I would be perfectly happy to still be in bed today. Let’s get this done.

There’s a nice thoughtful piece by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®™©^etc) on his Ell-Jay about a webcomics topic we sometimes pay short shrift to: webcomickin’ for the pure pleasure of webcomickin’, with no anticipation of turning pro:

And then I find myself thinking: Hang on. If there are a few dozen webcomic authors making enough money to live on, and I’m pushing for a spot in the top 50, why am I making no money whatsoever out of my comics? (In fact, why do I pay a webhost $40 a month for the privilege of putting my comics on the Net?)

To avoid any suspense, the simple answer is that I have never treated webcomics as a way of making money. I’ve never had any expectation that maybe one day I’ll be able to run ads and sell merchandise and make some money. That “business model” has never been something I’m aiming towards.

All I’ve ever wanted out of webcomics is to do something creative, share it with people, hopefully entertain a few people, and have it as a fun hobby. Over time I’ve added a couple of other desires: To educate people with the annotations I occasionally write to accompany comics, and to raise some money for charity.

As noted on a previous occasion, Morgan-Mar is that rarest of creatures — the pro-grade amateur in the world of webcomics, who has no desire to turn pro (much like myself in the worlds of competitve rock-climbing, cricket, happying-up the ladies, and webcomics blogging). It behooves us to remember that while the word amateur has fallen into a generally negative meaning these days, its original meaning was derived from the latin amare, “to love”. A true amateur engages in a pursuit not for money or acclaim, but for the love of it. Our thanks to Dr Morgan-Mar for reminding us while some are able to turn what they love into a profession, that final step isn’t necessary to love what you do. Not everybody gets to be a pro webcomicker, but if you get out of it what you desire, then you’re pretty lucky.

• Speaking webcomickers Down Under, did you hear about how the Tourism Board of Queensland wants somebody to live on a tropical island on the Great Barrier Reef for six months and blog about how much it rocks, and they’ll pay you AUD$150,000 (approx USD$96,000 as of this writing)? Good news: it could be you! Bad news: you’ll have to compete with about 15,000 other people for the gig, one of them being webcomics’ own adventure guy, Ryan Estrada. Follow the link on Estrada’s site for his audition video and vote him up if you think it would be awesome to see one of ours get The Best Job In The World.
• Speaking of webcomics and Ryans and The Best Job In The World, I recall that Ryan North had a bit in his newsbox about a friend of his applying for the job, but it’s not there now and I maybe dreamt the entire thing? If it’s true, let us know who we could also be rooting for, Ryan (North).
• Finally, the call remains open for those who have items to donate to the Karen Ellis benefit auction. One item we know for certain will be there is the original art of the latest Planet Karen update, and Otter (of A Girl And Her Fed) is putting today’s original up for auction, complete with free shipping to North America & Europe, and kicking in $25 of her own on top. Bidding runs here until March 1st.

First of all, we at Fleen were pleased to hear from Karen Ellis, who corrected an assumption made in our posting three days back. Due to luck and prior planning, Ellis managed to save almost all of her original art. The status of her Planet Karen Photoshop files is still in question, but on balance this was about the happiest occasion I can recall where I was told I was completely wrong about something. More on Ellis’s current situation may be found at her comic.

• In other news, I have a new graphic for surreptiously installing as the background on random computers. Yes, I am evil.
• Speaking of evil, you can now proclaim your status proudly as ComicSpace moves into merch production/fulfillment:
  

  We’ve entered into individual relationships with a number of artists we know. We’ve consulted with them about what kinds of designs we think we can sell (generally, designs that appeal to hardcore fans of a particular webcomic but can also catch the eye of somebody who has never heard of that webcomic). We’ve licensed the right to print a limited number of designs by these creators. We’ve paid 100% of the manufacture/screen-printing costs. And now we’re selling them — at the ComicSpace store, on the creator’s websites, across our ad network (1.1 million potential customers per month and growing), at our convention booths, and sharing the revenues. It’s kind of like Threadless’ model, except there’s not really a contest, and the creators still own their intellectual property at the end of the day, and the individual pay per shirt is better. [emphasis mine]

  Interesting. This appears to be a new model (please correct me if I’ve overlooked a previous iteration that’s similar), and one with a great deal of potential for getting around the “could make money if not for the upfront costs” dilemma (c.f.: yesterday’s post). Can’t wait to see how this experiment turns out.

