Articles by chuck-rozakis
Sun Sep 28, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: How Webcomics Make Money
The question is how webcomics make money. The answer is: Most of them don’t, but the ones that do usually rely on numerous sources. These typically include advertisements on the site, donations from readers, merchandise sales, and paid online content.
The webcomic itself can play several fundamental roles, all of which rest on the same idea: You come to the site to read the comic.
When the revenue source is advertising, the comic consists of a draw that makes the presence of advertising acceptable, in the same model as a TV show. Depending on the hosting site (and the author’s preferences) these can be Google text ads, banner ads put together by Project Wonderful and similar ad brokers, or customized ads solicited and designed by the artist himself. The former two are the easier choice, and typically the available ones to smaller comics with less traffic. More popular comics can often solicit advertisements from online retailers or other comics. The biggest comics, such as Penny Arcade [link: http://www.penny-arcade.com/], have been known to attract advertisements from companies looking to tap into their audience, such as Sega.
When discussing donations, the comic plays the role of a bridge or connection between the author and the audience. The author is typically closer and more responsive to audience feedback than a novelist or print comic author could be, often maintaining comic forums or a Livejournal to communicate with them. Over time, the audience thinks of the author not as a faceless comic-making entity, but as a friend who gives them free stuff and deserves to be rewarded for that. Randy Milholland is the undisputed master of this, having dared his readership that he would quit his day job if they’d donate a year’s salary. Which, in a matter of days, they did.
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Wed Sep 24, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: 'Something*Positive'
Randy Milholland is a very, very angry man. He distills that anger into the purest form of hate known to man, which he uses as ink. And with that ink, he effects a marvelous transformation of rage into humor, he creates Something*Positive.
Of course, as many an astute reader has noticed, “Your comic isn’t positive at all! It’s mean!”
S*P is based in Milholland’s real life, and follows the adventures of Davan MacIntire (obviously modeled on Milholland) and his friends as they find and lose love, perform irreverent musicals, play inventive role-playing games, deal with family troubles, and cause amusing property damage and extreme bodily harm to those who incite them.
Milholland also has a number of other comic projects. Those that are still updating appear on the main S*P homepage, and include: Super Stupor, a gag-a-strip comic about super-heroes and villains who are a bit more genre-savvy than usual; Something*Positive 1937-1938, which chronicles the life of Davan’s namesake, a friend of the character’s grandfather; Midnight Macabre, which follows stand-up comic Gaspar Baugh as he tries to revitalize a late-night horror TV show in 1981; and Rhymes With Witch, a collection of unconnected gags that have randomly emerged from Milholland’s brain. He has a discontinued project called New Gold Dreams, based on a roleplaying campaign introduced in S*P; and filler strips titled Life With Rippy, featuring Milholland and his “muse”, a talking straight-razor.
Notable moments:
The introduction of Choo-Choo Bear, the malleable kitty
Davan is the universe’s buttmonkey, in what become Kim’s most well-known running gag.
A second disturbing cat, Twitchy-Hug, is introduced and eventually removed.
A crossover with Queen of Wands . The main character of Queen of Wands eventually joined the cast of Something*Positive permanently.
Aubrey’s business venture, the sex-line for Geeks, Nerdrotica.
Fred and Faye MacIntire’s perfect day
Drama: Medium. The world of Something*Positive sucks, and though the characters virtually always bounce back and pass the suffering on to others, actual pathos has been known to rear its ugly head.
Humor: Excellent, though dark and often offensive. Milholland makes no bones about slaughtering sacred cows, turning humor out of sensitive subjects. Viewer discretion is advised, but if you can handle most stand-up comedy (particularly George Carlin), you’ll appreciate this.
Continuity: High. Very few of the comics stand alone, and stories tend to weave around to different characters as exciting eents happen in their lives. This is one where it’s important to start from the first strip [link: http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp12192001.shtml] and do an archive trawl in order.
Art: A cartoon-ish line-art style that has improved as the comic has evolved. How detailed the background art is varies from strip to strip, ranging from detailed depictions of Davan’s childhood home to flat one-color backdrops.
