It looks like all the denials about not expanding any time soon was just a ploy. Blank Label Comics has just announced two new members in Dave Kellett, creator of Sheldon, and Greg Dean, creator of Real Life. Maybe this was the big thing Kris mentioned in our interview with him and David Willis. From the announcement:
Beyond the formidable wealth of cartooning experience they bring to Blank Label Comics, both possess enviable business savvy and self-publishing knowledge. Continue reading
At a recent appearance at Changing Hands Bookstore Todd McFarlane sat down with The Republic and answered a variety of questions. There are quite a few good ones such as “What are the major differences between a comic book and a graphic novel?” and “Why has there been a boom recently to the popularity of graphic novels?”. The most interesting part for DS though was his answer to the following:
In a previous interview you had said that someday you’d like to do a daily comic strip. Do you still have that aspiration?
I think it would be more satirical, you know like Dilbert or something … stuff about “I remember going through that, now let’s write the funny way of going through that,” Getting your taxes done, while at the same time you don’t miss the date with the pretty girl you’ve been trying (to get) for three weeks. Which one is more important now?
In looking for web comic news we tend to forget about the simple news of a great subscription based comic openning it’s archives or an excellent artist experimenting with new artforms. If you run a web comic or your favorite one has news email us and we’ll put up a post.
Narbonnic – In celebration of getting nominated for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Comedic Comic Shaenon Garrity has openned up her archives on Modern Tales for everyone. Continue reading
The one business model that is suppose to solve the money problem for web comics is micropayments. The idea is an artist offers their work in soft form at a fraction of the cost in hard form. For instance Jon Rosenberg offers two comics for $0.25 through BitPass when the paper form costs $4. This method as applied to web comics comes from Scott McCloud. Twice now Scott has shown reasonable success using this method therefore convincing Jon of Goats to give it the once over.
The problem is it failed. We’re not talking it barely scraped enough money, we’re talking it plowed into the side of a mountain on freakishly clear day. How did that happen? To make sure we all know just how bad Jon reports that during the 8 days of BitPass Merchandising was down to 30% normal. That’s like being on the radio telling the pilot there’s a mountain 5 minutes before the crash.
So what when wrong? The common opinion I hear centers around not leaving BitPass up long enough. It’s like telling someone who has been shot that they are not going to bleed to death but let’s not block it and see what happens. To be fair that is a perfectly viable issue. Jon has been notorious for saying that BitPass would not work as a business model and that may influenced his readers into not purchasing the two comics for sale. There is also the issue that BitPass is still new and given enough time a transition will occur once every becomes comfortable. Here is where Jon tells everyone the problem materializes. Two families simply can not live off an experiment and the trend in 8 days was showing bad times ahead.
There are quite a few people out there complaining and just as many people cheering for seeing McCloud idealism evaporate. Here’s where I’m going to split hairs. Micropayments is a great idea for a business model, except the current method is flawed. There has to be some incentive for coming back to spend more money or the price of the product has to be so cheap that it really doesn’t matter. By offering whole comics at $0.25 Jon was cutting off his merchandising market. Why pay $3 when I can pay a quarter? Instead Jon should have left the paper comic alone and gone straight for the archives.
Offer today’s strip for free but force readers to pay $0.005 to read any one strip in the archive for the day. Get it? It’s a micropayment. Which reader out there wouldn’t pay 3.5 cents to catch up on the past week’s strips that you missed? Especially for such a fantastic strip like Goats. There’s no annoying monthly bill from a subscription and you could read the entire archive for around $15. For those of you who don’t believe this will work how do you think half the ads out there work? The advertiser pays you a penny for every visit your site sends them.
Micropayments are not the solution but neither is simply selling ad space. One of these days we’ll all realize that there is no one solution to making money on the internet, otherwise everyone would already be living off of it.
The past few days have seen a little buzz about the a license proposal for the internet from Creative Commons. There’s an excellent round table discussion by T Campbell at Comixpedia with Lawrence Lessig, Neeru Paharia, Mia Garlick, JD Frazer of User Friendly and Cory Doctorow. Current licenses tend to be restirctive and cause problems for honest fan art and fan fiction.
In short the proposal has eleven licenses created from four different methods: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works, and Share Alike. These all combine into Continue reading
On June 11th , 2005 Howard Taylor posted comic 1826. Posting that many comics itself is quite an accomplishment but the fact that it’s 1826 comics since June 12th, 2000 makes one of few feats accomplished by any comic. In case you’re still wondering why I’m posting it’s because there are 1826 days between the dates I mentioned above. Mr. Taylor has posted a comic every single day since the strip started.
You had to see something like this coming. It would appear that just maybe print cartoonists are starting to see more of the light that’s so blinding we’re amazed this hasn’t happened before. The AAEC has gone live with its own site. On it you’ll find works from current members along with cartoonists bios, news, prints, books, and of course cartoons. It looks like Cagle may be getting some competition, finally.
As fans of web comics we like to say events such as this are inevitable but the truth is the print industry has been slow Continue reading
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Xerexes pointed me over to a presentation by a Ben Hammersley delivered to an audience in Copenhagen. The presentation concerns micropublishing and coffeehouse culture in Enlightenment England and the current state of blogging. Is this a perfect topic for Last Drop?
It looks like Scott McCloud has recovered from the red he was seeing. He has decided to remove his essay demanding an apology and explained the posting as a lapse in judgment due to his need to defend friends. Does this mean the end of the drama? Websnark is predicting Sunday will be last day we hear about this.
The Lulu awards nominees were announced last week. These awards are meant to bring honor and recognition to the most inspiring and noteworthy women in the comic book industry. There are four awards (Hall of Fame, Kim Yale, Distinction, and the Lulu) with many notable artists up for the Kim Yale award. Also the artist for Narbonic, Shaenon Garrity, is up for the Lulu of the Year award.