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Comics On The Net - A Business Primer
Snotty Pippen writes "There's a new article/report/white paper called Comics
on the Internet: A Primer in 7 Parts that's showing up in all the right
places. It's currently being cited over at
Heath Row's Media Diet and
The Comics
Journal's Journalista blog. Media Diet says thinks it's the first
report of its kind. The Comics Journal says it's how to migrate comic books from print
to web and make it work. I think it's a somewhat comprehensive overview, and the bit about print-on-demand comics is interesting."
I got a subscription to Comics on the Web. It is all Crossgen comics, a pretty good publisher with a lot of good ex-Marvel and DC talent. They have a lot of free comics there with some pretty nifty image and veiwing controls. Check out "The Way of the Rat" - righteous oriental-myth inspired stuff.
How can it be comprhensive if it mentions neither Penny Arcade or Megatokyo?
Bitter, party of one.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
If a comic was, presumably, successful to become a comic book in the first place, why would it turn into a web comic later on? Usually its the other way around, web comics doing well and then making the slow change to real life comic. Unless the real life comic wasn't making a profit, different area of discussion, then I can't see the logic of making a move like this.
Is an increase in comics piracy, in particular over BitTorrent. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right places before, but you can download scans of most the major books.
Since when are comics childish? The majority of the comics I see in the stores arn't at all suitable for children.
Maybe they only have Archie where you live..?
From the article: In summary, I see a lot of untapped potential. Assuming you could cover costs with advertising, until you could show me the online audience strongly mapped to the current retail audience, I would advocate print publishers showcasing their titles online, a few months behind the most recent issue and pushing the reader towards either a trade paperback compilation or a subscription. The hobbyists will seek out the specialty retailers on their own. As a bonus, if the advertising revenue was to pan out, at a certain level of traffic your online ad revenue is capable of exceeding the revenue of todayâ(TM)s depressed print circulation. More quickly if online subscriptions work. I guess my major question with this is why does the newest stuff have to be in print only, and have the online run stuff that's "a few months old"? Looking at something like, say, megatokyo [megatokyo.com], it seems that they opt more for the stance of having the original content posted webside, and then providing print for the people who would like to purchase it. Of course, this does tend to lean a lot more toward the free side rather than the profit side (and I can see why that would be a factor, big business in comics). I think that megatokyo is onto something, though, because the whole idea of it being free opens up (imo) a bigger audience to sell merchandise to. I imagine they wouldn't have an online store or even a demand for it if it was all about pushing people into buying if they want to stay current. I bought megatokyo vol. 1, and I thought it was worth the investment to give something back. Am I just the minority?
"I'm not saying what you think I'm saying, but I'm not saying its opposite, either. In fact, I'm not saying anything at
Have you had your humourous removed Penny Arcade is fantastic
It would be cool to see a format for the computer screen, but if you're gonna do that it seems a lot more logical to go the Broken Saints route and do something beyond duplicating the paper model.
When I retire, I think I'd like to own a comic book store (I fall into the hobbyist subsidizng their habit group). But what will be the state of comic books and stores in 30+ years? Will we still have them as they are (but at $10 a pop at the current rate of comic inflation) plus internet distribution? Will they be only downloadable issues that go into an eBook-like device? Straight into your head? What is the future of the modern day comic book and thus the comic book store? On top of that, what happens to the collectibility of the digital comic book? Comments, please.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Is on-topic. Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-06 -22&res=l
Penny arcade's finest ever.
A perfect example of dialog between artists becoming an art form in itself.
Here are a couple on Spider-Man:
Spiderman, Sony vs Marvel
Review: Spider-Man
The Books section has a number of sci-fi book reviews:
The Cassini Division
You get the idea.
I have 8 boxes of comic books. Yeah they take up a lot of space.
But the fun of comics was collecting them.
http://underpower.non-essential.com/
go at once and then send the artist some money...
and remember: it's satire.
I am a leaf on the wind
There is some pretty funny stuff out there, if you browse long enough to stumble across it. I came across this site the other day and thought there were some pretty funny panel comics there.
Check it out while it lasts...
Your statement struck me kind of weird until I looked up at your name and realized that anyone who thinks it's cool and/or funny to use a name such as that probably has a very skewed sense of humor.
Take that for what it's worth, I will probably see you on a Counter-Strike server sometime in the near future shooting your teamates down to 15% life and then slurring.
