Aw, geeze, what’s Gary so damn happy about? Well, I’ll tell ya, Sparky, it’s because every once in a while I get an email or meet a reader that tells me I’m producing the occasional nugget of enjoyable infotainment here on Fleen. And every once in a great while, it’s somebody whose work I really respect and have enjoyed for a long period of time.

Case in point: Colleen Doran, who’s been doing the independent, creator-owned thing for about as long as I’ve been seriously reading comics (and I’ve been seriously reading comics since the early ’80s). We’ve mentioned Ms Doran’s tendency to provide useful information (cf: bad publishers and how to recognize them; sharing webcomic traffic data; how to get health insurance as a self-employed creator) in the past, so when she writes with information to share, we at Fleen pay attention:

[T]hanks for linking to some of my nuts and bolts discussions. You might find this post with comments thread interesting. I try to be candid about the earnings on my comic, and think this may be of use to your readers.

Unless you really enjoy wallowing in stupid, you can skip past the first couple of paragraphs, which deal with Rob Granito trying desperately to pretend that his fifteen minutes aren’t up; the interesting part starts when you hit:

Not too long ago, a webcomics artist I never heard of whose principle activity seems to be trolling for fun, went on a public rampage, claiming A Distant Soil would never go anywhere online, had never been popular in the first place, and I’d never made any money on it. I took a look at his site. He gets about 5 page views a day. Clearly, he’s an unimpeachable source for how to be a pro.

Interesting because Doran is willing to share income numbers to start the discussion; tl,dr version: A Distant Soil has about US$3,000,000 in lifetime sales, which works out to an average (and averages are slippery things and I hate them) of US$30,000/year over ten years, once things like publishers and distributors and taxes get paid. In the comment thread, she’s honest about the ups and downs of website traffic and what effects it may have on her bottom line (and at times, the correlation factor looks really low). The real gem, though, is this:

Anyone who claims they have The Magic Formula is full of it. I felt the same way about the whole self publishing phenom. There is no one size fits all solution for anyone. Some people who had great mainstream careers bombed self publishing. Some people who do well on the web do crap in print. Some people who do crap on the web do well in print.

Whatever works.

These people who puff themselves up and make themselves out to be gurus with ridiculous stories about big sales and huge money, sheesh! Some are making money getting hired to speak about how you can get rich. Might as well listen to Tony Robbins. [emphasis added]

So that’s today’s lesson — you can’t try to catch the lightning in a bottle that somebody else caught, because that particular bit of luck/hard work/right place, right time was for them and not you. At MoCCA Festival over the weekend, I saw more than one creator getting grilled by a would-be up-and-comer about their success where it was immediately obvious that the questioner’s thought process when something like:

1. Find out how _______ does it
2. Do exactly what he/she does, but with my comics plugged into the Magic Secret Success Formula
3. Sit back and let the money roll in

Yeah, hate to break it to you, would-be up-and-comer, but Underpants Gnomery doesn’t really work. And somebody else’s success in excess of your own doesn’t mean that there’s a conspiracy to keep you down, or that they’re lying about how they’re doing — it means that you haven’t found the formulation that will work for you.

By all means, pay attention to what those who’ve come before you have done (and especially what they tried to do and failed), but don’t think that a career in comics (or anything else) is plug-and-play replicable. Your success is dependent on nobody but yourself and Lady Luck (NB: she can be pretty capricious at times), so stop interrogating and start creating. Maybe you catch your own lightning. Maybe you don’t. But for certain you will not if you spend your time trying to make success into an algorithm.

Meredith Gran, at the Pizza Island panel, in response to the question, “How will the studio defend itself in the zombie apocalypse?” — I’m gonna die.

I trust that puts all of the zombie nonsense to bed once and for all. What else can we learn from this year’s MoCCA Festival?

• It’s easy to spend a lot of money on good stuff. In the photo up there, one may find mini-comics by Box Brown (Everything Dies 4, 5, and 6), Sophie Goldstein (her work apart from Darwin Carmichael Is Going To Hell is simultaneously more moody and more lighthearted, with one mini dealing with the pitiful few survivors of a global holocaust, the other with a mildly disgruntled cat), Kel McDonald (partnering with Marie de France to do a take on a fairy tale of the sort that used to exist prior to Grimm and Disney prettying them up — secrets, betrayals most foul, and righteous vengeance involving a de-nosing) and the NERD Comics collective (on the theme of Darwin).

