This was the year that merchandise blew up in webcomics. No, not that argument about whether or not a creator sucks for selling shirts (no link, because you’re as tired of it as I am); the actual mechanics of giving you goods in exchange for money reached a crisis.

In some cases, it was troubles with storefronts and software; in others, it was taking the time to produce products to sell. But the dominant issue was delivery. Few creators want to take the time to handle shipping and fulfillment themselves (a notable exception being R Stevens, who reports he enjoys the process; we’ll come back to him in a moment). So the solution is to outsource the task of maintaining inventory, processing payments, and fulfilling orders. If you’re PA or PVP, this might be through a large company like ThinkGeek, but many other comics went with a boutique outfit that set positioned itself to serve the community: Vault.

Let’s be blunt. Vault screwed a lot of strips. Tales of lost orders, unshipped merch, and upset customers abound. And just when that started to get under control, issues further back in the supply chain reared their ugly heads. The Dumbrella comics have banded together to do their own distribution now; in practice this means that R has more fun packing and shipping and Jeff Rowland gets some good material, but would definitely prefer more time to get everything done.

Backlogs are being cleared by other creators, and an opportunity is being created for somebody. Maybe Dumbrella expands their empire into fulfillment for those outside the conspiracy. Maybe somebody conscientious can start a new distributor business and do it right. Maybe ThinkGeek finds their customer base reads a wider variety of stuff than was previously thought. But this is a tipping point, and in the new year something approaching a robust solution is going to have to occur. Because orders not going out due to the distributor dropping off the face of the earth (or the shirt manufacturer being an utter whackjob) means no money for the webcomickers. And we at Fleen support the right of webcomickers to eat.

There’s a moment when watching Bad Luck Blackie by the inimitable Tex Avery that the logic becomes clear: if a black cat crosses your path, something bad will happen to you. More specifically, something large-ish and painful will fall and hit you on the head. That’s it. That is the entirety of the Laws of Physics for the next 7 minutes. Everything else is unconstrained, with time and space deforming around inhabitants of the cartoon world. Literally anything can happen as long as that one fundamental rule is obeyed.

This was Tex’s usual mode of creating cartoons: a wide-open, anarchic approach to story, character, and reality, but with a limitation that must be respected. Pushing up against that limitation (like a game of “I’m not touching you!”) is when things get funny. Jeff Rowland’s Wigu is in the finest tradition of Averian work.

Wigu Tinkle lives in a world where anything can happen. The only rule is that reality conforms to the perceptions of an eight year old boy, and when you’re eight, your big sister is a serious weirdo that you know deep down sorta really loves you, parental fights are the scariest thing in the world, and your dad can beat up anything. Everything else is possible: Cartoon characters come to life? Check. Magic fridge? Check. Coolest car ever invented (complete with eleven TVs)? Check.

Tex’s inner eight year old always thought there must be something to that superstition about black cats. Jeff’s inner eight year old remembers what most of us have forgotten: We NEED adventure. Forever. That, and there’s something deeply wrong with internet people.

You probably have webcomics in your bookmarks from a half-dozen countries on a couple different continents. You can write and draw these things from anywhere. So what’s up with Northampton, MA? R Stevens is there, as are Jeff Rowland and Jeph Jacques, along with a number of print comickers.

It’s always been an artist’s colony, and now it’s approaching a sort of critical webcomics mass. This is good because proximity means frequent contact. It means cross-pollination of ideas. It means that the next spontaneous Bald Lemur meet-n-greet pulls not just fanboys/girls, but some kid that really wants to make webcomics and figures this is the place to see how it’s done. It means that maybe the meet-n-greet after that isn’t in a coffeehouse, but in a gallery space. Good places to sell books, galleries.

And if we’re lucky and we’ve been good boys and girls, it means that creators get more creative. Want to see an explosion of fresh ideas in webcomics? Forget the fights about art vs. commerce, t-shirts vs. subscriptions, and the rest of the public wankery. Kick a buck into the Northampton Moving Fund for Deserving Webcomics Creators. Or, barring that, the Booze Fund for Weekend Webcomics Jam Sessions. That works, too.

T Campbell is a busy guy. He writes or has written every webcomic that Shaennon Garrity doesn’t, he’s an Official Person in Webcomics, his lengthy series of articles on the history of webcomics is going to be a book, he’s generally a go-to guy whenever somebody needs a quote, and with Ryan North, he’s introduced searchability to a bunch of comics that didn’t have it before. It’s this last one that’s giving me pause.

