Bunch of things today, in the order they occur to me.

• The WCCAs are back for another go-round.
• Speaking of “another go-round”, xkcd seems to be drifting towards (filthy) continuity.
• The paper doll thing is really taking off, with others available now, and the promise of still more in the coming days. It makes me wonder who the most disturbing webcomics characters to get the paper doll treatment might be. Probably Jon and/or Hastings.
• Speaking of which: is that a mini Goats/Ugly Hill crossover I see?
• Latest to try the Offer Your Webcomic To College Papers Approach: Wondermark. Snap it up, college editors! All it costs is a little (potentially disturbing) information about your bizarre personal fetishes:
  

  The editor of the paper should email me the following information:

  1. Who you are and what school you’re from
  2. How many weeks worth of comics’ you’d need (i.e. how long is your semester)
  3. Name and contact info of a faculty advisor
  4. Favorite mammal and why

  Wow! Not creepy at all, David Malki ! from Wondermark!
  Crap, I just noticed that Malki !’s bio includes something about being a freelance firearms specialist. Um, sorry about all that “Dreamcrusher” stuff, Mr Malki ! sir. Please don’t murder me.

• Finally, welcome back from the land of No Internet to Christopher Wright.

It’s just stuff, y’know?

• If there’s one thing that Cheshire Crossing needs more than an every-six-months update schedule, it’s an RSS feed. But other than that, it’s good fun. And is it just me, or does the Mad Hatter look … familiar?
• Speaking of webcomics that give Peter Pan a reworking, a while back we told you about Bill Mudron’s involvement in the webcomicky collection of Whedonesque stories known as Serenity Tales. Mike Russell writes to tell us:
  

  After a nice long hiatus, the Big Damn Fan Comic website Serenity Tales is back — with three new installments (and a few more not too terribly far off).

  I noticed Ursula Vernon contributing there, which meshes nicely with Digger coming back from hiatus today and all.

• Nothing to do with webcomics, per se, but check out Christopher Butcher’s visit to the Tezuka Museum; I was lucky enough to visit almost five years ago, but there’s been some really cool additions since then. Most notably: a pile of 150,000 sheets of paper (which represents Tezuka’s lifetime output), and Tezuka’s actual desk, which you can sit at.

  Although, there was one almost unforgivably awesome display up when I was there — it was 5 April 2003, which according to Tezuka was just two days before Tetsuwan Atom was first activated. Thus, there was a major display at the museum, with a life-sized Atom laid out on a lab table, with a clock counting down to his birthday. I also sat through four consecutive screenings of Butchy in the City, because it was just so damn charming.

• And lastly, noticed on this morning’s trawl: I have no idea what applecat is, but I’m intrigued.

In the aftermath of pointless election-year posturing, the Washington Post got all webcomics-friendly, although it appears the article actually came from PC World.

Dirk Deppey, mad genius behind ¡Journalista! (the blogfront of the venerable and very serious The Comics Journal) has released a list of the Fifty Best Comics of 2007 (with a couple of ties, so it’s actually 52). A touch over 10% of the list is webcomics:

• A Softer World, at number 45
• Scary Go Round, number 37
• Sinfest, number 31
• Nothing Better, number 27
• The Perry Bible Fellowship (in the form of The Trial of Colonel Sweeto), number 19, and
• Achewood, coming in at number 10

Also, Dirk? Scary Go Round actually updates five times a week, not three, so I hope you haven’t missed out on 40% of the enjoyment.

Finally, while stopping by Wonderella for my weekly fix on Saturday, I noticed the announcement that there’s new stuff every day this week. So far, it’s a strip previously-posted on Clickwheel and some character studies from the strip’s development. Just start at the beginning and read forward, and muse on why you’re not awesome enough to have a cape.