Archive: Almost seven years, about 2000 page-sized comics.
Updates: Irregularly, usually 3-7 comics per week. The main Something*Positive strip tends to be a bit more reliable than the others. For most of the archives, Milholland maintained (or retroactively added) a five- or seven-day-per-week schedule.
Risk/Reward: The story is very slice-of-life, and like life, doesn’t have a real beginning or ending. Milholland has commented that he has an ongoing plan for all of his comics and when they’re due to end, but schedule slips have called that into question. The best approach is probably just to enjoy it while you’ve got it.
Tue Sep 23, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The World of Webcomics Celebrates Ryan Estrada Day
70 Guest Comics - Read Them All
Guest comics are a tool of the trade in webcomics: The host needs a day off, the guest wants to get his work out there. A small comic can get a huge boost to traffic with a link and endorsement from a more popular site, and a guest comic is often the best way to get both.
Artist Ryan Estrada has taken this to new heights by drawing 70 comics, all of which were posted last Wednesday, 9/18. The comics are now being posted at Estrada’s own site, and are archived at each of the host sites. The lineup includes such notables as 8-bit Theater, Real Life Comics, Overcompensating, Dominic Deegan, and Wapsi Square. The good folks at Fleen have been kind enough to work up a complete list.
This is actually the second time Estrada has set guest comic records: Last year, during “Estradarama 2007”, he posted guest comics to some twenty different sites. This draw attention both to his ongoing work and the then newly-created custom-comics service Cartoon Commune.
This year, he’s using the day to announce a new full comic book, written with John Baird of the Create a Comic Project, titled Create a Comic Project Presents: Climate Change. The 34-page book is available at Lulu.com as a $6.00 printed edition or $0.50 download.
Mon Sep 22, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Willis Proposes via Comic
Stands on the Shoulders of Giants
David Willis, author of Shortpacked! and Joyce and Walky proposed to Maggie Weidner, his girlfriend of four years, using not just a single strip, but a week-long storyline of Shortpacked! Weidner, also an artist accepted in comic form, which was promptly posted to the Shortpacked! news section.
Willis is a long-time webcomic artist, having started Roomies! in 1997, continued with the sequel strip It’s Walky from 1999 to 2005, and continued that with the pay-per-month subscription strip Joyce and Walky. Shortpacked!, a less drama-heavy strip premiered in 2005 and chronicles the misadventures of the employees of a toy store.
Willis isn’t the first webcomic artist to propose in his comic. Mike Krahulik (“Gabe”) of Penny Arcade started the trend in 1999. Greg Dean of Real Life Comics did it in 2005, though he had actually proposed the week before, and the comic follows the (often embellished) events of his life. Eric Burns, also known as the webcomic pundit Websnark gathered a collection of 17 webcomic artists to create his proposal comic for co-blogger Wednesday White. And this past June, Three Panel Soul artist Ian McConville programmed a video game to propose to his girlfriend with.
Congratulations to Willis and Weidner, we wish you many happy returns. That, and we’re thankful you didn’t propose via LOLCat.
Sat Sep 20, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: Could DRM Kill Your Webcomic?
You thought Pirate Day was yesterday?
The idea that the march of technology is too slow and could kill a baby art form is nothing new. Scott Kurtz wrote “Could Success Kill Your Webcomic?” in 2002, as he was then concerned with the increasing cost of bandwidth that came with an influx of readers. Fortunately, in the last six years, technological growth outpaced his concerns, but things were a bit dicey for some popular webcomics for a little while there.
Webcomics are taking the market share from print comics, particularly indie ones (though I wouldn’t be surprised if the general correlation between the advent of the web and decreasing sales of major companies’ print comics turned out to be a causation). When it comes to attracting new readers, a free product available on the web and updated daily (or several times weekly) is far more enticing to cash-strapped kids than a $3 22-page pamphlet that requires leaving the house to acquire and only advances the story once a month.