Edit to add: For those that don’t read the comments below, we are informed by Jeffrey Rowland that Topatoco has quietly been in the “front the money for the creators and take a cut from the back end” business for a year now. While it is disturbing that I failed to pick up on this earlier, it’s reassuring to know that my speculation about helpful business services for webcomics (search this blog for “Aduz”) is not completely baseless.

The following was part of the newsbox at Scary Go Round yesterday, and later copied to John Allison’s blog (where it’s linkable):

First the bad news: from next week there only be four comics a week (M-T-Th-F). I need a bit of breathing space to avoid burn-out. I’m sorry if anybody is disappointed.

I consider myself very lucky that tens of thousand of people read my comic every day. But it is a sad fact of long-form, story-based comics like mine that it is hard, after a certain point, to add new readers.

In the last year or so I have tried to make the stories as stand-alone as I can, but the fact is that you lose readers over time and if you don’t get new ones to replace them, slowly but surely you will go the way of all flesh! There are already a few webcomic ghost ships out there, long sunk by the weight of history. I am not keen to join them!

After 7 years it is probably time to replace Scary Go Round with something new. I have a pretty good idea about what to do next. But I still have a lot of SGR stories to tell and I don’t really know what to do.

The reaction to Allison’s comment was about what you’d expect: panic at the idea of no more SGR, mixed with unalloyed support for Allison’s creative energies. He has clarified that SGR is not going anywhere in the immediate future (except to a slightly reduced schedule), and that any future projects would be recognizable spinoffs (much as SGR followed Bobbins).

For me, the far more interesting part of the discussion comes up several times as Allison converses with his readers (and gets brought out more thoroughly in the follow-on post), and is most clearly explicated in his newsbox (which, alas, does not support linking):

Several people have written to enquire about Scary Go Round book 7. It has been finished for months, but the tumble in the pound’s value meant that suddenly I did not have enough money to print it.

I could take pre-orders but with a lead time of months while it is on a boat from China I am not comfortable doing so — particularly since initial orders in the past only tended to just cover what it costs to print the collections. I love making Scary Go Round but sometimes doing everything yourself is exhausting and this is one of those times.

The thought that something with the strong potential to be profitable can’t get started without such a huge injection of seed capital to make it impractical drives me nuts everytime I hear it. So much so that a year ago I mused that what webcomics needs is some form of angel investment or aggregated micro-lending. It seems foolish to compare John Allison to the sort of micro-entrepreneurs that the Webcomics Kiva team is helping, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that their economic paths run parallel.

Understand, I realize that it would be insanely complex to set up any kind of Kiva-like establishment for the purpose of supporting webcomics artists, but I swear that if I ever hit it big in the lottery, I’m setting up some kind of revolving trust to do just that. Not having to worry about how to finagle their latest project (and thus, pay bills for the next period of time) would maybe give creators the fiscal breathing room to ensure they have, say, some retirement savings (my great nightmare is that in 50 years, you see beloved creators without savings or insurance because they spent their decades happily creating, but never quite getting ahead of the financial curve). Anyway, any well-capitalized types out there willing to accept modest returns in support of the arts, lets you and me do some brainstorming.

Oh, and to end things on an up note, congrats to Ananth Panagariya and Mohammad Haque for 500 strips at Applegeeks. Awful purty job you guys do.

See, the thing about Brad Guigar (aside from the obvious, such as he’s a hell of a nice guy, he has the world’s most understanding wife, and he laughs a lot) is that he’s almost more interested in the question What’s behind the curtain? than the question What is it? And by that I mean, rather than be content with a comic strip, he’s compelled to abstract things by a layer or two and look under the hood.

When he started comic strippin’ with Greystone Inn, he put recursion in plain sight; from the Google search on “Greystone Inn”:

Greystone Inn, by Brad Guigar
A comic strip about a comic strip, featuring Argus the gargoyle.

“A comic strip about a comic strip.” This wasn’t just using a comic to talk about comics, this was using the story structure to comment on itself and everything else comicstrippy. Sure, you see things like this, but not entirely — 30 Rock is a workplace comedy about making sketch comedy. Greystone, on the other hand, is a workplace comedy about making a workplace comedy — you get topic and medium recursion. It’s a little mind-blowing when you think about it.

