Backlogged stuff down below, but first, a fresh email that’s just so ridiculous that I have to share:

Just back from a major book tour to promote his new memoir “Zig-zagging: Loving Madly, Losing Badly – How Ziggy Saved My Life” (HCI Books), Tom Wilson, Internationally Syndicated Ziggy™ Cartoonist, joins Jeanette Smith, the powerhouse behind the DILBERT™ brand and former Vice President of Licensing at United Media/United Feature Syndicate to teach a vital new online course called “Cartooning Into the Marketplace.”

Learn from these pros how to give your cartoons a substantial advantage to gaining success! This program will bridge the gap between your creativity and reaching your audience, providing the essential elements that every emerging cartoonist, humorous illustrator and character animator must know to leverage their talents and take their creativity to the national and global markets.

Date: April 22, 2009
Time: 11:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
Price: $90.00/USD

To reserve your place, you can REGISTER NOW FOR THIS EVENT

Wow, all those secrets to success in only three hours. Cartooning must be easier than I thought.

Okay, onto more useful missives.

• From Tony Piro:

  Calamities of Nature is having its first ever caption contest. Whoever thinks of the funniest punchline to [30 March]’s comic will win a book or t-shirt along with the original art.

  Missed this when the contest was first announced, but the voting is underway; head over and help choose the winner.

• From Adam York Gregory, news of another competition of sorts:
  

  TNP Press (The Noir Project) are looking for a new member… it’s an open call to any comics wanting to join. Details can be found here. We will take every application seriously.

  Some pretty good talent over there at TNP; if you’re looking for an association of like-minded cartoonists, be sure to check it out.

• Story followup, courtesy of Tom Mason :
  

  In response to your post on infinite potential, here are some stats on WGA employment in Hollywood. Yeah, some screenwriters do significantly better than others, but it’s still not a pretty picture.

  The post in the link was put together during last year’s writer’s strike. The WGA has 4,434 registered members (as of last year).

  The money quote in the article: “The median income of screen and television writers from their guild-covered employment is $5,000 a year, in part because almost half our members don’t work in any given year.”

  So, for every 2200 that work, another 2200 don’t, at least as writers on projects covered by the Guild.

  PS: I remember reading similar stats about the Screen Actor’s Guild, but can’t find the link yet. All I have now is anecdotal evidence rolling around my head.

• And finally, one of the funniest guys blogging in the comic-ish world is Chris Sims, proprietor of The Invincible Super-Blog (now with even more weekly kicks to the face). One of his own comic projects is now available for your reading online, which based solely on his writing about comics I recommend to you unreservedly:
  

  Click [here] to read the first chapter of the all-new, all-awesome Chronicles of Solomon Stone #1, by me, Matthew Allen Smith, and Benjamin Birdie! Thrill to Solomon and Minxy’s latest case and the revelation of the newest–and deadliest–foe to face the World’s Greatest Half-Vampire Private Detective! I’ll be putting up a new chapter every Wednesday for the next three weeks until the whole 24-page story’s available.

Finally, the blogroll over thataway has just had its semi-whenever the hell I remember to redo; items no longer updating have been pruned, stuff that I’m liking and had inexplicably omitted has been added, and I won’t be doing it again for a while, but if you think you should be there, the criteria remain the same — do a comic that grabs me enough that I keep reading it when you update.

It was snowing, now it’s not and it’s gotten much warmer in the past hour. Wacky.

• Eisners: One of these days, the committee will figure out what they mean by “Digital Comic”. Is it a comic that’s primarily produced digitally? That would be an awful lot of the total output of what we call “comics”. Is it designed to be seen (or seen first) in some digital medium? That might include episodic animations, story-based videogames, as well as various near-advertorial content (not that we’ve seen that before) Will there continue to be a “longform story only” requirement that has prevented so many really good journal-type (or random-topic’ed) comics from gaining consideration? Must it be “comic-booky” or can a more strip–like endeavor find favor?

  In any event, the nominees for 2009 are reasonably solid, although I would naturally have nominated an almost completely different slate were I in charge of the world (and so would you, don’t deny it). For your consideration:

  • Bodyworld (Dash Shaw)
  • Finder (Carla Speed McNeil)
  • The Lady’s Murder (Eliza Frye)
  • Speak No Evil (Elan Trinidad)
  • Vs. (Alexis Sottile & Joe Infurnari)

  Speaking solely for myself: go, Finder. And if the heavyweight interface at Shadowline makes you a sad panda, there’s a lighter-weight iteration (but still unfortunately slow; Carla Speed McNeill, I emailed you so we can continue that site-optimization conversation we had at NYCC!) at www.lightspeedpress.com.

