The Problem With Reproduction, 193c Gallery
Greenpoint, Brooklyn

“I got the idea for the name first, then the pictures followed. I was falling asleep one night and there it was.”

The “it” that Andy Bell got while falling asleep was The Problem With Reproduction, his new one-man show; what might not be apparent from the adverts you may have seen is how small a scale he took when looking at reproduction. Not the paintings, they’re all 12 x 24 or 12 x 16 inches; the scale of reproduction. Each of the 22 images in the series takes its shape from one of the (in-scale, proportionately-accurate) chromosomes in the human genome.

In each painting, a black background was masked with a black film featuring little chromosomes, leaving bare wood for the shape of the main image. These windows Bell to filled with his creature-iffic, humorous, occasionally disturbing images. To wit: please enjoy chromosomes 20 and 21 (Sudden Starvation and Defective Delivery, with the un-level photo being entirely my fault).

You can actually see those background chromosomal images somewhat better in photos (where they catch the flash) than with the naked eye. It’s worth looking closely at them, because Bell has them doing things appropriate to the main image. For example, in Inevetible End Bringers (on the left, next to Superfluous Cepalopod), there are little skulls in the mix and the chromosomes form crossbones underneath them. The main images themselves range from playfully anthropomorphized (as in 12, Vindictive Viruses, with the Sam Brownesque eyes and smiles on the bacteriophage) to highly abstracted (as in 22, Fertility Figures).

Being a gender-neutral show, the Y-chromosome was absent. “Plus, you need a second chromosome to match with each of these for there to be reproduction,” says Bell. “What I have on the walls is less than half of a human being.” So will there be a second show, featuring white-backgrounded matching chromosomes? The artist considered his hands, bloody from the effort of completing his work. “No.” He seemed quite cheerful about it.

Rounding out the show were several of Bell’s Zliks figures (look to the lower left corner), eggs filled with skulls, a bird, and a squid, and several of his famed Creature drawings (photo at the start of this post, to the right, behind the grumpy looking Mr Jon Rosenberg). With a healthy crowd filling the exhibit space, Bell’s first gallery show of 2006 was a rousing success, even as he continues to straddle the line between cartoonist and artist. So is he a cartoonist that arty types find acceptable, or an artist that works with cartoony subjects?

“I guess I’m more of an artist than a cartoonist, since I don’t seem to be able to form any kind of narrative with my cartoons. Do artists make more money than cartoonists? I’ll be an artist, then, but not the starving kind.”

Worthy goals. Check out The Creatures In My Head over the coming weeks, when photographs of all the works (and perhaps even the elusive Y-chromosome) will be available. And if you’re in Brooklyn before April 11th, be sure to consider The Problem With Reproduction.

Okay, let’s be clear about something up front: this post is not meant to rag on the fine lads of Blank Label Comics. I’ve met or had exchanges with most of them; I like them, I like their work, I like what they stand for. I fully support their efforts to support themselves and their families by the sweat of their respective brows, which includes ads on the BLC sites. There’s nothing wrong with them accepting money to run a banner from people who want to sell you stuff.

But I reserve the right to call bullshit on the people selling stuff. It may not be in rotation when you click over there, but right about now-ish as I write this (Wednesday evening, since I’ll be covering Andy Bell’s gallery opening), there’s an ad from some conscienceless scam artists calling themselves “Life Technologyâ„¢” (no link to conscienceless scam artists).

They want to sell you a small aluminum tube with a screw-top and a lanyard ring; you can get them at outdoor stores for about three bucks. I have a red one that’s stitched to my dog’s collar in case her tags come loose; it contains contact info and phone numbers. I have a larger one that contains two tightly rolled $20 bills — emergency cash in my pocket in case I lose my wallet, just inconvenient enough to fish out and unroll that I’m not tempted to spend it.

But Life Technology calls theirs the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ„¢, and wants to sell it to you for eighty-nine bloody dollars and ninety-five cents. Plus shipping. They process payments through the UK branch of PayPal, perhaps because they’re British (note the spellings below), perhaps because the device makes unproven medical and nutritional claims that would run afoul of US law. But that nearly hundred bucks is necessary, because:

The Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ„¢ outer shell is made of aluminium [sic], which is first anodised [sic] (electrolytic oxidation) and then colored. The spin of the atoms and electrons of the aluminium [sic] is thus changed in such a way, that The Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ„¢ is said to vibrate in resonance with the fundamental energy (Chi, Prana, Orgon) of the universe. The Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ„¢ coating was developed by Ralph Bergstresser after a patent and from the knowledge / information and ideas of Nikola Tesla, with whom he worked in the 1940s. With anodising [sic], the field of the plating is changed and interacts with tachyons. The surface of the plating has a unique crystal-structure.

