Happy Thanksgiving, Canadianaians! I understand you’re all taking the day (and some of you, the week) off. Today just feels like a day o’ miscellany, so let’s get our feet wet.

• I know other people have pointed this out since yesterday but holy brick-throwin-mice, yesterday’s Sheldon was freakin’ beautiful. This is how you pay homage to the masters. Just check out the lettering on that puppy, and tell me that Herriman isn’t smiling in his grave.
• Call me cynical, but I have a feeling that there’s a pretty high correlation between webcomics fans and people who read mythology for fun starting in junior high. To that underserved demographic, let me point out how much I’ve been enjoying The Miserable World of Promotheus ever since I discovered it in the aftermath of Estradarama ’08. Eternal torments/hearty laugh chuckles, both delivered by a liver-plucking eagle — what more could you ask for?
• Was pointed to Vendable, recently. It’s about … well, let’s let the strip creators speak for themselves:
  

  Much like Rocky is a movie about boxing, Vendable is a webcomic about the vending machine business. Renton Hicks lives between his past in Paterson NJ and his future there, which looks like the same model of vending machine that he has to maintain everyday. The only thing that it’s stocked with isn’t particularly good for his heart. And . . . well, there’s other people who vend, and also there is Fatima Kutkin, the voice-disabled niece of the guard at the warehouse that Renton works in. She’s got a job lined up there, and is hoping for a quiet place to while away her lack of rightness. Here are their anti-adventures.

  Which, to be honest, doesn’t sound terribly promising, but I’m quite enjoying it. Haven’t read back through the 30-odd pages enough to completely formulate in my head why I like it, but I do. This bears more watching.

Mezzcotta — test-bed site for half-baked ideas:

So, the initial idea was half-baked. The countdown timer was half-baked. The €5000000 thing was half-baked. (We never expected anyone to go for it. But if they did, hey, that would have been cool.) The webcomic is half-baked. Everything about this site is half-baked. That’s what mezzacotta is.

Fleen offers condolences to David Morgan-Mar and associates that they weren’t able to get their pre-launch asking price, and we’re not too hopeful that they’ll get the post-launch price either. But hey, new webcomic! With 50 strips in the “best of” archive. And … hmmm.

Well, here’s the strip for July 13. Here’s an apparently popular strip from March 10, 1978. And it appears you can pump in any date you like, such as Oct 23, 4004 BC (when Bishop Ussher reckons the world was created), or days from September 1752 that don’t exist in English-speaking countries.

On the balance, I’d say that Mezzacotta officially has the largest archives of any webcomic in existence, and just took the continuous-updates crown from whoever had it before. No future comics are available, though, so crappy buffer. As a final note, Morgan-Mar hasn’t identified all of his cohorts in The Comic Irregulars, but I’d wager that at least one of them is named Alice.

• In other news, Teaching Baby Paranoia‘s update today (permalink eventually here) is pretty much accurate. Readers are advised that Bryant Paul Johnson may be trying to pull a fast one.
• Finally, I declare that round numbers are passé, so please join me in congratulating Steven “Beardy” Cloud on 1018 strips of Boy On A Stick And Slither.

Okay, so it’s well known that just about everybody associated with the northeast (US) webcomics scene has been in Overcompensating at some point or another. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Jeph Jacques started a round of Webcomicker Cameo Tag here, and Rene Engström (my Pretend Internet Girlfriend) tags back here, with the Little Gamers crew getting in on the game here. I was going to make a joke about Rowland being Sweded, but decided against it. Ball’s in your court, webcomics — drop one of your peers into your strip, join the game.

In other news, congrats to Matt Boyd (whom I still owe a beer) & Ian McConville for two years/100 strips of wildly varying art styles at Three Panel Soul.

Speaking of TPS, McConville points us towards this webcomic which has nothing to do with Iraq’s president. Rather, it has everything to do with what my vaguely-remembered high school French believes is cute adventures in a well-rendered manga style, with occasional forays into physics. While it’s true I once picked up a bilingual pun in a Jim Jarmusch movie, at present I’m really only able to enjoy the pictures. See if you can do any better.