Though I do think UF has kind of dropped off, it is still classic.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Todd once appeared on MTV in a futile attempt to explain computers to Pauly Shore.
WOW!!! He actually met the weasel!!
Childish?!
You obviously have never enjoyed the subtlety of Ionic Dog or PowerTroopers. I compare them, not unfavorably, to the best of Shakespeare.
Now excuse me as I have to go polish my figurines.
Wait... you didn't just troll me, did you?
Comics on the web are just great, but I don't think we should make too much of an effort making connections between them and their print counterparts... There is just something about reading comics out of a newspaper, and I dont think that can really be reproduced on the screen - I think the comics which really make it on the web wouldn't nessecarily make it in newspapers and vica-versa.
OK, you're trolling, but I'm going to bite.
Your rule is absolute, utter crap. I hardly thing that Krazy Kat is funny, or that Maus should be funny. One Over Zero, for the digital world, had a few chuckles now and then, but I didn't read it daily because I loved how utterly hilarious it was. Comics can be more important than a laugh. Krazy Kat was a poetic comic, and is widely regarded as the best newspaper strip of the 20th century. Maus told the story of the Holocaust in way that was both accessable and mature. One Over Zero had a very enjoyable take on religion.
Being funny is hardly an all-encompassing goal, and what you might find stale others will enjoy immensely. If you don't like it, don't read it.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
Um. Excuse me?
"The obvious conclusion that I came to is that all printed media is a dying breed."
"As soon as we see a good, cheap e-reader that's easy to use and has widespread connectivity to the Internet, printed media is in trouble."
Since print media is already in trouble. I think you'll have to look for your boogyman somewere else.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
how to migrate comic books from print to web and make it work
I used to read comic books. I still do on occasion, as well as comics on the web. I notice one thing : comics that work well on the web are shorter, simpler in drawing and text and quicker-paced than paper comics. In short, web comics have their own style, quite distinguishable from paper comics. I reckon that's merely due to current screen resolutions : 75dpi, even 100 dpi isn't much to display nice graphics, complex actions or texts, while paper can bear (near-)infinitely complex details.
Once, I started to scan my old paper copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is my all-time favorite comic, because the poor book was getting worn out and I wanted to preserve it. Well, after 2 or 3 pages, the digital result turned out to be awful and I reckon took away much of the atmosphere of the book, so I gave up and ended up buying another, recent hardback.
So is it such a good idea to migrate printed comics to the web ? I'm not that sure. It would certainly give an idea of what the original work is, but I think many comics deserve to be read on the media they were designed for originally. Maybe web comics could be considered as a wholly separate subform of comics in general, with its own style and talented authors ?
Finally, as a side note, there's another reason to prefer printed comics over web ones : have you noticed, on cheap comics, that sometimes you can see through the paper and have a look at what's on the next page, in reverse ? if that next page is colorful, or packed in action, you can see something's going to happen in the story and it makes you anticipate the rest with great pleasure. Web-based comics don't do that, and in a way that can take some of the reading experience away.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
mmmm.....offtopic
so I've got about 10000 baseball cards in individual sleeves, including limited run production (with full docs for all of them) sets, error production cards, etc...
I brought some to be apraised and they're not worth much....I wonder what ever happened to that "they're gonna be worth something someday."
I hope comic books fair better than baseball cards have, and it seems that if print books go out the colectability will drop...if it's digital it can be pirated (thank god...most of the time)
-Pale
I think the concept of an online comic--especially an online comic strip--is still not completely viable just yet.
Sure, you can do long, long story arcs and be a bit more adult in material presentation, but I still wonder are long-time online comic strips like Kevin and Kell, User Friendly, Sluggy Freelance and Megatokyo actually profitable for their creators. I wonder how much money are the creators of these online strips make from online ads and book reprints of the comic. Also, production deadline issues can be a problem; this has plagued Sluggy and Megatokyo every now and then.
Strong Bad's email every Monday.
Since Calvin & Hobbes has been gone, the comic industry has pretty much bored me to tears.
A Man who's already covered the future of comics.
...no Sluggy Freelance reference? Philistines!
(Note: Bad time to link as Pete is on holiday, but fill-in artist is doing a pretty good job. Oh well.)
what is this holier than thou trash. You're a geek if you're reading this anyway...go read your harry potter/star wars/star trek/router manual/WiFi review and stop denying who you are. Otherwise what are you doing with a username on /.??
