly down the middle between publisher and creator.
3. They don't require exclusivity, nor do they include "non-compete" clauses.
4. The rights to published properties revert back to the creator after a certain, set period of time and/or period of inactivity on the part of the publisher.
5. The creator usually has veto power over ancilliary licensing and promotional uses of the work.

Much is made over "industry standards" in publishing contracts, but this only reflects the fact that the traditional comics industry has some astonishingly shitty standards. The above is actually less reflective of what you'd get in dealing with companies like Tokyopop and DC Comics, and more reflective of the prose-publishing industry, which actually has standards. It's the difference between doing business with a shark who only sees you as an intellectual-property sharecropper, and someone who actually respects you for the work you create - and it's a big difference.

Moral: If you respect your rights as a creator, don't do business with someone who doesn't likewise respect those rights. The alternative isn't self publishing; it's doing business with a better breed of publisher. Others have successfully held out for better. If your work is good enough, or meaningful enough to you, then you should too.

Okay, let's put it like this. If you are being offered the kind of deal that Deppey describes at the same time that you're being offered a standard comics-industry deal-- and let's assume the advances are equal, too-- then of course you should take the former deal. What are you, stupid?

But let's take a look at my situation. I have two properties I've been shuttling around to bookstore publishers for years, three more I've added to the stack more recently, and one more on the way. I've learned a lot in the last six months, and I think every step we've taken has gotten us closer to a sale. But... no sales yet. I'm making plans to change that in 2008. But I'm not betting the farm on it, just because others have succeeded in doing so.

This "better breed of publisher" isn't better in every respect-- it takes seemingly FOREVER to make up its mind to publish ANYTHING, and it doesn't have much side freelance work to go around.

Meanwhile, doing Divalicious has not only given me a decent advance and my initial entry point into the bookstore market, it's led to a lot more freelance work and allowed me to get started on a public-speaking career.

5% of something is worth more than 15% of nothing. And 5% of three or four somethings...?

I write a lot. I like writing. And when I've got a plan, I'm pretty fast. The idea I have for my Zuda submission is harder to execute than some scripts, so it's taking more time, but it's still moving along pretty quickly now. My standard deal with artists is a 40-60 split or some kind of advance on same. So by my calculations, the Zuda contracts would make me about $800 for a twelve-hour day. Or $5600 for a body of work that will have taken seven or eight working days.

If Zuda doesn't bite, we end up with another creator-owned property, with which we can do whatever we choose. But assume it does.

The trademark will rest with DC. I don't expect the rights to revert back in time to do me much good. And they'll be able to adapt it however they want, up to and including hiring a second creative team onto it if my artist and I prove "difficult." There are royalties offered, but certainly not on a par with the percentages Dirk cites.

On the other hand, this would be my first work for any branch of DC, a profile-raiser for my other work, an interesting experience and a way to build contacts. My Rolodex for the comic-book industry is still pretty thin, and if this is half the ice-breaker that Divalicious was...

So is that $5600 worth it to me?

That'd be a HELL YES.

I can't afford to make everything I do a long-term investment. (Or a short-term investment, either... hence, those pitches for bookstore publishers.)

Dirk makes an eloquent case in his conclusion, but I don't buy it. I don't believe that the prose-publishing industry "respects my rights" any more than the comic-book industry does-- I think that each market's offerings are determined by commerce, not "respect." In time, I think the bookstore market will exert pressure that forces DC, Marvel and Tokyopop to become more like it, but that doesn't mean I should ignore the advantages of working with each group in the meantime.

My work, all my work, means a great deal to me. (My speed's a double-edged sword... I'm proud of it but always wondering if I'm going faster than I should.) But the reason so many artists make bad deals is they let their emotions get the better of them-- the eagerness to find an audience at any cost, or the desperation for validation, or the pride of ownership, even if these things have no practical value. (I did pick an idea that I think would be more profitable in Zuda's hands than in my own.)

Today's marketplace presents clear opportunities for those who can think "art" with one part of their brain and "business" with another. That's never come naturally to me, but I'm trying hard to learn.

10/11: Getting Out More

Congratulations to Jim Massey for his Hollywood fortunes, and Nicholas Gurewitch for his impressive Amazon sales streak. And speaking of webcomics success...

Tom Spurgeon says it's time he started taking "this webcomic thing" a bit more seriously... albeit with more good intentions than enthusiasm, like a new gym member signing up on New Year's Day. Among the reasons for this is that Tom, like Sean T. Collins, finds webcomics boosters annoying when they equate popularity with quality, or financial success with either.

I can't really argue with that.

I've made that mistake myself often enough, proceeding from "if this is popular, there must be a reason, and it'd be interesting at least from a cultural perspective to explore that..." which has resulted in a lot of crap in my Google Reader that I'm only just starting to thin out now.

But... glass houses, you know? It seems to me that many of the Ignatz nominees are likewise guilty of equating other things with quality, things like obscurity and a determined assault on the senses. In some cases, the work's lack of popularity with any general public seems to be proof of its worth. It is rewarded and buoyed up by a niche as self-congratulatory and insidery as the webcomics cults... or the makers and consumers of the worst of superhero comics' "continuity porn."

The name "alt-comix" implies a "mainstream" that is not addressing the public's artistic needs. If your world is the newsstand/direct market, then the need for an "alternative" quickly becomes apparent. But if your world includes the graphic novel market and the webcomics market, then things get murkier, especially since one-time "alternative" creators like Harvey Pekar and James Kochalka are now making more headway in those new markets. And then there's manga.

But this "alt-niche" has evolved under the assumption that the comics market is the newsstand/direct market, and it actually seems more interested in clinging to its feelings of persecution than in coming in from the cold. Sean, I don't think this kind of comics is part of the problem because it has fewer readers than Diesel Sweeties. I think it's part of the problem because so much of it doesn't read like it's the least bit interested in getting more. And you can have wonderful thoughts and fantastic insight, but they don't mean much if you don't share them with the whole class.

As distasteful as bragging about your audience numbers may be, it still seems better to me than writing and drawing specifically for the art-house critics. Dinosaur Comics and xkcd have demonstrated that you can get FREAKIN' HUGE audiences WHILE doing comics that address the great philosophical questions, the many quirks of everyday life and other esoteric topics... AND you don't even have to be a great artist to do so.

(P.S.: No, I don't hate all the Ignatz nominees, and no, I'm not telling you which ones get my goat. I'm more concerned about a general trend here, one that I'm glad to see in decline.)

10./10: Meh

I'm getting a bit discouraged about doing lengthy essays in this blog. Lately it seems like half the time I try it, someone whose opinion I care about totally misses what I'm going for-- and I tend to see that as not a flaw in the readers, but a flaw in me.

In Monday's essay, I did not mean to say that the only choices for your career were "don't do business with anyone stronger than you" and "submit to Zuda." Certainly there are a lot of cartoonists who are doing business with plenty of stronger companies that are nevertheless giving Zuda a miss. My personal response to it is probably pretty clear, but there are a lot of quirky things about my own approach to my career that won't apply to a majority of creators.

I was trying to say that some of the arguments against Zuda seem to be arguments that would apply under any circumstances involving stronger companies. Buying those arguments greatly limits one's options. It means you can't deal with ComicMix, Modern Tales, United Features Syndicate or a dozen other companies that have the potential, at least, to move your career forward.

Further, let's presume, for the sake of argument, that Zuda is a bad deal... if so, then an argument that proceeds from "all contracts are evil" (or "large companies are evil") won't turn Zuda into a good deal. In fact, they give Zuda a disincentive to offer a good deal, because you've told them that you're a lost cause, so they won't even try to engage you.

(And I'm not just going after Gary Tyrrell here-- I think a lot of the response is implying the bias which he states outright. Gary's generally much, much better than that, which says to me he's getting caught up in a wave.)

That's what I meant.

Assuming I haven't screwed it up this time.

Best Wishes To Chris Muir

Hope his unspecified family emergency resolves quickly and happily.

Strong Bad on How To Make Webcomics

He's got you covered. (Video)

10/9: We Haz A Logo

Yesterday's essay took way more time than it should have (I've simply got to get this blog's time consumption under control), so we're going simple with today's.



What do you think?

10/8: Zuda Zero-Sum

The last of the verdicts on the Zuda contracts are rolling in.

Since before I fell ill last week, I've been trying to reach some kind of grand conclusion, some explanation of why I seem so out of step with the rest of the good old "webcomics community" on this issue. (Those who agree with me seem to be outside observers newer to the field, like Tom Spurgeon and Todd W. Allen.)

I don't mean to harp on this, but when a generally sensible observer like Gary Tyrrell asserts and affirms that "all contracts are... about protecting your interests by explicitly denying the interests of the other party," then I feel like I've slipped into some alternate universe.

I have a contract with Gisele Lagace which is most definitely not about that. It's an agreement between equals, or near-equals, spelling out what she and I can each expect from our partnership.* With some other artists, I've contented myself with a verbal agreement, but I could not do business with any artist if we didn't know what we expected from one another. That is the first function of a contract to me.

The second function is insurance. Dave Sim once said, "No corporation will ever pay a creator enough to sue them successfully," and I think a lot of creators would agree with that. It's true that Warner has more lawyers than an individual creator ever will. But these days, the negative publicity caused when a company breaks the letter, not just the spirit, of its contract is a powerful deterrent.

Furthermore, just because a company has more money for lawyers than you does not mean they want to spend it. Creators tend to view a lawsuit as a zero-sum game: either the plaintiff wins or the defendant does. But the legal system bleeds both parties of time and money. And we Americans are a lot more lawsuit-happy than we were in the 1930s. Warner didn't get rich by inviting a million lawsuits, and it doesn't expect to stay rich by doing so, either.

If you mistrust contracts completely, then that leaves you with two alternatives. The first is to try to do business with corporations on a handshake basis. This is, of course, ridiculous. Even I don't trust DC to take care of me purely out of the goodness of its heart. I wouldn't vest that trust into any company that had more resources than me.

The second alternative is never to do business with anyone who has more resources than you.

"Do It Yourself."

Ultimately, I'm just less of a pure DIY guy than most of the other people who talk a lot about webcomics. I'll always do some things myself, and I've been doing more than I would've done five years ago, but I decided long ago that I'd need partners to create the visuals I wanted, which makes me a little more comfortable seeking out partners in other areas, I think.

None of the above argues that Zuda contracts are right for you. But don't confuse the recognition of a bad deal with a distrust of all deals. Your career can do better.

Movin' on.

UPDATE: Or not quite. Clarifications here.

*In case you're wondering, Gisele gets 60% of the profit from any work we do together, and 50% of any profit from any work done by third parties... movie royalties, for instance. I earn my 40% share not just by scriptwriting but by taking care of a lot of the odds and ends of the business, including clear and verifiable financial reports. Gisele and I do trust each other, but I want her to be absolutely sure of me as we go forward.

"Hating The Korean Wave"

Hey, Dirk, hope you're gonna link this one. This fascinating study of the online and print comic "Hating The Korean Wave" and it's Web-based marketing seems a bit tentative in its conclusions, but, at the least, it shows a side to webcomics-- and comics-- that boosters like me would prefer to deny.

10/5: End-of-Week News Roundup

Back in the game! Let's get some odds and ends out of the way first.

