Slashdot Mirror
The Rebirth of Comics
Malfourmed writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is running a story on web based comics and how the new medium can change the traditional "left-to-right in a rectangular frame" paradigm.
Concentrating on the work of Scott McLoud it also mentions geek favourites Dilbert and The Matrix, among others. Micropayments are discussed, with the article claiming that after you pay your 25 cents "most of which goes straight to McCloud, cutting out the middlemen that make it difficult for comic artists to make a living from their work, and in the process doing justice to their talents."
One of the more interesting sites discussed is the Oz Comics 24 Hour Gallery, the result of a competition in which artists had 24 hours to create an original, 24-page comic. So popular was the contest that the server suffered from a veritable slashdot effect."
I check Penny Arcade, Little Gamers, and Real Life Comics an awful lot. Probably too much to be healthy.
Why? Because the web provides me access to humor that is very, VERY specialized. Find comics like these in a Sunday Paper, or a comic shop, or anywhere else.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
I think that media like comics, video, etc. will start to flourish online with things like Micropayments, but more with the increase of bandwidth. It is remarkably difficult to set up a server that will receive & redistribute 10,000 comic strips a day, versus one that just gets 10,000 hits per day.
stuff |
A lot of the web comics are poor quality, make obvious jokes, and have lame characters. Sure there are some good ones. and I do like the cheap laughts, but reducing the barrier to entry also reduce the quality level.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
So popular was the contest that the server suffered from a veritable slashdot effect.
Think they're ready for the real thing?
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
I assume "The Rebirth of Comics" is following "The Death of Comics"? Anyone?!
Up next, "The Rebirth of Linux!"
I'm all for ANY distribution method where the artists actually get a sizaeble sum of the profits. .
Wouldn't "dramatic" or "tragic" books be a more apt name?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Does anyone remember the late stanlee.net?
Ah, such great expectations till it crashed:-p
They're like the pen, ink, and paper suppliers. The provide the medium (or access to it). You might say they're like the distributors, but print comics aren't really traditional in that sense, what with the syndicates and all.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
I agree that specialized comics are probably one of the best things about webcomics. Plus, since they're not controlled by someone in a suit (unless the artist wears a suit) and they can have content that you might never see in a newspaper. The site of the character in Penny Arcade banging his head against the wall drawing lots of blood comes to mind, or zapping the N-Gage pimp with a cattle prod or whatever that was. I made a webcomic 'cause I had nothing to do while unemployed and needed some type of cheap creative outlet.
Kick in the Head
Megatokyo.com Machall.com
Candy-Coated Knowledge
They are the web hosts and the ISPs. A middleman is a person who buys from producers and sells to consumers. The web hosts and ISPs don't buy his work and they don't sell his work.
If this dude sold his comics out of his apt, would you call his landlord and the electric company middlemen?
Concentrating on the work of Scott McLoud it also mentions geek favourites Dilbert and The Matrix, among others.
Is this an unintentional spelling error of Scott's last name, or an intentional jab at what some people think of his ideals?
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
e-comics, e-books, et. al. just don't work for me because I cannot lie back on the sofa, sit on the toilet seat, read while eating, etc. Good old paper is my preference until there's a more handy way to read e-books. Handhelds don't work well for me either since they just don't contain as much information in 1 page as a book and require frequent scrolling.
And I was hoping to get the first Sluggy post.. ;-)
Sluggy Freelance is possibly the finest web daily out there. The following is powerful enough that when the author (Pete) found out that the comic was making no money, he cried out 'Help Me!' Shortly thereafter, they had a flood of small payments from loyal readers.
A fine example of how online entertainment should be handled. The online comic is free (save a banner ad). You can pay to rid yourself of ads. You can pay to get merchandise (printed books, tshirts, etc). No 'required subscription' or any of that bull$hit.
Worship the comic. Go read some archives. 6 years of comics are online, for no charge. Go get addicted, and give Pete some money.
