Editor’s note: for those who missed yesterday’s rare weekend posting, we’re looking at each of the three Zudacontracts as quick overviews; the real analysis will come later. Up today: the terms under which you can submit.

Okay, the Submission Agreement. It’s not too long — about five screens full; much shorter than other contracts I’ve read. Numbering is as in the contract.

1. Definitions of terms — who are You, who is Zuda, what is the Website, etc. Most interesting part: “Submission” includes everything:

title of the work, the art and script comprising the work and the concepts, plots, themes, storylines, characters (including names and images), environmental settings, devices, characterizations, logos, trademarks, designs and other elements to the extent included in the work. (emphasis mine)

I have a feeling those things in bold are going to be critical;

2. If you don’t get selected, “Zuda shall have no rights at all in or to the Submission.” — that’s better than I hoped for.

3. You can’t use your submission in any other way during the review period (and presumably if you get selected that will be governed by the other contracts). If you were thinking about using Zuda to try to get a current project a wider readership, into print, or make some money off of it, stop thinking that now. You have to take it down and not show it in any form while it’s in consideration (which is for 90 days after submitting, or until explicitly rejected, whichever comes first). You cannot run a Zudaentry on your site.

4. If you’re chosen as a winner and sign the other two contracts, they come into force. Make sense. But if you decide not to sign with them, does Zuda get any rights to the work? I don’t see that explicitly laid out. That’s bad.

5. Okay, if Zuda doesn’t reject you and it’s not 90 days yet, they can enter you into a capital-C Competition; this extends the time you cannot use the work any other place and

6. If you’re selected for a capital-C Competition, you get $500 in exchange for everything in paragraph #5 (make sure you submit your W-9; I wonder if this disallows non-US residents?). If you get included in an anthology, it’s another $1000 (unless you win and are governed by the other contracts). If they reprint a hardcover anthology as softcover, or any other variation of form with the same content, you get nothing more. Sneaky.

7. Just a definition of how winners are chosen in capital-C Competition; usual bit about DQ for ballot-box stuffing.

8. This looks like the important one in this contract — what happens if you win the capital-C Competition? You get sent the Rights Agreement and Services Agreement (anaylses forthcoming), and you sign ’em within 10 business days, and then you’re governed by those contracts.

If you don’t sign, then “Zuda shall have the right to rescind the deal offer and select the runner up as an alternate winner.” Still no explicit description of what rights Zuda retains and what reverts to you if you don’t sign. The disposition of everything in graf 5 is not laid out in that case; that omission is making me nervous.

9. Looks like the standard, “You are who you say you are, you created the work, you have the legal right to dispose of the work as you wish, and you aren’t going to cause us any legal headaches down the road” boilerplate. No big deal.

10. I was wrong about paragraph 8 being the important one in this contract. Let’s quote Number 10 in its entirety, shall we?

You acknowledge that Zuda has no obligation to You for Zuda’s use of material that was created by or for Zuda without the benefit of the Submission, before, during or after You submitted the Submission, and that is similar or identical to the Submission in theme, characters, ideas, plots storylines, formats or other similar respects. In addition, Zuda shall have no fewer rights with respect to the Submission than any member of the general public. (emphasis mine)

That second sentence is just ass-covering, but do look at the first one. By my reading, it says that Zuda can create additional work that is “similar or identical” to your entry at any time and they don’t owe you anything.

In one reading, this could be interpreted as, “Well, we once ran a story that was about an ice-cream scooper with amazing freeze powers who fights crime, so you can’t submit something similar and claim we ripped you off.”

On the other hand, it could be read as, “You submitted a story about an ice-cream scooper with amazing freeze powers who fights crime, and after we rejected you we created a new character who’s an ice-cream scooper with amazing freeze powers who fights crime, and it’s become the biggest thing since Siegel and Schuster signed away Superman, which by the way is a situation you should be very familiar with on account of it’s what you just did, Sparky.”

Let’s put it in bold — by my I Am Not A Lawyer, plain-English reading, this is the paragraph that explicitly identifies Zuda as an idea-farming mechanism and win or lose, you just gave up your story idea for ever and ever, Amen.

11. Standard severability boilerplate — if any single part of the contract isn’t valid, the rest still holds.

12. Standard jurisdiction boilerplate — the contract takes place in the state of New York, and if you want to dispute elements of it in future you have to do so there. If you live a long way from New York, enjoy the commute to court.

13. Standard completeness boilerplate — this contract (and the other two, if you win a capital-C Competition) is the entire legal agreement, nothing else governs the deal between you and Zuda.

