Fleen: The Awkward Christmas Dinner Of Our Obligation To Existence

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Q: What do you get if you mix (from the right) Dean Haspiel, Raina Telgemeier, Rich Stevens, and Ted Rall, then get Collen Venable to wrangle ’em?

A: Webcomics: A Primer. The session started late due to A/V issues, but they were sorted out in time for Venable to invite each of the others to show a small sample of their work. Rall showed work by himself and others from the Attitude 3 collection, Stevens browsed the internets to show some of his latest web-only and newspaper strips, Telgemeier hooked up her iPod to show pages from Smile, and Haspiel had examples of Brawl and Billy Dogma to share. Yay, technology.

The question then turned to the philsophical “Why webcomics?”, with Rall providing the most cogent answer — immediacy. Unlike working in print where weeks can go by between original work, reader reaction, and counter-reaction, webcomics offer the ability to put the strip up and receive immediate feedback and community with the readers. Or, as Stevens put it, I get the strip up at 11:57, and by 12:02 people are emailing me with spelling corrections.

This led to the question of when to post — a simple question that appears to have no answer. Haspiel had a web-traffic expert tell him that Tuesday morning at 11:00am is the idea time to put content up and have people pay attention; Rall said that Friday is the peak day for editorial cartoons; Stevens noted that his peak traffic is on Mondays. Speaking authoritatively, Telgemeier noted that Wednesday is the peak day for dental comics.

Almost without prompting the conversation turned to who a webcomicker is; Rall noted that all cartoonists, in effect, are webcartoonists now. The work gets put up on the internet, which provides a larger audience but also makes it easier for people to send you death threats.

Asked if a uniform size for the comic help in eventual syndication/print efforts, Haspiel noted that he made every page of Billy Dogma a uniform block, but then thought about the possibilities for placing things inside the block instead of the restrictions of the form. Stevens once made a 58 panel comic because he got inspired, but wishes I’d been like Dean. I had to release PDF E-books of my old strips because I can’t print them.

The next question dealt with mobile devices. Haspiel points out that in a world where people can watch LOST on the subway, they may as well read my comics. Stevens noted that iPhones don’t require much in the way of reformatting, but Telgemeier worried about page compositions being lost in such a small space. Haspiel agreed with that being the major drawback, but Stevens felt that a good enough story would hook the audience and drive them to a book version.

Okay, you know how there’s sometimes an elephant in the room, and you’re just waiting for somebody to point it out? Elephant time. Venable then opened the floor to questions, and the first one dealt with the economics of free: “What does the boss think about you putting out on the net for free what they’re trying to sell?” Rall jumped in with both feet:

If I were in charge of the world … I would force everything offline. All cartoonists, all newspapers, no more archives, nothing. And every cartoonist would make fifteen times as much money. Giving it away, I think it’s insane and stupid.

For those who remember the qualifications that Rall made at SPX last fall, where a similar statement was couched in terms of specifically editorial cartoonists, there was no such qualification this time. It was a blanket statement, and it was made while sitting next to one of the strongest proponents of a business model where you (quoting now) Give away a ton of stuff, and edit down to things of value [that you can sell].

From this point, the dialogue got pretty fast; what follows is as close to verbatim as I was able to notate. Haspiel was the first to respond with a disagreement:

If it’s good, it’ll sell; Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, they put music out for free but also for sale. I would almost insist on new contracts with publishers that I could put portions of content online, because it builds an audience.

Rall responded:

Only print pays. Otherwise, you have to be in two businesses. You have to be a cartoonist and a businessman, and not many can do that.

Stevens, not quite close enough to his mic:

Great! You’re trying to keep people out [of the cartooning business] and that’s great. It’s less competition for me. If you have a story that’s compelling …

Rall:

I can’t make money on t-shirts. I can’t design a t-shirt that will sell.

Stevens:

You can sell novels and books. You have bestsellers.

Rall:

A book will only sell for 6 to 12 months. They don’t pay enough to live on.

