Hey, have you been following the new series at Lore Sjöberg’s Bad Gods? Today’s installment of Forumville features rotating text in the first panel; so far, I’ve seen seven different setups, and it has an odd effect on the rhythm of the joke. I keep imagining that Splat returns time and time again to the conversation between At and Pipe and is disappointed every time.

Interestingly, it’s all a giant Easter Egg. On the Bad Gods site, there’s no notice of the changing text — if you didn’t happen to reload the page, you’d miss it entirely. Contacted for comment, Sjöberg told us that the text is selected randomly from a pool of:

[r]ight at this moment, thirty. [A new one is selected] every three minutes. I’m going to do another twenty over the course of today, and probably leave it at that for a total of fifty.

There goes my productive time today.

In less frustrating news, as long-time readers of this page will be aware, the road to webcomics success runs through me — not unlike how the road to the White House runs through Letterman. Thus, given my vast powers¹, I declare today to be Kate Beaton Day in Webcomicstan. Check out some of her Conversations With My Younger Self strips, which have been remastered and posted in cleaned up form.

Then be sure to closely study her entirely true presentation of Darwin’s travails to get his theories accepted at the lastest Dark Horse Presents at MySpace. There’s also pieces there by some guys named Malki ! and Onstad; they look pretty okay.

Oooh! Oooh! Wild speculation! Dark Horse publishes Wondermark and Achewood books! Could a sufficiently big response to Beaton’s two pager prompt them in that direction with her? Tell all your friends about The Origin of Man now, because I want to do more than just send Beaton my undying affection for her work. I want to give her American cash money in exchange for a physical artifact that she can sketch in, and so should you.

_______________
¹ A complete catalog of said powers would be revealed as nearly identical to those possessed by Wonderboy and Young Nastyman.

Quickly, Robin! To the Linkmobile!

• New weekly comic at Modern Tales, and MT editor Shaenon Garrity does her customary interview with the creator, Aaron Neathery over at TalkAboutComics.
• Speaking of TalkAboutComics, Eric Millikin points us all towards Interface: The Journal of Education, Community and Values out of Pacific University Oregon, where Maria Walters overviews our lil’ world to formal academia. Corduroy jackets with patches on the elbows optional.
• ‘Member way back when I thought the TV Tropes list of long-running webcomics was fairly complete? You people keep proving me wrong; this is good, as it will hopefully make for a more comprehensive resource.
• Matt Boyd talks to American Born Chineseauthor Gene Yang. Awesome stuff, particularly the bit in the middle about Cousin Chin-Kee and finding your tribe.
• Speaking of awesome stuff, Paul Taylor‘s getting close to the final sculpt proof of his Monica collector’s statue. Those interested, pre-orders have been met and production moves forward.
• Need to congratulate/console somebody on their beard? David Malki ! will give ’em a phone call for free.
• Planet Karen photoshop files safe! Also, fourth anniversary of the strip! Double hooray!
• Finally, for those who don’t follow Ursula Vernon‘s LiveJournal, the people in today’s episode of The Devil’s Panties are Ms Vernon, her sweetie-pie Kevin, Panties creator Jennie Breeden, and K. Brooke “Otter” Spangler. We’ve heard Vernon’s take on this trip, and her gentleman’s, now it’s time for words + pictures. Pull up a seat and grab some popcorn, kiddies … this is gonna be good.

Back hurting, but driveway clear. Short one today.

• I don’t remember what directed me to TV Tropes on Saturday, but it chewed up half my damn weekend; you know how it is with wikis. Having grown beyond its original, televisual scope, TVT has a complete section on webcomics. And along with a proper respect for notability, TVT has a list (that looks fairly definitive) on long-running webcomics. I recommend it to you as a final settling on the question raised last July regarding How many webcomics have hit x strips? While there are probably webcomics that should be listed on the low end (1000+ strips) that aren’t, I don’t believe that any are missing on the 2000+ criteria.
• Speaking of Archive Panics and Binges, there have been two independent recommendations sent to me regarding Out There in the past week, and seeing as how today’s a Snow Day, and I’m weak, I can now definitively state that considering the strip’s about an excessively-drinking narcissist, it’s oddly similar to early Doonesbury (say, circa ’72 to ’75. Sometimes it’s the character design (especially the eyes), and sometimes it’s the rhythm of the strip’s dialogue. Either way, nice job at channelling compulsive “next strip” clicks from RC Monroe.
• Speaking of Out There, it’s among the webcomickry name-checked in the latest podcast from Cubertainment (thanks to alert reader “Dave” for the heads-up). The centerpiece of the podcast (which is nearly 90 minutes long) is an interview with Shane Johnson of My Life In A Cube. Dang it, Dave, I didn’t need another archive binge today.
• And finally, speaking of catching up, I missed Tom Mason’s interview with Larry Latham last week, but it’s never too late to read it. Enjoy.