Which maybe explains why it was never a gonzo-huge success. The meta maybe showed a little too much, the conceit maybe took too much of the place of the funny? In any event, Guigar found it not as satisfying as it could be (I suspect for both the audience and himself) and oh-so-smoothly (and this is where his technical mastery of the comic strip form really shone) transitioned it to a completely different strip, with a completely different premise.

Enter Evil, Inc., about a supervillian-run corporation. Still room for metahumor there, but also satire of society in general, and the occasional musing on the nature of Good and Evil (including a lengthy arc where the supervillian company had to be run by a hero following a hostile takeover — the herioc and the villainous need each other, but the Good Guys still tried to run the company as poorly as could be plausibly explained).

More impressively, Guigar has demonstrated that you can translate the capes ‘n’ tights genre into the four-panel form and still make it work. Hey, creative team behind Spider-Man on the comics page? Somehow, Guigar manages to move a story forward without spending the first panel recapping yesterday, the last panel previewing tomorrow, and the middle panel narrating what the characters are doing. Seriously, there’s more action and better villians in Mary Worth (meth labs!) or Judge Parker (murderous strippers!).

So congratulations to Brad Guigar for nine years of continuous explorations of the four-panel form (unlike most of his contemporaries, I can’t recall a time that Guigar has let himself outside the boundaries of a four-panel-sized entry). Guigar is celebrating his milestone not in the traditional manner (drugs and groupies), but rather by auctioning a piece of original E,I art, with the proceeds to benefit a Quaker school in his hometown of Philadelphia.

• Speaking of anniversaries, webcomics collective Eyeskream is five years old, and is holding a contest with loads of stuff up for grabs. Woo!
• ‘Bout six months back, my erstwhile colleague Anne Thalheimer pointed you towards some minicomics by L Nichols. Please note that Nichols is back with Dirt Between My Toes, a webcomic with equal parts (visually speaking) R Crumb, David Hellman, and Aaron Diaz when he’s drawing on paper, with a color palette that is somehow simultaneously Day-Glo and muted. Visually stunning stuff.
• Essays on business models for [web]comics (courtesy of Jim Thomas), and a tutorial/review of ad services (courtesy of Tony Piro) are your how-tos for the day.

We at Fleen are deeply saddened to learn that Karen Ellis of Planet Karen has lost nearly everything in a fire; the apartment above hers was the source, and tragically her neighbor was found dead. Ellis has one good coat, an MP3 player, and about nothing else.

Since “nearly everything” probably includes originals and work done on her previously announced book, the need will probably be ongoing.

Girl-Wonder.org, which hosts Planet Karen, is planning a fundraising auction on Karen’s behalf. If you have items you think you’d like to donate, please contact Karen Healey at karen dot healey at girl dash wonder dot org.

There’s also a donation link on the main page of her site, and now would be a good time for that generosity which webcomicdom is so very good at to directed toward the aid of one of our own.

Whatever you may think of Scott Kurtz from his online presence (and there’s a spectrum that runs pretty far from extreme to extreme), know this: I’ve made my living by speaking at the front of a room for longer than I care to admit, and Kurtz is a natural in front of people. Hand him a mic and you can just sit back to enjoy the ride; add in his love of comicss, and he is a terrific choice for any kind of MC gig. Raise your hand if you just got a mental image of Kurtz totally blinged out and giving his best gangster face.

• Not moustachery, but close enough: the noble beard. Be sure to read the whole thing for maximum understanding of how we hirsuite types have been persecuted throughout history.
• Speaking of reading the whole thing, Valerie d’Orazio is supremely well versed in comics (particularly business issues), writes beautifully and passionately, and is currently the president of Friends of Lulu. So it’s a little disheartening to see her get the idea of corporate + webcomics so very wrong.

  There’s a decent, polite back-and-forth going on in the comments thread and pretty much all of the points that need to be made have been, but I’ll add in one thought here: If her merging of Big Media and webcomics does occur in whatever future timeframe, it won’t be because Big Media bought out webcomics — it’ll be the other way around.