Stevens:

So? Adapt!

Rall:

And what kind of hours do you have to work to make a living, Rich?

Stevens:

Not enough! I’d work 24/7 if I could.

[I believe that with that last line, both Stevens and Rall felt that his own point had been made — Rall because Stevens spoke of working insane hours, and Stevens because he thinks sleep interrupts his compulsion to work.]

The next question from the audience came from Calvin Reid, and came straight back to the issue just concluded: Rall spoke about the good old days, when many more cartoonists were making a living, some doing extraordinarily well in terms of today’s dollars. But wasn’t it just as hard to break in to big-paying syndication deals back then?

Rall thought the question was misleading, that there is no ‘breaking in’:

You have the illusion of breaking in, but until you are paying the bills, you are not a professional, working cartoonist. It’s harder to break in now because the overall pool of money is smaller.

Stevens responded:

Is it? I wouldn’t have tried to break in [to syndication] if you hadn’t called me [editor’s note: Rall recruited Stevens into his current syndication deal]. And what if ‘professional’ isn’t your goal? If you’re not watching TV, you’re doing a comic and it’s paying your internet bill? That’s a better hobby than watching the goddamn Food Network.

And that’s where we’re going to end it, since my hands are getting tired and I still have to go back and format and linkify everything above. In any event, plenty there to argue about in the comments. Let’s finish up with some vaguely contextual quotes:

Rich Stevens, on Dean Haspiel — He’s hunky.
Colleen Venable, on Haspiel’s observation on the number of people reading webcomics from work — That’s a great thing about webcomics.
Stevens, on same — We’re why there’s a recession.

Haspiel, on the benefits of webcomics — Webcomics are lifting the veil between creator and audience.
Raina Telgemeier, on reader interactions — I’ve gotten hate mail over Baby-Sitters Club from 13 year olds with detailed reasons why I was The Devil.
Venable — At least they’re writing!

Edit to add: The spam filters are getting a little aggressive on this comment thread; from what I can tell, it’s mostly due to people that haven’t posted much in the past posting a lot now. Apologies to Eric Millikin and Ted Rall, who have had posts eaten or delayed. If you have difficulty, please send an email to us via the Contact page and we’ll do what we can.

According to Census data, 55% of Americans make $50k/year or less.

OK, so hopefully now everyone can understand that $50,000 is an unexceptional income. It’s less than average, 45% of Americans make more than that, etc.

someone have figured out how to get rich off webcomics â€” the guys who do Penny Arcade. Theyâ€™re the big superstars of the field, the Charles Schulz-level success story.

This looks like more dumbed-down expectations. Charles Schulz was often in Forbes as one of the highest paid celebrities. He continues to be one of the highest paid dead celebrities. He’s like Elvis level. As far as I know, we have nobody in webcomics that is at that level of income — around $32 million a year. Penny Arcade’s income, on the other hand, is described as “enough to live on at least.”

What Ted is saying here — that the economic opportunities for cartoonists today are worse than in the past — ought to be completely uncontroversial. Unfortunately there seems to be so much denial about this (here, anyway) that the conversation can’t even move anywhere. If this basic fact can’t be understood, then you can’t move on to examining the sources of the problem, the severity of the problem relative to other benefits, the possible solutions to the problem, etc.

There are, what 120? 130 full-time editorial cartoonists working in America? And 200-250 full-time syndicated strip/panel cartoonists? Let’s be generous and say 500, total.

Now, let’s ignore all the men and women who (I personally know) have to maintain a second job, despite their syndication contract. Let’s say there are 500 working, full-time editorial and strip cartoonists in America today.

Can Webcomics replace those jobs? My thought is that yes, in time it can….*but only for the strip folks*.

And this is where Ted is right: not every type of cartoon can be monetized on the Web. My personal feeling is that the editorial folks are really, really boned in this paradigm shift.

I have yet to see someone monetize editorial stuff online in a way that even approaches their old on-staff or syndicated salaries.