  One may also find books by Sylvan Migdal (Curvy 1 and 2), Collen AF Venable & Stephanie Yue (Guinea PI: Pet Shop Detective 3), and Evan Dahm (Order of Tales 3). One may additionally find prints from Kate Beaton, Meredith Gran, and Yuko Ota & Ananth Panagariya, along with a small piece of evidence that I am fated to die by TRUCK. That’s right, David Malki ! had an actual MACHINE OF DEATH into which I willingly placed my hand and received my fate.

• Nearly all of the above (as well as those without wares that I had not yet purchased) spoke of what’s coming up — Migdal’s new comic will feature a Victorian lady dealing with planet-destorying space opera; Malki ! spoke about the expected rush of audition tapes for the rapidly-approaching MoD live stage show; Dahm spoke about the scope and scale of his current storyline (Vattu will be larger than any Overside story yet seen), as did Latin Art-Throb Aaron Diaz (Dark Science will be longer than Hob, but not ridiculously so).

  Ota & Panagariya may be announcing a very interesting print in the future, so keep your eyes peeled for that. The newly-free Frank Gibson promised numerous amazing projects with Tiny Kitten Teeth (and life) partner Becky Dreistadt. Scott C is busily brainstorming new Showdowns every day, and Tracy White and I had nice talk about How I Made It To Eighteen.

• You meet the nicest people at these things; waiting in line for the Pizza Island panel, I met a charming young man named Zach who will shortly be launching a new webcomic that sounds intriguing, and may have a niche to itself. Think Bryant Paul Johnson’s now-wrapped Teaching Baby Paranoia, only actually true. Alternately, think documentary, but shorter and less investigatory than Darryl Cunningham‘s muckraking (and I use that word in the most complimentary sense).

All in all, quite a lot for one day. What else is going on in webcomics today?

• Long run: Achieved! Chris Daily’s Striptease (which bears the distinction of being the first webcomic whose creator I ever met, waaaay back at the first MoCCA Festival, speaking of closed circles) hit 1000 strips today. Ten and a half years (more or less), radically changed art styles, a cross-country move, a collaboration on a second strip (itself more than four years old at this point) and a marriage can’t keep the true-hearted webcomicker down. Well done, Chris.
• Return: Achieved! Karen Ellis’s long-hiatused Planet Karen (fewer than a half-dozen updates since November of 2009) popped back today, with the promise of maybe more strips in the future? PK had been one of my favorite autobio webcomics, and I do hope Ellis is able to find the time to keep up with it.
• Free Stuff: Achieved! Dave Kellett’s self-published Sheldon collection, Literature: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953 (which you may have heard got an Eisner nod last week), probably isn’t in as many hands as some of its competition for Best Humor Publication, so Kellett’s making it easy for Eisner voters to read. Got a data connection? Got 12 MB of free drive space? Voting in the Eisners? Then download a PDF of Literature here so that you can give it due consideration.

  I’m guessing that there’s no way for the download server to know who’s actually an Eisner voter and who isn’t, so Kellett’s essentially giving his book away for the next couple of weeks (there’s precedent, as when Ursula Vernon was nominated for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition back in 2006, Digger was subscription-unlocked to allow voters to examine her work). If you’re taking advantage of the freebie and like what you see, won’t you consider buying a copy? I’m sure Dave (and his young daughter, who likes things like food and shelter) would thank you.

Regarding the brouhaha over the comics-themed issue, Tony Ortega, Voice editor, had this to say:

I wanted to have a big special comics issue, but I had a limited budget. So in a well-meaning effort to make this work, I asked some cartoonists to provide work without compensation. In the last couple of days, it’s been pointed out to me quite clearly that this was not the best way to help out the cartooning industry. The thing is, we’re not a company that expects people to work for free for the exposure. And I’m making this right: I’m paying all of the artists in the special issue.

And hopefully buying them beers and working with them again soon.

Rest of the publishing industry: please follow this example.