  Meanwhile, David Malki !’s Wondermark reprint volume has been nominated in the Humor category (but the source material isn’t in the Digital category … answers on a postcard), so please send well-wishes towards Mr Dreamcrusher.

• I was going to clear some stuff from the mailbag, but something else came up that I had to mention. Probably you’ve seen it and been appropriately appalled, but what the hell people? At the risk of declaring a Venn diagram to be wrong, this is why we need a long-range slapping device.

What the crap? I turn around this morning and our main machine decided to have a small lobotomy. Thanks to those who emailed to let us know about the site outage; all is now well, and we may move on to more important things.

Joey Manley emailed me this morning to point me to a new piece at TalkAboutComics; short version: Cat Garza’s old site (Whimville, no link, for reasons that will soon become apparent) had lapsed its registration some time back, which ordinarily would not be a big deal, what with Magic Inkwell and all. Somebody scooped up the domain (again no big), and is now using it to most likely game Google’s search rankings and promote a chiropractor in California. And they’re using Garza’s name and art to do so. Right there? That’s your big deal.

I contacted Garza a little while ago and verified that he’s neither given his permission for his art to be used, nor has he been offered compensation. Manley’s engaged in a little Google-fu to try to mitigate whatever benefit the chiropractors might ultimately see; I’ve just sent the following message via their contact page to inform them of the situation and see if they have any response:

I am a blogger that covers the world of digital comics; please be aware that the purpose of this email is to solicit information for publication.

I am writing about what appears to be an attempt to make your website rank higher on Google. An expired domain has been obtained for this purpose (whimville.com), and is using the art of its former owner to promote your business.

I have verified with the artist, Cat Garza, that he has not given permission for his artwork to be used this way, nor has he been compensated for its use.

Mr Garza is both well-known and well-respected in the world of independent and digital comics; he is also distressed that his work is being used this way.

For the record, now that you are aware that these actions have taken place, will you be either compensating Mr Garza for the use of his art, or instructing those who are promoting you to discontinue using Mr Garza’s name and copyrighted material?

Gary Tyrrell
editor, Fleen
www.fleen.com

Nothing received yet, but we’ll be sure to let you know if there is one. In the meantime, if you’d care to contact the back-crackers and ask politely if they would care to deal with the situation in a manner that’s not ripping off Garza, that would be awesome. Remember: we won’t get a good response by yelling, threatening, or acting crazy. Let them know the situation, let them know it’s bad publicity, ask them politely to change their approach. Updates on the situation as warranted.

That grass looks like it came out of children’s storybook; Mike Krahulik has mentioned wanting to do a children’s book, and given what I’ve seen of the Penny Arcade’s attempts at kiddiebooks (and things that look like kiddiebooks), I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m ready to purchase that effort the day it’s published.

In other news:

• Long before I met Dave Roman, I was captivated by one of his many projects — in this case, a collaboration with John Green called Teen Boat; after all, how many things combine the angst of being a teen with the thrill of being a boat? (By the way, a Teen Boat Safety Note: please do NOT go to teenboat-dot-com unless you seek to lose your employment) Anyhoo, the recent Teen Boat Dreamboat video has now gone high-quality, which you can enjoy over at the Vimeo site in all its musical glory.
• Hey kids, do you like the originator of Estradarama (alternately, the theoretician behind Estradanomics), the globetrotting adventurer (and confessed Ryan) Ryan Estrada? And have you managed to work your way past the heavyweight (and frankly horrific) interface at Zuda? If you answered “Yes!” to both, you may be interested in Estrada’s contribution to this month’s Zuda-off, The Kind You Don’t Bring Home To Mother. This page is on record as not being thrilled with Zuda, but having previously read through TKYDBHTM, it’s a real kick and you will likely enjoy it.

Events!

• Those of you in Toronto will have the opportunity to hear panelists including Kate Beaton, Emily Horne, and Ryan North at the Keep Toronto Reading Web Comics Panel at the North York Central Library tomorrow at 6:30pm. Moderated by Christopher Butcher of The Beguiling, organizer of the upcoming biannual Toronto Comics Art Festival and generally smart guy.
• Those of you in New York can enjoy North, Horne (with her partner in madness Joey Comeau), Chris Hastings, and Chris Onstad at Titans of Small-Town (as of this writing, some tickets appear to still be available). Doors open 6:30pm at 303 Grand in Brooklyn. If I see you there, we can compare notes to see if Hastings is still tired from the night before, when fiance Carly Monardo is featured at My Plastic Heart’s New Moon show, interpretations of the Chinese Zodiac, at 6:00pm, downtown in Manhattan.

