Slashdot Mirror
Independent Cartoonists Band Together for Success
Brad Guigar writes "Six cartoonists, previously hosted at Keenspot, are banding together in a new approach to self-publishing.
They have formed Blank Label Comics, a cooperative group of cartoonists who are helping one another succeed as independents. Each is using his proficiency in a particular aspect of the cartooning business to help the others -- who are doing the same in return.
Scott Kurtz, creator of the daily comic strip PVP, applauded the move. 'The forming of Blank Label Comics is a big story in the webcomics community,' he said in a statement on his Web site, insisting that the 'real story ... is that a bunch of really talented guys are taking a chance, putting their necks out and trying to do this on their own.'"
It is encouraging to see any independent label for cartoons come into existance. Like music, film, or any other artistic medium it is better to have more outlets than fewer. I enjoyed, during my early teen and, later, my college years, a variety of "underground" comics (e.g. R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton) that would have *never* existed at established publishing houses. Some probably shouldn't have existed, but there you are.
The only concern I have with independent labels is their ability to fight off incorporation or extinction. Some independent music and film outlets have consolidated leaving these media under the control of only a few companies. We have all seen the result of that outcome.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Is anyone not an "independant online cartoonist" these days? The only thing there's more of are "internet models" and "blog journalists".
Ideally in the "dead and buried" category. Comics should either look good or be funny. Megatokyo looks good. Dilbert is funny (or, well, it has its moments, but is funny most of the time). Penny Arcade is both. User Friendly has neither art nor humor going for it, and thus is a waste of time.
We slahdot their server. Go figure.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
I have not seen any consistantly funny web comics. Most are painfully UNFUNNY. What does "unfunny" mean? That means they are the opposite of funny. They suck the funniness out of other things.
Unfunny web comics killed my inner child.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
I wonder how Wiley will mock them this time? He sure didn't seem to think much of Scott Kurtz when he offered his strips to newspapers for free.
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
taking a chance, putting their necks out
Umm... does this really take guts, forming a co-op?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sounds like they also created a new team of superheroes... I give you the Blank Comic 6! Cartoonist during the day and upholder of the first amendment on the Internet by night.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
And as a true test of your preperations to strike out alone, we'll slashdot your server(s) and drive you bankrupt from the resulting bandwidth fees. No no, I insist, there is no need to thank us!
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media. This is a viral sig, pass it on.
First, you should link to PA's comic directly, or your commentary on the strip won't make sense in a couple days. Second, black and white is not necessarily bad (Megatokyo is mostly in black and white). The problem with Userfriendly's art is not so much that it's not in color as that it's drawn with all of the skill of a three year old child. If the story was good or the humor funny, it could make up for the bad artwork. Sadly, neither of those are the case.
For the record, I just pulled a couple comics at random. As has already been mentioned, Diesel Sweeties is also good, as well as many others (ctrl+alt+del, Mac Hall when they update, Angst Technology, etc). All of these are better than UF, in story, art, and humor. If UF could pull even one of those out of its rear, it might be worth browsing once a month or so. Until then it's nothing more than a reason to laugh at people that think it's good.
a reason to laugh at people that think it's good.
Come on, why don't people realize that not everyones taste is the same. Frankly, I don't _want_ everyone liking just the things I like. It'd be boring...
...for independent bands to cartoon together.
/ suck it, RIAA
Well, I looked at those other comics, and I disagree. I suppose you have to have lived the life of a sysadmin (down, not across) to get the most out of UF, but it is funny. A lot of those comics are heavily targetted at gamers, and while I enjoy games, I'm not that heavily into it.
If we can dream for a moment that David Willis won't turn Shortpacked! into another infinite loop of "I can't have sex w/ you because I love you" like his other comics, then Blank Label might actually have a decent comic. 1 out of 10 ain't that bad...
Modern Tales has American Born Chinese, Ice, Narbonic, No Stereotypes, Odd Jobs, Paradigm Shift and Wahoo Moris. 7 out of 63.
Graphic Smash has Aces High, Ascent, Digger, Fans, Gun Street Girl, Johnny Saturn, Life's a Croc, Little White Knight, Magellan, Rip & Teri, The Jaded, The Replacements and Vigil. 13 out of 31.
Girlamatic has Jupiter, L'il Mell, Sevenplains and The Stiff. 4 out of 23.