• Hey, lookit that, the Eisner nominations are out, and there are some notable names from the world of webcomickry. Over at Best Publication for Teens you have Raina Telgemeier‘s SMILE, a book often championed on this page, which of course started as a webcomic. Likewise, Barry Deutsch’s Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, which started on Girlamatic.

  In the realm of Best Humor Publication you have Dave Kellet’s Sheldon collection, Literature: Unsuccessfully Competing Against TV Since 1953, and Julia Wertz’s Drinking At The Movies, a original graphic novel but direct offshoot from her webcomic (formerly known as The Fart Party, now rechristened Museum of Mistakes). Similarly, Jason Little’s Motel Art Improvement Service (over in the Best Graphic Album — Reprint category) is a collection of his storyline from the ongoing Bee.

  Then, naturally, the Best Digital Comic is entirely ongoing webcomics, with nods for Karl Kerschl (The Abominable Charles Christopher), Travis Hanson (The Bean), Tracy Butler (Lackadaisy), Caanan Grall (Max Overacts), and the pseudonymous duo of Amir and Khalil (Zahra’s Paradise) getting the nod.

  Here’s what’s most satisfying to me: the do-it-yourself, no publishers, no distributors, entirely creator-owned model is creeping out of the webcomics category (which, as we’ve argued before probably shouldn’t be a category of its own, but let’s not rehash that now) into the other awards. Kellett’s nominated book didn’t come from a publisher that was looking to get in on “this web-comics thing” — he produced and put out the book on his own. Look for this to continue in future years.

• As long as we’re talking about DIY publishing, get yourself over to Olly’s Organix and pre-order the new Octopus Pie book. Listen at Home with Octopus Pie contains more than a year’s worth of comics that have never seen print before, and now that Meredith Gran is back to self-publishing (following her Random House sabbatical), the enterprise is both potentially more rewarding for her (nobody else to split the money with) and more financially taxing (nobody else to pick up the printer’s bill).

  The book ships next month, and even if you’ve never read Octopus Pie before (and if that is the case, what the hell is wrong with you?), just the cover should be enough to pull you in. That is some goddamn gorgeous work, and it only gets better on the inside. Git. Order.

Man, I love it when creators send me the logical next part of the story. Makes my life easier. One may recall (if one wishes) my discussion of Michael Jonathan, his minicomic Quail: The Song of the Blackbird EP, and the plan to get music produced to accompany said minicomic. Did I say plan? I meant totally completed project, as the music to accompany Quail is now complete and available to all and sundry. Jonathan has this to say about the tunes:

The album that syncs with this comic (and my new Quail comic “Rope”) released today! You can listen to the entire album for free at the bandcamp site and download track 2 “Breath of Searing Gecko” for free as well.

The bandcamp site is http://gambelcovey.bandcamp.com/ — Gambel Covey is my band that worked on this, made up of actor/comedian Chris Yule and illustrator/girlfriend Nan Lawson.

I worked super hard on it and I’m EXTREMELY proud of how it turned out.

And well Jonathan might be; he provided a download of the full song package to me and I’ve given the tunes a good listen, which range from pretty damn credible bluegrass (Song of Blackbird) to almost Pomplamooseian, verging-on-preciouscore folk (the aforementioned Breath of Searing Gecko). Can I also say that it’s awesome that when you download your songs and/or comic and/or prints, the button on the screen says Gimme? Like the music, it’s just so unapologetic in its enthusiasm. GREAT FUN WOULD LISTEN AGAIN.

• Also on the followup front, DJ Coffman weighed in on the Drunk Duck situation via Fleen’s patented ActionCOMMENTS™ ‘tother day, and in case you didn’t see it, it was pretty useful stuff:
  

  I got a lot of emails last week about this, primarily because I encouraged a lot of creators starting out to use DrunkDuck back when I was cheerleader. For the people having problems I rewrote my “How To Host Your Own Webcomic” article and posted it here.

  Although every situation is unique and you can’t just follow a checklist and expect it to work in all circumstances, Coffman’s put together a pretty damn comprehensive guide that will get you about 97% of the way to hosting comics on your own, from buying your domain to changing DNS to setting up WordPress and plugins. In contravention of Tyrrell’s First Law of the Internet, the comments at Coffman’s guide are useful and informative, so give ’em a read.