ONR is a neat idea; Ryan put together some nice code, the interface is clean, and it appears to work pretty well with the workload it’s presently got. But T’s take on the Importance of their brainchild is a bit biblical. In a recent blogpost, T reveals the reason for ONR: it’s not because it’s neat, it’s not because it helps the readers, it’s because it will (quoting now) counter what I see as the single biggest threat to webcomics. Uh-huh.

The core of his argument is that Google can’t read webcomics (but search for “Jesus is a slacker” for a counterargument), and that without the searchability of ONR, nobody will ever find your webcomic. There’s two problems with this thesis:

1. It assumes that creators, people who (quoting again) want that comic to be read, will suddenly decide to do nothing in seeking an audience. Actually, some of them won’t. They do things as a lark, and if anybody happens to read it, yay. Some will be trying to build an audience, and will seek to swap links, get pimped by another creator with more traffic, or take out a banner ad somewhere. To assume that a creator that wants an audience will do nothing to find one is to assume that the creator is an idiot.

2. The second assumption is that ONR is the only means of publicizing a webcomic. He spends some time producing examples of searches that don’t produce desired results, and then says (in the same blogpost) if searching for a comic about zombies:

You might find Eric Maziade’s Zombies or Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s print Walking Dead, but unless you see this post or the interview I did with Joey Manley, you likely won’t know about the touching zombie plot in Scary-Go-Round, or “28 Geeks Later,” the snarky escape story from Sluggy Freelance.

By implication, only ONR can possibly fill this void. But to assume that ONR will be the solution, that it will something you pretty much have to get on board with or be left in the dust of history is … well, pick a word. But that may be too harsh, since ONR will inevitably meet its promise:

OhNoRobot will be a business. The site will become self-sufficient. But first and foremost, our focus is your comic and your search results. This is more than a business. It’s a CAUSE. And how we conduct ourselves will reflect that.

Our mission is to provide information about the world’s webcomics in order to make them easier to read and discover.

I am a zealot about this. By now, that should be clear.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Seems that Gabe and Tycho had a good night with their annual Child’s Play charity dinner (scroll down to the second item). They raised over $82,000 for the night, putting them on track to raise on the order of $400,000 this year, and a three-year total of $800,000.

Now you can argue over whether this is primarily a gamer thing, but one fact puts it squarely in the “webcomics” realm: the centerpiece of last night’s auction was an appearance in Penny Arcade, which went for Twenty. Thousand. Goddamn. American. Dollars. Somebody spent the equivalent of a new car, or a year’s tuition at an Ivy League college, on one appearance in a 750×390 pixel, 24 bits of color webcomic. That is utterly batshit insane, and if I ever find the guy who dropped twenty large in such a fashion, I am going to buy him booze until he can’t stand up.

There’s been a fair amount of hand-wringing this year about how little webcomics have accomplished, about how they’re artistically bankrupt, existing only to sell t-shirts, and how gamer comics and their readers suck (wade through the text, if you dare). You know what? Screw that. If this is how webcomics fail to get their shit together, appeal to base commercial concerns, and inspire their readers to a state of “frothing-at-the-mouth-crazy” (thanks, William G.!), then sign me up for more.

Update: According to Gabe, Child’s Play 2005 is now over $420,000 and may well crack half a million dollars this year.

Update: From Tycho:

We’re at over $420,000 already. I suppose I could exhort you to take us to $430,000, and don’t let me dissuade you, but money is still coming in from companies and sites that pitched in which will take us very near to a “cool half-mil.” My private objective was for Child’s Play to reach a million dollars in donations over three years, and it’s already done that. Of course, I say it has already done that, but it doesn’t have the power to do anything. You have done it.

If you’re part of the collective you that he’s talking about, you’re my friend.

So Joey Manley has a new gig doing a gossip column at Comicon.com. His current offering is on those who provoke shitstorms in the webcomics world. There’s a lot of congratulation and self-congratulation in the comments section if you scroll down.