Happy birthday, Mark Mekkes!
Mike Strang, creator of Platinum Studios' Weird Adventures in Unemployment, now written and drawn by Brandon J. Carr, is still not happy about being squeezed out. His account does make interesting reading, but I'm not sure it's as flattering to himself as he believes.

The new ComicMix is here, and its proprietary reader is here too. I'll leave the interface critique to Joey, except to vehemently second him on the matter of RSS feeds... RSS is a must in today's marketplace: more and more hardcore readers like me are relying upon it. The content of ComicMix is too new to call, really, but I think a lot of it will stand or fall on how thoroughly the creators, as well as their publisher, embrace "this Internet thing."

Simulated Comic Product has a program out called Boxen for the making of panel borders (assuming you only want rectangular borders-- but then, few cartoonists are really pushing those boundaries lately, it seems). Requires .Net 2.0, which means that Mac loyalist Gisele is unlikely to try it out and let us know how well it works. What about... you?

I'm mostly linking this so I can find it later when somebody asks "Did anybody ever do a really extreme animated panel in a webcomic?" (Thanks to Xaviar.)

Great news: How to Make Webcomics now has four authors.

One of those authors, Dave Kellett, had a really great week this week with his "Starbucks sequence" (beginning here.) I'm not gonna be able to declare "favorites of the day" this week but Kellett would almost certainly have made it with Monday's or Tuesday's installment.

Hmm, and this might've done it for Wednesday. Ethan is a lot funnier when not actually ruining the lives of his friends, and here he's almost an underdog.

The Complete Ryan Estrada

Ryan's own input makes me fairly confident that this tally of his guest strips and other accomplishments is now complete. (Although posting one extra strip somewhere in secret, and not telling anyone for years, would be JUST LIKE HIM.)

Still Catching Up: Jason Thompson Interview

My friend Andrew Farago has a lengthy but excellent interview with my friend and one-time collaborator Jason Thompson, author of Del Rey's Manga: The Complete Guide. (I've seen a preview copy, and if you have any manga-loving friends with birthdays coming up? You could do a lot worse.) They also discuss Thompson's insightful mix of horror and rom-com, The Stiff.

The interview's in The Comics Journal, available here.

Reckless Life Calls It Quits

Missed it: Tim Demeter goes out with a smile. Like Cox and Forkum, Tim was getting tired of his project, but you wouldn't know it from Reckless Life's last and best arc, "Murphy's Law." You can start that arc here or the entire series here.

Tim continues to edit Graphic Smash and Clickwheel, and has promised a kinda-sorta sequel to Reckless Life called Bustout Odds, sometime in 2008. Early adopters can go ahead and subscribe to the RSS now.

Cox and Forkum Call It Quits

One of the most popular editorial cartooning teams on the Internet by any measure I can find, John Cox and Allen Forkum, have given up regular editorial cartooning for financial and emotional reasons. Chris Muir gives them an insidery salute.

Scroll down Daryl Cagle's blog for an interview (no permalinks, sorry). Tom Spurgeon has pretty good commentary:

1) they were considered a conservative cartooning team, which is supposedly one of those thing the marketplace desires, 2) they were never able to generate much of an income despite having a not-inconsiderable on-line presence, 3) their cartoons were visually accomplished, something many people believe the market desires, and 4) it's harder to make a marginal cartooning enterprise work when any potential revenue is shared by two people.

Naturally, point #2 interests me the most. I'm not sure that they got as much revenue out of their site as they could, but then again, I can see how they might resist going beyond a few Google Ads-- they could sell advertising space, or go with a banner ad, but what if the resulting ad conflicted with their own politics? Penny Arcade has run ads for games that the strip has scorned, with little apparent controversy, but I don't know if the audience for political cartoons would be as understanding... after all, video games don't really determine the future of the free world.

I don't share their political leanings, but Cox and Forkum often reached across ideological lines to make me think a little, and Cox is a gifted caricaturist. I'll miss the team.

A Modern Humor Authority

One more check mark: Justin Rude of The Washington Post calls getting mentioned in Penny Arcade "an indicator of video game success." To be fair, he backs that up with actual download and member figures, but uses the PA mention as his principal indicator of "buzz." I was trying to figure out why this seemed odd, and then it hit me:

Is this "indicator" status anything like being a "notable reference?"

Favorite of the day: UH oh...

Quickies

Slow, slow news day.

Congrats to Paul Southworth on the birth of his lovely boy.

Favorite comic of day: Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's "Songs The Beatles Didn't Sing." (Link only good 'til 10/01.)

Members of The Unofficial Apple Weblog are easily flattered by guest appearances in tech strips. (And Joy of Tech has finally gotten around to installing a decent RSS feed, thank goodness.)

9/27: xkcd's "Non-Happening" Actually Happens

One of the most popular webcomics creates a convention out of thin air by announcing a time and place where nothing was supposed to happen. Was this really something Randall Munroe didn't intend, or a brilliant marketing move? Hard to say but it's an accomplishment either way.

Afraid I'm too busy for a detailed post today. Coming soon: final thoughts on Zuda contracts, the smiley in crisis, and notes on online advertising. Join us tomorrow, eh?

"Live-Action Webcomic"

Choice phrase from this piece about short online videos. Webcomics and YouTube: allies or competitors? I'm mulling.

T-Shirt Immortality

Four years after what seems to be his last mention on Penny Arcade, the elusive Batjew continues to touch lives through his iconic shirt.

iPhone Emulator For Clickwheel

Oh wow, that is pretty handy.

Scott McCloud Has 2008 Covered, Thanks

Scott McCloud is on the move again, and this time, uncharacteristically, he's going back, not forward. Before Scott was "that webcomics guy" and before he was "Mr. Understanding Comics," he was writing a delightful, thoughtful science-fiction adventure called Zot. (Or Zot!, but I've always had trouble with titles that contain their own punctuation.)

HarperCollins must like the way McCloud's books have been selling for them, because they've announced plans to collect the last 26 Zots into a monster 576-page "phone book" edition and sell them for the insanely low price of $22.95. Geez, you guys are aware that the dollar's in trouble, right?

This isn't quite "the complete Zot," but Scott's of the opinion that his work got a lot better after #1-10. I do think the best Zots came later, and the climax in #10 was a little off, but #1-10 did have some fantastic storytelling moments, particularly the climax to #3 and all of #5. Fortunately, those ten are already available in trade elsewhere.

I loved Zot and still haven't tracked down a few of the later issues, so I'm pretty well guaranteed to buy this. HC also plans to do a big promotional push for it, which is interesting, since the last thing we heard from Scott was that he wanted to stay quiet for a while and work on hundreds of pages of new stuff.

SPOILER WARNING: While Zot Online is a pretty good sequel to the series, it is a sequel, meaning that if you read it first, you will know a lot about how the printed series concludes.

Faves In Different Flaves

Favorite (disturbing) comic of the day: "Yes, Mother."

Second favorite (funny) comic of the day: Least I Could Do reveals a part of Rayne's thought process that only leads to more questions. As the marginalia says, "I don't know either."

Webcomics.com Update

Progress... major progress. One step back and ten steps forward. The one step back is a temporary suspension of the Webcomics.com forum, which will be moving to Webcomics.com instead of remaining at the Penny and Aggie site.

Lookin' like we'll have something to show you before the end of the month.

Catsby Uber Alles

Well, after that depressing screed, let's close with some good news. Other bloggers like Johanna are abuzz about the Death Note adaptations, and well they should, because it's an excellent series. But hey, I'm a webcomics booster first and foremost, so I'm more interested in this: the first webcomic-based live-action TV series I've seen. And it's Catsby, the best manhwa I've read all year, online or otherwise.

And hey, there's a musical play too!

Hat tip to William G.

Fave of the Day: "Davvy!"

Randy Milholland has teased Something Positive readers for months, hinting that Monette had done something so unforgivable that the Macintires, who had adopted her as one of their own, would now disown her. But how bad could it really be?

Her first appearance in the strip was as a "failed lesbian," who couldn't stop sleeping with guys, but couldn't see how this might challenge the "lesbian" label. She eventually did find a nice girl, and achieved some moments of clarity when it counted. But the rest of the cast-- particularly main character Davan Macintire-- has always known she was on the slow side. And you don't stay mad when the chihuahua ruins the carpet, because hey, what did you expect? It's a dog. How bad could it really be?

The answer to that question-- a toxic mix of stupidity and genuine achievement-- says some very interesting things about how Monette regards Davan, consciously or otherwise. And while Randy's expressions are often more functional than virtuosic, the last panel seems to have figured out the perfect eyebrow shape to suggest a throbbing forehead vein.

Tick, tick, tick.

Clickwheel's Second Act

Clickwheel is back, with exclusives. The general public will probably be most interested in the Judge Dredd spinoff, but as for me, I'm downloadin' for the Justin Pierce and Joe Dunn material.

Get Your Achewood Tattoos Right Here

"Right here" being Portland, Oregon. Well, I guess you'll just have to visit, won't you?

(Direct link to the tattoo parlor in question here.)

Better Dating Through Geekery

Scott Kurtz has announced that Dino Andrade, the voice of Skull in PvP Animated, now has a geek-centric dating site, Soul Geek. I've seen a similar concept at Otaku Booty, but I haven't done enough online dating that I could tell you which service is better yet.

This may change. :)

Favorites!

Tell you what, let's do three. Monday's always an embarrassment of riches and I really don't want to choose between these...

Questionable Content has finally run out of esoteric musical references and started using mainstream ones that are esoteric to the characters. The silent penultimate panel just kills me.

"Well, what's the point of a reunion if I can't learn about the sordid past of the girl who always slaps my ass after sex? That's my God-given right as an astronaut."

And finally, the delightful 62-page journey into a child's imagination, "The Upside-Down Me." All-ages friendly, and how!

9/24: "Huh Huh Huh, He Said 'IANAL'"

One long post today to give people a chance to catch up on Saturday's stuff. And my mind's still on Zuda today, so let's just pick up the numbering where we left off:

6) IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) is one of the more useful Internet acornyms, and never more so than in cases like this. As Joey Manley points out, Zuda ITSELF is advising would-be submitters to check their contracts over with a lawyer. I am not a lawyer. Neither are most of the usual commentators. I'll be seeking legal counsel about this through the week and I'd join Joey and Zuda in urging other observers or would-be submitters to do the same... seek their own legal counsel, that is, not wait for a comics-law blog post to do the legwork for them. What's important to you may not be important to us. (I will post what I learn here, but it could take time.)

7) That urging is Zuda's single best PR move to date. It's unimpeachable, yet it protects the imprint from the old PR problem of "Siegel and Shuster stories." And more immediately, it reduces the authority of impulsive bloggers without legal training, giving Zuda more of a chance to shape its own story.

8) Zuda's worst PR move? The blog page, which after two months still says, "Come on...one thing at a time, ok? Seriously we'll start this up later." Grammar check, anyone? It just sounds so defensive, almost paranoid. "GET OFF OUR CASE, MAN!"

Was anyone AFTER them about this? I mean, of all the things people wanted from Zuda, a blog is WAY down the list.

9) More attention should probably be paid to the Zuda message boards, where Perazza and Johnson are answering questions that come their way. Activity has been slow, but, um, I'm pretty sure it's poised to pick up.

10) Gary Tyrrell isn't happy with the contracts, and plans to spend the week explaining why. Buried in the ALT text of his latest post is this choice tidbit: "Today, we use the foreboding Zudalogo, because all contracts are inherently about ensuring that -- if needed -- you can cut the other guy's heart out and he's legally obligated to provide the blade."

