Olaf's comics blog

Do you make comics that often has a lot to do with current events? Whether it’s celebrities or politics, there may be a lot to win if you start treating your webcomic as if it was a blog.

Of course, a webcomic can rarely be called a blog. Your webcomic is, in most cases, an illustrated story taking place in a fictional story universe. So why should you even consider treating it like a blog?

Because the society has many advantages for blogs that will work just as well for webcomics.

I’m sure all of my Norwegian readers are aware of Twingly. I have no idea if anything like this exists in America, so if you’re one of the many North American readers I got after being linked to from Webcomic Overlook or Journalista in the last couple of days (thanks, by the way!), here’s the short introduction:

Twingly is a blog search which offers blog trackbacks to major news sources. Which means: If I write a blog post where I link to a news article from one of the main online newspapers in Norway/Sweden (and some in eight other countries), I then notify Twingly about it,¹ and that newspaper article will get a link back to my blog. I’ve used this with partial success in this blog — for instance here. Scroll down in this article, and you’ll find a link back to my blog. I don’t do this very often, but when I do I tend to get more readers. And if this had been a celebrity blog or a political blog or a movie blog or a blog about anything vaguely more popular than comics, I would do it a lot more often.

Can’t we do the same with our webcomics?

Seriously. Do your characters often stand around talking about the latest adventures of Barack Obama and Miley Cyrus? Or do they talk a lot about new CDs, or the latest videogames, or what they intend to vote for? And doesn’t the website where you update your comic have a field where you can write a short comment to today’s comic? Write a short comment, and include links to relevant articles in Twingly-associated newspapers. Then, ping your webcomic, and they will give you trackbacks. And you will get new readers. It’s that easy!

Of course, often it takes a long time to make a comic strip. If you use five days to draw a strip in response to a news article, it won’t exactly be hot news any more, and the number of people checking it for blog links won’t be as high any more. Still, even if you need your time to make comics, there will be some articles you can predict pretty easily. For instance, I predict that in the time around 14 September, Norwegian newspapers will write a lot about the election. I predict that around 19 November 2010, they will write a lot about Harry Potter. And, of course: If your comic strip is about “[insert name of political party here] does a lot of stupid things”, you can just finish your strip and then sit back and wait for them to do their next stupid thing. It’s bound to happen.

Here’s that link to Twingly partners again, in case you missed it.

I don’t know if anything like Twingly exists in North America, if it does I hope one of you will post a link in the comments. But even if it doesn’t: Take a look at your webcomic, and figure out if there is anything at all to gain from treating it as if it was a blog. There are very many possibilities marketed for blogs that are just as available to webcomics if we just think about it.

1. I can do so manually, but it’s also easy to tell WordPress blogs to do it automatically — which I do [back]

Over at Nettserier.no, Trond Stavås quotes some information about a new comics contest hosted by the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. The short summary: Make fifteen comic strips or political cartoons, send them to Dagbladet by October 5th, and win 68.000 Norwegian kroner. Click the link for more information.

A little heads-up to my Scandinavian readers: Next week one of my Uncle Scrooge stories (one I wrote a whooping seven years ago) is published in the Scandinavian Donald Duck weeklies (issue 32/2009). The story has the title “Déjà vu”, and rumor says that the same title is being used in Norwegian. The magazine is out on Monday in Norway, I have no idea about Sweden or Denmark.¹

The plot of the 12-pager is basically that Scrooge wishes that he was young again, Gyro Gearloose has an experimental potion which is designed to make people younger… And there’s a glitch in it, of course. No, Scrooge doesn’t turn into a baby or a preschooler, that joke has been done to death. Don’t expect Carl Barks quality, but my mother says she likes it. I haven’t seen it myself, so I don’t know anything about translation or coloring, but I *do* know that the artwork, done by Brazilian Luiz Podavin, is awesome. Podavin really captures emotion better than most other artists I’ve seen.

So now you know.

1. If you read the Finnish Aku Ankka magazine, you might have seen the story already, as they printed it already in issue 19/2009. [back]

I love the fact that many of my favorite webcomics are free of charge. If I had to pay to access them, I would probably read far less of them. But that being said, I don’t necessarily think that all webcomics should be free.