Opposing viewpoint is being provided by Contestant #4, Scott Kurtz, which may well be gone by the time you read this, so here’s a selection of his best points:

I’m concerned about the people who have elected themselves as the ambassadors of the webcomics community….When given the opportunity to present our community to the world, why in the HELL would Joey decide to display us at our worst? The drama and infighting and petty bullshit that the best of us participate in all too often? Joey, that’s what you want the world to know about webcomics? What were you thinking, dude?
…
Look, I didn’t vote for any of these guys to be my representation or PR manager to the rest of the world. It really irks me how so many of them have just stepped up and taken ownership of that role. From the public displays of dirty laundry to the self-important internalization and faux critical review of the work that’s out there…it’s all making me sick to my stomach.

Can’t you guys just let the work speak for itself? Seriously. The comics are going to do a much better job than you guys ever could.

Seriously, when Scott Kurtz is calling for a calm, rational approach to head off the next flamewar, and making a hell of a lot of sense doing it, one of us is off his meds. Manley’s running a column on a site devoted to print comics; people reading it may have never read a webcomic before. If that’s the case, the first impression they may get is, “Hey, this webcomics thing is filled with the bile and backstabbing that I despise so much in the print comics world. Pass.” If you’re trying to make a living (or even server costs) off of a webcomic (and Manley is), this is probably not the way to go about it.

Lots of serious talk in various quarters about the angsty QC storyline. But Josh Mirman is the first to remind us that Serious Things provide the best fodder for humor.

“But that’s horrible!” I hear you cry. “He can’t possibly joke about that!” He can. He did. He paced the gag perfectly. It was funny. And admit it — in your evil, black heart, you halfway expected the story to go this way, so no use complaining about it now. Kudos to Josh for reminding us that the more time we spend agonizing over Meaning and Purpose in comics, the more we tend to ignore their core function: to make us forget life and its attendant stressors for a bit (laughing optional, but highly recommended). Accomplish that, and whatever Meaning and Purpose you want to argue over are moot.

The more you think about it, the more remarkable the shift of Kestrel from Queen of Wands into a recurring character at Something Positive is. This isn’t a case of an open source character that anybody can play with; it’s not a studio player doing roles in various strips; it’s not a cameo, crossover, or spin-off of one strip into another. This is a creator giving up control of a creation and allowing somebody else to take control of their baby. It’s remarkable because people feel proprietary about stuff that they create, and to give it to somebody else just feels wrong.

Weirdly, this has been done once before, and in a creative realm at the very top of the uptight-about-IP scale: television. Even more weirdly, webcomics might be exactly the medium for this kind of experimentation with characters. Webcomics creators (as a rule) own their characters outright; there’s no publisher, production company, or multinational asserting rights or wanting sign-off. When you’ve done everything you wanted to do with a character, you have the option to let somebody else (somebody whose work and vision you respect) see where something can be added. That’s got to be a terrifying leap of faith, watching your creation leave the … aerie.

One of the most encouraging things happening in webcomics is the return of Lore “One Half of Brunching Shuttlecocks” Sjoberg’s Lore Brand Comics to regular updates. Three open panels of internal dialogue that leads to a humorous insight; it’s Garfield without the massive suck.

But what’s really interesting here is that the update schedule is better described as somewhat-regular, as Lore’s taken all his various projects away from the regular publication model. As he reminds us:

But that’s not the only paradigm out there. American television writers get the summer off. British television writers — well, I’m not sure how British television works, but apparently it involves all the good shows lasting maybe eighteen episodes. Some writers even work on projects one at a time with no particular schedule. Startling!

Of course, irregular schedules are no fun if you really want to keep current with a favorite site. This is why Lore Brand Comics (and his other projects) now feature RSS feeds for your comfort and convenience.

Interestingly, it’s led to far more updates than in the past. Lore Brand Comics hadn’t seen a weekly update in six months or more, and now we’ve gotten six in the past two and a half weeks (output on his other sites has likewise exploded). Webcomics creators with chronic trouble meeting a self-imposed schedule (which leads to frustration about not meeting a schedule, which rarely improves the flow of creative juices) may do well to consider this alternate model; it won’t work for everyone, but for some it may lead to a more relaxed creative environment and better comics.

You know how sometimes you have a dream and everything in it — no
matter how absurd — makes perfect sense? And how less commonly you wake up and it still makes sense? I dreamt the other night (and I swear I am not making this up) that Jeff Rowland had been named Minister of Culture for the state of Israel, and for the life of me, I can’t think of a single reason that’s not a good idea.