First off, something that you may have seen around the net; wasn’t sure I was going to talk about this because it’s not about webcomics per se, but there’s an object lesson there so let’s run with it. From Ted Rall, current president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists came a letter regarding the situaion of Brian Duffy and the Des Moines Register. Short version is that Duffy was fired recently as their editorial cartoonist, and the Register has kept his originals (25 years worth) and plans to dispose of them themselves. Full letter under the cut at the bottom.

I don’t know if Duffy’s terms of employment specified that the Register owned his originals, or was silent on the matter, or merely this is/was customary practice. Fact is, guy’s lost a job, and lost whatever value he might have obtained from selling his originals. Rall is appealing to the Register to return the originals, to (as near as I can tell) no response from the paper. Were this Europe, which has a history of creators being able to assert “moral rights” to their work, this wouldn’t have happened — but it ain’t.

Even if Duffy’s employment contract didn’t specify ownership of the originals, if the Register doesn’t choose to give them back, it’s a court case, delays, expense, and no clear outcome for potentially years. The lesson is this: if you work for somebody else in a creative capacity and you don’t have paper saying explicitly that you get to retain original works, don’t count on ever getting them back. Tattoo that someplace nice and visible on your contract-signing hand so you don’t forget.

• From Mark Ricketts comes an email (because, and this is a quote, We at Moose Mountain Comics care too damn much) about a special public service announcement from this week’s strips:
  

  Join us as we attempt to raise awareness about the nasty habits of broad-tailed rodents. SMOKING BEAVERS are a problem!* Really.

  I hope this doesn’t ruin our chance to get sponsorship from big tobacco.

  *If this notice seems vaguely pornographic, then get y’r mind out the gutter, son.

• From Brian Carroll, news that:
  

  [M]y film critique site, Genrezvous Point is going into its third major story, this time covering the Oscars (as some sort of post-world metaphoric Olympic games – it’s weird, yes, but makes sense in context).

  Also, figured I’d point out that when I was 12, I also did frog stories – “Commando Frog” which was a comic first before I made it into a weird stop motion short film later that year. Been trying to find pictures of it all day! The clay model is in storage, unfortunately.

  Man, was I the only 12 year old without a frog fetish?

• From Chris “no relation to Tracy” Flick, news that he hit the big 2-0-0 today, complete with cameo from a couple of disreputable librarian types:
  

  The first 200 strips are also being collected in trade paperback form and will be available by the time Heroes Con approaches in June.

• Finally, nothing to do with the mailbag, but Fleen sends birthday wishes to Christopher Baldwin (who turned 36 on Wednesday) and Howard Tayler (who will be 10.25 sometime after Saturday and before Sunday — silly Leap Year baby). Hope it was/will be sunshine & cupcakes for both of you fine gentlemens.

(more…)

Per yesterday’s note about Scott McCloud’s return to webcontentery, he’s off to a roaring start with a pointer towards The Grimace Project (note: McCloud’s site doesn’t seem to support direct linking of posts yet, so head to his LiveJournal instead).

Short form: it’s a software toy that lets you mix-n-match the emotional states from McCloud’s Making Comics, then shows you what the resultant face looks like; it looks like an invaluable tool for artists wanting to convey emotional states without confusing the reader.

Shorter form: it’s addictive as all hell. I’ve spent half the day trying to come up with a good mix to express schadenfreude (I think it might take more inputs than the system presently allows). Also, if you leave it alone, it cycles through emotions. Creeee-py.