Finally, a dip into the mailbag for an intriguing email. Y’all remember Ben Heaton? He did Terror Island with Lewis Powell for a couple of years, has been running Request Comics since, and is likely at least one of the official keepers of The Ham Project. Ben sent me an email, which I now share with you:

Remember when Randy Milholland asked Something Positive readers to match his yearly salary in donations, and they totally did? I’m going to see if Request Comics readers can pull that off too.

I’m unemployed, so the target value is $0.

If you want to support request-based photocomicry, come check out the donation drive here. Even if you donate nothing, that’ll go a long way toward my goal. Especially if you donate nothing.

I’d note that donation drives really only work once, so here’s hoping that Heaton gets his $0; if you’ve got nothing to donate, it’s hard to think of a better place to not give it than to him.

Emerald City Comic Con runs this weekend, and about the time you read this everybody I know in webcomics (almost) (not really) is on their way there. According to various twitterings, most of them are either delayed until further notice or on the Turbulence Express from Hell, so be kind when you drop by to say howdy. Additionally, rumor has it that Aaron Diaz will have a pre-order going for the long-anticipated, limited-edition Hob hardcover. If you say hi, remind him that my name should be at the top of that list.

• Small-Town (perhaps it should have been Tiny-Towne, or Sinkytowne?) is a little more crowded today, as Emily Horne & Joey Comeau are added to the lineup of talent. One night only in Brooklyn! Woo!
• Happy Birthday! Josh Lesnick’s Girly has been running for six years (and considering it’s an offshoot of the earlier Cute Wendy, you could credit it with a bit more age still. By amazing coincidence, today’s strip is #665, which is an awful lot of sixes for a strip that just happens to be six.
• Happy Birthday! David Willis has now been variously obsessed with toys, cartooning, Transformers, Transformers wiki, toys that transform from one shape to another, pie-throwing, and an awesome fiance (bonus points if you pronounce that word like Holly Hunter did in Raising Arizona) for 30 years. Congrats on living past your twenties David, and remember: it’s all a downhill slide into decrepitude and senescence from here. Have some cake to celebrate! Aw, heck … cake for everybody!

At this stage, do I really have to remind readers of this page that I loves me some Digger? Of course not, and may I say that I’m thrilled to be able to link to any page in the archives now that the strip no longer has a subscription wall. Today’s installment in the inadvertant adventures of everybody’s favorite wombat is both hilarious and question-provoking. Namely: is the ghost actually speaking to Murai, or is she addressing Digger (who would certainly find the thought of being a “child of prophecy” to be mortifying)?

But my sheer delight at Ursula Vernon nailing it again is tempered by her text update:

I have been waiting to get to this scene for YEARS. An embarassingly long time. I didn’t always know what was was going to be said, but I knew the ghost scene was somewhere on the horizon. Like Ed’s story and the revelation about the tail of the peacock, it’s been one of the touchstones I used to steer the plot.

Having reached it — well, gang, this is kind of the beginning of the end sequence. I mean, Digger still has a good chunk left to run — I suspect we’re looking at close to another year, if not more, since I always seem to run long (remember that I expected Digger to be less than a hundred pages long once!) — but having reached this scene, we’re definitely barreling towards the climax and picking up speed.

DAMMIT. I’ll let you people in on a secret: for nigh on three decades now, I’ve paced my life by a series of goals that weren’t entirely in my control. Things along the lines of “I can’t die until ____”, where the blank was usually along the lines of being able to read the end of some ongoing story. Until today, Digger and Anders Loves Maria were my don’t-die milestones.

But now Vernon tells us Digger’s maybe got a year and Rene Engström told me at NEWW that we’re down to the endgame of ALM. Now I need to find another ongoing story or I will die. If Vernon or Engström would care to let us in on their plans for their next projects, that would be awesome for all concerned except for my greedy, grasping heirs.

• Speaking of Engström, I wonder if her place of birth on the majestic Canadian prairies edit to add: mountains! I meant mountains! see comments below would be enough for the organizers of the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards to consider her in next year’s nominations, on account of she’s not in this year’s. A’course, given the slate of nominees in the Webcomics/Bandes Dessinées Web category (scroll down), the inclusion of Engström might actually qualify as an embarassment of riches.