Pale
I have to wonder how much of it is the economy, but still this post on PA (scroll down) today is pretty cool:
"American Greetings Profits Dip 55.7 Pct.
CLEVELAND (AP) American Greetings Corp., hurt by lower sales and pretax items, reported a 55.7 percent drop in earnings for the first quarter that ended May 31."
c-hack.com |
Did you try using a good scanner and this?
Also when SVG and SMIL come into their own, you'll see some of your quality issues diminish.
Wow, that's damned cool. I put the comic resolution to high and then tweaked the way the dialogue balloons work. This is some amazing stuff - some even have voice acting (it was pretty terrible, but still) if you dont feel like reading. Thanks for the link!
why is it that every pro-piracy post uses that argument.
Just because something is overpriced doesn't mean it's OK to steal it.
Provided that you are able to order printed versions of the online works directly from the websites, I'd say there is great scope to cut some of the middlemen out of the current equation. Business savvy illustrators and colourists can get more of the money. I actually started doing an online comic with a group of friends (for fun, not profit) about 5 years ago. It takes a lot of work, consequentially people lost interest after a couple of issues.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
One thing that this article didn't really go into is the already existing and very developed communities devoted to translating and distributing japanese comics on the web. Every day hundreds of pages of japanese comics, or manga are scanned, translated, and then edited (japanese taken out, english put in) and then distributed via irc, http, and bittorrent. If you're interested in dling, check out this site for a list of daily/past releases: http://www.dailymanga.fr.st/ There are hundreds of people working on this accross the world (including myself), and thousands of people already relying COMPLETELY on the web for their daily manga fix. The industry is way behind :)
Yes, most are still childish examples of storytelling. Most are are bad art, too, because that's what computer enhanced drawings look like: bad. I mean, I realize it's a lot of work to paint 100 watercolors (that stand on their own as art) merely to tell a comic book story, and hardly anyone does it because life costs money, but there you go, it's still mostly crap.
If you ever miss them, or have no idea what they are you got to check out She's a Nightmare. It's high quality, fully colored comic that's updated 3 times a week. It's completely free to read.
This guy seems to leave out other sources of publishing such as Plan 9. I just recently shelled out over $100 for copies of Sluggy Freelance for my boyfriend's upcoming birthday. They seem to work directly with the artists and cut them a fairly significant fraction of the proce (mind you that's provided the readers buy directly from Plan 9 and not Amazon).
Comic
I got an email from Scott Adams yesterday that the Comics.com emails such as "Daily Dilbert" will no longer be free. They are going to announce subscription pricing soon.
I think I'll just replace it with a cron job that sends me an email linking to dilbert.com.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Both Todd Allen and Scott McCloud have so far overlooked the potential for using web-based syndication (RSS, SOAP, etc.) and weblogs as an important, rapidly growing method for promoting comics.
Almost all major weblogs and newspapers feature an RSS feed nowadays, but they are also important for online comic strips too. Eight of the ten most popular RSS feeds read by LiveJournal users are for comic strips, with a "scraped" feed of Calvin in Hobbes coming in as the most popular feed. Currently, it only has around 3,000 readers, but if you start adding in everyone else out there reading Calvin & Hobbes' RSS feed with some other type of reader, you're talking about a serious, rapidly growing number of recurring readers -- the kind of people most likely to buy merchandise or donate to help support their favorite artists.
Web-based syndication can be a good thing for comic creators. Tom Tomorrow gains extra readers for his weblog and his cartoons with his RSS feed, and there are several comic strip artists out there using weblogs to post their latest strips, interact with their fans, promote new merchandise, and, yes, automatically create syndicated feeds.
Because tools like Syndirella or Cheesegrater are making it easier for people to scrape content off of websites, it's safe to say that we are in the early stages of a "Napsterization" of comics on the Internet.
This could be bad news for the big syndicates and even for the publishers, but it could be great news for the artists. Yes, they might have to give their work away for free, but they can also control how their work is syndicated, too. They can decide for themselves what their business model will be and promote it using their own weblogs, with their own syndicated feed.
All they need is an online tip jar...
Ah, those golden words that make a troll's day.
Scott McCloud is an idiot whose main premise is that it doesn't matter that consumers don't want micropayments, they're good for content suppliers and that ought to be enough. All evidence to the contrary be damned.