...ALL contracts, Gary?

Favorite comic of the day... let's just do two tomorrow.

Update: 11) And one more, since there's already been a bit of confusion about this: the "submission agreement" covers the rights of those who submit to the contest but are not selected, the "rights agreement" covers the rights of the original creator or creators of a selected SERIES and the "services agreement" cover the rights of the creators of the individual EPISODES of said series. In about 98% of all webcomics, the creative team that created the series is still creating the episodes, but there are notable exceptions like Life's a Bluff and Megatokyo. If you are not one of those exceptions, and you are selected, then you are entitled to both the compensation outlined in the rights agreement AND the compensation in the services agreement.

And We're Out

Webcomics Weekly has an excellent new episode about print runs.

See you all on Monday!

9/22: ZUDA ZUDA ZUDA DAMMIT WHERE'S THE SNOOZE BUTTON

So the wait is over at last. A few quick thoughts about Zuda's recently released contracts:

1) The timing of the release is interesting. I've complained about how long DC had taken to get these online. But then I had a chat with Ron Perazza, who told me that this contract was just taking a long time to hash out, and they'd release it as soon as it was ready. I believe him. But there's no way the time of week of this release was unplanned, not with the Wall Street Journal just happening to mention Zuda the very next day.

When I worked for The Man, one of the tips I picked up was to fire people on a Friday afternoon. Don't give laid-off employees the opportunity to throw a hissy-fit and poison productivity for the week. I'm wondering if similar thinking drove the decision to release these contracts Friday. "We may THINK we've got our bases covered, but let's reduce the odds of an Internet s**tstorm anyway, hm?"

2) At last I can safely disclose the payouts for top Zuda contributors, and they're worth taking seriously: $250 per "screen," with a couple of additional bonuses, and a royalty package that-- with apologies to my friends at Tokyopop-- is easily the most generous I've seen from a major publisher.

3) What the deal means for webcomics as an art form is a little tough to judge until we find out what kind of comics Zuda's audience likes. And Zuda is as unsure of that as anyone. I think the weekly frequency is still going to keep them from being a really major player in the space: a Sunday-only strip just doesn't seem to be enough to hold people's attention these days. But I don't think Bruning and Perazza are stupid, so maybe that was never their plan. Maybe they intend to be more of a Modern Tales, a choosy repository of high-profile, infrequently published comics.

4) And for that matter, nothing really prevents Zuda from doing it this way for 6-12 months and then starting to roll out the daily features.

5) The reversion of rights is likely to be the issue that critics focus upon. It certainly seems like the Zuda team worked a lot on this part. It's kind of baroque-- you might end up with rights to the comics but not film and TV rights based upon them?

But I don't have much interest in reversion because I consider it pretty unlikely to happen. DC is good at keeping nearly forgotten properties in play just so they don't lose the rights. Which is why that royalties package has my full attention instead.

At this point, I've made my position on this kind of thing pretty clear, but Webcomics.com means some new people will be reading this, so just for the record:

It's silly to think that publishers are evil for wanting to retain rights as long as they can. Publishers offer you a trade-off. You should get some promotion, some help in building a career, and most of all, you should get money. In exchange, publishers need the right to use your work for their own ends, or they will cease to publish.

Some people cannot abide this kind of trade-off. Some people cannot abide doing without this kind of trade-off. Some people, like me, like to make the trade for some projects and keep others close to the vest. I think we'd all be a lot happier if creators and commentators spent more time doing what they wanted, and less time promoting their position on this as the only position worth having.

Update: more Zuda stuff here.

E-books Expand Marketplace

Dirk Deppey spotted this Sony-Borders deal, which could mean important things for anyone who traffics in panels and pixels. Tokyopop seems to be all over this market already. If Gisele's and my early experience with Wowio and the improvements in the Sony Reader are any indication, the e-book market looks like a growth sector in 2008.

Fave of The Day

Just an ACT-I-VATE day today. Drockleberry's latest installment just keeps on amazing me.

Also of note, today's Wall Street Journal mentions the Zuda initiative and three webcomics-turned-graphic novels. (Well, Megatokyo is more of an ongoing series, but why quibble?) Of the three, the one I didn't already know was Parade (with fireworks), which has a nice clean style and a foreign-movie feel.

The Falling Pulp Standard

This post by Heidi McDonald about 1500 comic books that Publisher's Weekly can't even give away got me thinking. Heidi attributes the difficulty to the rise of the trade paperback format, and I'm sure that's part of it. But it does seem to me that the idea of comics as collectibles is a lot less prevalent in the comics community than it used to be. As webcomics gain acceptance, the value of the average floppy comic book declines.

Correction And Continued Confusion: Flex Comix

My apologies for an error on Wednesday: Jorge Vega notes that Flex Comix is a print-and-cell-phone comics company, not a cell-phone-exclusive comics company.

Therefore DC's decision to translate its comics into English-language print editions makes a little more sense.

But only a little, because all the press releases about Flex's acquisition stressed the cell phone connection, and DC already has a manga division, CMX. Why not lead with the aspect that makes Flex distinctive, instead of burying it? It's not like Warner doesn't have a pre-existing deal with a mobile content provider, which can easily be applied to Warner's subsidiaries. Can't they wait until some kind of simultaneous Web, print and cellphone initiative is ready? Are the comics on Flex just THAT AWESOME, that they need to get them to market NOW, however they can?

Such haste would be unlike DC, which has generally been patient to a fault about initiatives like this. I must be missing something. Hell if I know what, though. If you think you know, click the link to go to comments.

9/21: Heroezzzzzzzzzzz

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I can't muster any enthusiasm for the book collection of the webcomic based on NBC's Heroes. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is the most overrated webcomic I've seen in the last twelve months.

Oh, great marketing, sure. Give 'em a reason to check in on the homepage every week, and aim your message at the superhero comics fan. I can swallow my resentment of the "comics equals superhero" meme long enough to admire the producers' savvy. But the whole concept of the series dooms it to mediocrity.

Heroes the TV show, or at least its first season, has been many things, many good things, but above all, it's been tight. The plot moved, the unexpected happened, and even though the journey was long, time was not wasted. The role of Heroes the comic is to fill in the "blanks" that such an approach might create.

But you either need the comics' extra scenes to appreciate the entire Heroes universe, or you don't. The rave reviews of the series and my own experience watching it would suggest that right now, we don't. If we did, then the comics might actually become exciting and relevant, but if we did, then the TV series would become disjointed and confusing to most of its audience.

It's possible to tell really interesting stories that are secondary to a main text. The Star Trek novels of Peter David and John Ford, for instance. But those work by bringing a different, unexpected form, approach or point of view to the series in question-- something new to go with the something old.

The Heroes webcomic carefully avoids any such innovation. It mimics the Heroes TV show as much as possible. Perhaps in some misguided attempt to keep things fresh, it eschews a single creative team, employing multiple writers and artists of wildly varying talents, executing obviously pre-assigned plots. It's made up of heavily plot-oriented stories, a poor substitute for the TV show's character-driven tales. And those plot-oriented stories don't really need to exist, because we already know the plot works just fine without them.

Yeah, you guessed it: I don't usually like the "deleted scenes" section on DVDs, either.

Nobody I know even pretends to be enthusiastic about the project, except as a symbolic victory for all webcomics everywhere. But this is the kind of "victory" that makes me nervous. Heroes webcomics are derivative, unimaginative and rote... and promoted like crazy. Honestly, I think it'd be better for comics if they tanked.

On a happier note, today's favorite: things you might not know about GLBT.

Self-Promo: Webcomics.com Hires Programmer

Gisele and I have engaged the services of programmer Steven M. Lavigne to help us get Webcomics.com where we want it to be. I'm learning a lot about "cronjobs," which are not, as I believed, sexual acts performed using time-travel technology.

Even More Platinum

Drunk Duck comics, Cowboys and Aliens and Hero by Night are now available for mobile via Playphone.

Playphone, like Platinum, seems a bit overeager to convince people it's a player in its field. Its most noted 2007 achievements seem to be getting noticed and getting money. But I shouldn't single them out for that: the whole mobile content field has been very uncertain terrain for as long as I've been paying attention to it.

Missed This and This and This

New Modern Tales strips. More for the reading list.

New look for Clickwheel. God knows when this went up: I haven't paid much attention to the site and it's not mentioned in the blog records.

Booksurge is a self-publishing and promotional service partnered with Amazon.com, presumably related to Createspace, a self-publishing-only Amazon service.

Request To Headline Writers Everywhere

Can you stop using the term "online comic" to describe online comedians? Or at least not use it to describe losers like this?

Kthx.

Favorite Comic Of The Day FIGHT FIGHT!

So what takes it today?

xkcd's prediction of future nostalgia? Jeffrey Rowland's admission of a flaw that mirrors my own? R Stevens' guide to coping? Roger Langridge's romance of rhyming haikus? The Perry Bible Fellowship's kinda-sorta crossover with Dinosaur Comics? Dinosaur Comics' own tribute to classic sci-fi? The rules of the afterlife? The wonderfully dry second line in this "Talk Like A Pirate Day" installment? This flowchart? The true center of the universe, as we suspected? The joy of fandom for doomed programs?

'Twas a good day indeed for the usual suspects, but I have to skip past them all and give it to Kare Kare Komiks' "Mang Tomas the Storyhunter." Give it a look.

Because Fame These Days Means Imitating Jeffrey Rowland

Poker comic Life's A Bluff, in addition to hiring the rising star Ryan Estrada as artist, is spinning off a semi-autobiographical series called Laak and Loaded, featuring poker star Phil Laak. It's a bit vague how much Laak himself will be contributing to the punchlines but that'll probably be sorted out as part of the creative process.

Other stars have done deals like this-- Mr. T's Neal Adams comic leaps to mind-- but it's a rare sort of arrangement online, and certainly unprecedented in poker. Best of luck to the Life's a Bluff crew-- my poker-obsessed ex-roommates are counting on you guys to get it right!

Print Is Just Like Cell Phones, Apparently

DC Comics invested in Flex Comix earlier this year, in what Chadwick calls a "corporate strategy for two corporations to work together. [Flex Comix] is on the cutting edge of technology. It's unlimited what we can do together." In Japan, Flex Comics has already adapted its manga for cellphone download. At this past summer's San Diego Comic-Con, CMX had cellphones featuring Flex manga. "It's not just a manga panel on a cellphone screen," said Chadwick. "They really take advantage of the technology." But for now, Flex manga is not available for cellphones in the U.S., and CMX will take a more traditional publishing route with Flex, bringing its work to American readers in print editions.

Okay...

There's clearly plenty of demand for turning webcomics into print comics. But the differences between a cell phone and the printed page are greater than the differences between a Webpage and a printed page. By far. You've got a greater emphasis on animation or animation-like effects, less room for juxtaposed images, and-- duh-- a much smaller screen. Also, the Internet's a worldwide medium, but cell phones are much more localized. Meaning that the American audience hasn't seen them yet, even untranslated.

Why wouldn't DC at least begin by turning these Japanese cellphone comics into English cellphone comics, instead of turning them from Japanese to English AND cellphone to print?

I mean, why not change them into rock operas while you're at it?

This Might Be Redundant...