So it’s not helpful to tell an editorial cartoonist that you have to adapt and monetize your work online… their genre of cartooning is damn near impossible to monetize on the Web.

That’s not without historical precedent in cartooning….that an entire genre of cartooning be destroyed by the advent of a new technology. With the advent of the photograph, literally THOUSANDS of workaday American illustrators could no longer find an income, all within the span of ten years. Once the price to take, develop and reprint a photograph dropped to a certain point, people who had worked in newspapers, advertising, catalogs, and magazines…all found their jobs made irrelevant in a technology paradigm shift.

My gut reaction is that a similar thing will happen to editorial cartooning. It will continue, but in a far diminished cultural presence. The economics of getting readers to pay to read editorial cartoons just isn’t there. (Yet, anyway.)

And maybe that’s what Ted’s referring to: It’s definitely raining for editorial cartoonists, so hearing how sunny it is for web strips doesn’t help much.

Good point, Dave. Ted is (I think) mostly coming from the world of editorial comics, and from what I’ve been reading, editorial cartoonists have been getting squeezed pretty hard.

Eric, I never disputed that $50k was an unexceptional income. In my first post in this thread, I described it as part of a range in “the middle of the middle class”.

As far as the economic opportunities for cartoonists now, compared to decades ago — I think that’s actually a very complicated question. You need to take into account that there are several kinds of cartoonists, and that for some people cartooning is just part of a broader artistic career. You need to ask if the economic health of a field is best described by looking at its top earners or the broad middle.

You also need to consider the general culture. Modern Americans change careers far more often than the Americans of several decades past. While a cartoonist of the 1950s might get a syndicated slot and churn out a daily strip for the rest of his life, a modern cartoonist might do a webcomic for a few years while in college, then use that experience to snag a job at an animation studio while working on a graphic novel in his off hours, and then leave animation for freelance illustration, or computer game character design.

Dave, your empathy is making my snarkiness look petty.

Eric, I never disputed that $50k was an unexceptional income.

Awesome, Avram. Hopefully whoever it was that was holding $50,000 up as an example of success and/or had their mind blown by my assertion that $50,000 was less than the average income has now joined us in economic reality.

I’m empathetic because I’ve had the same discussion with dozens of cartoonists at the Reubens or at an NCS meeting…so I’ve learned that the slow, dawning realization is a painful one.

Their initial reactions are all predictably the same. You hear them say:

1.) “There’s no way to make a living around comics online.” Then you begin to show them your bank statements, and eventually they concede that point.

2.) Then they say “But there can’t be more than five of you doing it.” Then you start to list out the dozens of Webcomics doing it, including Penny-Arcade, xkcd, PvP, Questionable Content, Schlock Mercenary, Sheldon, and dozens more…and they concede that point.

3.) Then they say “But *I* don’t want to have to adjust my business model to do it that way. I just wanna do comics and get paid for it.” And that’s the rub, really. They don’t want to change. And hell, we can all respect that. If I had worked for decades to build a career around a certain business model…I wouldn’t want to change, either.

Dave, “dozens of Webcomics doing it” (whatever “it” is) isn’t even close to the same as a comic industry employing thousands of people, with the top earner making over thirty million a year. Someone who points this reality out to you isn’t just some old fossil who can’t handle change shaking his fist and telling us to get off his lawn and turn down the rock and roll or whatever.

You, me, and several other people are doing really well in our new economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that this economy is really bad for a lot of other people. While I appreciate the enthusiasm and positive outlook behind your “We did it, so can all of you!” attitude, I think the reality is that our current economic system does not support this.

On a related note, this week I helped a homeless man buy lunch. It used to be I knew almost every homeless person in my stomping grounds by name, but there are so many new ones that I can’t keep track anymore. This guy told me that he’s been homeless now for a little under two months after he lost his job. His wife had to move back in with her mother, and so now he hardly sees his wife anymore. If I’d suggested that he could solve all his problems by getting with the times and embracing the new economic future that webcomics represent, he probably would have punched me in the face.

