It is for entirely unrelated reasons that I’m criminally late in posting today, but as it turns out it’s a good thing — the additional time has allowed for more richness to develop around something I wanted to point out to you. Namely, a thinky piece at Webcomics.com by Scott Kurtz on the topic of webcomics and controlling your business.

That groaning that you hear in the distance that sounds like What, again? is not warranted. Yes, Kurtz has been involved in some of the more spectacular shouting matches that have blown up around this topic, but the essay he’s written is well-considered, well-written, and certainly helpful to the discussion. Key takeaway:

If the gap between business and creative responsibilities continues to widen — after having been so nearly bridged — if independent artists decide to find more ways to remove themselves from the responsibilities of running their own businesses, how can we make sure we don’t return to a time where we lose all our power and ownership in the process?

Can we find a safe harbor in the middle?

This in response to what Kurtz sees as a pendulum swinging away from the aesthetic/philosophical choice of retaining ownership of your comics work, and towards (over- ?) reliance on (what for the sake of brevity we’ll call) a “publisher” in exchange for significant ownership interests in the work in question. As of this time, there’s a good (and calm) back-and-forth in the comments, with the most salient point coming from Jeffrey H Wasserman:

This is the “curse” of a successful small business. Single proprietor businesses, be he or she a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, upon achieving a certain size must grow both horizontally and vertically. He needs people to handle or direct the traffic, systems, premises, bookkeeping, financing, legalities, public relations, advertising, etc.

A good business man realizes that in order to grow the business he needs to hire people or secure the services of outside contractors better than him in other fields. The trick is in managing these people properly and demanding results. [emphasis mine]

Which I think ties into Scott’s thesis, which is okay — very few creators will be fully competent business types as well, but that for their own good they need to at least be aware of how their business is run and not turn it entirely over to others. Kindly refer to the cautionary tale of Lynn Johnston, who upon her divorce discovered her ex-husband (to whom she’d entrusted her business) had strip-mined her accounts (original interview no longer available, but salient bit quoted here); if one can’t trust a spouse without doing some due diligence, one damn well better keep tabs on a corporation. You needn’t be expert in all aspects of business to do so, but you can’t just wash your hands of it and claim any degree of responsibility for your own life. Heck, this statement may satisfy even perennial nay-sayer Wiley Miller (although I’m not holding my breath).

Anyhoo, worthwhile read and recommended to anybody that wishes to create or own anything, not just a [web]comic.

I hope that Dave Kellett‘s got a good bouncer on for the latest Sheldon launch this weekend, or the celebutantes and MTV refugees will be swarming out of the woodwork for anything that resembles a free drink and attention. If you go and you see Paris, tell her to freakin’ eat something, already.

• Speaking of celebrations, couple of round numbers to note: 1000, 2000, and 2500 strips were each recently passed by (respectively) Theater Hopper, Least I Could Do, and Goats (no celebratory strip, so I chose a recent one at random).
• New schedules abound! Well, one new schedule at least:
  

  Hello With Cheese just got 500% Cheesier!

  After starting as a Monday-only strip in January, Hello With Cheese is changing to a 5-days-a-week comic, starting this week. Enjoy the cheesiness!

  My inner math geek compels me to point out that for HWC to get 500% cheesier, it would have to go from one update a week (100% cheesy) to a schedule with 500% more cheese, or six updates a week, so really it’s only a 400% cheesiness increase. My inner everything-except-math-geek compels me to apologize for the math pedantry. In any event, please enjoy a webcomic with hitherto-unknown levels of cheesiness, such that the Kraft people are expressing interest and alarm.

• Let’s wrap on something uplifting, shall we? J. Baird of the Create a Comic Project (oft-featured in these pages) sends word of an article about CCP’s panel at the recently-concluded Otakon, as well as an eyewitness blogpost from said ‘kon (warning: cosplay).

Ryan Pequin does some awesome comics on the web, including hourlies at his own site, and at Top Shelf 2.0 (and I forget what the accepted convention is for ending a sentence immediately after a decimal number, so I’m going to pad out here … pay no mind). To those outlets he’s now added a short-sketch site, to be found at Three Word Phrase. Starts here, and 30 updates in the archive already. Occasionally disturbing, as in the final panel of the latest update.