  Having any one of Kate Beaton, Karl Kerschl, Cameron Stewart, Ramón Pérez, or Kathryn & Stuart Immonen would make any country proud; having all of them plus Michael Cho, Lar De Souza & Ryan Sohmer, and Gisele Lagace almost makes Canadia look greedy (side note to the organizers of the Eisners, Harveys, Ingnatzen, and all other comic-related awards: this is what the webcomics category should look like, kthxbye).

• Final note: Matt Boyd, scribe of (formerly) Mac Hall and (latterly) Three Panel Soul is job-hunting. He’s a crackerjack writer/interviewer, and unlike some hack pseduo-journalists we could mention, actually has considerable skills in that (increasingly competitive) field.

  His name/work aren’t searchable worth a damn at Kwanzoo, but you can find a lot of his stuff here. If you’ve got need for an awesome communicator, drop a note to machallboyd at the Google-run email, which is a dot-com.

It takes a weather eye to bring 100% truth-facts to you, the webcomics-news-craving public, but that’s the kind of clear-eyed mission that we at Fleen pretend to have. Here’s the wheat teased from today’s chaff:

1. Everything I said about Topatoco yesterday is now outdated. Fleen congratulates Rowland for selling out when the selling was good, and hopes that the dumptruck full of money he received is enough to fund both his smiles and his dreams. Edit to add: Disregard.
2. Goats is entering the last of its tween years. This time next year, no more sparkly vampires; instead, Jon Rosenberg will be loathed by his creation an incredible 46 hours every day, eventually dying of a broken heart when it runs off with some jerk webcomic that’s not good enough.
3. Rooby Moon (kindly see here and here to refresh your memories) is revealed this very day as both gone and not gone. Let’s let creator Chris MacNeil explain:
   

   Rooby Moon is not dead, just hovering. I’m a stay-home, home school dad for my two young proletariats. This should make for more time to work, and it does, but I have far too many irons in the fire (all un-paying irons), and I run miserable, feeble, sputtering fires.

   I stopped Rooby Moon last year for what was to be only a few weeks, or (I thought) at most a month, in order to prepare it for submission. Actually I was (and am) preparing a spin-off of Rooby Moon called Ogden’s Pond, which uses those last couple of month’s animal character’s– Ogden, Jebediah, Fletch, etc. This has taken me until now to complete. Who would have thought that writing three lame character descriptions and a cover letter would take half a year? How’s that for procrastinating?

   Of course, my unwillingness to actually be rejected once again by the syndicates is only part of the extreme time lag. I have decided, along with other time-consuming, diversionary edits, to replace the text on the strips for the submission with a digital font– one real drawback to my strip is the panels are busy and wordy, and tend to become a lot of tiny images and small, difficult to read text when reduced to the postage stamp size newspaper comic strips are printed.

   Drawing political cartoons up until the election last fall was also part of the initial stop of work on Rooby Moon. I did 33 of them, not all of which make me cringe as I look them over once again. Some I actually like. The last introduced both a more comic strip feel and a couple of characters that I will probably incorporate into my comic strip work.

   So, to make a short story long, I am still writing Rooby Moon and Ogden’s Pond strips, and am doing the last editing of the Ogden’s Pond submission. I will have new work up soon. If you have made it this far through this porridge, thank you for enduring.

   Thank you for letting know the score, Chris! We look forward to whatever form Rooby (and now Ogden’s Pond) might take, although we suspect that now might now be the best time to try to get syndicated; by rough estimate, the possible market for syndicated comics has contracted by about a quarter since you started your submission packet, and that pace sadly seems to be accelerating. But toss us an URL when all is said, done, and (re-)launched, and we’ll be right there alongside you, enjoying your gorgeous linework.

Oh my goodness so many books to talk about.

• You got yer massive sale to make space for a secret project over at Exploding Dog. Seriously, ten bucks for 250 pretty pictures? When people ask you what it’s about, tell them It’s about half a kilo of awesome.
• You got a street date for Jellaby: Monster in the City. April 21st! I’m torn between grabbing this one as soon as it hits the shelves and buying it direct from Kean Soo at MoCCA in June just for the pleasure of handing him crisp money in exchange for his wares.
• You got Howard Tayler crankin’ out a dozen-plus illos a day for the next month so he can provide the drawings for (and publish!) a dungeon-masterin’ book. For those that dated in high school, Tracy Hickman (author of said book) is a big name in circles that feature dungeon masters, so this is a pretty big deal for Tayler.
• You got business majors across the country wanting to get a good look at the books of Topatoco (see what I did there), as we see their talent roster expanded by two names in the past two days (with promises of three more this week). Topatoco’s pretty much in charge of the webcomics merch business at this point, which makes founder/exalted leader Jeff Rowland that most mythical of all creatures in these challenging times: a small business owner who’s creating jobs. I am utterly convinced that each time Rowland falls into fitful slumber he wonders How the hell did this happen?