If you're reading this on Webcomics.com, you already know this, but this blog is now feeding to that site. My strategy for Webcomics.com can be summed up as kaizen: continuous small improvements. I'll be posting about those improvements as they develop from here on out.

Also, you may have noticed the posts getting a bit shorter and more focused, the better to accommodate a feed.

Penny and Aggie Research Reference

Via William G. He IMed me asking if there was anything I wanted him to sketch, and less than an hour later, I had a new character sketch that might get used in an upcoming story for my webcomic, Penny and Aggie. Whee, community!

Embracing The Critics

Lanarama, dedicated entirely to making fun of the Smallville creative process, gets a mention on the latest Smallville DVD. Because apparently, SNL-style satire is the greatest form of flattery.

The Siren Call of Prose

This interview with Amy Kim Ganter seems to paint a picture of someone taking baby steps out of the comics medium-- she's changing her magnum opus to prose, her Tokyopop series is ending with the second volume, and though she's got short stories coming up in Goosebumps comics and Flight 4, she emphasizes the comfort level of straight-up prose and the lack of faith in her graphic abilities.

This may also be a matter of staking out a little territory of her own, since her husband Kazu Kibuishi produces the award-winning Flight series and the award-nominated Copper.

Or maybe it's just a case of finding the right medium for one project and using comics for others. At any rate, I just thought it was interesting.

Today's favorite comic: the flexibility of remorse. (But please, Remy, just start calling it "Elfquest." No one will sue you. I promise.)

9/19: Podcasting Country

Seems like new webcomics-based podcasts and vidcasts are turning up more and more frequently these days. In related news, I'll be posting a few new Blowing Bubbles in the next week and a half, then giving up on talk-show podcasts.

They're fun and all, but I have to wonder how many people are listening. With a few exceptions, webcartoonists don't have the kind of star power that I'd associate with a radio must-listen. (Two of those exceptions, the Penny Arcade guys, haven't 'cast since May.) My own experiences at Broken Frontier suggest as much: what feedback I received was for the text pieces, not the podcasts.

Despite this, and despite my own feelings about my abysmal delivery, I don't regret doing "Blowing Bubbles." I think there are aspects of cartoonists' personalities that just don't come through clearly in a prose interview. I was happy to throw a spotlight on those for anyone who did care to listen in. But when it comes to listening myself, now? Webcomics Weekly is the only 'cast for which I can still make the effort.

(And note to the Webcomics Weekly guys: please don't broadcast two hourlong episodes in the same week again, mmkay? It's tough enough to cram one of them into my schedule...)

Even More Fleen

Gary Tyrrell continues to amaze and delight, this time with the best photoset of the MoCCA webcomics exhibit that we're likely to get.

I haven't followed Fleen's Anne Thalheimer as closely, so I missed the fact that she had already recommended The Three Men, the discovery of which I'd credited to Tim Tylor and Alexander Danner. So maybe it's time I started following Anne, too.

Let's just say that today's "favorite comic" is "Ryan Estrada's body of work." Check out those links in the previous post, it's a pretty wild ride. (More Estrada comics are STILL trickling in but I need to get to other stuff today, so I'll get back to this one next week.)

9/18: Are There Any Limits To The Estradaverse?

Update: The list of Ryan's accomplishments is now complete... as far as I know... thanks to info provided by Ryan himself.

The big news of the day is Ryan Estrada, who took the entire webcomics world by storm yesterday. In the space of about 24 hours, Ryan has:

1. announced he has quit his job to become a full-time cartoonist
   
2. set up a new business with an audacious and interesting plan: custom comic books and comic strips made to order-- with more features to come
   
3. contributed "fanart" to White Ninja
   
4. contributed a bonus strip to Sam and Fuzzy
   
5. contributed a guest strip to Ugly Hill
   
6. contributed a guest strip to PC Weenies
   
7. contributed a guest strip to Alien Loves Predator
   
8. contributed a guest strip to Cow & Buffalo
   
9. contributed a guest strip to Dr McNinja
   
10. contributed a guest strip to Hate Song
    
11. contributed a guest strip to Genny
    
12. contributed a guest strip to Wigu
    
13. contributed a guest strip to Dinosaur Comics
    
14. contributed a guest strip to Beaver and Steve
    
15. contributed a guest strip to Butternutsquash
    
16. contributed a guest strip to Cosmobear
    
17. contributed a guest strip to Joe Loves Crappy Movies
    
18. contributed a guest strip to Hero By Night
    
19. contributed a guest strip to Niego
    
20. contributed a guest strip to Dueling Analogs
    
21. contributed a guest strip to Genrezvous Point
    
22. contributed a guest strip to Goats
    
23. contributed a guest strip to Patches
    
24. contributed a guest strip to Joe and Monkey
    
25. contributed a guest strip to Little Gamers
    
26. contributed a guest strip to Nothing Nice to Say
    
27. contributed a guest strip to Multiplex
    
28. contributed a guest strip to Octopus Pie
    
29. contributed a guest strip to Overcompensating
    
30. contributed a guest strip to Questionable Content
    
31. contributed a guest strip to Rob and Elliot
    
32. contributed a guest strip to Scary Go Round
    
33. contributed a guest strip to Starslip Crisis
    
34. contributed a guest strip to Butterfly
    
35. contributed a guest strip to Theater Hopper
    
36. contributed a guest strip to Astronaut Elementary
    
37. contributed a guest strip to Yirmumah
    
38. contributed a guest strip to Instant Classic
    
39. contributed a guest strip to PC Weenies
    
40. contributed a guest strip to iHooky
    
41. contributed a guest strip to Life Meter
    
42. contributed a guest strip to Cow and Buffalo
    
43. contributed art to Project Rooftop
    
44. drew a guest strip for VG Cats (not shown on the VG Cats page itself)
    
45. contributed a guest strip to Filth Hole
    
46. contributed a guest strip to Jamie Dee Galey
    
47. contributed a guest strip to Matriculated
    
48. contributed a guest strip to Muffin Time
    
49. contributed a guest strip to Scene Language (but I can't find it on that site now, so this link goes to Ryan's blog instead. Scene Language is here.)
    
50. posted his first strip as the new artist of Life's a Bluff
    

(There was also supposed to be an I'm Just Drinking episode with Phil Kahn, but that appears to be lost.)

Hmmmm. I think the message here is "I AM FUNNY AND PROLIFIC." Message received.

Expanded from this Fleen post and its comments.

Estrada Attaaaaaack!

Ryan Estrada seems to have gone for another webcomics-related record: MOST WEBCOMICS POSTING HIS GUEST STRIPS POSTED ON A SINGLE DAY. Like his 175-hour comic, this is going to be hard to top. I'm totally envious.

Ryan hasn't made any announcement about this on his blog at this writing, and nobody else seems to know the full list, so rather than post an incomplete list today, I'm just going to wait and try to represent the effort more completely tonight or tomorrow. Let's see how many times YOU spot him.

9/17: Webcomics.com

WE HAZ A NU DOMAINE.

The new Webcomics.com is very much under construction at the moment. Our strategy is slow growth, not a sudden attack. But if you've been enjoying the little tidbits of webcomics news on this blog, you might want to go ahead and start visiting that site now.

Favorite for 9/17

Chirp.

9/15-9/16: Calm Before The New Form

Gisele and I are hard at work on something which will mean a change in blogging policy. Some of you may already know what it is. But no hints until tomorrow!

Yesterday's favorite comic was The Three Men by Kelli Nelson. I expected the most important spoken dialogue in the story to have a more direct payoff, but that's a minor complaint. The scripting has a very "Neil Gaiman" feel, and the abstract geometry in the artwork serves the story. Thanks to Alexander Danner and Tim Tylor for the tip-off.

Today's favorite comic is... honestly, one that I never expected to "favorite." But you got to respect a guy with the courage of his convictions. Day by Day's Chris Muir risks fatwa. Day by Day might be the most popular Web-based political strip running, so there's a chance that this could be actual news.

More Platinum-related tidbits still trickling in. Unpaid internships the best widely advertised opportunity at the company... table space running out... filing for an IPO... a burn rate that means they'll start going into debt in about two months...

It's all painting a pretty clear and consistent picture, a picture familiar to me from the desperate days at Clickwheel. Platinum has not been without success in its primary objectives. But then, neither was Clickwheel. I don't know whether Clickwheel's fate-- eventual buyout by a more established comics player-- is something that Scott Rosenberg and his team would consider acceptable, but I do know that Clickwheel wasn't under anything like the political pressure that Platinum is. One thing is certain: the current situation cannot continue.

9/14: It Belongs In A Museum!

Boy, it was a huge mistake to order all 12 volumes of Death Note and not save them for the weekend. I'm going to be pretty much obsessed for the rest of the day.

First museum exhibit in the U.S. to focus on webcomics opened last night, and early attendance was strong. Since I'm not in New York, I'm relying on Gary Tyrrell and other interested parties to do on-the-spot reporting (Tyrrell's piece is by far the most informative, and will probably remain so-- I keep linking to him because he's that damn good).

I think my own reactions to this are pretty typical and predictable. I'm kicking myself for not already getting in touch with the museum, happy for the artists on display, satisfied for the medium of webcomics in general, relieved that there's this one more thing that will make my parents take my calling just that little bit more seriously. And I'm crossing my fingers that "interest persists," as Tyrrell puts it, because Web guys do tend to have short attention spans.

Jennifer Babcock, who organized the exhibit, seems to have a lot on the ball, and since one of her subjects-- Shaenon Garrity-- and her husband Andrew Farago help run a similar museum in San Francisco, we may have the beginnings of a social network of webcomics curators on our hands.

Of course, if interest does persist, it's only a matter of time before the politics start. If they haven't already. My father is involved with the Contemporary Arts Center here in Virginia Beach, so I'm wearily, intimately familiar with them-- this artist is a prominent minimalist! No, he's a stick-figure hack! This robs the work of its context! You need more text to explain this one! You need to stop over-explaining things! Who are you to judge what gets in and what doesn't? But I hope we have the luxury of such shrill debates.

Other items:

Tyrrell again on the peculiar ubiquity of Chris Hastings.

Ignatz nominations up, with a refreshing absence of "online minicomics."

More information about Platinum's somewhat troubling finances.

I haven't said much about Amazon's CreateSpace because it's print-on-demand, a publishing model I've been trying to move away from. For now let's just say that a competitor to Lulu is clearly important to a lot of other cartoonists who do rely on print-on-demand. Might pick this up again on a slow day.

Favorite of the day: eh, it's one of those competitive days, but let's give it out to Kris Dresden's Ignatz-nominated grace.

Also: which of these two motivational speeches is worse?

9/13: Wow, Do-Over?

I tend to write posts just a little rough and tweak them with a quick edit or two afterward, but I really went overboard this time, with both the "rough" and the "tweaking." If you're getting this via RSS then please just consult the previous post here, with my apologies.

9/13: Not Such A Dark Horse Now, Eh?

I knew that Dark Horse's presence on MySpace was the result of a deal between the two companies, but I had thought that Dark Horse needed MySpace, and MySpace didn't really need Dark Horse or anyone like them. This article implies otherwise, noting that MySpace is trying to get big names in older media to shore it up against Facebook.

Of course Dark Horse still gets some very valuable promotion out of this deal, as do the other companies MySpace is doing these deals with. But that would mean something approaching an equal partnership, within the boundaries of this specific deal. It's kind of wild to think about Dark Horse that way, and to hear it mentioned in the same breath as NBC and the NBA. Especially since that, by definition, makes it less of a "dark horse."

