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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."
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.
It's _not_ "piracy".
Downloading a facsimile of a work is really not a replacement for the work it's self. You have to be kidding if you say people who like comic books will be happy looking at scans.
Comics are a collectible, and they are best enjoyed on paper. Even if you print them out, you can't get the effect of the real thing.
The "piracy" argument is even weaker here than in the music biz. I'd call it free advertising.
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!
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!
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...
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.
For instance, I do a comic strip at qwantz.com where the exact same images are used, without modification, every day. Put that in a print book and you can be a little put off, because it does look so computer-generated. But on a computer screen, it's natural.
Remember how ugly Frank Millers Dark Knight sequel was? He and his colourist Lynn decided they'd stop trying to make computer colouring look like real colouring and just go all-the-way with digital. The result was that the vast majority was turned off ("it looks so artificial!" they say). I'd venture that if it were published online, they wouldn't bat an eyelash.
Oh, and while I'm talking about online comics... you should also look at a softer world which is sweet and sad and you're going to fall in love with it.
dinosaur comics
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.