• Not followup, but as long as we’re talking infrastructure, let me mention Karmacritic. It’s a new tool for creators to get feedback on their work, but much like some commenting systems (especially those derived from the Slashdot model), it implements a karma mechanism to try to weed out the unthinking and promote the helpful. From creator Marco Leon:
  

  I created a site where creators can submit their work and get feedback. That’s been done before, oh, only a hundred times? But the twist here it this: this community doesn’t vote on the submissions themselves; instead we vote on the feedback given to those submissions. If you give useful feedback, you get karma points. And submissions are sorted in the front page by karma points. You see? In other words: any creator who invests some time helping other creators with useful comments or advice, will get rewarded with more prominence for his own work.

  If that sounds complex, the whole thing is explained with pics over here. Karmacritic is not for profit; I’m paying for the bandwidth out of my own pocket, and I just hope it helps people. Sometimes all we need is a few words, and we go from there for miles.

  I’ll confess that I didn’t get Leon’s explanation at first, but the pictures cleared up my misconceptions in short order. If you’re just starting out and haven’t developed a network of trusted peers to give you feedback, Karmacritic can quite possibly give you that first set of critiques that kicks you in the direction of developing your skills. Maybe? It’s a mechanism to receive feedback, but all critiques ultimately are useful or not depending on what the receiver is willing to hear and act on.

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What? No footnotes? I must be slipping.

The Village Voice, in either an incredibly ballsy “fuck you” to an entire industry, or an incredibly clueless display of irony, answers its own question.

Namely, If Cartoons Are So Big, Why Don’t They Pay?, the title of the four page surface-treatment of the economics of cartooning. Right in the middle of page 2 is the answer:

Also, many of the artists in this issue aren’t getting paid, but have contributed work for the exposure¹. [emphasis added so you can’t possibly miss the important bit]

Dear The Village Voice, you could have done a one-graf blurblet and accomplished the same thing. Here, you can have this one for free:

If cartoons are so big, why don’t they pay? It’s because publishers [including us] would rather put together an entire issue focusing on cartoons, but not pay cartoonists for their work. Works for us, sucks to be them. The end.

• Let’s shift gears to happier thoughts, shall we? Raina Telgemeier, genial chronicler of dental trauma, got to share some good news yesterday regarding fellow Comics Bakery members John Green and Dave Roman (the latter being Telgemeier’s husband):
  

  Finally announced!! @yaytime & @johngreenart‘s TEEN BOAT to be published in full color by Houghton Mifflin.

  For those of you not in the know, TEEN BOAT is an all-ages, very funny, occasionally touching web/print comic that tells a universal story: that of a typical teen who also happens to be a boat. Also, in a stunning proof of the proposition that there’s nothing that the internet can’t ruin, Googling “teen boat” also leads to a porn site that involves alleged teens gettin’ extra naked on a boat.

  Please don’t confuse the two if you’re trying to share Green & Roman’s work with your mom, the local librarian, kids that you know, your grandparents, or pretty much anybody that you’d be willing to shake hands with and not immediately want broad-spectrum antibiotics. For more on the good kind of teen boat, the announcement, some comic excerpts, and a video trailer can be found at The Beat.

• The thing about the bad kind of teen boat is that — like so much unimaginative modern naked media — it leaves a bad taste in my mouth (yes, yes, “That’s what she said”, moving on) from its exploitative, power-disparity POV. There’s quality naked media out there, by the likes of Jess Fink [NSFW] or Erika Moen [NSFW-ish], stuff that’s personally revealing, romantic, tender, and/or funny.

  Another good provider of quality naked media (although that’s far from the extent of his talents, having done by my estimation far less naked media — nakedia? — than non-naked) is Sylvan Migdal, who’s never been satisfied with doing just one comic at a time. Seeing as how Curvy [NSFW or not, depending on the page in question] is in the depths of storyline, it’s naturally time for Migdal to launch another comic, which will apparently happen on 1 June.

  Judging from the teaser, I’d say this one is towards the fully-clothed end of the spectrum, albeit the global catastrophe that’s hinted at might change social mores. Proceed with caution at place of employment, and with full enjoyment elsewhere. If you’re dying to know the naked-people quotient of the new strip, you can ask Migdal this weekend at MoCCA Fest, where he will be tabling.

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¹ People die of exposure.