• Also per yesterday’s posting, an anonymous correspondent has a different take on the UF/MeFi blowup. Snark ahoy.
• When you can’t handle the concession stand at Universal Studios, make webcomics: Tatsuya Ishida recounts his pathways to success and announces that Sinfest will be published by Dark Horse come June. Speaking of Dark Horse, we’re informed by alert reader Jake Stevens that their next Dark Horse Presents on MySpace installment (generally around the first Wednesday of the month) will include the lovely and talented Kate Beaton, David Malki !, and Chris Onstad.
• Speaking of books, you can now complete your Narbonic run with Book 6, courtesy of Shaenon Garrity. Your bookshelf could use some pink — it’s cute. And evil.

It’s official. Ursula Vernon has stolen my heart; Kate, Rene, Otter, I’m sorry. You’ll always be special to me but you just can’t compete with this news:

Well, it’s getting close enough that I can finally make the announcement — Graphic Smash is spinning Digger off and giving it its own site! They think that Digger was pretty much the breakout hit of the site, and they’ve wanted to do this for awhile, but there was some buying out and corporate stuff, so everything was on hold for awhile. But now it’s back on track! We’ll have our own site! Woot!

It will also be going off subscription, and over to advertising — Graphic Smash is pretty much abandoning the subscription model. I’m pleased that we’ll get more traffic as a result, and that people will finally get to read the whole archives for free, but I also find myself wanting to do something nice for all my faithful subscribers, who quite literally paid my rent a couple of times — without them, Digger would have been abandoned long ago, and I owe them big time for having sustained me and my comic so wonderfully and well. [emphasis mine]

I cannot tell you how awesome it is that when people ask me about favorite webcomics, and I include Digger on the list, that I know they’ll be able to read the entire archive and get engrossed. No more subscription wall! It’s not live yet, but the new site has a handy RSS feed that will inform you when the transition is complete. Now here’s where you get to help thank Ms Vernon for this supreme gift to us all — if you haven’t read Digger, give it a solid try. If you read Digger (and therefore love it), harrangue all and sundry into joining the rest of us on Tuesdays and Thursdays for wombatty goodness (and once they’re hooked, point them towards the books).

Oh, and if you follow the link to Vernon’s announcement, she’s soliciting for ideas on what she can do to thank her soon-to-be-former paid subscribers. If you’re one of them, be sure to chime in.

• Speaking of new sites, one of the early adopters of webcomics blogulation has an update: Scott McCloud, our roving ambassador to the less-geeky (okay, okay, differently geeky), has gone and given hisself a makeover. Best of all, he’s promising:
  

  While working on the graphic novel, I’m hoping to finally return to both regular blogging and to gradually finishing up The Right Number as well as one or two more Morning Improvs. I may not be making webcomics full-time for a while, just an hour or two of web work each morning, but I’d like to at least keep a toe dipped in the water on a regular basis starting next week.

  Can I get a yay?

• Not a new site, but some new cartoons? Via The XX-Man, JD Frasier of User Friendly in joke-stealing contretemps with the residents of MetaFilter. Warning: that last link only for those who are very patient, or emotionally invested in User Friendly. I confess, I am neither.

Um, woo? Haven’t seen much in the way of MG celebration in webcomicdom today — maybe tomorrow it’ll all be ashes and sackcloth and repentance, but somehow I doubt it.

• So it started with Jeff Rowland getting behind on WIGU due to the Topatoco move to new offices (combined with a simultaneous spike upwards in work from picking up the t-shirt business of Questionable Content) and wanting to post something for his amusement-starved fans. That something turned out to be a comic by Jeffrey Rowland (age 11) called Superfrog (depressing fact — according to the second link, when 11 year old Rowland was working on Superfrog, I was deep into my freshman year of nerd school).

  All was well, then Andrew Hussie of MS Paint Adventures revealed that he too did comics when he was 11 — and it was called Super Frog (even more depressing fact — when Hussie was 11, I was at grad nerd school). Then we come to learn that a fellow named Blake Reitz also did a comic called Super-Frog (he was 12 this time … and I was already a homeowner — stop being so young, webcomickers!). This is just getting freaky. If there are any more instances of super froggery, please let us know. Science must know!