Our economic system is horrible.

No argument there. We’re in for tough times in the next 6-24 months.

But that has little, if anything, to do with basic point here: That there’s a massive cultural switch of people preferring to read things immediately online vs. reading them a day later in newsprint…and the resulting business failure of the latter when that happens.

Let me state that better, Eric, so that we can stay on topic:

– The current state of the general economy is terrible…but is largely due to macroeconomic forces in state, federal, investment, and corporate policies.

– The current state of the newspaper comics industry can largely be traced to one microeconomic decision: The individual decision by the consumer to no longer take a paper.

You can rail about the sucky state of the first one all you want, but the truth is the second one would’ve happened even in a healthy economy. Thus, Rich’s original point: We need to adapt. Regardless of how fair or unfair it may seem.

…Because the bottom line is readers have forced that adaptation on us. They no longer want a paper.

I also am not terribly surprised that a business model barely a decade old does not employ thousands of people, with the top earner making over thirty million a year. I’ll bet most of the let’s-say-25 people earning full-time incomes from comics on the Web weren’t doing so five years ago. I’ll further bet that in five years there will be more doing so, and the top earners will be making more than they make today. I don’t think this is reason for alarm.

I will agree, however, that editorial cartoonists have a tougher row to hoe than most. But look at the JibJab guys, or David Rees whose non-traditional, magazine-and-alt-weekly print success has probably very little to do with the economic fortunes of newspapers. There will be new markets for different forms of political editorial content in the future because there will be new markets for different forms of everything in the future.

Eric, I can conclude only that you have some special, personal definitions for the words “success” and “unexceptional” with which I am unfamiliar.

Interestingly, the big-shot Web 2.0 bigwigs I’ve talked to think that editorial cartoons have a brighter future online than apolitical comics. They point to the tendency of political stuff to go viral, especially when it responds quickly to breaking news. Certainly it’s easy to imagine a political comic (static or animated) making the rounds to millions of phones or Blackberries or whatever about a topic that everyone’s talking about.

Print editors and publishers are hurting editorial cartoonists more than the web ever could.

My overall point is a much broader one: Most cartoonists, political and otherwise, can’t come up with a second line of business to support their cartoon habit. So that model doesn’t work.

That leaves ad-supported websites. But the rates are so low–and deservedly so, since the value of an online reader to an advertiser is so much less than that of a print reader.

Consider the New York Times. NYTimes.com is, by all accounts, one of the most successful examples of a paper transitioning to online. Indeed, it has 13 times more readers than the print edition! But here’s the trouble: overall revenues are 13 times less. In other words, a NYTimes.com reader is worth 1/169th as much as a New York Times reader to the Times Company.

OK, you say, they’ve gotta adapt. If they can replace every NYT reader with 169 (or, better yet, 170) NYT.com readers, then they’ll be fine.

Maybe they can replace 10,000 NYT readers with 1.7 million NYT.com readers. But can they replace 100,000 with 17 million? The paper’s circulation is 1.1 million. Will 187 million people read NYT.com? Probably not.

Like Mulder, I want to believe. Damn, we’re all webcartoonists now! Very few print cartoonists don’t have their own websites. But the numbers don’t make sense, at least for those of us who would like to see a lot of cartoonists be able to generate a living wage.

P.S. When Dave says he’s making beaucoup bucks, I wanna know: how much? As Eric says, I’m sure it falls somewhere short of seven, much less eight, figures.

Just a random thought I had about the prices of things lately– I was thinking about the price of comic books. 3.99, some almost 5 dollars, when not too long ago they were under a dollar, and not long before that, a dime! And for 64 pages! These are the days I think Ted refers to when many cartoonists were bringing in a decent living, especially some editorial cartoonists. I know the price of printing has gone way up, but I always felt like the cover prices of comic books were always a bit artificially inflated– i mean, a book that costs 30 cents to print, costs almost 4 bucks to own. Huh?