I still don’t see the explicit reversion of rights to you if you get selected as a capital-C Competition winner but don’t sign. Zuda explicitly waive all its interests if you lose, but nothing about what happens if you reject them. Keep in mind that it’s a hole in a contract that does not completely answer a question that makes for lengthy fights in future.

And hey, guess what? DC Comics (wholly owned by Time Warner) has a hell of a lot more IP and contracts lawyers than you do, not to mention an annual legal budget that looks like the GDP of a small South American country. No matter how strong your position in a dispute, they can wait you out.

The remainder of the contract is divided into Technical Requirements (the 4×3 dictate, the length of the submissions, format of the images, and text descriptions), and a list of wherever the work may have previously appeared or currently appears.

To sum: by Zuda’s own declaration:

Everyone wishing to submit a comic to Zuda must read and agree to this agreement. If you don’t agree with it you should not submit your work.

If anything here (particularly the logic hole referenced in paragraphs 4 and 8, or the terms of paragraph 10) gives you that prickly feeling up the back of your neck, stay away. If you can, on careful reflection and consultation with an actual attorney, live with what’s here, then come back tomorrow as we look at the next contract.

The long-awaited day came on Friday — the text of the contracts that will govern American Zudaidol hit the web and a bunch of people started carefully parsing them. They are, as Ron Perazza promised, up before the initially-announced October date, and in reasonable plain language. I was thrilled by the lack of terms like “estoppel” and “thereunto” and “party of the first part”, but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. There are three contracts; if you’re thinking of submitting to Zuda you need to pay attention to at least one of them immediately — the other two can wait until you decide if the first contains any dealbreakers.

The Submission Agreement is for anybody submitting an entry to the Zudaparty, as the overview page explains:

It explains, among other things, the conditions under which you can submit your work, the rules by which we can read and evaluate it and details about the competitions we plan to run. Everyone wishing to submit a comic to Zuda must read and agree to this agreement. If you don’t agree with it you should not submit your work.

The Rights Agreement and the Services Agreement are for those accepted onto Zuda (“winning”, if you will). The Rights Agreement:

covers the rights that you have as a creator and that we have as the publisher and all of the various conditions and considerations that might arise from that working relationship: including things like what kind of royalties you get for different products and publications, copyright and trademark issues and how your property can revert entirely back to you.

and the Services Agreement:

covers the consideration for actual work that is done — things like the page rate for the artwork and additional royalties you’re due as the artist.

As you might imagine, this is a huge moment for the whole Zudaexperiment; in their favor is the fact that Zuda is making the contracts (including what terms you’re working under if they choose you) up front. To my knowledge, this has not been the case with other publication competitions to date. With Zuda, there will be no moment where you’re told, “Okay, you’ve won, but you get nothing unless you sign these additional contracts and agree to these terms and no, you don’t get adequate time to absorb them.”

The potentially very bad news is the contracts themselves. Because this is such a big topic and I continue to analyze these things (and may I remind you all that I Am Not A Lawyer), we’ll be breaking up the analysis.

The next few days will be the first pass — my first-impression notes of each contract as I read them, immediate visceral reactions. After that we’ll present the in-depth analysis and hopefully present some analyses from others to make this a full discussion. Somewhere in there, we’ll try to have at least some non-Zudacontent, because any sane person will have to take a break from it sometimes. Strap yourself in, kiddies, this one’s gonna be bumpy.

Why does it not surprise me that Vachel was so well-prepared in yesterday’s Little Dee?

On the merch front, pre-orders present and imminent; stock up for the holiday season, won’t you?

There’s going to be more conversating of a cursory nature in your immediate future; Wizard online scribe (and webcomics interviewer) Brian Warmoth is kicking his biweekly schedule to the curb and going weekly now-ish. It’s my understanding that it took some convincing to get Wizard to run these interviews at all, so if you appreciate ’em as much as I do, drop an email to the comment line and let ’em know that Warmoth’s doing a great job.

And lastly: Chuck is not a vengeful god; the Coyote could have stopped his punishments any time he wanted to if he would only leave the Roadrunner alone. It is heresy to think you could do any better, Randall Munroe! What do you think modern birds (especially the ground-running types) evolved from? RAPTORS. They laugh at your collection of ACME goods.

Lost in the aftermath of Estradamania (Estradacalypse? Estradarama? anyway, check of the inside scoop on the recurring dadnugget theme) was a note from Jeffrey Rowland on the relative success of the highly-disturbing me shirt. Now for those who may scoff and say that $28 is not a lot of money, bear in mind that the fine folks at the CBLDF need every penny they can get for the infinitely-prolonged Gordon Lee trial, and $28 is a bit more than one membership would net them. I’m certain it will be appreciated.