There’s even a few non-book things going on; think of them as “stages of a webcomics life” sorta thing.

1. (Re-) Birth: I met Shoolhouse Daze creator Mike Ciccotello at a bookstore event in my town about two years ago. He’s gotten his strip into a major college paper (with a circulation of 17,000+), experimented all over the place, taken hiatus to retool and sharpen his skills, and now relaunches better than ever tomorrow, April 1st. Get in on the new ground floor, y’all.
2. Difficult teenage years: Help Desk turns thirteen damn years old today. And it hates you! You never understood it! It wishes you were dead! If you really want to infuriate Help Desk, pay attention to it in public in front of its friends (the RSS feed is particularly handy for this).
3. Starting the career: As of yesterday, Daisy Owl creator Ben Driscoll has left the world of “paychecks” and “benefits” to make his living by his wits and his webcomic. For now, signed strip prints are all that he can sell you, but let’s hope that we see a nice, beefy collection in book form soon.

Look at that, we’re back to books. Enjoy the rest of your day.

In no particular order.

• Not getting into comic shops even with a Xeric grant. Correction time, kiddies! Box Brown contacted us to let us know that Diamond are hold Xeric winners to sales order minimums, but
  

  If the book doesn’t quite meet the minimum they will take it into consideration because of its status as a Xeric Grant. But, there is no hard and fast number. It’s mostly going to be case by case basis I would imagine.

  Translation: tell your local comic shop you want a copy of Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing.

• Listening to your own voice; Brian Carroll of Instant Classic goes musical, taking the lead as Author Donathan in a singalong installment. Along the same lines, watching yourself on video is also disturbing — I say “uh” way too much in this video from NEWW panel #1 (more panel video without my verbal stumbling at BDC).
• Being afraid for your job because you do a webcomic. Check this out (author’s name and webcomic name redacted):
  

  My webcomic is my 5th-grade-potty-humor-and-dick-jokes outlet, and I love being able to share the things I create or find funny with the world; however, I’m employed by the US Government.

  I’m sure many employers would look down upon a site or comic like mine which proudly displays my name, and the Government thinks it much worse. No one who is offended in power has seen my site yet, but it just takes one higher-up to see what I’m doing and either fire me or force me to make a change.

  I’ve contemplated going back and re-signing my comics with a pen name so I can feign ignorance, and I’ve even thought of taking the site down completely. Neither of those ideas sound fun or fair to me. I was wondering if any persons familiar with law could help me figure out how to distance myself from edgy material for work purposes while still being attached to it creatively. Can they legally force action upon me? Will a click-through EULA (I hate those things, but if it works) protect me? What about a link to an EULA that informs people that by viewing the page, they agree?

  It would be wonderful to find help with my situation, and I think it’s interesting to think about how something like comics can affect people who still work at a desk job for a living.

  We’ll preface this with the obligatory I Am Not A Lawyer, and note that anybody that relies upon me for legal advice/expertise is probably even more boned than they thought. That being said, my understanding is that there’s not a lot you can do. Over the past decade or so, protections for individuals expressing personal opinions or creative works vis-a-vis their bosses punishing them for such opinions/works have been … eroding. The fact that you work for the government may actually work in your favor, though, as the Bill of Rights is specifically written to describe relations between citizens and the government (as opposed to citizens and business). A’course, to get to the point where that distinction actually helps you could require years of lawyers and court dates.

  If you’re really worried, adopting a pen name might not be a bad idea (c.f.: “Clay” vs “Hard” — various identities used by the creator of the now-gone Sexy Losers in response to perceived risk of doing things under his own name), if only for peace of mind. It’s a fine line, though — you’ll probably take another job at some point in your life, and employers know about Google, too (as luck would have it, there’s more than one “Gary Tyrrell” in the world, and one of the other guys is more famous than me).