Anyways, on the same line of that thought I wonder if people, with the internet age here, aren’t deciding what’s REALLY worth their money anymore. What’s worth what… as if, if newspapers only still cost a nickle, or comics a dime, I wonder if there wouldn’t be MILLIONS more readers. Stuff just got too damn expensive somewhere along the line, and with the internet it’s beginning to seem like a MYTH that has collapsed. — That myth of price was everywhere though, from cassette tapes to CDs…. CDS cost like a 9 cents to make– they sell for 20. And the artists were always LAST to get their measily 5 cent cut, if anything. Maybe the internet has finally killed Facism or something?

Ted– Just out of curiosity here, how much money are you thinking is a livable wage for cartoonists, if 50k would be considered non-successful? Like, if in a perfect world there was a way for a GOOD cartoonist to come online and use a cookie cutter method to make a salary per year drawing a daily comic strip– what would that be to be a comfortable living?

Also, I’m not sure where you live, but I have many friends in large cities paying outrageous amounts for rent, etc.. with no REAL benefit of working and living in a big city as cartoonists with the way the web works now.

Take Hugh McLeod for example, http://www.gapingvoid.com – he’s in marketing and draws cartoons on the backs of business cards. He was living in New York, London– and now he’s moved to Alpine Texas, where he has everything he needs and he does his work from there. I have no idea how much money he makes, but he’s extremely happy.

I suspect, D.J., that we’re on the same page existentially. If I made $30K a year (significantly less than I do now) drawing cartoons, I would be very, very happy. After all, I’d be drawing comics and getting paid. I dreamed of that for years! Most cartoonists never get that.

In a broader, economic sense, however, it is relevant to compare the overall scale of what cartoonists earned a few decades to what they earn today to what they seem likely to earn in the future. That’s where I worry, not especially for myself–I’m getting older, and can see retiring before the economics get too hard, and I personally have others pots on the fire that should ease the transitional pain–but for the profession overall.

To answer your question, editorial cartoonists at midsize newspapers can currently command at least $100K. Many earn substantially–several times–more than that. $50K would be on the very low end of editorial cartooning–and editorial cartooning is in crisis. Comic strip artists do better…much, much better.

Eric is exactly right: First, we all have to understand that the future is very, very scary for all cartoonists, including webcartoonists who have adapted to the new paradigm. If we all get on that page together, we can put our heads together and start to figure out some ways to save ourselves.

If, on the other hand, we all look at the few artists who have won the Toon Lotto as role models to emulate…well, we’re probably fucked.

By the way, I drew a comic about this topic for tomorrow:

http://www.rall.com/rants.html

Ted, to answer your question: I told you in the above posting how much I made this year…just shy of six figures. That’s in my fist full-time year with “Sheldon”, and with 15-25,000 daily readers.

Now I’ll ask you in turn: How many guys can you name, syndicated on their first strip after 2001, who don’t have a second job? Can you name one? Even one?

You’re playing a sophist’s trick trying to compare my 1-year career with Mort Walker’s 40+ year career.

Here are numbers to chew on: Based on my first quarter numbers for 2008, I’ll be breaking six figures this year. If my readership continues to grow 2-5% every month (via RSS, the site, and via e-mail signups), how many years will it take me to crack seven figures? Eight figures? Gosh, about the same amount of time it used to take a syndicated cartoonist to crack those same amounts.

Gosh, imagine that! It takes years of work to get to eight figures! Whodathunk!

Oh, and Ted, because I can already hear you wondering how to crack six figures with only 15-25,000 daily readers, let me give you a hint from my business chapters in “How To Make Webcomics” (Image Comics, 2008; Guigar, Kellett, Kurtz, Straub):

*High-margin items….e.g., our artwork.*

Not all of us have opted to become low-margin t-shirt salesmen.