Also lost in the fray was any mention here of the Ignatz nominations, including well-deserved nominations for Achewood, Grace, Persimmon Cup, Thingpart, and my nemesis, crusher of my dreams.

Sadly not overlooked, the crap-fight in the comments section: it’s been suggested that the comments be locked, deleted, and that we all agree to never speak of this again. Much as I am tempted, I’m philosophically opposed to it. As unpleasant as it is to see a genuinely awesome accomplishment get tarnished by proximity to unwarranted unpleasantness, it did happen. Time may be an illusion (and lunchtime doubly so), but we can’t just rewind and “make it didn’t happen”.

I believe that Jennifer Babcock‘s future is well assured, and I don’t think that inspiring people on the internet to such heights of emotional outburst is necessarily a bad thing for a career in museum curatorship — if nothing else, it proves that her efforts will attract attention, and hopefully spur people to learn more about the creators she highlights.

That being said? I think we’ve nearly all agreed that it’s over, it’s done, we’re all embarassed by it, and attempts to restoke the flames accomplish nothing. A rousing flamefest is good for my hits, but let’s try not to live down to John Gabriel’s expectations, hmmm?

So let’s end on a high note — from Christopher B Wright:

Help Desk published its 1500th strip today. This shining achievement is marred slightly by the simple reality that there are younger comics with larger archives — but these are comics written by cartoonists who can only be described as “driven” and “dedicated,” whereas I can charitably be described as “unfocused” and “an undisciplined wreck”.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people who made this goal possible: my readers, who routinely put up with my dodgy publication schedules, the captains of industry, who made it so easy to come up with 1,500 jokes about their total lack of moral fibre, and of course the inventors of “cut” and “paste.”

You know what? I was going to be doing the whole Pirate Talk thing in this post, but it’s hard to write in that dialect, so please content yourself with the title. Thank yarrr.

Anyway, is it just me, or has Estrada Day become a whole Estrada Season? It used to be that you’d look forward to the day, gather with your loved ones around the monitor, sing a few Estrada carols and drink some nicely-spiked Estrada nog … but now it’s like people won’t let Estrada Day finish. The full collection of Estrada Day strips is now being re-run with a new one going up every five hours — given at least 40 confirmed sightings from this blog’s staff and readers alone, that’s going to take at least the next nine days before we see them all. Which, now that I say it out loud, is pretty much the cherry on top of the awesome cake.

In other news:

• You’ll Have That promo videos on YouTube, and an original strip art sale for good measure. Seems Wes Molebash’s faithful compy is givin’ up the ghost, so email him (wesmolebash) at that free email service run by the Google folks to see if your favorite strip is still available. Prices range from $15 (print of a strip) through to $100 (original strips or various levels of commissioned originals).
• From Michael Rouse-Deane, an appeal to your better natures:
  

  The Kid’s Book Project that is helping raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation is getting close to being completed. Comprising of over 50 webcomic artists making one single page within a story none of them know the start or the end to, are making their page by only seeing the page either previous to their own or after their page.

  With artwork from Mitch Clem, Frank Page, Brandon J Carr, Ryan North, James Hutchinson and many many more, this book is spectacular whether the story makes sense or not. But that is the question, can over 50 artists actually create a story that works well?

  At the moment pre-orders are still available. It’s £6 per book, with £1.50 P&P for UK and £2.50 P&P for International Orders. There’s only going to be 500 printed and they’ll only be one print run, so if you don’t get a chance to find out the answer and also see what great artwork is inside, then you’ll never do!

• Speaking of webcomics in print, Pewfell creator Chuck Whelon writes that:
  

  A New full-color print edition of this long-running weekly webcomic is now available. In this volume Tina the Warrior Princess finds herself pregnant and, in order to make ends meet, Pewfell must take a job as wizard in the city sewer patrol. Meanwhile, a demented and zombie-mad dictator seizes control of local government and an army of chaos invades the city. Order your copy here.

• Speaking of Pewfell, it’s found on Modern Tales, which announced it’s new Fall Lineup the other day. Watch for editor Shaenon Garrity’s interviews with the new contributors soon (her first, with Little Dee‘s Chris Baldwin, is already available).

Okay, 37 by the count of Fleen staff & readers, and I’d estimate that he probably did in the range of 50 webcomics; in fact, it appears that he hit everything this side of the chronically-underreviewed Simulated Comic Product. I suppose we’ll have to wait for Ryan to come back from India to get the official tally. How about some stuff that has nothing to do with the prolific Mr Estrada?

As promised earlier: photos from the MoCCA reception.