I remember an article that Scott Kurtz (pvponline.com) posted a while back, on how the sunday comics haven't been funny for the past 10 years. Blondie, while starting off in the depression, actually had a plot based on romeo and juliet, with unlikely characters Blondie and Dagwood. Anymore, it just doesn't have the magic, or the humor. The great thing about web comics is that they do not have to have an audience in order to thrive. The greats like Penny-arcade, Megatokyo, and Mac Hall, are all very specialized and niche-based humor. Whereas, in a syndicated comic, it would be hard to be successful while making jokes about video games, anime, and other relatively 'outside' subjects.
Not to mention the fact that free hosting and no need for an editor produces a lot of general crap, but that's really just the price to pay for the really good quality webcomics that are out there.
Interesting article about the same subject.
Summary (from the site): Although micropayment is a great thing in principle, existing implementations contain big problems which block their success. This article analyzes these problems and proposes a new solution without them. The solution lacks most traditional spending features, but still preserves the "spirit of micropayment".
Cheers! The Psychic Burrito
Anyone familiar with the publishing of Web-based ads -- you know, banners? banners with standard sizes and pricing for levels of traffic? -- could tell you that Web publishing faces some of the same constraints traditional paper models do.
Strips within Flash movies -- to use an example from the article -- just replace the four-panel, left-to-right constraint with another set of limitations. Have the right player? How big a monitor? Do sites that might want to syndicate your comic have a layout that'll accomodate your "infinite" canvas? Maybe we should agree on some standards to help people along... Sound familiar? Take a look at the flash-based ads you see around; they're a standard size, usually more or less square, so as to be set into a variety of text articles.
I'm not convinced that a subscription service is the model that'll reach critical mass, either. A dedicated site of comics for $3 a month will reach solid fans, but it won't have the same broad appeal as the funnies in your paper. And there was already a specialty market for graphic novels, right? We're talking about freeing the popular, daily strip from the tyranny of four-boxes-in-a-row. To do that you'd want to get to a sort of syndication model: ISPs might allow their users' custom home/news pages to include a certain comic, something like that. Again, you're facing some standardization to make something like that work.
It's a publishing thing, not just a magic Web thing.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The article is also mixing comic books and comic strips. Sure, stuff like Dilbert , User Friendly, The Boondocks, and Achewood work well on the web. They're short and easy to read. Most people who read comic books, however, relish the strip to the store, holding it in their hands, filling up the long white boxes...
got biv?
Well, generally middlemen tend to take a cut. ISPs charge a fee non-dependent on what an artist takes in. Of course the more viewers, the more bandwidth so probably more charges but $10 a month or $0.25 a month they don't work off of revenue.
Is the owner of a building a shop keeper leases a "middleman?"
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
No more so than the telephone company is a middleman when you make a long distance phone call. Yes, without them you wouldn't be able to make the call. But they're not buying the conversation from you and selling it to the person on the other end.
A middleman is someone who purchases from the producer and sells to the consumer. The ISP/webhost isn't doing this -- they're merely providing transport. And, yes, this is an important economic and (more importantly) legal discrimination. The ISP/webhost is not responsible for policing their content because they aren't creating or selling it.
Ah another comic thread on /. I really like the idea of web comics but the comic world is going to run into the same problems the music biz is dealing with. First off, there's a lot of people saying, let's do a comic on the web, it's so cheap, we'll get more of an audience, we don't have to go through a publisher. Well, then there's the whole issue of how do artists get paid, how do artists keep their work from getting ripped off, etc. but I think a lot of these topics miss a key element of web comics ... is the medium even appropriate for the type of comics that you create?
I think the type of comics that are most suited for the web are strip comics like the dailies in your local newspaper. Reading a graphic novel on a computer screen via the web is, frankly, a huge pain in the ass. I don't care how you present it, panels to fit the screen, no scrolling, click on the image to go the next page, I just find it tedious. The content is too long for the medium in my opinion. And I WANT to read graphic novels ... it just seems like, not on the web. I think what needs to change is, higher resolution monitors.
