We have previously reported on the failure of Vault Distribution and the impact it had on the creators that were involved. At that time, we also pointed out that there now an open niche in the market and creators who were looking for someone to help sell their stuff. (As a side note, if you’re one of the small distributors out there, and are looking for some exposure – please use our contact form to tell us your story.)

Yesterday, we received the following press release, sent out by Neil G.
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While this is very old news, I recently had a conversation with D.J. Coffman about the demise of PVComics.

PVComics went offline sometime early last year – D.J. said that it had been gone for over a year now but it had actually been floundering for a bit before that.

The bare facts of the matter are that Logan DeAngelis got too busy with ComixPress to continue to manage and direct PVComics. And the domain and intellectual property still reside soundly in Logan’s hands… so nobody else can really pick it up and carry on.

PVComics started out trying to provide a creator centric subscription model, acting more as a service collective than as a publishing house. When it became clear that almost nobody was making any money off of the subscription business, PVComics switched to other business models, and ended up basically a pure service collective.

And then D.J. had this great idea… why shouldn’t someone start a print-on-demand service specializing in webcomics that was just as creator focused as PVComics was…? And so he mentioned it to Logan and…

All of the big plans and high hopes of PVComics members quietly went by the wayside.

D.J. says that the break up was amicable, and that he was happy to get the dishes and that rug that really pulled the front room together, and that he’s glad that all the PVComics alums are still friends.

Of course if any of you out there have a different side of this story, and would like to tell it – we all know that the webcomics industry doesn’t have nearly enough drama on a regular basis, so do your part to keep us all entertained by sending me some email or writing some comments or use the contact form.

The newest webcomics meme has hit over at LiveJournal.

People are drawing Batgirl! Webcomics types like Meredith Gran (Mer gets top billing because she designed our kickass masthead — thanks, Mer!), Ian Jones-Quartey, Brian Lee O’Malley, Abby L., R Stevens, Vera Brosgol, Ryan Estrada, Ryan North, Lem, Kean Soo, and Kristopher Straub have taken a whack at drawing the commissioner’s daughter. Also Andy Runton. Okay, Andy works in the print comics world, but Owly is too cute for words, and you should go buy all of his books.

And that’s just the people whose names caught my eye when scrolling down the list — as of this writing, there are nearly 500 entries. The whole thing apparently got kicked off with a link to some old character proposals by Andi Watson (buy all his books, too). Favorite so far: Jeff Rowland, reminding us that even superheroes need some “alone time”.

One of the things that you get used to real quick when you read webcomics is merch. This is a pretty natural thing, given that the people producing that webcomic you love so much ain’t paying hosting bills for the sheer fun of it. If there’s not a tip cup, there’s stuffs for sale, even for the semi-hobbyists.

But fundamentally, those stuffs fall into the categories of:
1. Shirts and shirtlike garments
2. Books
3. Art

That’s about it. Oh, sure, if you’re willing to associate with Cafe Press, you can get your character on a frisbee or whatever, but why so few options?
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One of the harder parts of creating a webcomic is actually writing it.

Even comics that are exclusively joke-a-day, like ?, need to be written.

And if you’re doing anything even a little bit more involved than that, you need to create characters. And these characters need to be distinguishable from each other. And so you give them different haircuts (none of them anatomically possible) or different boob sizes (none of them realistic), and they wear different clothes (and never change their clothes).

And then, just because you’re so very very very clever and fun… you decide to give one of them an accent.

And because you’re just such an amazingly original writier, you decide to give this character a French accent. And now your new character says ‘Ze”, and “Mozair” and “non!” and “baguette” and “bagatelle” and “Voulez-vous coucher” …

But, really. You’re not very good at it. And your character is not nearly as cute as you think it is.

So, try again, please. And that character you have, who is always obnoxious to everyone? That guy isn’t funny either. And enough with the bad guys who always sssssss their essess.

And remember the lesson of Lucas, too. That accent you find so hilarious may actually be racist. Oy Vey!

What with Clickwheel blurring the lines and all, you could argue that Homestar Runner is or is not deserving of mention here. But one thing is certain: Strong Bad is himself a comics creator, and you see his comics on the web, so….

Anyway, after a month of no updates, H*R has an update. Thrill as the aforementioned Mr Bad skewers every terrible Hanna-Barbera “Hey, chums, let’s go solve a wacky mystery!” cartoon of my youth. You know that somewhere, Frank Welker is laughing at this, too.

Also after a month or so, Kestrel and her crew are continuing their commented countdown towards … um … something that starts with a “k” sound. Queen of Wands reruns with DVD commentary track, for your enjoyment.