You don’t know need to sell many daily comic strips at $100 to $155 a pop via the site…
http://sheldoncomics.com/store/item/originalart.html?strip=080323

Or at $560 a pop via eBay…
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290213638931

Or at $400 a pop via galleries…
http://www.storyopolis.com/kellett.html

…to make a damn good income. Throw in a wheel-barrow full of book sales, and a few big-earning conventions every year, and Ted, even you could be making a living online.

Very funny strip, Ted. Though after reading it I thought I should pipe in with my two cents, as I’m a full-time webcomic creator that generates most of my income not from T-Shirts, but from advertising revenue.

Webcomics I produce have generated over $80,000 alone from ad-supported ebook downloads on WOWIO.com in the past eight months. It’s anyone’s guess how long WOWIO will last as a business, but at the moment, their payouts are very real.

Additionally, my webcomic sites have made over $20,000 in ad revenue since December 2007 from ADSDAQ, and I’m seeing similar results from other ad networks like Gorilla Nation.

Full-time webcomic creators who thrive on T-Shirts and other merchandise sales may be prominent, but ad-supported full-timers exist, too. And our ranks seem to be growing as the outlets that supply advertising to indy sites grow and improve.

(For those wondering, the revenue numbers quoted above are unrelated to the company Keenspot, which I bought 100% ownership of recently.)

(That said, I am working to increase our T-Shirt output and merch sales. Once we’ve got that going in addition to sweet, sweet ad revenue, we’ll really be doing gangbusters.)

Just another anecdotal point for the income discussion: I edit comics and earn $50K per year (but would have expected $60-80K had I taken a similar editorial job elsewhere). I live in an expensive city, and I own a car and pay a mortgage and keep the cat fed. Since I suspect my raise this year won’t be to 6 figures, I’m thinking I need to ditch this sorry gig and become an artist instead. Editors, we get no respect anyway….

Unfortunate Editor: You speak the truth! And my apologies if my gauche mentioning of income came off as rude.

Unfortunately, whenever I have this discussion about Webcomics, the conversation always comes down to “Oh yeah, well how much do *you* make??” Which, in the American Puritan tradition, is the rudest possible thing to expound upon. (For the French, your personal religious beliefs are the rudest possible public topic. For Americans, it’s your personal income level.)

So on that note, I’ll just wish Ted well in the years ahead, head back to work, and duck out of this conversation permanently.

Eek, eek.

[…] Editorial cartoonist and United Media’s Acquisition and Development Editor Ted Rall, Rich Stevens, creator of online and print comic Diesel Sweeties, along with web cartoonist Dean Haspiel, Raina Telgemeier, Collen Venable were at a recent event to discuss the impact and viability of webcomics in the cartooning industry. […]

[…] our discussion of webcomics and the economics of free is winding down, but it’s just heating up over at The Daily Cartoonist. My favorite part is […]

Wow, if I get to 1k views a day with a strip I’ll be pumped and obviously will still have to remain working at my nightslave job stocking groceries, which atm pays less then 20k canadian per year.

Hey Ted- Love the NY Times analogy, but it’s totally reversed when you compare a typical print reader to a typical webomics reader.

Chris Crosby isn’t bullshitting on these ad numbers, BTW. I’ve been trying to learn from him in this regard and am finally seeing some results. (tho nowhere near his yet)

How in the world can so many assumptions be made about an industry that’s roughly a decade old?

And is it right that we only compare online content with print? I know for a fact from working in television that there is a TON of money in it, much of it wasted and horribly distributed for TV content. I was on Viacom’s comprehensive health plan for a year on a show that never even aired. Imagine how many cartoonists could make their life’s work on that kind of money! The money TV networks use to furnish an unaired show’s wrap-up party.

Things are changing and advertisers are reluctant to put their money elsewhere, but they will. The money exists, and it will go where today’s youth are. (Incidentally, MTV is miserably behind in the times, and they know it. Especially since they lost the MySpace bid.) Kids born in the 90s don’t think of the internet as a novelty or a catalyst for change like us old-timers do. (I’m including myself in that, and I’m 23.) The internet is second nature for them.