• It was warm in the musuem: Jon Rosenberg (left) and Scott McCloud (right) contemplate the availability of air conditioning.
• Wizard scribe Brian Warmoth commits journalism with the assistance of Rosenberg.
• No good museum show is complete without a statement of philosophy.
• Slightly less than half of My Obsession with Chess.
• The Massachussets section: Questionable Content, Something*Positive, and Wigu original sketches and color prints.
• From sketches to final rendering: Scary Go Round, Diesel Sweeties, Get Your War On, Young Bottoms In Love.
• Inconvenient flash reflection: PhD, minus one face.
• Now showing on the LCD: The Formalist, Order of the Stick, My Obsession with Chess, Pup Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe, Delta Thrives, When I Am King, and Five Ways to Love a Cockroach.
• Crowd scene with webcartoonist and Narbonic strip.

Hey, remember how last week Dr McNinja‘s Chris Hastings was all over the place? Forget Hastings; he sucks. Ryan Estrada is The Man. Let me back up a moment. Posted yesterday by Mr Estrada:

Over the last year, you may have noticed that this site has been a little quieter than usual. That’s because I’ve spent a year behind the scenes building up to this day. I’m officially a full time artist.

Today is the official launch of Cartoon Commune! The commune is John and my business site, which is how we’ll be making a living with comics. We’ll keep the business stuff there, and keep our respective sites rolling with free comics and content. We’ll be building it up more as we go, but right now we are offering custom comics. I’ll draw you a custom comic book about whatever you want, and you can do whatever you want with it. Finally all that training doing 48, 72, and 168 hour comics will pay off!

Okay, then more about how he’s the new artist at Life’s a Bluff, more chapters coming of Frank: The Comic and Aki Alliance, and how he actually has to go back to India for a bit to wrap up loose ends. He finishes with:

But since I’m leaving on a plane to India in a few hours, don’t expect to see any new comics from me today.

Okay, that was yesterday, no new comics yesterday. What about today?

Now we have to jump gears a little. When I saw the guest strip at Ugly Hill today, my initial thought was, “Hey, Paul’s wife had the baby”, and I started making plans for a little congratulatory something-or-other (Paul, send me your mailing address). And hey, by coincidence, the guest strip was by Ryan Estrada.

So was the guest strip at Goats. And Starslip Crisis. And Little Gamers, Overcompensating, Questionable Content, Scary Go Round, and I’m not sure how many damn others today.

In fact, I half expect to see Estrada’s handiwork over at You Damn Kid, which returns today from summer hiatus, but it appears to actually be Owen Dunne’s handiwork. Appears to be. In fact, careful examination of the MoCCA webcomics exhibit opening photos (which will now run tomorrow) show the presence of an individual who may be Ryan Estrada, having managed to simultaneously be in New York and Mexico.

Mr Ryan Estrada, you hereby win webcomics. Please try to use them wisely.

Update: Now that I’ve had a chance to continue the Monday trawl list, Ryan Estrada sightings continue with Octopus Pie, Yirmumah, Hero By Night, Dr McNinja, Hate Song, Multiplex, Patches, Sam and Fuzzy (extra strip), and White Ninja (guest art).

Holy. Crap. Did I miss any? No, wait, I mean, “How many did I miss?”

Answer: Dinosaur Comics, which wasn’t updated when I checked it earlier. And Wigu, which hasn’t updated for a while so I didn’t check, and DAMMIT RYAN STOP BEING AWESOME.

Second update: Okay, not going to try to keep up with these anymore. Post any new sightings in the comment thread (and watch for duplicates). We’ll try to get a complete accounting by tomorrow.

Apologies to Owen Dunne at YDK, as Estradamania caused me to completely overlook the announcement of his daughter’s birth (no permalink yet). Congratulations to Dunne, wife, and child.

Last night, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art in New York City opened its latest exhibit, and for the first time webcomics made it into the world of culture and connoisseurs. I don’t get to too many museum exhibition openings, but I do know one thing — when the room is packed wall-to-wall and the air conditioning is insufficient to cool the air from all the people, it’s not because of the snacks or the booze. It’s because people want to see the pretty stuff on the walls. By that criterion alone, the opening of Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics would have to be judged an enormous success.

The show was put together by a MoCCA volunteer/Art History & Archeology grad student (Egyptology, I believe) named Jennifer Babcock; this was her first show as curator, and it featured a wide variety of genres and implementations of webcomics. Per the show’s title, the centerpiece was a vertical-hanging, mounted-on-paper-towel-rollers print of Scott McCloud’s My Obsession With Chess; in the days before the laptop, McCloud would unfurl the full 23 foot piece at the conclusion of talks, but here the height of the gallery space limited Chess to about the first 12 feet.

