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The fate of comics after newspapers
From the comic strip "Frazz" by Jef Mallett
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TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: One reason newspapers are in trouble is that you can so happily get your news other places. It's fun to scan the Web for stories. It's easy to, you know, check your stocks on your phone. But there's one part of newspapers that seems to go best with a cup of coffee and some crinkly newsprint, and that is the comics section. Reporter John Rabe wanted to know: What happens to comics if newspapers die?
John Rabe: Jef Mallet draws Frazz -- a sweet, smart comic strip about an elementary school janitor -- out of his home in Lansing, Mich.
Jef Mallett: You dream right from the start that it could be a living. I was able to feel confident enough to go strictly full-time with Frazz after about a year of syndication.
Mallett grew up reading standbys like Peanuts, and now he's making his living drawing a strip that runs in 150 U.S. newspapers. But these days the Detroit News, which runs Frazz, only delivers three days a week, and other papers are shutting down or going online only.
Mallett: Sometimes I worry that they're just so ingrained and associated with ink on newsprint that they're just not going to fit quite as well into wherever newspapers go next.
All comics are already online, but nobody's found a way yet to get the web to pay enough so that drawing a strip can stay a full-time job.
Cartoonists are worried. At their annual convention last month, they held a seminar on "The Future of Newspapers and Comics," where Jim Borgman, who draws the strip Zits, heard from a lot of frazzled young artists.
Jim Borgman: Yeah, you may have a syndicated strip. You certainly need to keep a Web site up. You're probably blogging. Some of these guys have like stand-up acts. They're in bands that. you know, somehow cross pollinate with their strip. One guy looked up at me today and said, "You need a staff to do this."
Cartoonist Darrin Bell has chronicled the death of newspapers in his strip, Candorville, and he actually has a tip jar on his Web site. He says the money coming in from the Web -- not just in tips -- is only a quarter of his income as a cartoonist. But he's not worried about comics.
Darrin Bell: Comics have been around basically since the first caveman found the first cave wall.
One thing we're fairly sure cave men didn't draw on cave walls is crossword puzzles. They debuted in newspapers in 1913.
Will Shortz is NPR's Puzzlemaster and editor of the New York Times crossword. He says puzzles will survive in books and online even if newspapers go away, and the economic impact on puzzle makers will be minimal.
Will Shortz: Honestly, most people are making puzzles cause they love it -- they just love the process - and they're anxious to see their names in print. They're not doing it for the money.
Shortz pays his freelancers 200-bucks for a daily puzzle and a thousand for a Sunday puzzle, but since he publishes the work of more than a hundred puzzle makers a year, nobody's making a real living at this except him.
In Los Angeles, I'm John Rabe for Marketplace.
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I'm a cartoonist who has been living off my website for seven years now. No side job except an occasional small freelance gig. I was syndicated nationally from 2007-2008 but had to quit because it was hurting my main business.
I've got at least a dozen close friends who are also surviving off our websites. I'd be happy to follow up if Marketplace want to cover the post-newspaper future of comics!
It may be the case that no syndicated print comic artist has gone full-time on the web, but that is not to say that nobody has. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to cater to the demands of newspapers while achieving the level of quality maintained by the creators of Achewood, Questionable Content, Penny Arcade, and their ilk.
One problem is that of rigid formatting. Achewood ranges from the standard "3 panels with one punchline at the end" format all the way to 20-panel monster strips. Questionable Content comes out every day in full color, covering enough real estate to take up 1/4 of my newspaper's print comics page.
A second problem is that print comics have to avoid offending a wide audience. Penny Arcade frequently features violence, terrible language, and references to beastiality. Achewood, too, feels free to make use of bad language, sexual innuendo, and drug references. Both strips are genuinely funny to their target audiences, but would provoke a furious letter-writing campaign from the audiences of The Family Circus and Marmaduke on day one.
People aren't going to lose interest in comic strips; they're just going to go to follow them to a less restrictive distribution model. The strips that thrive online are not going to be the same as the strips that do well in the world of print syndication, simply because it's possible to be so much better than that.
(following up my previous post)
In fairness, I should say that despite the many success stories to be found on the web, the expectations of the readership tend to be very different in webcomics than in print comics. Successful online humor comics tend to work best by targeting a specific niche or demographic, and don't always play well to a general audience. Successful story-based comics tend to have more complex plots that don't recap events very often, since interested readers can go back and read the archives. In some cases, this can leave a new reader the choice of either trying to read years of material or hoping they can learn enough of what's going on from faq pages to pick up in mid-story.
There are no hard and fast rules that define what will work online, but these are trends that would make turning a successful print comic into a successful webcomic difficult at best. Looking at the local paper's comics pages, I honestly think there might only be 2 or 3 comics I could see working online without significant changes to tone and/or content. The other option would be to try to tap into the post-ironic crowd, who tends to enjoy the comics in the newspaper BECAUSE the jokes are stale, or the plot lines make no sense (See The Comics Curmudgeon at http://joshreads.com/ for examples).
Despite the many online success stories, I can see that from the viewpoint of an established print comic creator, the future is very uncertain.
To add my voice to the comments, it's by no means impossible to make money on webcomics. While the income from my own webcomic, "Digger," would not keep me afloat by itself, it's been a very significant portion of my income for several years now--and it's a small, weird, not hugely known comic that isn't merchandised to the hilt. It's at least the financial equivalent of having a part-time job. (Most of my living is from art sales, of which the comic is a not-insignificant advertising draw) Other people with greater marketing skills than mine can and do make quite substantial livings wholly off webcomics.
Get with the times, guys! This whole "Can comics actually live on the internet?!" thing got hashed out a good decade ago. (Also, just to avoid future highly dated embarrassment, comics are not just for kids any more, and some of them are even winning literary awards. Please make a note of it.)
I don't know who John Rabe is, but he needs to work on researching his stories more in the future. Least I Could Do, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Penny Arcade, GU Comics, Questionable Content, xkcd, and a mass of other comics have existed purely online while their creators work on them full-time. Many have released books of their work, a few have had animated shorts made of their comics, and a couple have been picked up for syndication. Many even have a staff that are supported by their comics.
The reference to Borgman hearing from a lot of frazzled artists is ridiculous in its own right. Starting a website and maintaining a comic online is a cheap and easy way to get publicity for a young artist. This can be seen by the thousands of such comics that have sprung up over the years. Not recognizing the power of the internet as a haven for starving artists is ridiculous.
I hope you put in a little more research into your future articles.
I agree with Ian. How can you overlook Penny Arcade, whose Penny Arcade Expo is the largest video game expo in the US? And their very successful charity, Child's Play? It may be difficult for some comic artists to make it online, but it is by no means impossible and has been done several times, as Ian listed. The comic artists connection with the newspaper seems similar to the musical artists connection with record labels. If you rely on the label to pay you, you can probably get a deal and be moderately successful. If the labels go away and you're forced online, then you will be only as successful as your product is good or appreciated by a niche. If your product is truly valuable, then it will make money for you (through concert tickets for bands or merchandise and books for comics) when you give it away for free. But if your product is not valuable, you won't make it.
Two more successful webcomic authors worth looking into for a follow up story:
1) Howard Tayler, creator of Schlock Mercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/), who quit a lucrative job at Novell in 2004 to become a full time cartoonist, after determining he could both support and be closer to his family from turning his (already very popular) webcomic into his full time business.
2) Phil and Kaja Foglio, who moved their Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) from a print comic book published quartlerly to an online webcomic updated 3 times a week. In both cases, independently published graphic novels collecting the online comics and other online merchandising are key components of the business model, and both seem to have had considerable success in pursuing this strategy.
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