Okay, so you may recall Jeff Zugale from his various webcomics, or his work on the Kindergoth comic books, or even a guest appearance full of Wooo! For a while now, Zugale’s been working for a video game company, drawing cool stuff.

But he just got laid off. Suck. But he’s also going to be giving us more comics, so that’s good. Also good — there’s a history of webcomickers getting laid off and throwing themselves into their creations with more fervor and success than when they were toiling for The Man.

Even better, Zugale’s been careful with his finances (having an innate understanding of what capitalism is, which others seem to lack), and he’s got some savings and plans. Or, as he put it in discussion, Plan A has gone by the wayside, but he also had Plans B through E.

As a guy who teaches IT pros how to prepare those other plans, I’m declaring Jeff’s experience your Takeaway Lesson Of The Day. Whatever you do for a living (webcomics or no), ask yourself what (at least) your Plans B and C are. And if that conversation results in you maybe defining your Plan B, give Jeff the props due him (and maybe buy something from his store).

Similarly, this morning brings the official announcement of the formation of a new group devoted to [web]comics as artform/medium/topic of serious talk. Yeah, yawn, happens all the time, why the big whoop? Because of some of the names attached to the project — Matt. Murray and Anne Jen Babcock. You will perhaps recall them from previous writings that were associated with Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art and its attendant Fest.

The gist of it is, members of the MoCCA board have left behind their association with the museum to form the Sequential Art Collective, so that their efforts could be made more broadly than the confines of the museum would permit. As Murray puts it, the SAC will be:

… an organization that looks to work with publishers, creators, fans and other organizations to coordinate comic and cartoon themed art exhibitions, programs, performances and lectures for and at various venues providing for and attracting the widest and most varied audiences possible.

“As far back as December, 2007 there were a number of [MoCCA’s)] leaders and longtime volunteers who began to feel that our next steps personally and professionally would be to collectively branch out and work with other organizations. We’re looking to not only bring the comic and cartoon community closer together, but to recruit new fans in other markets– who might be out there waiting for the right invitation in to the fold.”

[The mission of SAC ]is to work with publishers, creators, fans and other organizations to coordinate comic and cartoon themed art exhibitions, programs, performances and lectures for and at various venues providing for and attracting the widest and most varied audiences possible.

Given the indy- and web-comics friendly tone that Murrary, Babcock and others of their MoCCA contemporaries have always had, I’m quite intrigued to see how this plays out. There are some really capable people in on this effort — including MoCCA curators and Fest directors, and Leah Schnelbach, who was instrumental in the SPLAT! symposium — and what can [web]comics as a whole be if not thrilled that a 6′ 6″ self-described Smurfologist is working to promote the medium? We at Fleen will be following the efforts of the SAC with interest. For more information, check out the (yet-to-be-fully-launched) website of SAC or read the announcement after the cut.

(more…)

So Raina Telgemeier‘s all finished with the Baby–sitters Club series, which means nothing from her for a while, right? Nope! We get SMILE in 2010!

Scholastic has acquired Smile, Raina Telgemeier’s charming coming-of-age memoir written in comic format, currently scheduled for publication in 2010. Smile has been posted as a weekly comic on Telgemeier’s website and is about growing up, dealing with friends and crushes, and the dental drama that ensues after a trip-and-fall mishap.

Better yet? It’s gonna be in COLOR. There’s no part of this that isn’t awesome except for one little detail: the webcomic is basically on hold. Much like Kean Soo’s Jellaby, the conclusion of the story (a good 80 – 90 pages that have yet to appear online) will appear only in print.