On a similar note, I’m of the strong opinion that when a company is able to produce and market a color ebook reader at the right screen size and the right price-point, it will kill the pamphlet comic book and hugely broaden the market for webcomics. Once the reading experience is equivalent, the decreased effort of ebooks can win the market for them. Why buy when you can download? If you want a physical copy, wait a few months and buy the trade paperback.
Obviously, the solution for the big companies is to appeal to those new readers by directly competing with webcomics and taking their advantages for yourself, while keeping your original advantages (professionalism, well-known brands, and the like). Of course, there are problems with translating print-sized comics to screens: Virtually no-one’s monitors can fully display ten-by-seven inches in portrait format with enough magnification to make it readable without destroying your eyes. Which means you either expand the image and have to scroll, or you can’t read the text and need to magnify it. (And in the worst cases, you need to scroll in multiple directions.) And there’s the loading wait when you turn a page. Most webcomics solve these problems by formatting their comics to fit most browsers, intentionally limiting the necessary scrolling and optimizing their text size for reading on monitors. The comics themselves are set up as compressed graphic images that load quickly. The archive sections of sites are usually designed with stripped-down graphics so that you can read through them quickly.
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Thu Sep 18, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: 'Player Vs. Player'
It started as just a gaming comic, but expanded to much, much more. It’s one of the most popular independent webcomics out there. It’s spawned books, cartoons, shirts, and even plush toys. It’s won an Eisner Award. And it shows no signs of stopping after ten years online.
It’s Scott Kurtz’s PvP .
Cole, Brent, Jade, Francis and Skull make up the primary cast, and the staff of PvP magazine, a gaming-centric publication that’s typically ignored by the cast in favor of wacky misadventures. Cole is the responsible grown-up (when he’s not jumping ditches in his replica General Lee), Brent is the Mac-loving artist type (and constant victim of panda attack), Jade is the hot chick who also plays games (and is often the “straight man” of the group), Francis is the twitch-gaming teenager, and Skull is the loveable-but-incredibly-stupid mythological creature (he’s a troll).
Kurtz’s style is a broad-based humor, backed up with ongoing plotlines. Pretty much every strip has a punchline, but there’s a continuity over weeks and years, and the characters develop throughout the strip’s run. It plays like a newspaper comic, if the average reader was a software engineer, rather than a little old lady.
If you’re intent on paying for additional PvP, there are six books available, five through Dark Horse (collections of pamphlets produced by Dark Horse, which are “enhanced” collections of strips published online) and a book of original material produced by Dork Storm Press. Shirts and books (and toys, as they’re produced) are available from the store, and then the random-and-amusing animated series.
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Sun Sep 14, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
The Theory of Webcomics: What are Webcomics?
Our Webcomics Reporter Stops to Define the Term
Help me Wikipedia, you’re my only hope! What are webcomics?
Oh, okay. They’re comics published on the web. That was easy. What else have we got? Over 18,000 exist, few are self-sustaining, blah blah blah, some are like newspaper comics and some are like graphic novels, yadda yadda yadda, sometimes use sprites, pixels, photos or 3D Poser art. Some are funny, some are not; and they cover a wide variety of genres.
But really, what are webcomics? “Webcomics” is the collective name we’ve given to sequential art that appears online. Scott Kurtz’s PvP is a webcomic, as is Scott McCloud’s Zot!, but so are the reprints available from Marvel Digital Comics and the online For Better or for Worse strips. Same name, wildly different products: Kinda like comparing a 1940s Superman story with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. They’re all “comics”, but the similarity stops there.
We’re going to need a little more granularity: Typically, one will use the phrase “webcomics” to refer to creator-owned properties published originally and/or primarily online. Reprinted newspaper strips would still fall under “newspaper comics”, and reprinted superhero material would still be “print comics” or “comic books”. So our narrowed “webcomics” would include DC’s Zuda Comics, but not Marvel Digital or FBoFW. This is still hazy for cases like Diesel Sweeties, which started on the web, and published both on the web and in syndicated papers simultaneously (with different content) for a time; but it will do.