Bite the hand.
I am a co-creator of an original indie comic. When we were first getting started, the idea of web publishing was very attractive, and we gave it a lot of thought and discussion. We rejected it because primarily, we wanted to make comics. It was my opinion that what we are selling is more than content, it is an experience. Seriously. There's a lot that goes on in your head about paper. Just think about how the act of turning pages controls pacing. We set the reader up with something exciting, the page gets turned quickly. Something dreadful, the page gets dragged over slowly. That's just one example, there are others.
Our decision has largely been vindicated. Nobody we've ever spoken to wants to read comic books on a computer. Strips are another matter, they fit neatly on a screen and once one has loaded you can decide whether you want to read the rest or not. They're like M&Ms. But a comic book is different. Even if you reformatted the standard page to fit a monitor's aspect ratio, you still have problems. No 2 page spreads, for example.
The lack of micropayments is another problem. And yes, I'm on Peppercoin's mailing list. Not a peep since the announcement.
We've got a website obviously, where we try to keep in touch with our readers, promote ourselves to the unsupecting masses, and allow people who don't live where we do to buy our books. We've tried both online pictures and downloadable samples in PDF. Neither one has exactly gone gangbusters.
I'd love to know what you guys think -- would anyone pay to read these (or other comic books) online? How many subscribers does Crossgen have? Try to keep in mind that we have four people who work at other jobs and that we lack Crossgen's millionaire benefactor before comparing us.
Thanks.
It's idiotic.
If someone rolls dice again and expects a different result, they're insane?
How about if someone tries playing a song and it comes out sounding bad, so they keep playing it hoping that it will start to sound better?
No, insanity is believing that doing the same thing will always get the same result.
You can be insightful without being insensative, I am not riding some kind of a hardcore PC trip here, if he is gay and black it's still not a particullarly appropriate name.
Some people just enjoy the attention they get from shock value, be it positve or negative.
I might have a fair amount of respect for him/her if s/he legally changed his name to that just to illistrate the idea that words aren't dangerous, it is the ideas behind them, however in a printed or electronic medium, people are defining themselfs with words, and in this context they really do mean something to the person who reads them, although when text is read it isn't read with the mind of the writer, but instead with the reader and interpretations made by them based on past experiences...
The fact of the matter is that those two words have a whole assload of negative feelings chaged into them. Homosexuals being burned in Germany, 100's years of slavery, an addtional 75-85 years of segragation, Matthew Shepard and the huge hangover that has come with each of these things will require time to heal. These words are still oppressive. I am not saying that people shouldn't use them, I am just saying that people should think before they open their mouths.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
It took me a half an hour to find this again.
i read it a long time ago.
i would like to share this with you.
You will judge other strips by this well done
series.
http://www.demian5.com/
What about all those people who spend hours "recovering" the naughty bits (poorly) hidden to protect the japanese artists from (stupid) japanese censorship laws? No props for the combatants of censorship?
Scott McCloud is a competent cartoonist. Not a great one, just competent. If you gave him a great story and talented art direction he could crank out the pages, but left to himself he produces mediocre, unoriginal, unpopular comics.
As his webcomic about webcomics is titled, "[he] Can't Stop Thinking," but he doesn't come to reasonable conclusions. Contrary to his strongest claims, scrolling comics are a goofy novelty, page comics work better. Micropayments are not feasible and won't be for a long time, if they ever are. People care far more about comic appearance than load time. Gradient shading is uglier than crosshatching, and people prefer the traditional look. Nonlinear goofiness is annoying. You can't just make whatever you feel like and succeed unless your interests coincide with the target market that has been obvious from day 1: young male computer geeks.
As a web cartoonist, he's a failure because he neglects the single most fundamental aspect of successful webcomics: frequent and reliable updates.
Every one of his original ideas I could pick out was a bad one. His own practices are poor, accordingly so are his results.
He's a guy who chose to write about this stuff. That doesn't mean he's had something useful to say.
Looks interesting. Your site is having some issues (slashdotted?). As I mentioned to others the "display" limitation is a technical one. Digital paper shows promise and in the meantime ebook readers among other devices (LCD Displays) are improving. People have already shown what can be done with Flash (Broken saints).
Will we still have them as they are (but at $10 a pop at the current rate of comic inflation)...?