  That being said, nothing’s ever gone from the internet and there’s no way to retroactively wipe those pages, what with the Wayback Machine and all. The best advice I can think to give you is, if you feel that doing your webcomic leaves you open to sanction, be sure that you never update on contribute to it from work, and can document it (i.e.: keep your server logs). Don’t even visit your own site during work hours. Good luck with the dick jokes, and if anybody reading this actually is a lawyer, feel free to provide advice that’s actually worth something.

• To wrap on a happy note, how about one thing that is the opposite of disturbing? In Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport/Aéroport International Macdonald-Cartier d’Ottawa (at least at the terminal that sends you to Merica after pre-clearing Customs & Immigration) you will find a cardboard stand in the RELAY magazine shop, chock full a’ BONE color volumes. This cheered me immensely and actually makes me feel generally good about the future (or at least the future of those travelling through gates 1-13 of YOW).

So after a few hiccups, the live-from-Webcomics-Weekend episode of Webcomics Weekly is available at webcomics.com. Webcomics, webcomics, webcomics, webcomics! Listening to it sparked a few memories from the recording session and kicked my brain into one of those rapid streams of thought that I feel compelled to share (plus I have only a short time today before I have to get on a plane and these thinky pieces don’t require a lot of links).

At about the 34:30 mark, the discussion of what a new-model publisher could provide to the world of webcomics gets brought up (it’s similar to the model I’ve referred to as Aduz in these pages).

This put me in mind of the initial steps towards that model that have been/are being taken by Topatoco and ComicSpace. To my eye, Topatoco is running itself as a boutique service, where CS (with its hosting, and integration with other business services planned, and its open call for partners in the shirt business) is looking more like a high-volume/economies of scale operation; my suspicion is that both models have the potential to succeed simultaneously in their only-slightly overlapping spaces.

This, in turn, put me in mind of something that Steven Cloud said in the Print/Web/Bear panel — in response to Chris Hastings telling us that he knows how Dr McNinja will end, Cloud took a contrary position. BOASAS, he said (and this is an inexact quote because I was moderating instead of note-taking), is a barley-disguised discussion with himself that will die when he does. This, still further in turn, put me in mind of Cloud’s earlier statement that he doesn’t make money from BOASAS — it’s the job that he hates that pays the bills.

That, finally, brings me to my point. Webomics (and more generally, the internet; I had this conversation with my master’s thesis advisor back around 1990) is an inherently democratic medium; the barriers to entry are so low that everybody has a chance to be heard. This isn’t to say that all voices are equally loud — like it or not, <insert Famous Person here> is always going to have more hits/friends/followers/whatever than you — but the opportunity for any random person (“you”) to reach a receptive audience far outside your immediate physical place exists in a form that was inconceivable only 20 years ago.

But that reach doesn’t mean that everybody has an equal chance of capturing the lightning in a bottle that will make them (modestly) rich and/or (partially) famous.

For some time now, the promise of webcomics (at least to me; your mileage may vary) has been the potential for so many more voices to be heard than would through traditional channels; all you needed was the raw talent, and that would win out. But you know what? There’s a hell of a lot of talented creative types — writers, actors, singers, dancers, sculptors, storytellers, take your pick — and history has always seen fit to ensure that 99.9993% of them will never make a living at their chosen form of expression.

Take the wannabes and the self-deluded out of the equation (even though it’s the cattle calls that drive American Idol — lack of talent as entertainment, how meta can you get?) and leave only the truly skilled and you’re still looking at long odds. Maybe somebody in LA can answer this one for me — how many card-carrying members of SAG, AFTRA, WGA, and the other creative organizations ever get to quit the cater-waiter job?

I’ve been looking forward to the triumph of the professional for so long that I’ve overlooked this basic law of nature: your talent is just one part of the equation, along with luck, timing, good genetics¹, and a bunch of other things out of your control. The number of people who can make a comic into a career (or who could if they cared to, cf: David Morgan-Mar PhD, LEGO®™©^etc) is both much greater thanks to the internet and more finite than we would all like.

Which sort of brings me back to that first point of discussion, and how the success of webcomics opens up opportunities for supportive businesses. Is the sphere of revenue-producing webcomics going to be relatively limited, resulting in boutique approaches to a modest number of potentially-high earners? Or will it be broader and more readily reward the approach that casts a wider net? The success of one camp (the creators) will necessarily intertwine with that of the other (the providers).

My mind’s not made up, but I forsee a discussion over much beer with Eric Burns-White, Xaviar Xerexes, and other members of the webcomics punditry at next year’s NEWW. In the meantime, your thoughts, please.

_______________
¹ Good looks less necessary for webcomics success than many other creative fields, but probably couldn’t hurt.