And that’s the definition I’m typically using and tend to focus on when I talk about webcomics. When I talk about how webcomics make money, I’m thinking about how Kurtz or McCloud would make money, not how Marvel would monetize their website. When I talk about “the most popular webcomics,” I don’t mean Dilbert. The collection of comics that are creator-owned, published online, usually maintained by one or two authors and typically full of geeky content are a community and a genre all their own, and deserve the same singular attention that we give to, say, sci-fi novels.
These are the comics that you find on Keenspot [link: http://www.keenspot.com/], Zuda, Blank Label, Dumbrella, Modern Tales, and similar collectives. These are the comics that get their start on Comic Genesis [link: http://www.comicgenesis.com/], Drunk Duck, or Webcomics Nation.
And yes, these are the comics that obey Sturgeon’s Law much more so than any others—after all, the barriers to entry are very low; anyone with a computer and a bunch of free time can create one. (I myself had a short-lived sprite comic, now gone from the web and never to be seen again.) This means they’re often drawn and written by hobbyists with limited time, no editors, and the occasional limited grasp of spelling and/or grammar. Which is, of course, the other reason I like to talk about them: There are some fantastic gems of comics to be found, if you know where to look.
I’m going to be picking apart how these comics exist as an art form and what makes them different; discuss how they make money, why some do so much better than others, and which ones you really should be reading. Though be warned: The only thing that sucks up more of your free time that creating a webcomic is reading them.
Tue Sep 9, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
'Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars' Coming in October
Fourth collection of web comic
Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars is now available for pre-order. The Teraport Wars is the fourth collection of Schlock Mercenary strips to make it into publication; in true George Lucas style, Book 3 and Book 4 were released first. This book fits between The Tub of Happiness and Under New Management, and with it the first 1000 strips are available four hard-copy volumes.
This 228-page volume is in full color on glossy paper, and contains all the strips and footnotes from November 12th of 2001 through March 8th of 2003. It also features some new footnotes, commentary, guest art, concept art, deck plans for the Post-Dated Check Loan, eleven pages of all-new bonus story, and an introduction by Brandon Sanderson. The book is expected to ship October 9.
Schlock Mercenary is a webcomic by Howard Tayler that follows the adventures of a mercenary company aboard a starship in a 31st-century space opera setting. Schlock Mercenary updates daily at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/, and has been doing so continuously since June of 2000, a near-unheard-of feat in webcomics. Schlock Mercenary was previously featured on Keenspot, and is now a member of the Blank Label Comics consortium.
Mon Sep 8, 2008 — by Chuck Rozakis
Webcomics You Should Be Reading: 'Darths & Droids'
Though Star Wars fandom is full of disagreements and divisions, most of us fanboys are in agreement about a few things: Jedi, lightsabers and force powers are awesome. Anything Timothy Zahn writes is going to be better than anything Kevin J. Anderson writes. And Lucas probably would have had a better script for The Phantom Menace if he’d hired a seven-year-old to write it.
Enter the Comic Irregulars (Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick, and Steven Irrgang), who you might recall from their work on the action figure/photo capture comic Irregular Webcomic. Inspired by Shamus Young’s work on DM of the Rings, they ask the question, “What if Star Wars was a roleplaying campaign that went far, far away from what the Game Master intended?”
And thus was born Darths & Droids.
The comic is set in a universe where Star Wars never existed, and the unnamed game master/narrator has designed the world from scratch for his game. Before the game begins, the players don't know anything at all about Jedi, or Tatooine, the Skywalker family, because they only exist in the GM’s mind. The setting is built up over the course of the story in response to what the players do, and what they do is never what the GM expects, in a classic roleplaying maneuver known as “going off the rails.”
The plot follows Jim (playing Qui-Gon), Ben (playing Obi-Wan), and three other players who join later as they demonstrate why you shouldn’t make laser swords the cheapest available weapons, why you shouldn’t bring your little sister to roleplaying group, and how much more sense the plot of Episode I makes when filtered through the chaotic lens of a roleplaying game.
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