Press embargo over! Jon Rosenberg and his lovely wife Amy had twin boys yesterday. ‘Twas a tough pregnancy (you can glean details from Rosenberg’s twitterfeed of the last few months) that featured a whole lotta medical care. New babies, big sister Norah, and a pair of sleep-deprived parents all reportedly doing well.

Surprisingly, the American medical insurance industry has yet to finalize the specifications for the Webcomics Creator’s Gold Plated Insurance Plan¹, so if you’d like to help Alec “Guinness” and Benjamin “Kenobi” Rosenberg (aka Team Babies) avoid a lifetime of debt indenture, maybe a purchase from Rosenberg’s Dry Goods Emporium might be in order?

• Missed it yesterday: the ladies of Pizza Island got a two-page spread in New York magazine (referenced here), and it’s now available for your online enjoyment. As a reminder, they’ll be at the MoCCA Fest this weekend, with a passel of other webcomics types. I hope all the good stuff lasts until Sunday, when I can make it to the show. If nothing else, I think I need to get my copy of Machine of Death autographed by as many contributors as I can.
• Time to drop some science. Received earlier today:
  

  My name is Mia [Wiesner] and I am a graduate student at the University of Applied Sciences in Leipzig. As part of my dissertation on digital comic books in the US, I am conducting an online survey until May. Would it be possible to post the link [to the survey] on Fleen?

  Done and done. Ms Wiesner’s survey is on the expectations and opinions held by readers about digital comics (granted, “digital comics” is a term which is a bit nebulous, and every respondent is likely to have a slightly different interpretation, but I don’t think it will skew the results appreciably). Ms Wiesner’s offered to share the results of her survey with us, which will only be worth the electrons it takes to email if there’s enough data to achieve statistical significance.

  Translation: take five minutes out of your day and fill out the survey; the more responses, the more we can trust the dataset. For my part, I was pleased to have a place to offer up the fact that I’m annoyed by excessive “media” involvement in comics (motion, sound, interaction, etc), almost as much as I am by DRM issues. I imagine you have your own pet peeves about the format, so go forth and provide data.

• Received a while back, kept getting bumped: in what appears to be one giant leap for webcomickind, a copy of Krishna Sadasivam’s PC Weenies collection, Rebootus Maximus, has been carried to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Said peak being, of course, the highest elevation above sea level in Africa, leaving Sadasivam only six more mountains (including some really hazardous climber-killers) to become the first webcomicker to not merely have books carried to all seven continents (I think maybe Ryan North probably won that one), but carried to the peaks. Anybody going up one of the other six summits? I think I know a guy that might send you a book.

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¹ Premium: $50/month, covers absolutely everything, no benefit limits or co-pays, and patients receive soothing foot massages from disgraced former Blue Cross executives.

Could it have failed last week when I was working from home? Surely not. And had I that ability to work from home this week, would it have failed? Surely not. Figure I don’t mind replacing all the perishable food I just bought yesterday. And can I stretch this The Dark Knight Returns callback any further? Surely not.

But you know who loves DKR, and (I have it on good authority, on account of I gave it to him) owns a shirt that reads MY NAME IS KARL? Karl Kerschl. And speaking of Karl Kerschl, his home is a little more full, as he welcomed his son into the world on Saturday. No report of a name on Baby Boy Cooper-Kerschl just yet, but we at Fleen wish proud papa Kerschl, proud mama Amy Cooper, and the surprisingly hairy-armed tyke all the best. I’m guessing that the stuffie Charles Christopher is getting drooled on in the best possible way about now.

• Around these parts, it’s pretty rare that I mention a brand new webcomic, unless the creator is a known quantity like Doug TenNapel or Shaenon Garrity (Radness Queen of the East Bay). But when your twitterfeed shows Evan Dahm, KC Green, and Aaron Diaz all telling you to check out a brand-new webcomic, you check that mutha out. Thus, may I draw your attention to Cucumber Quest, which has but three pages in its archive, but damn are they pretty pages. There’s artistic echoes of Scott Pilgrim, and 101 Dalmatians-era Disney, with maybe a veneer of Miyazaki? Color me intrigued enough to mention it early, and to go back to see how it develops.
• I also got some email over the weekend about discontent in the Drunk Duck forums, with anger building on the part of creators towards current Drunk Duck overlords Wowio (who never get linked by me to any of their endeavors, so you’re on your own). My correspondent went to the trouble to use a pseudonym, claiming fear of retaliation with respect to complaints on a recent server/backup failure that led to three months worth of content being lost. I’ve begun to scan the DD forums, trying to piece together a complete picture of the situation, but you know what? It is entirely too nice a day to break Tyrrell’s First Law of the Internet¹.