On the one hand, that many pages would probably take until 2010 to run (remember, Raina’s got to go back and color the whole thing). On the other hand, I want to read the story, dammit (I already know how it turns out, in that Raina’s smile turned out awesome, but still). So let me just set aside $14.95 now (or whatever we’re using for economic exchanges in 2010 — soup ‘n’ old clothes, perhaps) and start countin’ the days. ONE …

On any other day, this would have been my lead, but oh well: whatever you might have heard of his personal temperment or thought of his various returns from retirement, it’s a safe bet that a solid majority of today’s webcomickers were influenced by Berke Breathed and Bloom County. So it’s a little significant to hear that he’s making Opus grow up for good, and that the ultimate fate of the scrappy penguin will only be revealed online. In other news, today’s installment at GoComics just happens to be the second of two that got me hooked on Breathed’s work way back when. Funny coincidence, innit?

From Bethesda comes word that Achewood won the Ignatz Award for best online comic; as James Kochalka pointed out, one of the awesome things about this category is that all of the nominees are really good, so you can be happy no matter who won. You can see Kochalka’s very funny presentation of the award here, and sharp-eyed readers may even be able to spot a gorilla in the midst of the audience.

• Totally missed it, which required Rosscott to point out to me that Danielle Corsetto has passed the four year mark for Girls With Slingshots Last Wednesday. Corsetto, modest to the end, announced the happy news via Twitter, but unfortunately is under the weather with post-con death rot. Send good wishes (and maybe some soup) to her, won’t you? And to Karen Ellis, too.
• Speaking of Rosscott and his very limited palette (put to remarkably good use), a photo comic I recently came across uses a similarly limited toolset — Red Pen. Thnk of a cross between the late Terror Island and the even later Bad Line (no longer exists as far as I can tell, but you can always check the Wayback Machine).
• That’s two dimensions down; anybody want to bet that Munroe doesn’t stop at three?
• Speaking of three, you’ve got about that many days to get in on the ground floor of the taste sensation fabulous mystery that is Mezzacotta. Since I read last week that social networking finally passed porn as the major driver of net traffic, I’m really wondering if the Mezz’ falls into either of those venerable categories, or is something completely new.
• Finally, one of my favorite creators in the print indy comic world, Alex Robinson, has had two pretty damn good releases in the past twelve months or so — Too Cool To Be Forgotten, and the wonderfully silly, bloody, and wordless Lower Regions. Now Alex joins us on the network side with a followup to LR at Top Shelf 2.0: Defense of the West Gate gives one of them dungeon-dwellin’ critters the chance to tell his version of what happens when the conquering heroes decide to go earn a living. Inner 13 year olds will be giving bonus points for the totally awesome, surgically precise, midline anatomical sectioning (via battle-axe) on page 12.

Okay, so Ben Gordon has written a critique of the Halfpixel Business Model (as described in How To Make Webcomics) and come to the conclusion it doesn’t work. I wish I had time to dig into this the way it deserves, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to in the near future.

So let’s be clear that this is not a formal analysis of Gordon’s entire thesis, but specifically a response based on his numbers. I’m going to talk about this using casual terminology so as to make my thoughts as accessible as possible to everybody that doesn’t know (and, rightfully, doesn’t care) about the difference between skew and kurtosis. Onwards.

Gordon looked at a sample of webcomics, and sought to estimate how much money could be made from his reading of HTMW‘s “10% Rule” (5 – 10% of your readership will open their wallets and buy things). His calculations led him to conclude that the rule is fundamentally flawed, but pointed out:

I hope someone will find fault with my analysis, because if it is sound, it is a setback for webcomics.