Via Dirk Deppey: Ebooks have begun moving to a new publishing standard. .epub is nonproprietary and apparently quite popular among industry insiders. In the short term this means little change for Wowio or most e-book vendors, but in time it's going to mean some inconvenient changeovers, and then very good things for the business.

Webcomics AND BRAILLE formats? Now that's what I call covering the spread. Gay pun not intended. I wonder what the translation process is like? Sorta related, from xkcd.

Favorite of the day: The posters are great (I'd watch that third movie) and the film "criticism" is pitch-perfect, but what really puts this one over the top for me are Tom's INVISIBL GUNZ.

Comic-Book Artists Do Webcomics (Not Often Enough)

Everyone is right to think this Gene Ha-John Allison exercise is cool, and not just because Gene is a great artist working with John's delightful character design. It's the kind of crossover between established comic-book artists and established Web-native cartoonists that should happen a lot more often. The only other example that leaps to mind is the PVP comic book, which has featured Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Frank Cho, David Finch, and the late, much-missed Mike Wieringo.

Ooh, and Gisele and I got a Marshall sketch from George Perez once.

Can anybody think of any others?

9/12: Things That May Interest You, But Bore Me

Zzzzzz...

1) I'm not too worried about the use of the term "graphic novel" to describe things that are only a few pages in length, or posted piecemeal on the Web, or otherwise not novelistic. I mean, it's embarrassing and wrong, but it's only a symptom of an older generation's lingering contempt for the format.

In the case of the ACLU webcomic, it's one of several symptoms. "We're not trying to disguise a civics lesson in a comic book," says Anthony Romero, and then begins a civics lesson in comics form. Way to begin addressing the issues of keeping government ethical: with an obvious lie. He pauses to remind us that superheroes are imaginary, because only superhero-heads read any comics, and they love being condescended to. Finally, whoever wrote this thing seems to think the best way to illustrate civil liberties' "unpopularity" is with a shot of the Statue of Liberty. The ACLU is worthy; this comic is not.

Calling itself a "graphic novel" is the least of its problems. (At least it doesn't simply call webcomics "novels" like Heroes does.)

2) I'm glad to see Meredith Gran getting some more recognition and all, but I already know she's awesome.

3) When I linked to ComicMix yesterday, I didn't even bother to discuss the phrase "amazingly cool proprietary reader." Because I think that either this reader is innocuous enough that the audience won't pay much attention to it, or else ComicMix will shed it so quickly that it won't be worth discussing, or else they're in big trouble. The lesson from "the infinite canvas debates" still stands: not one person in twenty wants to learn an entirely new way of reading just for the sake of trying something new.

But I'm thinking "innocuous." Because the key word seems to be "proprietary," not "reader." One of the little ways you can still tell when something is coming to the Web from the traditional publishing industry is that there's some sort of token defense against piracy. Dark Horse hides its comics in a frame and provides no direct links to them. Marvel has that Flash reader thing. Jury's out on Zuda.

Never mind that the two fastest-growing comics of 2006 (as far as I know), Cyanide and Happiness and xkcd, have spread so quickly in part because they urge readers to steal their work: xkcd displays a prominent Creative Commons license, while every C&H strip tells readers how to copy it into blogs, Myspace, forums, et cetera. The method seems crazy risky, but it just keeps working, time after time, since it was pioneered by Cory Doctorow.

I'd love to see someone from the New York comics industry, with ink in their veins, take up that method... but let's not expect miracles. Let's do assume that ComicMix is smart enough not to sabotage the reading experience. That means they'll stand on their content, as they should!

4) Platinum's IPO filing. Both Kevin Church and my friend Joey Manley say this is probably the beginning of the end for the company, and that its fall might have serious repercussions for webcomics or comics.

I don't think both can be true. If it uses the IPO money to succeed, that might have repercussions. But if it fails now? Its present holdings amount to: Drunk Duck and a handful of print projects that seem to generate more buzz for Platinum than for themselves.

Drunk Duck does represent real value to its 4000 cartoonists, and losing it would be unpleasant. But not catastrophic: we lost it once before. I was pretty upset about that at the time. But most cartoonists who seemed to care switched over to another service without missing a beat. And while I wouldn't want to take bread out of the mouths of the creators of Hero By Night, Cowboys and Aliens and Gunplay, I think it's fair to say that the future of the field does not depend on their staying in print.

For a failure to matter to the field, Platinum would need more success first.

Favorite of the day: Today's provocative exercise in 9/11ishness is brought to you by the aforementioned Cyanide and Happiness. Don't click if you think it's "still too soon."

9/11: Mixing It Up With A New Crowd

The Perry Bible Fellowship won another award and somebody expressed interest in tech comics, but you don't care about that. The news of the moment is ComicMix, a group blog turning webcomics emporium.

I had the good fortune to meet the founders of ComicMix, and I believe they indicated some interest in producing webcomics, but not to anywhere near this degree. A roster of sixteen professionally produced features is no small thing, and some of those names carry considerable weight with old-school comic-book fans like me. (William Messner-Loebs? John Ostrander! And ah, Marv Wolfman, the man who introduced me to superhero comics...)

So, launching on October 2, probably beating Zuda to market (Zuda claims only that it will launch "in October"). A bit noisy about the fact that their creators retain trademark, while Zuda's and Platinum's do not. Parading the names of their creators, knowing that those names have currency with old-school comics fans. Whatever creative roster Zuda gets and Platinum has can't hope to match ComicMix's collective experience and name recognition. This initiative looks well-equipped to compete with Zuda and Platinum for the eyes, and heart, of the old-school comic-book fan.

I hope that the people involved with ComicMix understand that the webcomics audience is not made up of old-school comic-book fans. The rules are different here. My own experience on the original Adventure Strips suggests that this is a difficult lesson for some: Adventure Strips was very popular with the Comics Buyer's Guide crowd, but that was insufficient to gain a commercial foothold. Of course, that was four to five years ago, a generation in Internet time, but I don't think webcomics have gotten much more oldschool in the interim. We still don't have a single superhero hit. ComicMix's real competition isn't Zuda or Platinum, it's Penny Arcade and Dumbrella and the swarm of independents.

I'm part of that swarm, but I think competition and diversity is good for the field, and certainly, people who've been writing and drawing professionally for two decades or more stand a great chance of raising our game. I'm looking forward to it.

Perhaps also responding to the scheduled Zudapocalypse, Platinum Studios goes public.

According to CBR and Newsarama, Kristofer Straub and Scott Kurtz are working on a how-to book for webcomics. Kurtz and Straub are also part of the only lengthy podcast I still listen to, Webcomics Weekly.

Favorite comic of the day: Since I didn't find it before now, my favorite is Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis' Cthulu Tract. Thanks, CBR. But if I'm gonna play fair and go with something published yesterday, then let's make it Jeffrey Rowland and the Weedmaster's lessons from 9/11.

9/10: Told You So

And now we're at Monday and I can barely get my head around all this good stuff. There are THREE serious contenders for favorite comic of the day. But if I had to pick one... There's only one that made me laugh for a full minute and that's Octopus Pie. Another great storytelling idea that I just have to steal sometime. See for yourself.

Next up: Stuff Sucks' Liz Greenfield mocks us all-- MOCKS us, I tell you-- by waiting until the fuss dies down to reveal the strip's TRUE ending. It still leaves some loose ends but it's a good deal more satisfying and appropriate. Unless this is yet another ruse...

And finally, David Willis' admittedly in-jokey but skillful tenth anniversary special.

Honorable mentions: Osama bin Laden's continued slide into irrelevance. And... "LESBO SNATCH-O-GRAM! COMPLIMENTS OF THE DARK ONE!"

Yeah, that should do it. Nothing particularly newsworthy today.

9/9: Slender Sundays

Pickings are slim today, as they often are on Sundays-- the more time goes by, the more cartoonists seem to follow the cycles of Internet usage rather than newspaper-founded tradition. Which means that a lot of the best material goes up Monday, the busiest Web day of the week, but on Sunday webcomics hit snooze and go back to bed.

Looks like my favorite of the day is this alternate ending to Dr. No.

What really made me laugh today was catching up with the most recent week worth of Luann, particularly this strip. T.J. could actually give lessons to Stan from Penny and Aggie.

Comixpedia.org, the webcomics community's Wikipedia alternative, is under new management. Best of luck to Josh Roberts.

And at CBR, Bill Reed has been celebrating webcomics all week.

9/8: Mostly Fanboy Enthusiasm Today

Favorite comic of the day has gotta go to Wonderella. "...real busy with my charity work..."

But the comic that's got me salivating for upcoming installments is Starslip Crisis: Alterverse War. Kristofer Straub is writing this as a prequel and a crossover with 29 other comics-- including Fans! I don't think anyone else has really done a webcomics-based uber-crossover in quite a while, and Straub is an accomplished mimic as well as one of the best writers we've got in the field right now. Looking forward to it.

Related and I missed it: almost a year to the day after its last installment, Checkerboard Nightmare gets two in one shot.

Howard Tayler knows where his next batch of new readers are coming from.

Covered already: I wish they'd stop calling this kind of stuff "comic books on cell phones." You can cram a comic onto a cell phone but the resulting format is nothing like a book.

PC Weenies' Krishna M. Sadasivam celebrates his impending fatherhood with a new autobiographical series... because... fatherhood means he'll have more free time? I wish Krishna all the best but I suspect that Uncubed may not last long enough to show us baby's first steps.

Alexander Danner and Tim Tylor have reminded me that Phil Foglio's early works Buck Godot: Zap Gun For Hire and What's New are now being serialized on his site, albeit without clearly labeled RSS feeds of their own. It's interesting to see this early work of Phil's again. Originally published in the recently deceased Dragon magazine, What's New is a pretty good torch-bearer for what "gamer comics" were like before that meant "videogamer comics." Godot has a few story problems that I think we all overlooked back in the 1980s: the first story shows a much meaner Godot than the others, and the "Rat and Teleporter" story relies on Godot pulling a staff of experts out of nowhere. But it's always lots of fun, and as with many webcomics, one of the pleasures is watching the creator continue to get better.

9/7: An Embarrassment of Riches

Embarrassment of riches as I look for my favorite comic today. Starslip Crisis seems to be wrapping up a wry sequence where the main villain takes a Caribbean "vacay" with unintended consequences. PvP's latest sequence does actual research instead of repeating the same five anime jokes I've heard for the last ten years. Doonesbury earns back my trust, and a non-webcomic honorary mention, with a quotation that I've heard used by girls younger than Alex: good to see an old warhorse getting young people right. Diesel Sweeties has an awesome knock-knock joke. The carefully laid plan in Erfworld continues to go magnificently t**s-up, a first-act turning point done exactly right. Perry Bible Fellowship continues to exist.

But when all is said and done, I gotta give props to The Interlopers, Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon, for the utterly uproarious Sugarshock #2, which I just discovered last night. It starts with Abraham Lincoln and ends with... well, that would be spoilers. Maybe I would have learned about it sooner IF DARK HORSE MYSPACE HAD AN RSS FEED OR A MAILING LIST OR ANYTHING THAT WOULD KEEP US NON-MYSPACERS IN THE LOOP.

I know, I know, I need to learn more about MySpace. I'm sure there's a great way of keeping track of MySpace pages that I don't know about yet.