  If you’re curious as to the feel of the community, I invite you to take a look at the Drunk Duck forums and form your own conclusions — if you don’t feel like doing so, my (preliminary) take on it is that other hosting solutions may be looking at an influx of new clients soon, and to remind everybody that when it comes to hosting, no provider will care about your content more than you pay them to do so.

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¹ Never read the comments; it is generally applicable everywhere except for The AV Club, and Comics Alliance posts by Chris Sims, where even the flame wars are entertaining.

Missed it in my trawl yesterday, only found it in clearing out RSS entries, and it would have been perfect in my discussion of longevity and migrating to webcomicking:

Fifteen years ago today Help Desk was born. To be more specific, on March 31, 1996, Help Desk debuted in OS/2 e-Zine!, a web magazine covering the OS/2 operating system.

A’course, Christopher Wright had a bit of a different journey than Larry Lewis, and there have been lengthy hiatuses (hiatii?) but still … fifteen years. That’s a long damn time. and Wright and Lewis probably have a lot more in common than they have different:

I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to do this for as long as I have. The last few years haven’t been particularly easy for me, or for this comic. This is an out-of-pocket venture—at best, revenue generated from banner ads offsets my server fees, more commonly it simply mitigates them, and I operate at a loss—and as I’ve mentioned before there are risks associated with working this way. That said, the advantage is that I’ve had the freedom to pursue this comic and my additional projects exactly the way I wanted to, and how many people can actually say that about anything in their lives?

Wright concludes with a list of goals, and I must draw your attention to one of them, because I think it neatly encompasses the feelings of not just webcomickers, not just creative types, but of everybody. It’s a universal desire, and one that I’m pretty sure Wright will make good on, and sooner rather than later:

Show them. Show them all.

Feel free to insert maniacal laughter, and join me in congratulating Christopher Wright on fifteen years.

Also, it’s on pretty serious hiatus right now, but today marks fourteen years of Goats. The art started, um, a trifle rough, but it got much better pretty quickly. I don’t know when Rosenberg will have the time to get back to Goats (there’s some family health issues that should resolve themselves in the coming weeks¹), but that’s okay.

In the fourteen years since comic-Jon and comic-Phillip started their comic-love affair with slackery and beer (real-Jon and real-Phillip, naturally, were well established in those patterns years prior), Rosenberg started and finished multiple other webcomics (look up Patent Pending or Worlds of Peril via the Wayback Machine, or browse through the MEGAGAMERZ 3133t archives, or enjoy the funky-fresh Scenes From A Multiverse), and continues to have more ideas per second squared than any three other people you’ve ever heard of².

Jon’s also the reason you’re reading this — he was the one that prompted me to take on the writing/editing duties here at Fleen, and it’s because of his introductions that I’ve met so many of the best, most creative, and generally wonderful people in the world. So if you’ve ever found anything I’ve ever written here to be even slightly of interest, he is a big part of why. Do me a favor and give @jonrosenberg a little love³, hey?

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¹ Go, Team Babies!
² Except for Rich Stevens; dude’s a caffeine-fueled idea machine with no off switch.
³ Also, expect him to freak out slightly if you tell him that I told you to give him some love. Despite our history, I’m not allowed to touch him; long story.

Well, since Zach Weiner first tweeted the URL yesterday, I’ve been digging my way through the archvies of Les and May , which has a somewhat pokey design and takes a while to show the next strip. Les and May is the creation of Larry Lewis, has been updating Monday through Friday for most of the last year without fail, and is Lewis’s second major comic strip project. The first was called Campus Clatter and ran for about seven years, wrapping up in 1976 in the face of competition from Doonesbury.

Did I mention that Larry Lewis is 82 years old? That he started drawing cartoons twenty years before I was born? That after doing advertising, commercial art and editorial cartoons in various forms from the ’50s until 2002, he retired but never lost the itch?