So I think graphic novel type stuff CAN work on the web, it just needs to be created with the web in mind from the beginning. Make the pictures standard screen size, use nice readable anti aliased fonts, make the art appropriate for web reading: large, not tons of tiny characters that look like blurs, and LENGTH. I don't really want to click through 100 images and bore myself to death.
And, I would argue, as soon as you start thinking of putting multimedia geegaws like audio, just go Flash all the way and animate your whole project.
... at a theater near you. http://www.americansplendormovie.com/main.html
Think The Devil's Panties, which is probably one of the most creative comics I've ever seen. Always funny. Usually twisted. %-)
Some of my favorite weekly comic strips have made the journey from print (in news weeklies) to online. Presumably, these guys don't get paid to reprint their comics on the Web, but it increases their exposure and maybe convinces their fans to lobby to get them into local weeklies.
Tony Millionaire's Maakies is pure genius.
Try Underworld , by Kaz, if you want to tickle your cynical side.
Breakfast served all day!
I think these two comic formats have very different venues from each other. A comic book is meant to have more than a 10-second total viewing time, and usually has a more involved story and has a larger time to develop the action. The strip, on the other hand, must be satisfy the reader on a daily basis, and usually has to stick to formulaic jokes in three or four panels to succeed.
Correspondingly, in the physical world, the comic book is sold by itself, while the comic strip is tossed in amid a sea of other reading material(other comics, ads, articles...) and left to "sink or swim" as it will.
I think a similar dynamic applies online. The web-comic in strip format generally relies on advertising to succeed, but a full web-comic book might get somewhere through micropayments.
But I can say fairly confidently that nobody would pay money to view one strip.
not comics (more like an interactive cartoos)...but definately worth a look, and it definately shows off the media potential of the internet.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Bill Watterson broke this a while back in the later years of his Calvin and Hobbes strips. Once he got popular enough to be able to dictate some things for artistic sake, he declared that his comics will only be published in a rectangular area where he has free rein inside, free from panels or any other limitation within. Most papers required all comics to be broken into panels so they can be arranged how they saw fit. Watterson hated those limitations, especially for a strip that was so involved with fantasy and imagination. Some papers had to actually shrink his area in order to keep the proportions right and for other comics to flow right around it, but he remained steadfast, and thats how the sunday strips were presented until he ended the strip, a strip still sorely missed by me and many others.
I find this to be quite true when I look at comics in the *.jp domain. Everything is right to left for some reason, and the characters speak in little picture symbols. Must be the Internatioanl Date Line.
I have a hard time with comics from the *.au domain, thought. They appear on my monitor upside down.
--- Ban humanity.
I think the web (as I posted below) is most suited to strip comics. Not graphic novels or comic books. But collecting, I agree, is a huge deal to many comic book collectors. There is no value in an "issue 1" of a website comic, if it's been blasted all over the web. I don't even know how one would begin to value jpgs and gifs. Will the print versions always be more valuable just because of rarity? What if there is no print version?
The comic book store is another story. While for the average comic book reader, the comic book store is part of the experience, I think a lot of people are afraid of comic book stores. Seriously. the other day at a comic book shop two of the clerks were slapping shipping tape on each other's heads and drawing on them with magic markers. Don't ask me why. All I can say is, if that were going on in your local Barnes & Noble bookstore many people would say, the help there is retarded, we're not shopping there anymore. Only in a comic book store have I had clerks look at what I was buying and make inane comments like, "This shit scares me". Luckilly I'm used to that kind of crap so I keep going back for more (a couple of comic-cons will harden you up for that kind of banter). I've also had a few embarassing experiences when I take someone into a comic book store for the first time, and all they can focus on are the anime chicks with huge boobs. How many of them there are and how large are the boobs. So many potential customers leave the stores thinking most of the comics out there center around muscle-bound super heroes and over-sexed babes with huge boobs. And I guess, truth be told, this is actually an accurate observation. But many people just don't look beyond that to realize there's other kinds of comics out there.
I guess if you LIKE that kind of experience, then comic stores are enjoyable but my point is, I think in general the "comic book store experience" is detrimental to the comics industry and in fact is a barrier to comics gaining a wider audience. It's the image, the types of people that shop / work there, the attitudes of store owners that customers aren't a priority, etc.