Items of some note:

• When I think awesome, one of the first things that pops to my mind is insane webcomics experiments. And the current gravitational center of insane webcomics experimenters may be found at a commune in Mexico where Ryan Estrada and John Campbell cackle with glee each time they come up with a new mad scheme:
  

  hi gary!

  john campbell here, from the cartoon commune, pictures for sad children, etc. i’m starting my third year of hourly comics, which is this thing where i make a little journal comic every hour i’m awake for a month. they’re going up at hourlycomic.com. i’m wanting to see what journal comics look like if they are kind of preposterously detailed. because with daily journal comics i rarely feel like i get a grasp of what the author’s average day is like. the comics go up each hour i’m awake with a 24 hour lag time. which is part of this thing where i was wondering what if a website updated hourly is that something that is interesting (it is not all that interesting).

  On my first reading, I actually thought that Campbell would be trying to stay awake for a month, and a new comic in every hour would provide us with documentation of his descent into madness. Alas for my sense of schadenfreude but luckily for Campbell, a more careful reading reveals he’s actually doing a comic for every hour that he would be awake anyway. But there is an upside!

  the important thing is that you will get to see ryan estrada say and do what i am sure will be all sorts of dumb things.

  I am so there.

• Chris Hastings, abetting the beffudlement of through-drivers everywhere.
• An epic story started here (or possibly here), ended here, and now offers a jumping-on point for new readers here.
• Looks like 500 strips on January 3rd 2008 wasn’t just a Karenic Phenomenon. Behold.
• Finally, Friend O’ Webcomics Brian Warmoth has finished his escape from the Den of Satan Wizard‘s website to a different sort of diabolical situation. As of yesterday, Warmoth is now the new Marketing Manager of Devil’s Due Publishing, and will handle marketing, publicity and convention responsibilities. We at Fleen hope to see Warmoth on the convention circuit, and urge all reading to drop by the DDP booth to say “thanks” for all the great interviews he did.

Big changes coming up in some webcomics, for varying reasons:

• Over at PvP, it looks like it’s wedding season! It’s been half a decade that Brent & Jade have been in a holding pattern (the year-long arc where they were split up was Scott Kurtz’s most interesting work), so making such a fundamental shift could be fraught with danger. But Kurtz pulled it off once already, with the complete alteration of the Robbie & Jase dynamic. Having heard him (back in July, yo) riff live onstage about how shaking characters out of their comfort zones can lead to hearty laugh-chuckles, I’m very interested to see how this plays out.
• I come to praise PC Weenies, not to bury it. That is, the Mark I version of PCW is now a permarchive, while the new Mark II incarnation has migrated to the wilds of the .net TLD. At the same time, Krishna Sadasivam has shifted to a mix of panel gags and stripping. Along with the change in comickin’ style, there’s a nifty new layout, courtesy (once again) of Tyler Martin‘s Comicpress (in the absence of any new Northian tools in 2007, I’m going to declare Comicpress to the be neat webcomics infrastructure thing of the past year).

  Anyway, PCWv2 joins Uncubed under the umbrella of the Random Nerds Comic Group, which is as good a name as you could come up with for a one-person collective. If changing the site design of two comics and building a new brand identity for them both seems a little ambitious, well, I suppose we can cut Sadavisam a little slack for feeling somewhat creative these days. I know that I said I was sick of all the webcomickers spawning this year, but dang — that’s one cute kid, K.

• Finally, Karen Ellis will have to deal with change as well — for after today, she can never again say, “I’ve had fewer than 500 updates to my journal comic”. Considering that those 500 updates occurred in the space of less than two years, I’d say that’s pretty impressive. Also impressive? Cartoon Karen makes a surprisingly cheerful Supergothgirl, especially with the bunny slippers.

Much bigger response to yesterday’s call to arms that I anticipated; lots of good input from all who have commented. I particularly wanted to highlight something Bill Barnes wrote a little bit ago:

Honestly the $10 number seems completely arbitrary. Yes, it’s $100,000 divided by 10,000. But those are both also arbitrary numbers too.

Absolutely true; I was thinking in terms of numbers because I was mulling over Jon Rosenberg‘s Law of Webcomics Merch (first stated during one of the fights over micropayments): any reader that’s going to buy something will spend up to $20, so you’re better off trying to sell them a $20 item than a $2 item, because they feel equally satisfied either way.

Honestly, what I considered the most important part of the post wasn’t the number, wasn’t the suggestions of specific merchandise, it was this:

… if you’re thinking about doing this for a living, you have to be willing to work it at least as much a regular job.