The comics industry needs to provide more for less. Most comics are between $3 and $5 an issue on the newsstand today, and are less than 30 pages. Why is there such a major price difference between comic books and magazines? I can buy an issue of WIRED for $5 that gives me around 180 pages per issue, in full color. (And if I subscribe, I can get the same 180 pages for a buck!)
Comics were once cheap entertainment, so cheap people threw them away when they were done. Now they're one of the worst entertainment values for your dollar. Until or unless the comics industry learns from their magazine counterparts, they'll continue down the path of dwindling circulation.
What is the future of the modern day comic book and thus the comic book store?
Even though I expect circulation to decline, there will always be print comics. If current trends continue, I see the comic shop of the future as something like the vinyl record shop of today; an expensive, niche market for an obsolete but well-loved format.
I doesn't have to be this way, though. I'm a believer in print. Webcomics aren't better or worse than print comics; they're different. Webcomics and print comics are not and never will be the same artform. Beyond that, for me there's something about owning a book, holding it, thumbing through it, just seeing it on your shelf that has real value. It's something I'll pay for.
If the comic book industry was asking me for advice, I would tell them:
Remember your strengths! This sort of local, everyday community is what webcomics can't accomplish.
Point is that clearly Penny Arcade and User Friendly are sincerely, honestly, DESPARATELY trying to BE FUNNY...
and fail miserably.
Don't take life too seriously, you won't get out alive.
Man, I hope you catch those fuckers before they strike again!
Great japanese comics in the usenet newsgroups.
Great gaming comic-strip! Contains the great trolling laughter you see her on slashdot. Check it out here
Greed.
:)
There is probably a reason that the bottom dropped out in the mid 90s. I know that's when I left. Both DC and Marvel were going nuts. Every other issue had some special cover. Every story line was a cross-over event that you couldn't follow without buying into 12 titles. Every other page was a splash page - one big ass graphic.
The problem is they stopped the story telling in favor of gimmicks. Even now, while the art is amazing in the current books, you still have tons of pages that are half taken up with one image "for effect", and it seems every female is a victoria secret model.
I'll admit I have a lot of the old (nigh unobtainable) X-men commics in cbr/cbz format (ie. scanned pages in a rar/zip) and read them with CDisplay. I don't mind reading them on the monitor - why? Because the stories are good. The only thing I've bought recently was the latest Frank Miller Dark Knight Strikes Again...a good self-containted story spread over a few issues - just like the older comics were.
Of course, just like music, you don't have to buy the mainstream stuff. And just like music - just because it's indie doesn't automatically mean that it is good. Some of it is, a lot is crap. Cerebus is probably the only thing that is REALLY worth following
So if they think that comics on the web will save the industry, they'll need to correct the underlying problems first. They'll probably wanna charge for this, so they need to stop making you need to follow tons of titles for one story. Can you imagine if they had the ability to use flash or something to make an issue - tits would be flying around like crazy and splash screens would scroll for five minutes.
Until they fix the greed they are fucked and will continue to spiral down.
How can you even talk about Marvel Comics without talking about Jerkcity?
It's a pisstake of Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame, for those who were wondering.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
A friend of mine got propositioned by The Weasel recently. Ewwww...
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
*sigh*
It was supposed to be funny, not off topic!
There's no place like
There was a problem and it got an extra space (thx IE!)
- 06 -22&res=l
Those of you who didn't get it, didn't get it for good reason.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001
Are there any actually funny web comics? I've read many different sites and by and large, they're just NOT FUNNY. Penny Arcade, Homestarrunner, real life etc. can be occasionally vaguely witty but never actually lol funny.
Do any of you actually laugh out loud when reading web comics, and if so which ones?
Hmmm.
Well done that AC! Nothing beats the weekly Strong Bad email.
Especially when it is.... Trogdor The Burninator!
You can play the game to... Trogdor The Game!
Have you ever fancied reading a comic, then suddenly someone makes a film based on it and all the back issues sell out? There's quite a few commercial services where you can read back issues to your heart's content.
I wrote an article a few months back that discussed commercial web-based comics, inspired by the release of Crossgen's online service. Although reading comics on a screen is obviously not the same as collecting real comics, it's a pretty good way to find something amusing to do during work/university when you're slacking off... ;)
...is right here.
But seriously, props to Scott McCloud.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?