Gathered around Chess were pieces from webcomics with originals displayed next to final renderings (Goats, Scary Go Round, Wigu, PhD, Penny Arcade) to all-digital creations without preliminary work (Diesel Sweeties, Get Your War On). The displayed pieces ranged in age from a nine year old Sluggy strip to the very first Something*Positive to a Questionable Content from four days ago.

Reinforcing the theme of “Infinite Canvas”, large screen LCD monitors displayed comics that spread beyond the traditional panel boundaries or existed in purely digital form: oft-referenced examples like When I Am King, Pup Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe, and Delta Thrives being joined by the likes of a particularly tall Order of the Stick. Nearby, a Narbonic strip that was drawn in four panels but assembled in a twisty, non-rectangular layout reinforced the theme.

While Babcock didn’t get contributions from all the creators that she wanted (specifically mentioning Kazu Kibuishi’s Copper), she did have more work than could fit on the walls. Those pieces that were gifted to the museum will become part of the permanent collection, she said, and will end up on display in rotation with the general collection, and as long as interest persists, she’d like to mount future webcomics shows.

She particularly mentioned a desire to explore the economic side of webcomics (how can a creator make a living by giving away the product?) and to see more female creators included in the next show (only Narbonic’s Shaenon Garrity and Finder’s Carla Speed MacNeil are to be found in Infinite Canvas). Intriguingly, Babcock would also like to include demonstrations of webcomics tools like Wacom Cintiq tablets.

Noted in attendance were Jon Rosenberg, Chris Hastings, Carly Monardo, David McGuire, Dean Haspiel, Wizard webcomic interviewer Brian Warmoth, surprise attendee (he realized he would be in New York the day before) Scott McCloud, and about a zillion other people. More photos of the event on Monday, after I have a chance to go through them.

Infinite Canvas runs until January 14, 2008. MoCCA is at 594 Broadway (just below Houston), 4th floor; admission is $5 (free for members) and the museum is open Friday through Monday, noon to 5pm.

We’ve got some leakage of webcomics into other info-spheres today — and some curious overlaps between them.

First up, Jeff Rowland noticed that Cracked (formerly a magazine competing with the much-better Mad, now dot-com humor venue) has declared:

Are there a lot of terrible webcomics in the world? Sure. But, finding the good ones is well worth the effort.

Their list of The 8 Funniest Webcomics is a usual-suspects roundup (and let’s just acknowledge that everybody’s going to have both But they forgot! and I can’t believe they included! moments) that starts with Dinosaur Comics and ascends to the lofty heights of Achewood.

Secondly, the redoubtable Mister R points me to a Reddit poll that lists out Reddit’s favorite webcomics (ordered by “hot”ness here, and by vote totals here).

Now here’s the curious part: Notice who’s staring at you from the top of the Cracked story pages (and scores #3 in their tally)? Dr McNinja. And what comic is at the top of the Reddit “hot” poll (which apparently denotes degree of controversy), and also 20th out of 87 on the vote-totals list? Dr McNinja.

And who is moderating a new webcomics podcast, spawned from the unholy depths of the webcomics discussion threads at Something Awful? Chris Hastings, creator of Dr McNinja. Clearly, Hastings has gotten to Them (you know who I’m talking about) and revealed the existence of embarassing photos or something, since he’s all over the place these last couple of days. Suspicious of his wicked motives, I asked Hastings what the deal with the new podcast was:

I think what I’m trying to do with this podcast is make it like panel discussions at conventions, but without the convention. I’m looking forward to when we have a few episodes in the can, so we get the feel of the show smoothed out a bit, and I can start bringing back old guests to make different mixes of creators.

Likely story, Chris Hastings of Dr McNinja! Whatever your game is, I’m gonna find out, so you just be careful.

Slow news day. Slow, slow, slow, slooooow. So, here’s a few items to tide you over until Thursday (which is statistically proven to be the most newsworthy day of the week):

• Jack Carter (he of the monkey-themed webcomics reviews) has seen a burst in activity of late. New reviews, an interview, and an obligatory post about Britney are waiting for you.
• Latest discovery: Naivety Incarnate by Sergio Torres; art reminds me a little of Amelia Rules! (always a good thing), and the tone is more melancholy about growing up than just about anything I can put my finger on right now. That, and it features the eternal promise of Super Mario Bros. 2, always a little out of reach. Come to think of it, that’s pretty melancholy, too.
• Don’t forget, webcomics invade the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art tomorrow night, 7pm; Fleen will be reporting live from the gala, and we hope to see you there.