I think there there are two worlds here. One where people are living an a fish bowl and think that 50K is not a lot by any standard (and yes I did get the analogy of how much the regular syndicated person did and does make), and another one where you’re outside looking where money is the goal to make a living to do what you love, and how much based on living expenses, what your parents made, etc where even the “low” amount of 50K is more than great it’s extra where you can do what you love and have bills paid even if it is rent and not mortage..

I’m also not talking about some low income state. Both my parents were (I say “were” because they are now retired) teachers in Orange County California which is not a cheap place to live, own a home are not working because their retirement is good based on what they made. This is what I grew up as a standard of living. So I can’t fathom how 50K grand (plus a bit because they had a masters degreee and that helps out in teaching) is some sort of small amount. It was enough for me have grown up in a home where two parents worked and had enough to pay bills, buy computers and not other extra in life.

I’ll even concede that 50K isn’t what it used to be, but it’s more than enough to live comfortably keep bills paid and enjoy a family life. I know because that’s the kind of income I grew up with.

Right now If I could make 50K it would be a very comfortable living.

My point though was two worlds. The one in a fishbowl where you don’t really see out, and the one where you can ONLY see in. I”m sure there’s tinting from either perspective, but I think it needs to be mentioned that we are talking about two different worlds here as it almost seems that the discussion is talking about one.

If you’re on the outside, you don’t mind making consesions in lower income to just get in and enjoy something more what you do 8-5 PM. There’s also the factor where that 50K is more than what you are making now (and that’s with my BA in one field and AA in another field)

I can’t speak of IN the fish bowl as i myself am on the outside peering in.

Didn’t mean to make this sound as direct as is probably does but, I thought these were posts worthy of note…

If I was only looking to make money from my webcomic, I probably would have dumped it after strip number 25.

The cool thing (and difficult thing) about webcomics, is that there is NO ONE to blame for your comic’s demise but YOU. On the flip side your comics success is all you as well.

Another great thing about webcomics is that there is no restrictions on your character’s dialog. It’s not like YES I can finally start swearing in my comic, it’s more like, YES I can finally use REALISTIC sounding dialog. The editorial rules on dialog (and subject matter) for the comic pages in newspapers have not changed with the times and I think it is partly responsible for decline in readership.

Would I love to have a syndication deal? Damn straight I would. But, I would probably try to build a strong web presence for the comic, too.

[…] of this writing, the great print/webcomics meeting of the minds is now up to 80 comments here at Fleen, followed by 175 at TDC, meaning that just keeping up with progress on the issue has […]

[…] after we were done talking about Project Wonderful business, Ryan and I got to talking about the Fleen thread that exploded about the business of comics. (Ryan linked to it […]

[…] was the print vs. web discussion that raged through the comment strings of both Fleen and The Daily Cartoonist! After the back and forth on the threads seemed to be at a standstill, […]

[…] It seems that Greg Carter was following The Great Web/Print Comics Convocation of Aught-Eight and wondered, “But does this conversation apply to people not doing […]

[…] after we were done talking about Project Wonderful business, Ryan and I got to talking about the Fleen thread that exploded about the business of comics. (Ryan linked to it […]

[…] Interviews Only print pays. — Ted Rall, SPLAT! Symposium, 15 March […]

[…] as slash and burn, and don’t get me started on his near-religious adherence to the idea that Only print pays), but it’s a shame that he now faces the financial difficulty that comes with job […]

Haspiel, on the benefits of webcomics — Webcomics are lifting the veil between creator and audience.

[…] of whom — massive close-out sale on the only pop-culture t-shirt measured in radians) said at SPLAT! back in 2008 which boils down to Think you can’t make a living at webcomics? Good! Less competition for […]

[…] the filters than the previous two weeks; for some reason, they’re really attached to this old post regarding the SPLAT! Symposium back in March 2008. No idea why it’s so attractive to people that really want me to buy fancy […]

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