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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.
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
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.
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!
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
Piro (of megatokyo) has been doing MT full-time for a while now. Recently, they have become so busy that Seraphim, his fiance, has quit her job and is helping Piro do MT full-time as well. I'd say it's doing quite well for the two of them :).
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 :)
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).
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.
It's funny that you mention User Friendly, Sluggy Freelance and Megatokyo here while asking if on-line comics are economically viable. I don't know about Kevin and Kell, but in the case of the other three you mention, the artists/authors have all quit their day jobs, and live off their webcomics alone now, (Megatokyo is only the most recent of the three to have done so, in fact).
On the other hand, I do still grant the point. Those three have among the largest readerships of webcomics, and therefore have a larger base from which to make money off of when selling merchandise, while other webcomics are not so fortunate.
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...
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.
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.
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.
It's a pisstake of Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame, for those who were wondering.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
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... ;)
Kevin and Kell creator Bill Holbrook still has mainstream strips running; On The Fastrack and Safe Havens.
--- Gary McClellan