I have two suggestions for future comical-type conventions:

1. Put Larry Lewis and Malachai Nicolle on a panel together.
2. Make him the Guest of Honor at the next iteration of Classoline Alley.

Lewis is a living conduit to how comics were, and he’s working on the internet for the same reason that so many other webcomickers started (and so many still do): because he loves drawing, and wants to share his work with an audience. I’ve got nothing to add other than Bravo.

• In other news, the extraordinarily popular Lookouts side project at Penny Arcade has grown into its next incarnation. Namely, board game/RPG hybrid. Cryptozoic Entertainment have done the design work, and with a release date of “early next year”, I’d be surprised if there were not a playable version at PAX Prime this summer. This one looks gorgeous.

So Scott Kurtz has been making his feelings known of late. There was the Webcomics Weekly where he spoke about Chris Onstad’s step back, and while I think I got his point, he pissed some people off in how he made it. There was his announcement about giving up on the NCS, and a related discussion behind the paywall at Webcomics Dot Com, ditto. And just concluded, a live recording of Webcomics Weekly (to be posted in the near future, no doubt) where he recounted the history of his NCS interactions and Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett had what can only be called a come-to-Jesus discussion with him.

Whew.

So let’s talk about Kurtz. I’ve always liked him, but damn if I could say that I really understood him (although I’m getting ahead of myself), and he could charitably be called polarizing. For a considerable amount of time, I felt he was just important because of the obvious influence he brought as an early and enduring success, but maybe more notable as his own worst enemy.

What I’ve come to realize is that Kurtz isn’t about (and never has been) about picking fights or starting shit; he’s completely passionate for what he does, has such a responsibility to do more/better/more again/even better, and is almost completely blindered by the intensity of that feeling to the extent that things fall into (as the livecast put it) a binary worldview (and on occasion, I’ve been on the receiving end of that worldview). That’s not the real revelation that I had earlier this week, though.

The revelation is that Scott Kurtz is one of the most important people not just in webcomics, but in cartooning in general. For all the unrest and disquiet that seem to coalesce about him, he is someone (or perhaps, like a force of nature, something) that the [web]cartooning community needs. Bear with me.

Almost everybody you will ever meet lives their life from the perspective of If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; it’s neat, it’s logical, it makes sense. The best professor I ever had back in nerd school taught me If it ain’t broke, break that sumbitch and make it better; yeah, he actually did raise his voice when he said it. That impulse to break things that are perfectly cromulent, the creator/destroyer duality? The stresses and challenges it brings against the ecosystem of [web]cartooning are a big part of what forces it to evolve. It’s all but guaranteed to make such a stressor un- (or under-) appreciated and it scares people, but it’s goddamn vital if cartooning is going to adapt. A steadily changing environment can be deadly (just ask the slowly boiling frog), but a sudden shock to the equilibrium causes a reaction that allows a fighting chance to survive.

Here’s something else that you have to give Kurtz credit for, regardless of how else you might perceive him: he’s acutely aware of his flaws and doesn’t try to deny them. That made today’s discussion of his approach to people and challenges a tough listen at times, as the experience flirted with being an intervention playing out in real time, before a live audience (and a larger one once the podcast gets posted to the world). Being willing to stand up to that kind of scrutiny in public from your friends — and Kellett and Guigar surely count as among the very best friends one can have, the ones that can tell you honestly when you’ve fucked up¹ — and reflect on it without flinching has earned Scott Kurtz a considerable amount of my respect.

That example of self-reflection is also forcing me to reconsider my firmly held opinions on the topic of Ted Rall, so it’s definitely a two-edged sword. But being forced to look at the prejudgements that I hold (while unpleasant) can only be a useful thing in the long run. So if you care to do so, join me in that reassessment and reconsider uncharitable opinions that you might hold. Back to non-navelgazing tomorrow, I promise.

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¹ Another fairly major change in my thinking over the past year or so comes from realizing the value to be found in fucking up. If you’re in an environment that won’t tolerate mistakes no matter what, you’re careful to the point of stasis. Being allowed to screw up big time because you risked and overreached? That’s the opportunity to grow. Just don’t make it a continual thing.