“But webcomics don’t have any expenses, they don’t need to buy paper or print and distribute their comics, so it’s a sin to charge money for them!” No. Webcomic cartoonists need to buy food and pay rent, too. Of course, since webcomics is a market where everybody who wants to can publish their own comics, many of them are very amateurish, and would never make enough money to go around. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, I think — only the best comics manage to grow and get tons of readers, and those are the comics who deserve to survive.

Of course, charging readers is not the only way to make money. Most webcomics today use a quite different business model — they have advertisements on their websites, and they often have a store where they sell webcomic-related products (for instance, book collections of the webcomic). And that is clearly the model that works best today (I wrote more about this in my Master’s thesis two months ago… I promise, when the University Library actually gets around to publishing it, I’ll post a link here, but they’re slooooow).

But here’s a thought experiment: If a decent webcomic decided to start charging their readers for reading the comic, how should they do this to make it work?

I think that’s a tough question, but also an interesting one. So, here are my ideas:

• I prefer payment models based on how much you download over time-based subscription models. While I’m a big fan of subscribing to print comics, the difference between print and web is that when your print subscription expires, you get to keep all the comics. If I pay money for a graphic novel, I want to be able to pick it out and read it again in two years, and that goes for digital comics too. So when I pay for something, I should be able to access that specific comic for all eternity or until the website disappears.
• It is more interesting to pay for large chunks of content than small ones. I don’t want to input my credit card number every time a new strip updates, but if I got a package of strips every other month, that would be more interesting. So the product for sale should preferrably be either a collection of strips or a chapter of a longer story, say 20 pages or so. Of course, such a model would favor long-form comics, but it could work for comic strips too.
• The first part of the comic, at least the amount of comics one gets in a common comic book issue (20-24 pages, I think?) should be free of charge. Becuase, seriously, you don’t get any readers if you don’t have anything to tease them with. Give away the first issue for free, and you’ll at least have a chance of getting people to buy the next one. And if you’re running several different comics, you’ll have to give away the first issue of all of them for free.
• And for the upcoming issues: Give away a couple of pages from each of them for free. What, I have already read issue one for free and I still need more? Well, maybe I don’t, but I may be convinced that I don’t need to read more of this comic, and a few pages of the most current chapter could make me change my mind. Not more than a teaser, but still, it would show me exactly why I should buy this issue.¹
• I generally don’t mind reading something on the screen in my browser. But as long as I’m paying for it, if it is possible, I would strongly prefer it if I also had the chance of downloading a high-resolution PDF file of the entire issue (and perhaps a CBR file as well). What I love about the web is the accessibility, not the low image resolution, so I may even want to print the comic and read it on paper.
• All the text in the comic, and textual descriptions of the images, should be searchable. That way I can easily find all the page numbers and issue numbers and storylines where my favorite character appears, or where the characters are talking about the last Batman movie, or anything else I could find through a search. Of course, this would also increase the chance that I bought more issues.
• I have no problem with licences telling me that I shouldn’t publish these comics anywhere. After all, I don’t own any royalties, I just bought an issue. However, if I want to share the comic with a friend, I should be able to do so. Whether said friend is reading it over my shoulder or I’m talking to him on an instant messaging program doesn’t matter. Nobody ever stopped me from lending my print comics to friends, the rules for digital comics shouldn’t be any different.
• The payment process should be easy and trustworthy. Preferrably so easy that I could pay for the comic with my cellphone.

These are of course all just fantasies, I have no idea if this could actually work financially. Probably not. Still, I think that if a webcomic filled these requirements, I would be more interested in paying for it.

What do you think? What would a webcomic have to offer for you to be willing to pay for it?

1. For that same reason, I’ve often thought that it would make a lot more sense if printed comic books skipped the fancy cover and instead showed the first page of comics on the cover (in addition to title, creators’ names and barcode, of course). [back]

Last week, the 2009 Eisner awards were awarded in San Diego. First thing first: Warm congratulations to Jason for winning the Best U.S. Edition of International Material category. I think it’s wild that a Norwegian can win an Eisner, but when the same Norwegian wins the same category three years in a row, it’s obvious that we have a true star we should be proud of.