Sexy Losers
You may be grossed out by a few of them at first, but they are just so funny.
I'm a fan of Irregular Webcomic, which seems more innovative than any of the examples mentioned in the article. The comics are pictures taken with a camera, rather than drawn. Generally pictures of Legos or painted miniatures, with some shots of the script's creator in there.
Lots of funny strips, especially the Star Wars ones.
Most of the webcomics out there that are generating profit from their sites are doing so because they never had that intention to begin with. They set out to do something they enjoyed that they hoped others would also. For a webcomic to be successful, the creators have to enjoy it, because it's a lot of work and it takes a long time to build a fanbase, let alone start making money.
The webcomic I write, BandWich, has a very limited fanbase despite being having been around well over a year. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication for a webcomic to be successful in such a saturated field.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Watterson went way out on a limb with that decision but he felt it was the right thing to do - and he was very right! He lost space in a lot of papers (my parents got both of the big local Sunday papers and I'd always go for one in particular because they printed C&H properly - large) and lost some papers altogether, but the art was worth the sacrifice.
I still have the final C&H strip tucked away in my high school yearbook. Yeah, it was a little cheezy. So what.
I too miss C&H but I'm glad that Watterson went out on top instead of letting the stories get recycled and old. He left on his terms at a point where we could never say "hey, C&H was great until...", unlike other cartoons featuring an orange feline which should have been put to rest a long time ago.
8-bit Theater. Remember Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage from Final Fantasy? Well, they're the main characters in this strip. Archives go back a year or two. Rather entertaining.
d+pad covers the goings-on at a video game store. The artwork is pretty crude, but if you're into the gaming world at all, you'll enjoy it.
Goats is a VERY disturbing strip. The early artwork was a lot less refined than it is now, but how can you go wrong with a strip that involves overclocked lemons and a Satanic chicken named Diablo?
PvP is a strip about a fictional gaming magazine. Sometimes crass and goofy, but often hilarious (go to any geek gathering and see how many people laugh when you shout "Panda attack!"). I know I'd subscribe to any magazine that had a 300-year-old blue troll as an intern.
And, of course, Sluggy Freelance. Best. Webcomic. Ever. But you really have to go all the way back to the beginning of the archives. There's years of great stuff in there. (Worship Bun-bun!)
I know that no day is complete without reading all my webcomics... which is really easy using bookmarked tabs in Mozilla. I just click on one bookmark, and the browser opens up a dozen separate tabs with all my comics loaded.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
In general, voice talent for online content is grotesque. But for comics it's positively criminal.
Why?
Because when comic artists use their own, untrained voices to act out the lines they write, you can hear every bit of their insecurity, apprehension, false bravado, delusion, and contempt.
And if they use their friends', you can hear their inability to understand the material, as well, which is a failure of both acting and directing.
(This problem extends to Pam Anderson's "performance" in Striperella on the actual television, so don't expect it to get better online just because a few people pro-up.)
(Okay, Homestar Runner isn't too bad, but after six or eight characters, they hit their limit, and now it's undeniably The Strongbad Show featuring Homestar Runner.)
One nice thing about webcomics, is that anyone can do one, ie: me.
I have actually been doing mine two days a week for over a year on keenspace.com, and have really enjoyed it. Since the hosting is free, the only thing I have to worry about is setting aside the time to do it - usually at 2am.
It's really been a good creative outlet, and I've even written a game to go along with it. And though it's not a stand-up great comic, I do have a few fans.
As far as goals, I don't make any money from it, and don't ever really expect to, but I'll keep doing it because I enjoy it.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
One of the comics in the 24 hour gallery is mine! :D (It's Tabeshounen, hint hint)
Thanks to the Intarweb it's been a lot easier to get publicity for an Australian (or any indie) comic. The article was really focused on web comics, but there's still a great zine/small press scene happening here. Now all we need to do is get more of the female creators (there are a lot!) into the spotlight and everything'll be just peachy.