Every crappy submission can “see print” on the web–every reprint book that would sell three copies in print would work on the web. The web is the great equalizer. Every crappy thing can get tossed up there. If it all went digital nothing separates a pro from an amateur. Print is far more discriminating. There are fixed costs which can’t be ignored for long. It’s not the wild west like the Internet is. That’s why the web doesn’t excite me a whole lot. Every nitwit can put stickmen telling fart jokes up–there’s nothing special about it.
Robot 6 quotes Erik Larsen on the inherent merit of webcomix — suffice to say he’s no fan. But that Larsen has a strong opinion about other people’s comics is a dog bites man story — what’s more interested is how clueless he comes over about the economic realities of both print and web comics.
The thing that Larsen forgets is that the kind of print comics Diamond carries is only the tip of the iceberg. Fanzines, minicomics, d.i.y. photocopied and stenciled pamphlets sold through your local comics store or regional con both as good as anything carried by Diamond in most months and as bad as anything the web can offer have been created for decades. As long as there have been cheap and easy ways to quickly copy or reproduce amateur comics, people have been doing so. The best of them “graduate” to socalled professional comics, most people lose interest after a few issues, some people keep doing them for decades.
The web hasn’t really changed anything in this. Yes, anybody can publish their own comics on their own website, but that doesn’t mean anybody other than their mother will ever read them. Every crappy thing can get tossed up there, but most will end up with hitcounters in the low two figures. It takes hard work, talent and a dollop of luck to become a hit — even more of each to be able to make a living from it. Just like regular comics in other words.
To sneer that “I mean–there’s things on the internet that people are willing to read but they would never pay for–and those are the success stories” is missing the point as well. Which is that in a period when print comics of the kind Larsen has worked in his whole professional life have steadily been getting smaller various amateur cartoonists have found ways not just to publish their comics on the web and get an audience for it, but actually make a living from it — even if they offer their comics for free. Not to put too fine a point on it, but America’s current most successful cartoonists, who managed to raise millions of dollars for charity each Christmas, can support several conventions organised around their comics are Gabe and Tycho. And they did it completely on their own, finding out what worked and what didn’t through trial and error, just like several dozen other web cartoonists have managed to do. And they managed to do so without shackling themselves to a dying business model.
Sure, most people working on the web, even the successful ones, aren’t able to make a living off their comics and have to find other ways to supplement their income or only do it as a hobby — but this is the same reality most print cartoonists face as well. The fact that most successful web cartoonists offer their strips for free and make money on e.g. selling advertising, print collections or t-shirts isn’t important: that’s what works so people use it. It only gets exploitative when people offer their own comics for free on other people’s site: the Huffington Post business model, where you build your IPO on the free labour of thousands of hopefuls working for “exposure”.
Shorter me: “every nitwit can put stickmen telling fart jokes up”, but the same nitwits could’ve done so with photocopied or stenciled pamphlets too — and got them published by Aircel, while having your comics up on a website is no guarantee for success without hard work, talent and luck. Shorter shorter me: Larsen is a great artist, but boy can he talk crap sometimes.