• I honestly have no idea what the central thesis of this email (reproduced as received) is:
  

  We’ve had a lot of free help for the development of our webcomic from the kindness of strangers, which is amazing since we honestly have no idea how to use the internet in any technical sense. We really wanted to do Tuna Carpaccio P.I. promotions and other fun stuff that you see on ton of other sites, but between full-time jobs and putting the comic together, the process of learning the full ins-and-outs of programming seems ridiculously daunting. I guess this seems more like a sad confession than “insight” but we really just wanted to do the webcomic part… too bad there aren’t people out there willing to be the 3rd party only: programming for the sake of programming. That said, you can definitely appreciate webcomickers that are one-person shows.

  … but it got me to check out the linked site on a whim. In that respect, I suppose it’s a success, because I found a bizarrely compelling mystery story there that somehow reminds me of the bastard child of Don Martin and Kris Straub, but not in any way I can articulate. Weird, huh?

• Missed in the Con Fever/Recovery/General Laziness of the past week (with apologies all ’round): an almost silent (and rare non-irritating use of a nearly infinite canvas) Valentine’s Day strip from Eros, Inc. (which happened to be strip #100). Even more missed, another #100, this one from Boxcar Astronaut (but since both strips are now only onto strips #101, I didn’t miss either one too badly, did I?).
• Most beautiful thing I’ve seen in about forever: Tiny Kitten Teeth, by Becky Dreistadt and Frank Gibson, whom you may remember from the long-wrapped (and sorely missed) Combustible Orange. Frank and Becky have since decamped to New Zealand (which is on its face awesome) and have been working TKT since the last week of January and managed seven updates — an amazing feat when you realize it’s painted in gouache on watercolor paper and is frickin’ gorgeous. (obligatory disclaimer: I have just learned that Dreistadt is also known as “my niece Colleen’s buddy Becky from college”, which just goes to prove it’s a small damn world).

It’s a holiday for some of us in America — no mail, banks are closed, just a lazy day to do a bunch o’ nothing — and you get an update to match!

Remind me — didn’t we settle this crappy TOS thing when MySpace did it? Facebook tries to pull a fast one, not realizing that Jeff Rowland went toe to toe with Rupert Murdoch to save us all. Those of you with webcomicky content on Facebook are now officially Mark Zuckerberg’s bitches.

Holiday how-tos:

The line at the cupcake place is down the block and around the corner, and Fashion Week is kicking in across the street (complete with the still-unaired Project Runway finalists … how are they going to keep the lid on this one?), bringing with it the hordes of snootistas that reek of too much money and other people’s labor. But there’s still things to be happy about — for example, I get Monday off work. In other news:

• Via ¡Journalista!, coverage of the Intellectual Property panel at NYCC that I didn’t get to attend; the recap goes heavy on copyright and trademark, and it good reading.
• Newly re-indyfied Steven Cloud hits the reading stage tonight for a talk about comics with Ted Rall and Stephanie McMillan at Blue Stockings bookstore tonight at 7pm. I know we mentioned this one about two weeks ago, but just in case you forgot with all the Valentines Day/Fashion Week hoopla. You can recognize Steven by his magnificent beard.
• Lost in the shuffle: interviews with Norm Feuti (by Tom Mason) and Brendan McGinley (by Brian Warmoth).
• As of this writing, Kiva Team Webcomics is eight days old; it is large (in terms of members) than Germany, Sweden, Japan, or France. It has contributed more money than Brazil, Lebanon, Austria, or Democrats (US). And for all teams created in the last eight days, Team Webcomics exceeds the monetary donations of the next-most-generous team by $7700. Keep up the momentum, guys.
• In response to our question about preserving clusters of exhibitors in their new venue, MoCCA replied that they’ll try to honor requests for booth proximity, but it will naturally be impossible to guarantee the same layouts in a very differently-shaped space. So if you want to show at MoCCA and be near the other webcomickers, be sure to request it on the reservation form.

News all over Webcomicstan this morning — there’s going to be an international gathering of creators in Easthampton, MA the weekend of March 20 — 22. Public details are a bit sketchy right now, but word on the street is that it’s going to be informal … think meetups, studio tours (lotta creators in the the Western Massachusetts zone), signings, and perhaps some light commerce. Behind the scenes will surely include creators “hanging” and “drinking”, with a side order of banging their heads together to figure out ways to entertain you more effectively.