Speaking of MySpace, here's a new spin on old, sad news. Cyclist and cartoonist Eric Lappegard died July 23 of complications from an auto accident. Friends and colleagues are coming together for a MySpace-headquartered memorial project.

Master artist Kazu Kibuishi announces the approach of his next project. Amazon pre-orders are already available to the faithful.

DC Comics meets Second Life? That seems to be one of the features vaguely promised for 2008 in this press release.

9/6

Missed it: Sluggy Freelance on NPR. Not too much new info here for longtime fans, but it's interesting to hear how Pete fields questions.

I've given the Create A Comic Project permission to use Fans, Rip and Teri and Penny & Aggie work to help teach kids to write. It seems I'm in increasingly good company.

This Flickr-based "Caption This" site looks interesting, but I'd like it better if we could do speech balloons, thought balloons and multiple captions.

Only vaguely webcomics-related, but hilarious: Lulu sues Hulu.

"THE INTERNET IS RUINING YOUR FUTURE ARTS CAREER?" I don't think so. The article writer mentions Penny Arcade as a counterexample at the last minute but then shrugs it off with "entrepreneurial artists are few and far between."

Thing is, entrepreneurial artists have always been few and far between. Yes, having all that art out there freely available does lower the value of art, but artists of previous generations had nothing like today's options for making their art available. The rules of the game keep changing, and quickly, but I think there will always be opportunities for those who make their art special enough to stand out from the pack. And I think there will always be only a few who are lucky enough, and a larger few who are smart and lucky enough, to make their way. Flip the law of supply and demand around and apply it to the suppliers of art-- they have plenty of demand for an audience, but there is only limited supply.

Favorite of the day: this brilliant layout by Joe England captures an entire town under the spell of the lead. It's much more frightening and disturbing than the scenes that actually show her at work. Joe England is walking a fine line here, trying to maintain sympathy for Sandra while inspiring revulsion at her deeds, ratcheting up the tension without completely abandoning what makes the extras and lead characters likable. I don't know if he can bring this one off-- it's his most ambitious stuff to date-- but right now I'm definitely riveted.

Maybe I Should Just Start Calling These Posts By Their Dates-- "Webcomics Yada Yada 9/5" Ahoy.

You may find the math intimidating in this PDF study, so I'll break out the best bits for you:

1) The Marvel Universe is very like a real social network.
2) Captain America was connected to more people than anyone else.
3) The Avengers is the MU's greatest social hub.
4) The most frequently reinforced connection is between Spider-Man and Mary Jane, making the most popular single plot in this superhero universe their love story.
5) Villains "socialize" far less than heroes.
6) I need to get on Facebook and beef up my Myspace and Comicspace already.

I wonder what the author-- a physicist, for Pete's sake-- thinks about the death of Captain America and the widely rumored annulment of Peter and Mary Jane's marriage in "One More Day?" Does that bode ill for the whole network? Or might other socializers and relationships arise in the vacuum?

Dunno. This has certainly gotten me a lot more interested in the study of social networks.

Interview with the always diplomatic Paul Levitz about Flex and Zuda, subset of larger DC interview. Responses from Gary Tyrrell and (in the comments) Xaviar Xerexes here.

I think we're all trusting our guts on this one. People like me, who have always been happy to play the DC-Marvel game, are ready to play it some more or at least check out the new rules, whereas independents would like to remain independent, thankyouverymuch. What annoys me most is that I think Zuda's delay in releasing its contracts has left its critics with no ammunition and its sympathizers with nothing to go on but optimism, and I'm not so sure that wasn't part of the plan all along. Transparency is transparency, guys.

Heidi mourns the loss of Disney Adventures and links to lots of takes on it. A sad event, to be sure... the Adventures book seemed like sort of a wildlife preserve for non-Archie kids' comics, and for Disney's wide variety of charming characters. The way it follows so closely after the demise of The Weekly World News makes me wonder if there's any future for airy reading in the supermarket checkout line. Archie is holding on, but that's pretty much all Archie ever does.

Could the comics featured in Adventures have an afterlife on the Web, and/or in album collections-- perhaps bundled with Barks, Gottfredson and other Disney comics produced over the years? Lord knows comics aficionados still love their Barks, and I think webcomics for kids is a pretty underexplored market, right now. (Yes, I know about Dandy and Company, Ozy and Millie and Bonus.com, but I mean in general.)

The hubbub about this comics Reaganography seems to consist entirely of conservatives who think liberals shouldn't create a comic like this and liberals who think they should. Bonus points have got to go to the conservative blogger who, apparently without irony, dismissed the comic-book form as a shallow exercise while syndicating the Day by Day strip prominently in his blog.

Okay, so apparently Doonesbury CAN still sneak some PG-13 material into the papers-- though I'd be surprised if some papers did not give the topless Alex an "emergency coloring job," like the women in certain Marvel comics. (Yes, it's true: certain women in Marvel Comics could actually be even less scantily-clad than they are.)

And favorite comic of the day: "The Casimir effect can indeed stabilize an artificially made wormhole, but it would not be possible to go back any further in time than the point at which it was made. There is, however, a way around this."

Odds and Ends 9/4

KimonoKitsy Studios does a sketch for an add-on to an Osamu Tezuka exhibit, which gets the studio into the local paper. There's marketing for you! (Watch someone interpret the above item as "KimonoKitsy Studios desecrates Tezuka's grave to promote self.")

Congratulations to Dirk Tiede and his lovely bride.

Spotlight: Octopus Pie

From Octopus Pie:



I've been meaning to link this one for a while. Meredith Gran and I go back a ways-- her Skirting Danger was one of the founding strips on Graphic Smash. I lost touch with her after the strip moved to Keenspot, and it bogged down in the middle of a storyline and never really developed the promise of its premise. Mer resurfaced a year later with a thoroughly charming animation thesis project, and now she's doing a new series which, really, puts her pre-grad work to shame. In fact, it puts a lot of other people's current work to shame, too. It's the kind of good that makes me look at my own work and say, "am I worthy of being on the same Internet as this?"

Eve and Hanna are preschool pals reunited as young roommates in a New York apartment. Mer is definitely working with the "odd couple" archetype here, but she's not a slave to it. Eve is a fussy superego, a little bit repressed and quick to scowl, but she can get wildly creative, as in her design of a theft-proof bicycle and later abandonment of same. Hanna is mostly id-- she doesn't seem to have changed much since kindergarten, to the point of going around topless for the sheer joy of it. But she does worry about losing toker cred, and even into her carefree life, some rain must fall.

The current strip, a response to the imminent closing of Coney Island's famous park, shows off one of the best things about the art: its sense of place. Backgrounds are backgrounds, and spatial relations relate, playing nicely off a style of cartoon facial expression that I'm used to seeing in "flatter" work. I'm really really sick of New York City (and its clones) as a default setting for every superhero story ever made, but I'll visit Meredith Gran's New York City any day.

There are a few issues with the site design, but nothing that can't be fixed in a day, so I'll just e-mail Mer about those privately. It'll be good to have an excuse to get back in touch. Kudos to Dumbrella for following Graphic Smash and Keenspot's lead and giving her hosting. Y'know, you guys could do worse than actually bringing her into the fold...

Webcomics Odds And Ends 9/3

Is any publicity good publicity? How about if someone says "this made me laugh" but misspells the name of your comic and provides no link?

Or how about an article explaining how you LOST a contest?

Last, best PAX roundup.

INCREASE WEBCOMICS READERSHIP, DESTROY FACEBOOK. Related is this Doonesbury, which I suppose is a landmark for the social-networking site. But man, I'm tired of the little dance newspaper comics do around anything remotely risque. I assume that Alex is posting some kind of Girls Gone Wildish image but it could be a dozen other possibilities just as easily.

Favorite comic from yesterday: the rules for piggybacks (three pages, click for more).

Webcomics News & Things 8/30-8/31

Congratulations to August J. Pollak, whose Some Guy With A Website is now featured on the Huffington Post. The HufPo is the fifth most popular blog on Earth according to Technorati.

Here's a contest that's actually respectable: "Pitch Your Game" from The Penny Arcade Expo.

More Wikiscanner fun: state governments discover their employees are filing paperwork on 8-Bit Theater.

Censored: This Opus installment. Newspaper editors continue ever vigilant for the next cartoon jihad, sort of the way Homeland Security keeps watching for the next kamikaze hijacker. (Lightning will strike twice ANY DAY NOW!) Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that this is not a portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed or even of a Muslim woman, but a moonbat trying on multiple identities, but whatever.

Comics installments: Uh oh. Okay, I'm just going to give up guessing where Brad Guigar is going with all this. Also from Brad: the best pun I've seen in ages. And I don't need to tell you why I like this one, do I?

My favorite comic of the day: Shaenon Garrity asks, "What if Edward Gorey drew Star Trek's "The Trouble With Tribbles?" Apparently it would be AWESOME.

Miscellaneous: "KNEEL BEFORE BARGAINS..."

GARY GARY GARY GARY GARY GARY

It's like Jeffrey Rowland is giving a seminar titled "How to Separate T Campbell From His Money." I haven't bought a merchandise shirt in over a year, but you better believe I'm buyin' this one. I was sold before I even knew it was for charity.

Other stuff from all over:

Penny and Aggie on a tablet PC, via Wowio.

I suppose congratulations are in order to Jorge Vega for winning the Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge, even if the headline "millions of votes received" looks pretty shabby if you know that "voters" were encouraged to "vote as many times as they liked." But Vega's Gunplay does have an interesting pitch and early fragments look promising. Some good may yet come of this. But Jorge, prepare to spend the next year being known as THAT GUY.

Stuff Sucks is ending somewhat awkwardly and abruptly as Liz Greenfield struggles with the slower connections in her new digs. I suppose the transition between this strip, where the lead resolves to stop jumping from relationship to relationship, to the most recent two, where he dives right into a new relationship, is appropriate to the character's aimless pattern. I suppose the fate of the record store is kind of funny. But it's a disappointing ending to a young-relationship strip that looked like it could have grown to give Questionable Content tough competition. I hope Greenfield refines her art a bit and comes back with a brand-new winner in a year or two.

The Paranormals webcomic helps kids learn to read.

A couple days ago, I suggested that nobody made that big a deal about webcomics anniversaries anymore. Then somebody made a huge deal about The Joy of Tech's 1000TH STRIP DING DING DING DING! The universe mocks me.

I've been meaning to link to this quote for a while: "Hello registered user! I am the semigod for this artificial pocket universe. Please select an option." The background of that panel is truly inspired.

Strips that are hilarious, but only if you know the series in question: example one, example two.

I thought this Wordpress plugin was pretty funny too.

Wait-- Sproose can't be "user-powered search!" Mahalo is already "human-powered search!" Unless... USERS ARE NOT HUMANS...

New webcomics magazine. Gisele and I have agreed to be interviewed for issue #2, so I'm totally biased, but it's by Michael Rouse-Deane, who's an old hand at this by now.

I wonder how many cartoonists might benefit from this quick how-to about image optimization for search engines?

Odds'n'Ends

All right, I gotta get this day started, so let's blitz through the rest of this:

Wowio: Just to be extra clear, since it seems some missed this: "information shared in aggregate only" means that no information specific to individuals, like e-mail addresses or such, is ever shared with anyone. Wowio asks for demographic information like age and income level as part of the signup process.