Lastly, we commented earlier on Owen Dunne’s computer loss and revival. Not only is You Damn Kid back, but he’s launched a new strip called My New Mommy (check out the intro here), and revived the hiatused Norman P. Function and the deliciously deranged Nippleshine Manor. That’s four separate strips, for which Dunne has set himself an ambitious update schedule of eleven strips per week (including color Sunday YDK). Here’s hoping that life doesn’t conspire against him, because his work’s always entertaining.

It seems like almost every week, there is a new webcomics collective that is started or dies or is reborn…

All this activity leads an inquiring mind to, well, inquire. Or at least to wonder.

Why do artists form collectives and why do they join?

Most collectives seem to fall into one of the following broad categories

• Business collectives – collectives put together for the purpose of making money directly, usually using a subcription model. There aren’t as many of these as there used to be.
• Service collectives – collectives put together to provide information and artistic and technical support to members. There aren’t as many of these as there should be.
• Marketing collectives – collectives that provide a unifying brand to promote the works of the artists in the collective.
• Hosting collectives – collectives that provide hosting services for members.
• Community collectives – collectives in a more traditional sense of the word, to provide a gathering place for webcomic creators and fans.
• Artists collectives – collectives that provide an artistic umbrella for works of a certain style or quality

There’s a few more types of collectives, with fewer examples, like vanity collectives, but that’s not the topic under discussion.

All of the types of collectives listed above provide different reasons why artists might want to join a collective.

But I think there’s a simpler reason.

I think that the majority of webcomic artists are lonely geeks living in garrets and basements, and need all the friends they can scare up or pay for.

Or is that just me?

To go along with potentially earth-shattering storylines, R Stevens 3, mad genius behind the wacky robot antics at Diesel Sweeties, has decided to give us a gift for his birthday: a new website.

It’s a sketch blog, if one can be said to “sketch” with pixels, as Stevens digs up things that wouldn’t be seen in other venues. Included in the now-launched iheartpixels: paper dolls!

Happy Birthday, Mr Stevens, and thank you.

Item! The Ryan named Estrada reports that he’s teamed up with LiveJournal to produce a comic about semi-beloved LJ mascot Frank. Says Estrada:

Yeah, this is an official LJ comic. It’s being announced in the mid-January LJ newsletter on the 15th, and will be linked to on the front page of Livejournal, right where the picture of Frank is as soon as it launches. I’ve been working closely with the LJ team on this, though they seem content to give me creative control and let me run with it.

And for you beloved readers, Ryan passed along a link to a super-secret preview of the new strip!

Item! Another view on the topic of giving up control of a character, this one from Lore Sjoberg. Okay, it’s mostly to do with his upcoming flash animation project (link not yet live), but it does relate to his existing character (and star of Lore Brand Comics), Lore. Here at Fleen, we like just saying Lore! Lore, Lore, Lore, Lore, Lore, Lore!
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It seems that a number of different websites have recently taken to using new math to figure out something that might seem at first, important – comic strip “ratings”.

No, I guess I don’t mean ratings – I mean “rankings”. That is, some numerical value arrived at through a supposedly secure mechanism, and supposedly calculated properly, that will indicate in some manner the relative quality of a particular webcomic.

Example 1 of this phenomenon is Top WebComics.

The entire purpose of this website is provide rankings. But it seems that they overlooked a small little security flaw in their methodology. And it strikes me as unlikely that SketchBattle is going to be the only one poisoning the pigeons in this park.

Example 2 is Smack Jeeves.

In addition to “proudly” hosting 13,016 comics (as of current count), they provide a number of different views into their ranking system – Top comics of the month, Top Strips of the Week, Top All-Time Strips, and Top All-Time Comics.

The first time I looked at SmackJeeves was about two weeks ago. The Number #1 Comic of All Time was a really really crappy sprite comic that had a total of 4 Ratings. Yep. 4. The comic “artist” had either signed up 4 phony accounts, or gotten his one friend to sign up a couple of phony accounts as well, and given himself the highest ratings he could.

A reasonable method of calculating rankings of comics on a site – based on user feedback – would be to INCLUDE the total number of rankings in your calculation. Otherwise, why bother letting more than one person rate a comic anyway? And then something sensible would occur – a comic that had 300 people decide that it was a good comic would always be rated better than a comic that had 2 people think it was a good comic.

The huge drama factor that is associated with the SmackJeeves ratings system, in their community, is thus at least an order of magnitude (that’s 10 times bigger for the calculationally challenged among you) more humorous given the major flaws in it. Last I looked there were at least four separate threads devoted to “Someone ranked me badly! WAAAAAAAA”.

Math – it’s not just for getting your G.E.D anymore.