Woo, anodized aluminum! I guess the cookware in my kitchen is keeping all my chi/prana/orgon even more tachyonically vibrant, plus it boils up pasta! There’s more on their webpage (still no link to conscienceless scam artists) about “Psychic Protection”, “Aura Amplification”, and “Crystal Enhancement” (presumably similar to “natural male enhancement”). Also something about “The Lost Cubit” and how it “is resonant at 177 megacycles” and it hurts my brain just to type this drivel make it stop what we need more of IS SCIENCE.

Better now. Please notice the fine print on the BLC site just above each ad (including that for the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ„¢):

We were paid to display the following

See, the fine lads of BLC, they’ll give you credit for being smart enough to read between the lines. Somebody is selling something — caveat emptor and all that, they’re saying. Conscienceless scam artists give them money, they fulfill contractural obligations by running the ad, you’re too smart to fall for the crap, everybody wins. Everybody except the conscienceless scam artists — but they think you’re stupid. Screw ’em.

There’s a new trend that some creators are taking, mixing published works with online in a fairly short timeframe; no waiting a year for a reprint here! Jeff Rowland is pushing new Wigu adventures as books, then will be making stripped-down content available for free afterwards. Over on Webcomics Nation, Tyler Page’s Nothing Better followed a subscription approach mixed with print copies, but has recently thrown open the gates on his archives and the current content. Go buy the first two issues so he’ll be able to print more.

Nothing Better is the story of growing up and letting go and making that big leap into college — and life, and Page has got it nailed. There’s the disgustingly chipper RAs that you want to bitchslap, the horrors of campus jobs, textbook sticker shock, and the certain knowledge that college is the time you can reinvent yourself. Nobody knows you from high school, you can finally be cool, and someday at a reunion, have your revenge.

Page has also taken the narrative step of setting the story at a religiously-affiliated (though fictional) school, which makes it easy to bring in the fact that when you’re new and unsure of yourself, there’s somebody waiting to recruit you to their way of thinking; it’s been a while since I was in college, but even then, this sort of thing was kind of forceful. Kudos to Page for exploring what many people would just step away from (Do lines like God wants us to be together really work? ‘Cause the rationalist in me thinks it would suck if they did).

The story is developing at a nice pace, with a full page delivered three times a week. Presently, we’re about three pages into issue #5 (about 75 pages in all), so you’re at a perfect point to jump in; there’s enough backstory to get to really know the characters and get good and hooked for future installments. Not to worry, though, Page has a nice fat buffer, having already worked up the cover for issue #6 and part of issue #7’s art. Art which, by the way, equally invokes Terry Moore, Chynna Clugston, and Alex Robinson, none of whom is a webcomicker, all of whom you should be reading. In fact, Alex Robinson provided the perfect taglilne for Nothing Better when he described his own work (to his wife, on their first date) as, “Like Archie with swearing and sex.”

Sounds great to me.

Admitted Dumbrellist Andy Bell is having a gallery show! Yeah, nothing new, guy does gallery shows all over the damn place, but this one is coming up soon! The day after tomorrow, you (yes, YOU) have the opportunity to wend your way into wildest Brooklyn and check out his majesty.

The promo posters exhibit Andy’s usual flair for whimsicality, with an absolutely sunny outlook on life. Honest.

So watch out for parasites and spores, and come shake the hand of the very scary man. Day after tomorrow. Here.

It’s here. Order!

Elizabeth Dean sends us the following:

Real Life Comics has left their publisher, Starline Multimedia, in order to “break out” on their own.

San Francisco, CA – March 13th , 2006 – After two years of partnership, Real Life Comics has decided to end their contract with their publisher, Starline Multimedia.

Real Life Comics is already working on building a new e-commerce store where new and old Real Life Comics merchandise can be purchased. A launch date has not been set, but they hope to have the store running by the beginning of May. Real Life Comics is hoping that this opportunity will allow smoother transactions for customers and perhaps some new features that were not feasible during their time with Starline Multimedia.

Watch RealLifeComics.com in the weeks to come for more details.

For questions, please contact Elizabeth Dean at liz [at] reallifecomics.com.

Coming on the heels of our discussion of aligning one’s webcomic with larger companies or going the DIY route, that appears to be one vote for doing it yourself. Future shifts of webcomics will be noted on this page.