Worth listening to, MARVEL AND DC: Christopher Bird outlines a sensible proposal for using webcomics' well-established and addictive episodic format to save, or at least help, the traditional comic-book industry. This conversation is an endless one and I can't get sucked in today, but Bird is one of the few big thinkers who's still in the direct market up to his eyeballs, so he's worth reading if you are too.

Not sure why this blog is linking to a five-year-old comics-PHP-making program. I'm kind of interested in the program's stated ability to build PHP pages without a database, which would certainly make setup easier. But I'm wondering if you pay a price on the back end. I've contacted the people known to have used it and I'll let you know if I learn anything.

Jesus, every time I think Goblins can't possibly get any more violent (not really safe for ANYWHERE)...

Unintentionally Hilarious Headlines

"A flood of emotions in a Katrina comics serial" - I dunno, I think it may still be too soon for the puns.

"Comic creators spin pennies into gold" - Tycho and Gabe do micropayments???

"Penny Arcade Site Debuts" - Well, it's about time.

Plus, intentionally hilarious dialogue: "You're having sex with it, aren't you?"

The Howio of Wowio: Our Profit, Your Privacy

I've been getting some questions about Wowio. How does it work? Is readers' privacy secure? How is it that readers pay nothing but Gisele and I make money?

Wowio exists because advertisers are always looking for new ways to reach customers. The ads are embedded in the e-books Wowio sells-- downloadable PDFs, generally designed for the screen. Wowio's clients include companies like Verizon and Electronic Arts.

Wowio compensates creators 50 cents per unique download. If you download our first e-book over and over and over again... stop doing that, because Gisele and I won't make any more than fifty cents. But if you download all 14 Penny and Aggie e-books (nine available at this writing, the rest coming soon), Gisele and I make $7. And if two people do that, we make $14. As it is, Gisele and I have made over $1,000 with Wowio in less than a week, most of it with just four books.

And now for the big question: how does Wowio tell that you're unique? For the answer, I phoned the company president and CTO, William Lidwell:

"If there was a magical, universally-agreed-upon standard for determining that, we'd be all over it. In fact, that might be my next project, given the challenges we've had with this one."

At present, Wowio asks for one of three different kinds of information: a "non-anonymous" e-mail address (my Gmail account is no good, because I could have fifty of those), a scan of some ID like a driver's license, library card or passport (interesting but a lot of work for a signup) or a credit card number (what I ended up using).

It's this feature that has triggered some small controversy. Webcomics blogger extraordinaire Gary Tyrrell admits, "There's no way in hell that I'd ever transmit either [CC numbers or IDs] to somebody offering me something for free. Why yes, I am a cynical sumbitch, thank you."

But I'm not sure why Gary thinks a company that asks for a credit card number, or alternatives, and no money is less trustworthy than a company that asks for a credit card number and money. When my identity was stolen, it was due to a transaction made in an Orlando restaurant. There is always risk in exchanging information, online or off-- and many companies don't have founders saying things like this:

"We don't store identifying information, and there is no way for anyone at this company to break individual information out of aggregate. Some people have even sent us driver's licenses with certain information blocked out-- we accept those."

How, then, does Wowio continue to verify that the same individuals aren't signing up multiple times? Lidwell's answer was partly confidential, but the gist is that they use well-worn techniques from other online vendors who do ask for money, and err on the side of user security.

Ultimately, it's your call whether you believe Lidwell's words. My own beliefs are that a writer of books on management and design doesn't put his reputation on the line lightly, and that Verizon and Electronic Arts are not in the habit of tying their brands to scandals-in-the-making. When I signed up for Wowio to download the Sore Thumbs collections, I typed in my credit card info without a second thought.

And People Thought Fans' Ending Had A Wild Resolution To Its Love Triangle.

My favorite comic of last week goes out to crossword lovers everywhere.

Noteworthy: Inverloch has concluded recently at 764 pages (excepting some "where are they now" bits that Sarah Ellerton has promised-- but all is resolved). Curious new readers, start here.

Informative: Slashdot has a lengthy writeup of the Penny Arcade Expo, Day 1.

Fun: Found this webcomics-themed puzzle from an abandoned blog. How many can you guess?

Yesterday's Blogvictims Defend Themselves

D.J. Coffman responds to my earlier question by giving an IP address of his own, different from the one cited. I'm sure one of his fans can verify that sooner or later? He also speculates the edits were the work of his one-time collaborator Bob McDeavitt.

Needless to say, not knowing who vandalized the Graphic Smash entry doesn't make me any happier. But it was a couple years ago; I'll let it go. In a day or two.

---

Matthew Toner of Zeros 2 Heroes did his best to address my earlier impressions. I hesitate to inflict my speaking voice on all of you any more, but I thought you might be interested in our exact conversation (mp3).

My takeaways? I was interested in the opportunity "Comic Creation Nation" might represent for beginning writers. Z2H will use its federal funds to commission artists for some user-selected pitches. ...Yes, they retain trademark. ...No, they are not paying writers at present. But when I was just getting started, I would have worked under those terms to get something professional drawn from one of my full-length scripts, some centerpiece for a portfolio I could take to paying clients. (I didn't ask if Comic Creation Nation would give the writers any say in choosing the artists who worked with them, though, which could be an important qualifier. I mean, Rob Liefeld is technically a "professional...")

So I think that is a modest value-add for beginners. A freelancing opportunity for artists, too, although Toner's admission that different nationalities get paid different rates may come back to haunt him.

Beyond that, Z2H seems scattered. As Toner explains it, the central idea is helping people start from the bottom and fly into the sky: "zeroes to heroes," get it? But Z2H is also doing that ReBoot thing where users vote on five professional pitches, and offering some hands-off hosting packages, which Toner says are for more seasoned webcomickers. He also says "We may have a few false starts," which says to me, "We're not committed to any one project so much as to the general idea of helping out creators... somehow."

I've been guilty of similarly cloudy thinking, so I feel a stab of sympathy. I never assumed Toner was rubbing his hands together in fiendish glee at the prospect of bilking cartoonists. I don't think there are too many Helena Dionysuses in the comics field. But if a company has only a vague sense of its goals, it often finds itself on the path of least resistance, a path paved with good intentions. I hope Z2H can blaze a better trail.

Bile Pt. 5: And Now We Know

Todd W. Allen points out that we do definitely know that DC is holding the trademarks, in part of a lengthy piece that covers Zuda, Drunk Duck, and scrappy independents like Jennie Breeden (another businesscartoonist Gisele and I look to for inspiration).

Bile Pt. 4: More Wikisins of the Past

Once more, with feeling:

Is this D.J. Coffman's Wikipedia edit history? The address is located in Connellsvile, Pennsylvania, where D.J. resided as a child. Said author claimed Yirmumah was one of the most popular strips on the Internet and edited Graphic Smash's entry to read "Completely Graphically Smashingly Comics online!"

I am displeased.

(Update: D.J. answers, "No." More in the comments.)

Getting The Bile Out Of My System 8/24

I have a lot of negative things to say today. Let's start with "mild embarrassment" and work our way up. Part 1 of some.

Mild embarrassment: Brad, you know you're my bud, and I hope this doesn't sting too badly...

Last week, I said Brad Guigar had his best week to date. Part of my judgment was based on where his plot was going and part was based on where I thought it was going to go. I was wrong.

I thought we were in for an extended sequence where Captain Hero, disillusioned not only with the Legion of Justice but with the superhero establishment, committed fully to the Dark Hood identity, shifting from his earlier role of doing good by managing "evil" to trying to do good by actually performing "evil."

Well... no. This week, Hero handed Evil, Inc. over to its original owner, saving himself a lot of headaches and us a lot of interesting conflicts.

So the previous week becomes... still entertaining, but something less than Brad's best, or the best comic of the week. Brad's still given himself some good story options as Evil Inc. goes from a struggling institution to a small remnant angling for a comeback. But in a lot of ways, we're back to the status quo, and Hero leaves just as he was getting more interesting.

All IMHO, of course. I'm more of a story guy than a gag-strip guy, and I enjoy changes in the status quo more than readers who are trained to see them as temporary. I'm sure Brad's gotten some readers who say to him, "This Captain Hero as CEO storyline NEVER ENDS! Who do you think you are, CHRIS CLAREMONT?" That balancing act never gets easier.

How Zuda Fits Into The "Loser-Generated Comics" Movement

Zuda's a slightly different beast from the Comic Book Challenge and (apparently) Zeros 2 Heroes, much like a porpoise is not quite a dolphin. On the one hand, its note that "creators will retain copyright" sounds good, but... oh, take it away, Christopher Butcher:

[Zudacomics.com] also says that the work will be published "...under fairly conventional publishing agreements..." which is what you really need to pay attention to.

First and foremost, DC Comics may be benevolent enough to grant you the copyright to your own work, but they haven't said anything about the Trademark (basically, the title of the work). Trademark is interesting, it's why the KRAZY KAT collections that Fantagraphics are doing are called Krazy & Ignatz and why the GASOLINE ALLEY collections that D+Q are doing are called Walt & Skeezix. The copyright on those early works may have fallen into the public domain, but the titles (marks) used in business (trade) haven't, and are still owned by the syndicates. So does Zuda own the trademark to your series, or do you?

Secondly, "fairly conventional publishing agreements" [are] what keeps WATCHMEN and V FOR VENDETTA in print at DC Comics against their creator's wishes. You can own the copyright to the work, as Alan Moore and his collaborators do, but those "...fairly conventional publishing agreements..." could say pretty-much anything. Moore's says that the publishing rights for WATCHMEN only revert to him once the book is out of print for a set period of time. That book will never be out of print...

On the other hand, I have reason to believe Zuda will be paying a work-for-hire rate that I consider acceptable before they secure any rights. If that's true, then Zuda and I can do business together-- I don't feel the need to own everything I've ever done. (If I did, I never would have sold Marvel an Avengers story.) But I don't know the exact terms for sure. (We're ready to see those contracts any time you're ready to put 'em on the website, fellas.)

Webcomics In The News 8/23: Loser-Generated Content, Eh?

Zeros 2 Heroes in the news again, eh? I bet you never even thought about what the largest Canadian webcomics "publisher" was before now, eh? Web 2.0: continuing to set records no one cares about. Eh?

"Comic Creation Nation." I've heard a name very like that before... can't put my finger on it...

I've come to realize that one of the great things about the modern comics scene is that nobody cares whether you're from Canada, or the U.S.A., or the Netherlands, so long as you speak the same language and understand the general needs of your audience. A lot of people don't even know that Gisele Lagace and Ryan North are Canadians, and that's fine, because their work's appeal translates well to American audiences. Sure, there are some cultural differences, but it's not like Canada has flying cars or anything. Is there really a need for a Canadian-only webcomics channel?

Ah, but if it weren't Canadian-only, it wouldn't qualify for the Canada New Media Fund. A nation spending money to raise its own cultural capital is a good thing. I just wish I were confident that the Fund's money would filter down to the creators.

Like most other online "talent farms" (Zuda is a kinda-sorta exception... I think), the idea here seems to be to trap creators with the promise of multimedia development deals, the implied promise of financial compensation, and some squirrelly language about who actually holds the rights, so that the company can claim it's the holder of "thousands of intellectual properties" to herd-mentality investors who are looking to be part of "the next Marvel, Web 2.0." (These investors either don't realize the long-term incompatibility between intellectual property ownership and the Web 2.0 spirit of sharing, or they hope to sell the idea to others who won't.)

