The webcomics blog about webcomics

Still In The Weeds, Work-Wise

So a couple of apropos of nothing observations:

  • It’s an oldy, but a goodie: psycho wang shakin’ primate is a combination of words that is never not hilarious. This comic actually went up about six weeks before this blog debuted, and it still makes me laugh out loud every time.
  • Burning up the twitters today (I saw the link when Raina Telgemeier retweeted Bill Amend) is a beautiful comic on artistic potential and telling those voices that say you can’t, everything’s too limiting to drop dead. As near I can tell (seeing as how I don’t read Norwegian), Jellyvampire is a new webcomic (only a month and a half-dozen updates old), some of which appears to be plotoriented in Norwegian, and some of which is non-plot-oriented and in English, by a cartoonist named Ida Eva. Messing around the site (did I mention it’s in a language I don’t speak or read?), I found a bunch of work by other cartoonists, at least some of which make decent sense regardless of language barriers. Explore, enjoy.
  • I don’t think I have ever hated a fictional character as much as I hate Clarice (formerly known as Agent 146 ) over at A Girl And Her Fed. I am including Sauron and Cruella de Ville in that statement (but not their hypothetical offspring). What do you do with somebody so irredeemable, when you live in a world where ghosts are an objective reality and killing them only makes them stronger? I want to see Clarice broken down to her constituent pieces and her mind taken apart to the point that she’s nothing but autonomic reflexes. I hate her that much, which I guess means that AGAHF creator Otter is doing her job.

    NB: Clarice the murderous cyborg bitch-goddess is not to be mistaken with Clarice the librarian and part-time dominatrix; Clarice the librarian is cool.

  • From the mailbag, Kevin writes:

    I am trying to nail down stats on (A) how many newspaper cartoonists remain in the U.S.; (B) how many syndicated comic strips remain, and (C) how many strips are now available online. I also am trying to get a sense how many online cartoonists are making a living at this. If you can help, I can cite you as my source.

    (B) would probably be the easiest to determine, in that there are only a few syndicates left, and looking down their list of offerings should give a pretty good number. (A) will probably be about the same as (B), in that some cartoonists do more than one strip, some partner up on the same strip, and there are some in-house cartoonists here and there. (C) entirely depends on what you count as a “strip online” (Solely online? Primarily online but collected to print? Originally print but tangentially online? English language only — see the second item, above?), and when it’s worth taking note of.

    I’m guessing that the Powers of Ten approach is the best that you can do: at any given time, there’s on the order of¹ 100,000 webcomics, 10,000 of which see more than a week’s worth of updates, 1,000 of which have an audience beyond immediate friends and family, and 100 of which allow their creators to make “a living” (the definition of which is its own can of worms). Anybody got a better set of numbers, the comment link is down there.

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¹ Naturally, “on the order of” means that you could easily go up or down by a factor of ten. In other words, it’s the opposite of anything resembling an accurate measure.

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