Speaking of the discussion of syndication, your questions for Dave Kellett have been received and will be forwarded anon; the guy’s busy at SxSW teaching bloggers how to make money. If you got anything good, Dave, we’re all ears. Also, there were several requests for a larger version of the graphic included in part 2 of the interview. Here y’go.

Speaking of Dave Kellett, I know that lead times to syndicates are weeks long, but I’m going to pretend that our recent review and general (ha, ha!) pro-Zod stance had something to do with today’s Sheldon; check it out before the archive times out. What are you waiting for? KNEEL!

Several worthy items today, campers, so let’s dive right in.

Firstly, if you didn’t scroll down far enough yesterday, you may have missed the debut column by the scintillating Ms Tuesday Crimson. To silence the mutterings I hear in the dark corners of the internet, no, I didn’t write that. For starters, Gary Tyrrell does not refer to himself in the third person. Ms Crimson is a real-life girl, and will be bringing us all the news of webcomics boning each Thursday.

Secondly, if you did miss Ms Crimson, it’s likely because you got caught up in the conclusion of Dave Kellett’s interview on syndication. He was brutally honest about how he sees the various models working for comics artists in general, and for himself in particular. Don’t forget to send in your followup questions for Mr Kellett.

Thirdly, because it’ll piss off this guy, the new Wigu book, The Case of the Missile Crisis, is coming so soon you can practically taste it. Jeff Rowland tells us that preorders will go live with the next update to Overcompensating, so keep your eyes peeled and your fingers on the browser refresh button.

Fourthly, the collected population of Webcomicistan offers its collective explression of relief that Roast Beef is alive and well. Repeat: RB is OK. In fact, as of this writing, links to Achewood are non-responsive, no doubt due to the overwhelming press of well-wishers. But how long can this happiness last?

Mostly, Fleen would like to thank founding contributor Jeff Lowrey for his posts to date. Circumstances dictate that Jeff start running in Deep Cover mode for a while, but we hope to see him pop up from time to time and lay some prime webcomics commentary on us. Or phat beats, whichever works for you. Jeff’s posting privileges will remain in good standing as long as there is a Fleen, except in the unlikely case of a conviction. We salute you Jeff, our very own Man of Mystery.

If you’re coming here for the first time today, be sure to scroll down a bit and check out our new contributor’s first column. And now we continue our discussion with Dave Kellett on the topic of newspaper syndication, going it alone, and how getting a newspaper gig isn’t always the best thing in the world.

We would like to thank Dave Kellett once again for taking the time to share his views with us; remember, you have the opportunity to contribute to the followup questions by emailing Gary in care of Fleen.

Joe Zabel doesn’t like you if you haven’t read his latest piece at The Webcomics Examiner. Go read it so he likes you, then come back here and we’ll talk, okay?

What starts out as seemingly another means to quantify art (and after thousands of years of trying, seems like somebody might actually do it) takes a sudden shift towards the end. There’s some contradictions inherent in some of Zabel’s theses — if I’m reading his charts right, Achewood is extroverted, and therefore derivative (of what, one begs to ask) — but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because four of the last five paragraphs head off into completely different territory — micropayments:

This is the chief reason that paid content systems, particularly micropayments, are so necessary. By collecting payment from the readers up front, artists are free to control the context in which the comics themselves appear, i.e., they need not resort to advertising.

Reasonable enough … I don’t think anybody would deny any artist any means to attempt to make a living off their honest effort. Here’s where things get a little problematic:

Alas, micropayments so far haven’t gained momentum as a viable payment system. That’s why it’s so important that we build support for the system and solve its problems. We need for hosting services like Comics Genesis and Webcomicsnation to enable micropayments as an option. And we need for the webcomics community to begin speaking positively about the system, instead of slamming it like it was the spawn of Jack Thompson. [emphasis mine]

Big personal reveal here: I don’t know much about Joe Zabel’s background, apart from his comics work. I really like what he’s done with Harvey Pekar, and I like that he’s trying to keep a regular conversation going about comics and webcomics in general. But I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess he’s not a technologist. And by that, I don’t mean, Uses a computer for regular tasks, up to and including the creation of his art. I mean, Has built commercial-grade, practical systems where they did not exist before.