It's offensive and upsetting to me to see this snake oil peddled in place of the real value-adds of webcomics collectives past. Keenspot got overambitious in the long run, but it offered free hosting, social networking, cross-promotion and advertising dollars, back when those things were hard to come by. Modern Tales debuted as a new way for cartoonists to make money. OhNoRobot was and is a means to make your comic more findable. Webcomics Nation debuted as an advanced tool suite. Clickwheel represented a hub for comics formatted for a new medium. All of these projects offered these things without laying any automatic title to the rights of its creators. I know, because I was a creator using all five of those.

Zeros 2 Heroes offers...

The chance to help out Zeros 2 Heroes, and a chance to feel more Canadian, I guess.

Company president Matthew Toner: "We're calling on all Canadian novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, journalists-- pretty much anyone who can set down a laptop and write-- to submit their storylines for development. We want to change the way genre entertainment is created and consumed. The strategy is simple and effective: combine user-generated content with social media enhancements to produce market-ready properties that have a built-in following of hardcore fans."

How nice for them. How... investory. SUBMIT!

I resist the term "loser-generated content" because I know there are lots of cartoonists out there, especially beginners, who do good work but who haven't thought through the business side of cartooning, and I don't want to call these guys losers. Because they don't lose at everything. But if they make a bad deal, they're gonna lose at that.

UPDATE: Company president Matthew Toner has asked for a chance to clarify his press release; we'll be speaking tomorrow afternoon/evening. I admit the possibility that Z2H has a value-add it has not shared with the press. I'll share whatever I learn.

---

Also, Robert Khoo on the Penny Arcade Expo: "[It] has grown into something much more than the comic itself. Some people don't even know about Gabe and Tycho."

(Cue weeping and gnashing of teeth as purists cry out, "IT USED TO BE ABOUT THE COMICS, MAN!")

Some Things That Made Me Laugh

"NO FLASHBACKING!"

"That sounded like a great adventure! I can't believe I missed it!"

Forgot to feature this earlier: Joss Whedon does webcomics, all other webcomics scriptwriters now obsolete. (Except Warren Ellis.)

Give the gift of metafiction.

Finally, this continues Edge the Devilhunter's sweetest and best sequence to date.

Webcomics In The News 8/22

Actual quotes from Platinum Studios' 2007 Comic Book Challenge: "Vote often for your favorite comic!... [after voting] Thanks for voting! Vote as much as you like."

I'm not sure the Challenge and I share the same concept of "voting."

Interview with Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots, who is one of Gisele's and my role models right now. She reveals how she's spent her time before and after the donation drive. Graphic novel, she says...?

Interview with Josh Neufeld of A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge.

And what the Hell, almost all the usual channels have linked to it or displayed it: David Malki! is better than Comic-Con, featuring the musical stylings of Kristofer Straub and many, many cartoonist guests.

Webcomics Scuttlebutt 8/19

Is this Tim Buckley's Wikipedia edit history? If not, then someone is sure doing a good impression of Buckley's low tolerance for bad press. (The only thing that makes me hesitate is that we only have the sender's word that this IP address matches Buckley's e-mail. It seems unlikely that anyone else would edit this obsessively, but with all the CAD fans out there, it's possible.) Update: an anonymous reader notes that the IP address is from New Haven, Connecticut, Buckley's hometown. Hat tips: Randy Milholland, Scott Kurtz.

The Penny Arcade Expo itself will be a game, because Robert Khoo is the smartest businessman in webcomics.

Hmmm. Joe England updated less than six hours after I asked him to. For my next trick, I command Karl Rove to resign! What, already? What are the limits of this power?? I command Robert Khoo to begin rewriting my Wikipedia entry in a way that makes me GADZILLIONS!

Best Webcomic Of The Week?

As far as I'm concerned, this one goes to Brad Guigar, who had maybe his best week to date.

Guigar's gentle, humorous take on super-heroes actually underscores their moral ambiguities better than the angst-heavy, oh-so-serious approach that's become the industry standard. The Legion of Justice, a superhero group, has bought out Evil Inc., a supervillain company, and appointed their own Captain Hero as CEO. Hero moonlights as supervillain Dark Hood to meet the demands of his dual roles. Mr. Invincible, leader of the Legion of Justice, demands profits while squandering his own resources on trophy girlfriends, but still believes himself Hero's moral superior.

Guigar followed last week's explosion with a meaty confrontation between Hero and Invincible. With two final words, Captain Hero commits to a startling change in his life, a change Guigar has been quietly setting up all year.

I'll take Guigar's brand of existential superhero over Civil War or Countdown any day.

Also: DAMMIT JOE ENGLAND UPDATE MORE OFTEN PLZ KTHXBYE

We Knew This Headline Would Show Up Somewhere, Because People From The 1960s Were Still Alive

So let's get it out of our systems already:

HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTENT, BATMAN
HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTENT, BATMAN
BATMAN
BATMAN
HOLY USER-GENERATED
HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTEN
USER-GENERATED
HOLY BAT
HOLY USER
USER BATMAN
HOLY USER-GENERATED CONTENT, BATMAN


And now we can move on.

David McGuire, You FOOL!

David, don't you realize that uhhh satirizing me only uhh FEEDS MY EGO and makes it uhhh EVER MORE MONSTROUS?



David's nailed my speech pattern, or the pattern I get when I'm nervous. The CRFH and WCCA stuff is on the money. But he must be using a six-year-old reference photo, because I got laser eye surgery in 2001, well before he and I worked together on our pitch to Mad Magazine. (And if you want to build a case against my ego, which isn't too hard, maybe you shouldn't use the post where I ask for help or admit ignorance at least seven times.)

Apparently David's webcomics satire has been over a year in the making. If so, I hope he's gonna get more current with his targets. History is so 2006.

Perennials.

I've enjoyed singling out some of my favorite webcomics installments this week. Have you enjoyed reading about them? Then you might enjoy the "Thirty To Go" series, my last work for Broken Frontier. First three installments up here and here and here.

Latest Faves...

Tough call. Diesel Sweeties has a particularly wry installment about RFID tags, one of my own favorite subjects. And this is just awwww.

But I think I gotta give it to the alternate-reality John F. Kennedy admitting the reality of his own assassination (seen here). Antique Kennedy Chronicles is presented so matter-of-factly that I can almost forget how insane it is. This is a John F. Kennedy with four wives and two husbands who doesn't hesitate to call himself a "king" and makes bad decisions that get him into crazy adventures. But despite his occasional foolishness, this JFK has something in common with the original, or our memory of the original: a primal American can-do-everything spirit. I want this Kennedy to be real-- and his reaction yesterday threatens my hopes.

True Story

Elanor Cooper and Gisele Lagace and I spent about 20 minutes in a conference call to discuss which chat platform we would use to conduct a three-way chat.

THE WONDERS OF TECHNOLOGY

By the way, Elanor and JJ Naas are doing really interesting work on The Broken Mirror. You'll probably see it in the "fave episodes" section sometime soon.

Fave Comic 8/7

Not safe for work... although really, are any comics exactly safe for work?

I think this may technically be for 8/8, but oh well. Corey Marie looks to be one of the Web's rising stars, and her canny grasp of relationships is one of the factors in her favor. It's on full display here.

The fact that this story went from 25 episodes to 20 somewhere in the middle ("3 of 25"... "18 of 20") shows a certain seat-of-her-pants quality to the creative process, but that's hardly uncommon among cartoonists, and it's a good sign that she's willing to cut extraneous material to move things along.

My Favorite Webcomics From Yesterday

Kristofer Straub is one of my favorite writers churning out webcomics on a regular basis right now. For the most part, he's outgrown his early tendency toward overcleverness. I absolutely loved the giant Starslip Crisis collection I picked up at Comic-Con, which represents his best effort to date.

Even so, my heart sank at this installment of the series. I felt I knew where it was going, and I was right. Kris's earlier Checkerboard Nightmare managed to be navel-gazing comics satire yet mostly funny. But the Starslip Comic-Con sequence was contrived, cliched (ha ha! Trekkers are geeky!) and embarrassing (a webcomic that claims webcomics are widely ignored? Boo hoo poor you). Like a great comedic actor stuck in a cheesy movie, protagonist Vanderbeam struggled to mine good jokes from poor material.

And then Kris pulled out his hole card, and Starslip's plot roared back to life. In yesterday's installment, Vanderbeam commits more deeply to a passion that threatens to consume him, for a dead woman whom he barely knew. He's creating an A.I. more advanced than anything in his time, and although he takes some precautions, he's mucking around with the timestream and that's never a good idea. There will be consequences. And yet I can't help but root for him-- whether he's an old fop, a pompous aristocrat or an impulsive commander, in his heart Vanderbeam is just a lonely man who wants to be loved.

And speaking of love, one of the emotional highlights of Sluggy Freelance has been the improbable bond between its protagonist and an omnivorous alien. Yesterday, that bond may have come to an end:

"I feel like I'm never going to forgive you for it."

Sluggy has snatched happiness from the jaws of tragedy before. But I have a bad feeling about this.

The Power Of Inaccurate Complaining.

Shortly after I complained about a lack of RSS feeds for some of my favorite strips, I had a few readers come in and tell me how to get them. Fortunately, I don't feel too stoopid about this, because most of said RSS feeds were hard to find. On the other hand, it's unfortunate that the RSS feeds were hard to find.

I did an informal poll (Excel format) some time back which indicated that about 30-40% of webcomics with independent URLs had RSS feeds. With feeds as well-hidden as Sluggy's, it's hard to know if my poll is accurate. At the very least, your feeds should be visible in the address bar of a Firefox browser: this takes a single line of code and creates immediate benefits.

(Services like Drunk Duck and Webcomics Nation, if included, would skew those numbers a lot. WCN kicks everyone else's RSS ass, providing automatic feeds for features, artists and the entire WCN oeuvre. Keenspot provides just one feed for its whole oeuvre, though some cartoonists add individual feeds on top of that. I use Feedrinse to filter out the Keenspot strips I still read.)

Personal upshot: Now I can rely entirely on RSS for webcomics reading. Boy, I'm going to have to complain more often.

Webcomics That Begin With "S" That Need RSS Feeds Because IT'S 2007 COME ON ALREADY PEOPLE

UPDATE: All these webcomics do have feeds, though sometimes very well-hidden feeds. See comments and the next post.

Shortpacked

Sluggy Freelance

Schlock Mercenary

Sinfest

Something Positive*

Square, Wapsi*

S'Joyce and S'Walky

(These are the only non-RSS'd webcomics I'm keeping up with regularly, and I subscribe to about 170 feeds now. And I've tried using RSSPECT but I've had mixed results.)

Webcomics In The News 8/7/07

Interesting tidbit from the WSJ: Microsoft will be planting clues in a number of places, including webcomics, to promote its new Halo release. No word on whether these will be original or previously existing webcomics.

Comixtalk got to this first: a webcomic released in four languages simultaneously. Penny and Aggie is translated by volunteers into three different languages, and I'm sure we're not the only one, but this may be the first comic to do this as a deliberate campaign. Hope it works out for them-- I know little about the Portuguese market for webcomics.

Webcomic-To-Theater

This is a first, I think: a stage-play adaptation of a webcomic. Said comic, Get Your War On, can be found here. If anybody's in Edinburgh, let me know how the play goes!