So everybody remembers Latin Heartthrob Aaron Diaz‘s magnum opus, Hob, right? Massive, 27-part story that unfolded over 20 months at Dresden Codak, with massively detailed art, essentially forming a manifesto on transhumanism and the technological singularity, and still managing to include references to Richard Feynman and a girl in a miniskirt kicking high in the air (I like to think he’d approve)? Got my copy in the mail yesterday, and boy howdy is it pretty.

I’d just like to point out that for a work that posits (even celebrates) a time when technology and life merge into indistinguishability, it’s oddly comforting that it’s been encapsulated in a form of storage that might be called archaic: the hand-bound book. Hell, my copy had pages that were stuck together as an artifact of the production process, just like hand-printed and -bound books always had for the first 450 years or so of their existence.

Diaz produced 50 of these babies, and later took orders for a run of softcovers (which should be going out shortly by my calculations), but as far as I know, that’s it. If you want to see what the fuss is about (and with the large-trim pages, the images are bigger than on my monitor, and dang do they look nice), come over to my place, ask politely, and please make sure your hands are clean. But you can’t have it, it’s mine.

For those keeping track of such things, there’s still a stack of books from the recent comics gathering that I got and haven’t read yet. Capsule reviews: Dr McNinja 3 and Girl Genius 8 are both shining exemplars of how to bring a payoff to every thrice-weekly page, while still having an overall story develop. Since I’m mentioning Girl Genius, word from Phil Foglio is that the recently-finished-catching-up-online Buck Godot epic, Gallimaufry, will see print in January. Hooray!

• If you’ve ever looked at the list of websites over there to the right, you may have noticed waaaay down at the bottom is one that hasn’t seen updates in a long time; Owen Dunne’s You Damn Kid updated for a long time, released a book (via Keenspot’s imprint), got optioned by Fox TV, went on hiatus, came back, went on hiatus, launched a bunch of other comics, went on hiatus for a long damn time, came back with a live-action video series this past February, and managed a pair of updates before reverting to hiatus.

  Please don’t misunderstand me — I labor under no illusion that Owen Dunne is my bitch, and I don’t mean to bring up the irregularity of his comickry as a means of criticism. Life gets in the way, and through all the interruptions, YDK has retained its place on the links because I really like Dunne’s work and consider myself essentially infinitely patient waiting for the next iteration which begins today:

  [Y]ou get paid and hate your job, I make squat but I like to do this. And that place where we meet in the middle is The Happy Monday Place. Or something like that. So welcome, and I hope you make it a regular stop each week.

  So here’s how it will work. A new page every Monday, with new comics, a short installment of the Barnyard Pete Show, and a monthly edition of Banion — The Podcast. The individual pages will be archived, not the individual comics. (However, the old YDK comics are archived, just click on the text at the top right of the comic.)

  Catch that? The Barnyard Pete live-action shorts will now be in Flash (much faster to produce), and Banion (clueless but serious detective in the Joe Friday tradition with his own webcomic) will now be podcast as an old-style radio drama. Looks like my theory about webcomics being a breeding ground for other forms of creativity wasn’t too far off. Speaking solely for myself, Dunne had me at an all new Nippleshine Manor! Welcome back to the game, Mr Dunne — should a hiatus come up again, I’ll be waiting for your return.

• Know who else we haven’t heard from in a while? Nicholas Gurewitch. Know who’s trying to remedy that? Andrew Farago:
  

  The Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics exhibition is so big that it needs TWO opening receptions with special guest Nick Gurewitch, creator of the popular webcomic The Perry Bible Fellowship.

  On Thursday, August 27, Gurewitch will meet fans and sign copies of the two bestselling Perry Bible Fellowship collections, The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack. The booksigning is free and open to the public.

  On Friday, August 28, Gurewitch guides Perry Bible Fellowship fans through an artistic thesis about visual storytelling, and will go behind the scenes of comic-production with co-writer/spiritual advisor Evan Keogh. Special guest Michael Capozzola (stand-up comedian and creator of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Surveillance Caricatures) will lead a Q&A with Gurewitch immediately following the presentation. This is a ticketed event. General admission for this presentation is $10, or $5 for members of the Cartoon Art Museum.

  Those of you in the San Francisco area at the end of the month, take notes and report back to us.