I’m not sure if his conclusion can be proved or disproved (we are, after all, talking about applying mathematical rules to a creative endeavour), but if his conclusion’s based solely on the numbers, I think that I’ve found the fault he was looking for, from a purely statistical standpoint. Consider the following statements from his posting:

• [the business model] cannot be verified by the majority of case studies
• I’ve chosen comics in a range of sizes from a list in Wikipedia which reports comics that support their creator(s). … I removed the ones that don’t belong and analyzed the rest.
• The formula for estimating each comic’s profit is: … We assume the average profit per sale is $5 — typical for a t-shirt
• [five calcluations of estimated webcomic profits ranging from $975 to $24,000]

First off, we need to agree on some terminology — Gordon doesn’t have “a majority of case studies”, he’s got one study with five data points. Semantics? Nope — because the number of data points is a critical element of how much we can draw reliable conclusions from the numbers. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Secondly, Gordon’s eliminated data that “don’t belong” (for example, Achewood was eliminated because Time magazine declared it the best graphic novel of 2007 — which may have artificially inflated its numbers, I guess), meaning that we’re not looking at a random sample. We’ll come back to that, too.

Thirdly, the assumption of profit per sale is entirely arbitrary — $5, which is described as the average profit on a t-shirt (I don’t sell shirts so I can’t say, but having ordered custom shirts from the same guy many webcomickers use, I think it’s probably a bit low). But the profit per shirt doesn’t matter anyway, because it assumes that any item the creator makes will produce the same profit. Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold up.

Case in point: I have purchased a number of originals from a number of webcomickers (some of whom describe themselves as entirely self-employed by their strips and others that do not); prices have ranged from $20 to $175. Profit on even the lowest priced of them is several times Gordon’s assumption, and on the high end it utterly destroys his model. Okay, many webcomickers sell shirts, and okay, the profit on a shirt probably occupies a fairly narrow range of values, but what do we do with all the other items? You’ve got books, prints, hoodies, skateboard decks, hot sauce, and an upsell (of $5 to $10, generally) to get the item signed/sketched. That’s an incredible variation.

That price range actually points to the real problem in Gordon’s analysis — the distribution curve of those “price per original” data would form a flat line. It’s not a set of consensus values with outliers because there’s too few points — this does not allow for meaningful statistical analyses. The same situation exists with the estimated profit figures he gives: 975, 2012, 8000, 17270, 24000 … that’s only five data points. The confidence that we can derive from any analysis over such a wide range, with a distribution curve that looks like a flat line, is vanishingly small.

Statistical analysis only works if any random datum that you select to calculate can be assumed to represent many, many, similar (to the point of being essentially identical) other data that you don’t bother to include in the analysis. The key thought here is Margin of Error. You know MoE — it’s what tells you that a political race between, say, the Harbinger of the New Golden Age and the Evil Throwback to All That’s Unholy is presently split 52% to 48%, plus or minus 4.3% (and since the MoE is greater than the difference between HNGA and ETATU, we essentially don’t know who’s ahead).

Also bear in mind that the MoE is probably only to the standard level of “95% confidence”, which means that there’s a 5% chance that the real split could be even more than 4.3%. I’m going to run one simple equation to drive this home. It’s a rule of thumb that if you want to calculate the margin of error to a 95% confidence level you can do so approximately with:

0.98/√n

where n is the number of samples. In this case, n equals 5, which gives us

0.98/2.236 = 0.438 = plus or minus 43.8%

So there’s a 95% chance that the five data points we have are representative of webcomics earnings potential, with the assumption that any number we come up with could conceivably be off by as much as 43.8% from the true value. That’s not a number that we can be very confident in. Add to that the fact that statistics in general is predicated on random samples (but Gordon selected his population), and we have numbers that can’t be relied upon to any degree, even if we take the problematic $5 assumption off the table.

Heck, even recalculating for every self-reported self-supporting webcomicker isn’t going to help, because the number is still too low to provide statistical significance (honestly, we’d want a population several thousand and a sample of at least 500 to have much confidence in the numbers). It’s still an anomaly to make a living this way, and there simply are not enough data to allow for any analysis beyond the anecdotal — which is precisely what HTMW affords. This is not to say that Gordon’s question shouldn’t be asked or that his conclusions are wrong — but it is pointless to try to draw any statistical meaning from these numbers.

Speaking of “pointless”, I strongly urge that you avoid the related thread at The Daily Cartoonist, as it quickly devolved (despite Alan Gardner’s specific request to stay on the damn topic) into truly astonishing levels of dickery re: webcomickers do not have careers/incomes/lives/redeeming qualities.