YMMV.
[o]_O
Going independent is a good move for these people who look like they are looking to turn their cartooning into their primary job. However, for most internet cartoonists, I think Keenspot is still the best option for those who make 1-2 comics a week and don't want to deal with the hassle of having to maintain a server, deal with bandwidth issues, etc. The downside of working with Keenspot is that they take a big chunk of the advertising revenue that a site generates. A few weeks back, Tycho at PA had a comment about someone he knew who left Keenspot and went independent and started making triple what he used to make from advertising. For its flaws though, it seems that Keenspot (Or Keenspace rather for those undiscovered comics) is still the best place for a new cartoonist to start.
This kind of alliance between creatives has a good history of working in the comics industry. Malibu was that kind of a cooperative at first, started by a bunch of creatives who turned to someone with passion for comics and business sense. In the end they sold to Marvel, which didn't end well, but it could quite clearly be considered a success for the people who founded the group.
Right now the founder is doing this: http://platinumstudios.com/, and that seems to be going quite well. While they don't make much on the comics themselves, they leverage the best of their materials to go to mass market and to Hollywood. It's a good business strategy, and they seem to have tremedous respect for their creative people.
I know you're trolling, but for the benefit of anyone who cares...
Image comics has nothing to do with this discussion. It was a group of well-known superhero artists who wanted to get away from Marvel and keep all the royalties to themselves. Of course, they stuff they turned out was more expensive and no better written or drawn than the typical Marvel book, and they tried to maintain a market saturation that couldn't last forever, so they failed and failed big.
Blank is comprised of cartoonists, not superhero comic book writers and artists. It's a pretty big difference that I won't go into, if you don't understand it then you probably don't care. But these guys are like an indie band who's in it because they love what they do and I don't think it could be considered a "failure" if they don't turn a profit... As long as they can generate a fan base that makes it worth doing. After all, what's the cost, the domain name and web space?
And, Image is hardly the only independant comic book publisher. There are quite a few who've been around for a while and do pretty well-- Fantagraphics for one (Eightball by Dan Clowes, or have you not seen Ghost World?), Slave Labor (haven to all the teens who shop at Hot Topic), Drawn and Quarterly... They may not be huge successes or household names, but they have quite a few loyal readers.
As for "getting syndicated"... That's one route, yes. But not a likely one. The funny pages are incredibly hard to break into and editors are notorious for censoring any joke that wouldn't play on "Leave it to Beaver." An occasional Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes slips through the cracks but that's maybe once every five or six years. And frankly, no one reads them any more anyway. There are a handful of Village Voice/Your-City-Weekly alternative papers for more eclectic strips, but that's also a tough nut to crack. It's a limited and slowly dying market and I don't think many aspiring cartoonists (who do comic strips) are even trying to go these routes any more. It's certainly not the end-all, be-all that you seem to think it is.
The thing is, Keenspot does have its place.
... some of the money that would otherwise rightfully be yours is going to go to the umbrella organization that's sponsoring you. Going independent might make you more money, if you're willing to deal with the financials yourself. (Ideally, you wouldn't care because you'd be doing it for the love of your craft ... but when you become more popular, the bandwidth and hosting costs more money.)
There are a lot of webcomics out there. And I mean a lot. One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that anybody who can find a place to host their files can make a webcomic. There are no other real barriers (though I might argue that not having any discernable talent should be a barrier).
So how do you find a good webcomic? Well, Keenspot is an option. It's a portal that links to a variety of strips. It has certain standards of quality. It's been around for a long time, and it's well known. So if you're looking for something to read, you can always head for Keenspot.
On the flip side, if you're an aspiring webcartoonist and want to get known, getting accepted by Keenspot is a good bet for exactly the same reasons.
From a business perspective, Keenspot is okay. They sell advertising, and some of the money goes to the webcartoonists. Keenspot has done some work to get into newspapers, too, though I admit I don't know many of the details.
And Keenspot also handles the technical side. They provide the servers and all the website code necessary for a webcomic to function (if I recall correctly, that is). In exchange, you, as a webcartoonist, agree to brand your website with a little bit of advertising.