And now, let’s look at what I think is one of the most interesting categories… Best webcomic. The winner was Carla Speed McNeil‘s Finder. I tried looking at this comic a few weeks ago, but had to give up. I found the comic a struggle to read. Not because of the quality of the comic, but because of how it is presented.

First, look at the URL: http://www.shadowlinecomics.com/webcomics/#/finder/. What is that # doing in there? Isn’t that a very inconvenient URL? “Hi, check out my webcomic, it’s at www dot shadowlinecomics dot com slash webcomics slash number sign slash finder”? Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But it appears that was never the intention, either. You’re apparently supposed to go to shadowlinecomics.com, click “webcomics” and find your way from there.

Now, the first thing you notice there is the huge Flash thingie that the entire comic is presented in. Which annoyed me a lot. What is the purpose of it? Apparently, only to make the reading experience more difficult. The pages of the comic are so large you have to scroll to be able to read all of them, even when viewing it in full screen. That wouldn’t be that big a problem if this was ordinary HTML files where one could scroll, click the button to read next page, scroll, and so on. But here, the previous/next buttons are on a separate toolbar. Meaning: When you’re holding your pointer over the “Next” button, you can’t use the scroll wheel. You can’t use the keypad to scroll, either. And I seem to recall that when I tried reading this comic in Opera (my browser of choice — but not the one I use at work, where I currently am), the scroll wheel didn’t work either. Goddarn it, why not just let me progress forward by clicking the page itself?

It seems as if this comic is being updated on a semi-regular basis. Well, that’s good, but if I’m a regular reader, how do I get to see the latest page? Most webcomics either display the latest page on the frontpage or they have a link to it from most other sites. Here, if you want to see the latest page, you either have to click “Next page” fifty-seven times, or you have to find the thumbnail button, open the thumbnails (which you’ll want to close again as soon as possible because it takes up even more of the screen so that you have even less space to view the comic), drag the scrollbar all the way right, and click the correct thumbnail. Imagine doing that three times a week.

The Flash format has a few nifty advantages, for instance you can zoom in on the comic if you want to. However, there are also some disadvantages that may or may not be intended. In addition to the navigational problems mentioned above, one thing that annoyed me was that there seems to be no way to print the comic. Okay, I understand that McNeil wants me to buy her books, but this comic is hardly ideal for viewing on a screen, so why can’t I just print it as long as it’s free online anyway?

And every time you click to view a new page, you have to watch the Shadowline logo while it’s loading. As long as you’re using Flash, why not actually take advantage of it and pre-load the next page while I’m reading the first?

Notice that in the <title> field, words like “Finder” or “Carla Speed McNeil” aren’t mentioned at all. That’s probably one of many things that make this comic near-impossible to find in search engines. If you google “Finder Carla Speed McNeil”, the Shadowline comic won’t show up in the top ten. However, you will immediately find a link to Carla Speed McNeil’s website, where she also publishes “Finder”. Wait, I’m confused. This looks as if it’s a completely different comic? Okay, apparently it has run for thirteen years, so I understand that there are tons of different material to choose from, but the stories seem so very, very different. The “Finder” we learn about on McNeil’s website appears to be “a secret society of hunters, trackers and more“. The comic published on Shadowline’s pages… I’ve only read the first thirty pages, but I get the impression that it’s about a beauty contest and that there’s a species of people where men have boobs there.

Oh, and by the way, this comic isn’t finished. No, seriously. I don’t mean that the ending isn’t written yet, while that seems to be the case it’s not really a disadvantage, but most of the last 26 pages haven’t been inked yet. Only pencils are published. I would link you there, but that’s another disadvantage of the Flash navigational system used… Linking to or bookmarking a specific page is impossible. But seriously: Why on Earth isn’t the entire comic inked before publication? That just looks unprofessional.

I’m sure McNeil is an excellent writer and artist and that the Eisner award was well-deserved. But this was a terrible, terrible way to present a webcomic.