It never ceases to astonish me that individuals that I have met — and who are perfectly polite and rational in person — turn into such raging exemplars of John Gabriel’s best known theorem (minus the anonymity … weird) when discussing this particular topic. I stopped reading in disgust after about 20 comments and won’t go back there. Proceed at your own risk.

The discussion at the original post is, by contrast, civil, productive, and based on logic. Gordon has been polite in responding to questions and everybody is doing their best to treat the question as an intellectual exercise designed to figure out the truth. Bravo.

Hey kids, are you going to SPX? I’m not, dammit, but that shouldn’t stop you from checking out the funnest couple of days in indy-comics (plus, last year they did this chocolate-dipping thing at the party after the Ignatz Awards that was really cool). Stuff to keep an eye out for:

• Kate Beaton, who reminds us that history isn’t just boring and dead, is bringing her first mini to the show. It’s chock full o’ the history and misbehaving Founding Fathers. PS Kate I still want to buy the original of this comic from you. Do it now while the American dollar is still worth something!
• Raina Telgemeier‘s got a new minicomic about teaching kids to make comics which looks freakin’ beautiful. Also, something about babysitting and clubs? I dunno, I don’t see that one going very far.
• Also a stack o’ moustaches. Remember, Willrad for all your rad will needs (and shirts with squid).

Dammit, I put in my Achewood order two weeks ago. Free 7th anniversary shirt until the 11th with $50 order.

Oh please oh please oh please let this agenda be on the discussion list for tonight’s debate

NAZIS, that’s who! It’s time for Wonder Woman Day III, a benefit for domestic violence shelters in Portland (Oregon) and Flemington (New Jersey). As he did last year, Paul Taylor of Wapsi Square is contributing a piece to the art auction. What, Wonder Woman isn’t allowed to wake up with her coffee and fluffy slippers? I particularly like that this WW has the arms to support some serious buttkickery. If webcomickry feels like turning this into a meme, the organizers are apparently accepting submissions for about two more weeks.

• Fleen noticed that three years of doctoring and ninjaing were marked on Monday; we would have run notice of the anniversary yesterday, but there was this big BANDWIDTH EXCEDED thing going on. Still, the entire decision to color Dr McNinja could have been made solely to set up this splash page, and it would totally have been worth it.
• Speaking of DrMcN, Kent Archer, inker extraordinaire, is taking commissions.
• Hey, do you like your stories of time travel, grad students, and wacky antics mixed with a rubbery-limbed, Saturday morning cartoon art style? You might wanna check out Chronillogical, which is at a natural jumping-on point in the story and doesn’t have too deep of an archive to get caught up on.
• Mr Oblivious: It’s like a widescreen, silent movie version of The Far Side, and something about the art reminds me of Roger Langridge. It’s worth the occasional checking-out, if you enjoy the laugh-chuckles.

So let’s try to find some fun where we can.

I should have written about this one yesterday, but I didn’t want it to get lost in all the other stuff. The opera made about this Dinosaur Comic is going to be performed in public. A guerilla group of musicians named Liederwölfe will perform the song of the sinister raccoons at 10pm this Friday, October 3rd, as part of the Pop Montreal independent music festival. So if you should find yourself in the vicinity of 30 Ste-Catherine Ouest, Montreal, and can afford a ticket price of Pay What You Can, you should be there.

Interviews!

• Rick Marshall talks with Sam Brown, who explodes dogs for your amusement.
• Von Allen of The Road To God Knows … talks to Jennifer Contino at The Pulse (Ms Contino is talking to lots of webcomickers these days, and we at Fleen wish to encourage her in this direction).
• Tracy White of Traced (and Ignatz nominee) talks to The XX-Man at ComixTalk. For good measure, White has turned the first Traced comic ever posted into an animation … time to remember your first time GETTING DRUNK.