But Keenspot isn't the be-all and end-all of webcomics. Even though there are so many webcomics out there, the webcomic "community" is pretty small. Many of the artists/writers talk to each other. They see each other at conventions. They hang out. And they link to other comics in their rants. If you're looking for a good webcomic, it's almost as if it's a game of follow the links. All you have to do is find one good strip and read it for a while, and if you pay attention, you'll find out what some other good comics are. Word of mouth seems to be the best way to get known in the webcomic community.
And, as I understand it, Keenspot webcartoonists don't get paid as well as they could. Keenspot is a for-profit venture. It's the same as with any label you might sign with
I've got work tomorrow, so I'm going to wrap it up with a couple of webcomics that have my highest recommendation (not that you'd care, given that you don't know anything about my comic preferences). Both webcartoonists are independent.
Something Positive: It's pretty damn mean spirited a lot of the time, and sometimes gets a bit wordy, but it's consistently funny, and the characters come across as being very human. They have hopes and fears. They grow as time goes on. I think they're pretty believable.
Schlock Mercenary: This is a fine piece of science fiction (certainly much more deserving of the label than is Star Wars), and very funny to boot. It also has very good characterization, and wonderfully twisty, entertaining plotlines. This is probably the first comic I check every night, and I read some 30+ webcomics. I think many Slashdotters will appreciate it too. Incidentally, this strip, like the ones mentioned in TFA, recently split from Keenspot.
The short version--for a longer version, see my post just below this--is that people who belong to Keenspot lose some control over their comic.
They:
-Have to share any profits they make off of the success of their strip with Keenspot
-Don't really get to decide who advertises on their site, Keenspot does (I think that's right)
-Have to format their page in a certain way to meet Keenspot's requirements (which includes a large adbox that points to other Keenspot comics)
For some webcartoonists, this loss of control is a dealbreaker. But for others, having the backing of a large-ish organization (which handles some of the more annoying details) and belonging to an established community are very nice benefits.
The webcomic review & criticism blog Websnark.com has some interesting entries looking at Blank Label's creation, its choice of tagline, and the webcomic syndicate from which its members departed.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Here is the link: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/comics.html
Groups like this are all over the place.
Just in terms of webcomics, fleen was one of the earlier "networks"... and there's also dayfree press. The bit of Major News, as it were, is that it's a bunch of comics that were previously keenspace "titles" peeling off- ugly hill is the only newcomer to the batch. Keen isn't the Mount Awesome some people have made it out to be - if anything, it is to webcomics what livejournal is to drama... and these guys have all apparently realized it's time to move on.
Personally, it's nice to see shortpacked free of keenspace advertising feces- bullshit reduction is something I can always get behind. Joining a network looks like it's a good thing for all parties concerned, if it's something you're comfortable doing.
My own comic is going into its third year without being a member of a network, without having run a single ad. I might get shit for traffic but I know exactly what I'm displaying on my site- display and control of presentation is a huge concern of mine, at least for the time being. I'm sure one of these days I'll get sick of obscurity and spend more effort on increasing project awareness than I currently am on project production. Maybe eventually, like these guys, I'll find some like-minded media creators who want to conjoin into some sort of co-prosperity sphere.
I read many Keenspot comics (maybe around 10) religiously; it's a nice central place to read a bunch of stories on a regular basis. A long time ago it was slow and unstable, but lately it's been great, and has a few comics that are very professionally done.
:)
My big gripe is that a few of the comics that moved off are the ones I read. Now they're not in one area anymore, I probably won't read them regularly. That is of course selfish -- but I imagine other readers don't like the move for the same reason. I'd expect an initial loss of readership for these authors, except for very dedicated fans.
On the other hand, it's a logical move for the cartoonists. Keenspace and Keenspot are great ways to jumpstart a budding talent or hobby and watch it grow. From what I can tell, the Blank Label starters quite liked Keenspot and regretted leaving it -- but now that their work has matured, they'd like to take it in a direction they can't do under Keenspot. So good for them
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
You are absolutely right, but TBH I was more encouraged by the fact that the article had "independent" spelled correctly (not "independant").
There is still hope in the world. Perhaps I should mark this day in my calendar (not calender) as "independence day".
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Funny and NOT trying to be userfriendly:
Jendini.com
I wish more cartoonists would do "realistic" storylines without the sci-fi/fantasy copout of not being required to make any sense. I also like that the animals don't talk. :-)
Disclaimer the author is a friend, and I am actively attempting to spread the word about this new comic