• Any of you out there looking to print your webcomic in a book? Jennie Breeden could teach a master class in the pros and cons of various models, on account of I think she’s tried them all by now. Breeden’s self-published third volume of not-Satanic-porn has hit the shelves (and my hands) less than two months after the viciously-delayed second volume from a fancy-pants publisher. This one includes Breeden’s brush with death (actually, a stroke, leading to an MRI) and her brush with England (including Customs interviews). Good stuff, highly recommended.

I would be perfectly happy to still be in bed today. Let’s get this done.

There’s a nice thoughtful piece by David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®™©^etc) on his Ell-Jay about a webcomics topic we sometimes pay short shrift to: webcomickin’ for the pure pleasure of webcomickin’, with no anticipation of turning pro:

And then I find myself thinking: Hang on. If there are a few dozen webcomic authors making enough money to live on, and I’m pushing for a spot in the top 50, why am I making no money whatsoever out of my comics? (In fact, why do I pay a webhost $40 a month for the privilege of putting my comics on the Net?)

To avoid any suspense, the simple answer is that I have never treated webcomics as a way of making money. I’ve never had any expectation that maybe one day I’ll be able to run ads and sell merchandise and make some money. That “business model” has never been something I’m aiming towards.

All I’ve ever wanted out of webcomics is to do something creative, share it with people, hopefully entertain a few people, and have it as a fun hobby. Over time I’ve added a couple of other desires: To educate people with the annotations I occasionally write to accompany comics, and to raise some money for charity.

As noted on a previous occasion, Morgan-Mar is that rarest of creatures — the pro-grade amateur in the world of webcomics, who has no desire to turn pro (much like myself in the worlds of competitve rock-climbing, cricket, happying-up the ladies, and webcomics blogging). It behooves us to remember that while the word amateur has fallen into a generally negative meaning these days, its original meaning was derived from the latin amare, “to love”. A true amateur engages in a pursuit not for money or acclaim, but for the love of it. Our thanks to Dr Morgan-Mar for reminding us while some are able to turn what they love into a profession, that final step isn’t necessary to love what you do. Not everybody gets to be a pro webcomicker, but if you get out of it what you desire, then you’re pretty lucky.

• Speaking webcomickers Down Under, did you hear about how the Tourism Board of Queensland wants somebody to live on a tropical island on the Great Barrier Reef for six months and blog about how much it rocks, and they’ll pay you AUD$150,000 (approx USD$96,000 as of this writing)? Good news: it could be you! Bad news: you’ll have to compete with about 15,000 other people for the gig, one of them being webcomics’ own adventure guy, Ryan Estrada. Follow the link on Estrada’s site for his audition video and vote him up if you think it would be awesome to see one of ours get The Best Job In The World.
• Speaking of webcomics and Ryans and The Best Job In The World, I recall that Ryan North had a bit in his newsbox about a friend of his applying for the job, but it’s not there now and I maybe dreamt the entire thing? If it’s true, let us know who we could also be rooting for, Ryan (North).
• Finally, the call remains open for those who have items to donate to the Karen Ellis benefit auction. One item we know for certain will be there is the original art of the latest Planet Karen update, and Otter (of A Girl And Her Fed) is putting today’s original up for auction, complete with free shipping to North America & Europe, and kicking in $25 of her own on top. Bidding runs here until March 1st.

First of all, we at Fleen were pleased to hear from Karen Ellis, who corrected an assumption made in our posting three days back. Due to luck and prior planning, Ellis managed to save almost all of her original art. The status of her Planet Karen Photoshop files is still in question, but on balance this was about the happiest occasion I can recall where I was told I was completely wrong about something. More on Ellis’s current situation may be found at her comic.