And this is the rub with micropayments, I think: the vast majority of people who have radically invested themselves in the success or failure of these damn things are not hard-core nerds. Disclaimer: I’m not either, at least not by the definition I gave just above; I’m capable of doing a part of what would be necessary for a practical implementation of micropayments, but not the whole thing. I do, however, have a sense of what would be required from a technical perspective. And from that perspective, micropayments need so much more than We need to talk them up, then they’ll work. Scott McCloud was, I believe, sold a bill of goods when he wrote in Reinventing Comics:

… sooner or later, micropayments are bound to come into their own. After all, the cost of any of these operations — old or new — is ultimately just a function of bandwidth and processor speed, and in an industry governed by Moore’s Law, whatever clever protocols can’t solve sheer computational force eventually will! [emphasis original]

That’s page 185, for those of you playing along at home. And with all due respect to McCloud, he places way too much faith in The Promise Of Technology to solve what is essentially a financial transaction, which is governed not by bandwidth limitations, but by regulations, industry agreed practices, and guarantees of service. Somewhere in the basement, I have the notes for an unsubmitted thesis in defense of a Master’s degree (interdisciplinary: electrical engineering and history, because I hated having joy in my life) about what has to happen for technology to spread in a network. From telephony, telegraphy and power grids, through to internets, electronic banking, and yes, micropayments, it requires a hell of a lot more than sheer technological might.

Example: the one-swipe method for verifying credit cards didn’t come about because modems became faster or cheaper; it was because Congress passed a law that made credit card issuers responsible for fraudulent charges, not the consumer. Sure the swipers are convenient, but the system as a whole is expensive as hell for the card issuers, and they would drop it in a second if they could legally do so. And from the department of unintended consequences: To make up for the cash they have to sink into instant-verification systems, you have ever-escalating fees and late charges, and clauses buried deep in the cardholder agreement that lets BobsBancCorp of South Dakota retroactively jack your rate up to 34.99% if you fail to pay an entirely unrelated card on time. Technological constraints are the easy part of the puzzle: regulatory, societal, and financial constraints are where the real work has to be done.

Not that any of what I just told you is going to change anybody’s mind. So, today I am unilaterally declaring a moratorium on the micropayments pissing match. If you think that they’re crap, please acknowledge that they may eventually come about, but only by piggybacking on other protocols that will establish identity in a manner much stronger than is available today. If you’re in favor of them, please acknowledge that a viable one-click micropayment system won’t be developed until a viable one-click macropayment system is developed (because with the costs of building the damn thing, any developer is going to need to see a return on investment before scaling down). To get to the McCloudian promised land is probably going to require something analogous to a national ID card, linked to your bank account, along with the inevitable unintended consequences (think identity theft is bad now?). Everything that could be said from a philosophical POV on the topic has already been said.

Let’s let the people that know how to build payment-processing systems and those who know their way around electronic transaction regulations have their say. The rest of us? We’re just talking to hear ourselves talk.

More of the discussion on syndication coming soon, folks.

But first, with a apologies to whichever lit-crit school it is that declares authorial intent irrelevant (I never learned those things; I went to nerd school), I draw your attention to today’s Starslip Crisis. Clearly, Kristofer Straub is taking the opportunity to kick T Campbell while he’s hurting and should be enjoying himself.

Proof: The character’s a southern “colonel”, and T went to college in Virginia, which is in the South. The character is a discusser of indie arts, that’s webcomics and indy comics. He’s named Samuel Q Breckenridge, which can be anagrammed to A BRICK DE MENSE REQ GUL: a brick de [French for “of”] Mense [typo of MENSA, T is a member] req[ires] gul[libility]. Clearly, an attack on T. For the sake of all that’s holy, look at the man’s tie — all he’s missing is an ascot that spells out “Campbell”!

It all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Today, Fleen begins a general discussion on the nature of comcis syndication. While many webcomics and webcomickers have firmly turned their backs on the newspapers, for some it remains a career goal. The question, in the web-heavy world, is why? And that’s not a sarcastic question … what advantages are there for a webcomic creator in the traditional syndication model that would not be better met by being independent, or by belonging to one of the webcomics collectives? Is It was always my childhood dream to have a strip in the newspapers enough of a reason?

To kick things off, we open today with an interview with Dave Kellett, creator of Sheldon and member of Blank Label Comics. Unlike almost all webcomics creators, Kellett has a syndication deal of sorts: he’s represented by United Media, but only on the web at their Comics.com portal site. Kellett also has an extensive background in the history of comics, what with those masters degrees and all; as such, he’s unique suited to clue us in on how things work in general, for him particularly, and where they’re going. Ladies and gentlemen, Dave Kellett, part one:

That’s all we have room for today, kids. Join us next time when we go into the challenges to syndicates, where they fall short, and Unfit. We’ll also be doing a series of followup questions for Dave Kellett after this interview completes; send your suggestions to gary @ this website.