Aspiring historians of webcomics, remember what a meet/greet for just one group of webcomickers did for one of the pioneers of our field a little over four years ago: it cemented E. B-White‘s place in our narrow discipline as The Literary One (Xaviar Xerexes remains The Cute One, and I’m Ringo), and forever associated [Dumbrella Hosting principal and Fleen publisher] Phillip Karlsson’s name with malefactors. You too could have that kind of lasting influence, or at least say hi to some talented people and enjoy some sophisticated adult beverages that make everybody around you seem smarter and more attractive.

In other news today, books!

• Via Mike Russell, news that Dylan Meconis is going to be self-publishing the collected Bite Me; I am ashamed to say that I didn’t catch this new myself, but Meconis’s current series, Family Man, is one that I only visit every few months so that I can absorb as many pages at one time as possible — I simply cannot read one page a week without going mad with anticipation. Meconis is podcating about the self-publishing experience with fellow conspirator Bill Mudron, which you should listen to with the caveat that there may be the odd naughty word or concept in your earbuds.
• And who’s up for a new Templar, AZ book? If you didn’t shout Me! Over here, me!, you’re a filthy liar because all right-thinking people love Templar, AZ. From Spike herself:
  

  I’m now taking pre-orders for book three of TAZ, with the same intent as always: To cover the print bill. I’ve put everything I sell on sale, but the prices are going right back up the second the bill’s covered. This won’t last forever, so people have gotta hurry.

  You heard the lady — get your orders in, ’cause she don’t go to print ’til it’s paid for and I want my book, dammit.

Things that have happened since we last ran current news:

• Dave Roman did some walking around at NYCC, did some panels, and did some thinking on the future of [web]comics and how digital future media will be. Good reads, and well worth your time.
• While at NYCC, I got to speak to Scott Kurtz and Meredith Gran about their recent pushes into premium content — both have seen a modest take-up amongst their readers (although Kurtz’s jumped when he announced the first three months of net profits would go to the Ringo Scholarship at SCAD), and are pretty much playing it by ear.

  The big questions in this experiment (and this year of economic turmoil is nothing if not a test-bed for new approaches to making a living online) is how many people will carry over from the first month to the second, and whether or not people will even sign up for that first month, believing themselves to be locked into an automatically-renewing subscription that keeps charging them (they aren’t).

  Similarly, I was contacted recently by Israel L’Heureux (what a great name), one of the founders of Assetbar. To clarify some of my initial descriptions of the Fanflow program, it was built by L’Heureux and his compatriots to meet Chris Onstad‘s needs, and has been generalized as a tool for the community since. The commenting/rating interface at Achewood (aka acheworld), while powered by the first iteration of the AssetBar technology, is not part of the premium feature set, and remains free to use. Fleen thanks L’Heureux for the clarification and regrets the incorrect description.

• In the less-than-a-week since the webcomics team at Kiva launched, membership has swelled (as of this writing) to 132 and total lending to $4500, placing Team Webcomics 42nd out of 481 teams in terms of membership, and somewhere around 127th in terms of money lent (placing well above teams in existence for many months). Take that, Team Harvard!
• Yep, it’s true. Gotta love the commenters taking it seriously.
• Finally, check what popped into my inbox a few minutes ago — the long-anticipated exhibitor registration for MoCCA Art Fest ’09 is now available:
  

  Exhibitor Applications & Guidelines for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s 2009 MoCCA Festival are now available for download on the museum’s website [PDF].

  Artists, writers, and publishers wishing to have a table at the 2009 Festival are encouraged to get in their applications and payment as early as possible, as well over half of vendor space has already been sold to returning exhibitors and MoCCA members.

  The 2009 MoCCA Festival will take place the weekend of June 6-7 at the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street in New York City. As the 69th Regiment Armory is a much larger venue, nearly 100 more exhibitors will be attending, and arranged in a more democratic manner than in previous years.

  MoCCA will begin accepting and processing new 2009 MAF Exhibitor Applications on Thursday, February 12th. Exhibitor applications arriving at the Museum before that date will be processed as if postmarked at 11:59pm on February 11th.

  We have an inquiry in with MoCCA to see if the new venue allows the webcomics creators to a) be clustered together as at the Puck Building, and b) to have some newcomers join the party. Answers as we receive them.