And that was just kind of easy to wrap up in the quick thought of “Go get your tenner”. If it’s an overly ambitious goal, well that’s better than one that’s too easily achieved.

I am privileged to know a lot of webcomickers, a significant number of whom are making their livings at it. I also see a vast wave of newcomers to the game, a larger number every year, for whom there has never been a world where there weren’t people making their living from webcomics. They are not, I fear, aware of the incredible range of talents it takes to succeed in this fashion — basically, everything that isn’t writing and drawing.

Five hundred years ago, being an artist meant finding a patron and tying your fortunes to his; it also meant that your job was to rehabilitate or glorify your patron’s image rather than expressing your vision. Today, being a profesional webcomicker means you can follow your muse as you wish, but it also means you have to run a small business with varying degrees of daring and skill depending on how many readers you can develop in your niche.

I have a feeling that Webcomics = Business is going to be a recurring theme for me in 2008, but it’s because I want you to succeed as a professional creator. It won’t be easy, but hopefully (for both of us), it’ll be a lot of fun. So let’s restate yesterday’s conclusion this way —

2008 is the year you decide to go pro; how are you going convince the rest of us to help you stay there? You don’t have to tell the world, but you do have to set the goals and make the plans and be ready to change along the way.

Ten dollars.

That’s a number that’s been running around my head. If you’re a webcomics creator, it’s a number you should be thinking about, hard. It’s not very much — a sandwich, a refreshing beverage, a slice of tasty pie — that’s probably more than ten dollars right there. As I am constantly reminded by the year-end pledge requests from my local NPR station, it’s less than 2.8 cents a day when spread out over a year.

If you want your webcomic to be your job, it’s the amount of money you want to make off of each of your readers in the coming year. Doesn’t sound like very much, does it? But this time last year I was wondering if 10,000 regular readers were enough to support a webcomic creator, and it occurs to me that if that theoretical creator can get ten dollars off of each of those 10,000 readers, then the answer falls pretty strongly in the Hell, yes category.

Now you aren’t going to make ten dollars off of each and every reader; you probably won’t get more than a hard core of readers — say 10 to 20% — to give you anything. But those most loyal fans are going to make up for the slackers.

By way of example: 2007, I bought three originals from a particular creator who charges an entirely reasonable $40 a pop. That means that I covered 11 non-contributing readers, minus a bit for shipping. Call it me plus nine others once you subtract the cost of Bristol and ink.

Chances are the same is going to happen next year, which means that Our Hero doesn’t have to entice all that many more people to have purchasing habits equivalent to mine, and he’s a goodly way to his goal. Add in a percentage of the readership that buys a book or poster and he’s closer still. Tack on a bit of advertising, and even the deadbeats are contributing.

The point is, the average reader of webcomics will blow through ten bucks without thinking of it. It will take some effort to figure out what will separate that particular reader from ten bucks, and how many increments are needed, but everybody reading your comic is willing to purchase something.

• T-shirt buyers tend to be repeat purchasers — sell ’em three with a $3.50 margin, and they’re covered.
• Posters are a nice high-margin item — you should be able to clear $5 profit per without trying.
• Originals! Physical artifacts created as part of the production of your strip are as close to free money as you can possibly get. Even if you don’t produce finished inked-and-lettered originals (and most of you don’t), the pencil or blue-line sketch that got scanned, along with a decently-printed version of the final artwork, is worth placing up for sale.

  If you don’t work from scanned artwork, you can still do a pencilled rough of what you’re going to draw on the tablet; it’ll take you five minutes, and somebody in your readership will value it at ten dollars, guaranteed. Everybody not named Ryan North should be able to exploit this.

Does all this take a lot of creativity and time? Oh my yes, but you’ve got creativity coming out the ears or you wouldn’t be a webcomicker, and if you’re thinking about doing this for a living, you have to be willing to work it at least as much a regular job. Is stuffing an envelope and standing in line at the post office fun? I promise you it’s more fun than my commute.

Ten dollars per reader in 2008 is your goal … go get it.