• In other news, I have a new graphic for surreptiously installing as the background on random computers. Yes, I am evil.
• Speaking of evil, you can now proclaim your status proudly as ComicSpace moves into merch production/fulfillment:
  

  We’ve entered into individual relationships with a number of artists we know. We’ve consulted with them about what kinds of designs we think we can sell (generally, designs that appeal to hardcore fans of a particular webcomic but can also catch the eye of somebody who has never heard of that webcomic). We’ve licensed the right to print a limited number of designs by these creators. We’ve paid 100% of the manufacture/screen-printing costs. And now we’re selling them — at the ComicSpace store, on the creator’s websites, across our ad network (1.1 million potential customers per month and growing), at our convention booths, and sharing the revenues. It’s kind of like Threadless’ model, except there’s not really a contest, and the creators still own their intellectual property at the end of the day, and the individual pay per shirt is better. [emphasis mine]

  Interesting. This appears to be a new model (please correct me if I’ve overlooked a previous iteration that’s similar), and one with a great deal of potential for getting around the “could make money if not for the upfront costs” dilemma (c.f.: yesterday’s post). Can’t wait to see how this experiment turns out.

Edit to add: For those that don’t read the comments below, we are informed by Jeffrey Rowland that Topatoco has quietly been in the “front the money for the creators and take a cut from the back end” business for a year now. While it is disturbing that I failed to pick up on this earlier, it’s reassuring to know that my speculation about helpful business services for webcomics (search this blog for “Aduz”) is not completely baseless.

The following was part of the newsbox at Scary Go Round yesterday, and later copied to John Allison’s blog (where it’s linkable):

First the bad news: from next week there only be four comics a week (M-T-Th-F). I need a bit of breathing space to avoid burn-out. I’m sorry if anybody is disappointed.

I consider myself very lucky that tens of thousand of people read my comic every day. But it is a sad fact of long-form, story-based comics like mine that it is hard, after a certain point, to add new readers.

In the last year or so I have tried to make the stories as stand-alone as I can, but the fact is that you lose readers over time and if you don’t get new ones to replace them, slowly but surely you will go the way of all flesh! There are already a few webcomic ghost ships out there, long sunk by the weight of history. I am not keen to join them!

After 7 years it is probably time to replace Scary Go Round with something new. I have a pretty good idea about what to do next. But I still have a lot of SGR stories to tell and I don’t really know what to do.

The reaction to Allison’s comment was about what you’d expect: panic at the idea of no more SGR, mixed with unalloyed support for Allison’s creative energies. He has clarified that SGR is not going anywhere in the immediate future (except to a slightly reduced schedule), and that any future projects would be recognizable spinoffs (much as SGR followed Bobbins).

For me, the far more interesting part of the discussion comes up several times as Allison converses with his readers (and gets brought out more thoroughly in the follow-on post), and is most clearly explicated in his newsbox (which, alas, does not support linking):

Several people have written to enquire about Scary Go Round book 7. It has been finished for months, but the tumble in the pound’s value meant that suddenly I did not have enough money to print it.

I could take pre-orders but with a lead time of months while it is on a boat from China I am not comfortable doing so — particularly since initial orders in the past only tended to just cover what it costs to print the collections. I love making Scary Go Round but sometimes doing everything yourself is exhausting and this is one of those times.

The thought that something with the strong potential to be profitable can’t get started without such a huge injection of seed capital to make it impractical drives me nuts everytime I hear it. So much so that a year ago I mused that what webcomics needs is some form of angel investment or aggregated micro-lending. It seems foolish to compare John Allison to the sort of micro-entrepreneurs that the Webcomics Kiva team is helping, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that their economic paths run parallel.

Understand, I realize that it would be insanely complex to set up any kind of Kiva-like establishment for the purpose of supporting webcomics artists, but I swear that if I ever hit it big in the lottery, I’m setting up some kind of revolving trust to do just that. Not having to worry about how to finagle their latest project (and thus, pay bills for the next period of time) would maybe give creators the fiscal breathing room to ensure they have, say, some retirement savings (my great nightmare is that in 50 years, you see beloved creators without savings or insurance because they spent their decades happily creating, but never quite getting ahead of the financial curve). Anyway, any well-capitalized types out there willing to accept modest returns in support of the arts, lets you and me do some brainstorming.

Oh, and to end things on an up note, congrats to Ananth Panagariya and Mohammad Haque for 500 strips at Applegeeks. Awful purty job you guys do.