Comic for Friday, Nov 19, 2004

Posted: 8:57 am, Friday, November 19, 2004

I guess today's strip doesn't exactly have a punchline, but I like the third panel. This was the first comic since I've been doing this where working on a computer bit me in the ass. I somehow closed Illustrator without saving the last two panels on Monday, so I had to redraw them last night. You may be interested to know that in the original draft, Ron had his head down on the desk in defeat, and Jen's gallery was in the Fifties instead of the Twenties. You may be, but I hope to God you're not, because that's just not interesting.

This post is going to be a little different than many of mine, at least for the first bit. If you don't want to read a totally self-indulgent recap of the webcomic forum I went to, just click here and it'll skip that part of the post.

On Wednesday, instead of watching Lost with 2.0, I went to a forum on webcomics at NYU. This, amazingly, is the first university function I've gone to since I've been here in NYC for over four years now. I'm not sure which is more embarrassing - that I spent four years in a city with several renowned learning institutions and this is the first time I've taken advantage of anything open to the public, or that the first such function I attended was about webcomics. But, anyway, it was basically a two-hour Q&A with R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties, Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content, and Squidi of - well, actually, I'm not sure of the name of his strip. He seems to have more than one strip going over there. You'd imagine a webcomic forum to be a little bit dorky, and it was, but it was still entertaining and educational at the same time. The guys only briefly discussed how they got their start, since there's pretty much no guaranteed success method to having a webcomic.

By the way, Diesel Sweeties is the only one of those three I read regularly, and is probably the most anomylous webcomic out there - most of the dude's massive readership aren't comic readers, and the only advertisement he's ever taken out was in Bust magazine, which had lead to an amazingly high amount of female readers of the strip. I did poke through Questionable Content one time, it's OK and has improved a lot since I read it, and I'll probably give whatever it is the other guy does a shot sometime, but it's pretty heavily fantasy-based, and I tend not to read many fantasy webcomics. Um. Any, actually, that I can think of. Used to, don't now.

Anyway, so these guys - all of whom actually do their comics for a living these days - all said that they started building up their readership by joining a bunch of comics forums, which is actually a horrifying concept to me, because I don't really like forums other than lurking (I'm too easily angered), by word-of-mouth viral marketing-type shit, and by having their own forum board, giving people a chance to chat about the comics and make comments and crap.

As I said, kind of scared of forums. Other people are frightening.

Word of mouth. Probably my constant infusion of polarizing political views affects who all would even be interested in the Five Bucks community (one of the guys mentioned that, actually, quoting Tree's favorite line about R. Kelly, "separate the artist from the art"), but I know that some of you guys are telling other people, which is cool. I dunno, I'm still hesitant to tell many people about this thing myself, but it is neat to see the counter go up (all time high of 871 the other day, by the way).

Getting a forum myself. I have no friggin' idea how to do this. But I guess I'll start working on that. Thanksgiving break is coming up (break? what am I, still in school?), maybe I'll bring the Dreamweaver book home with me.

Anyway, that was more or less the part about getting a readership built up. I'll probably take some action toward this end in December - too busy next week - and I'll keep you posted on it, as I keep you posted on friggin' everything in this li'l blog, but I'm just spelling out thoughts right now. The rest of the little forum thing was mostly them tossing jokes around - R. is a hipster, Jeph is metal, and Squidi is an angry dork. It was a pretty eclectic group, but it made for a pretty entertaining panel.

Oh, as for how these dudes make their living on this - t-shirts. I didn't ask them how big their readership is that they can sell enough t-shirts to stay in the black, but, damn, that must be a lot of friggin' t-shirts. If you check out any of the above links, make sure to check out Diesel Sweeties' store. His t-shirts are the bomb.

OK, more or less it. Got a few quick links to pitch your way.

Dinosaur comics. This was mentioned last night - it is friggin' hilarious. Highly, highly recommended.

On this day in 2002, Matthew won a trailer, a trip to the Dodgers' training camp, and a freestanding safe in The Price Is Right showcase by bidding $25,000 on a price package with an actual retail price of $26,615. His opponent, the hopelessly outmatched Oscar, bid only $12,500 on a package of a living room, carpeting, 51-inch telly, and a player piano. Oscar, that stupid asshole, underbid by a whopping $8,847. How do I know this? It's all thanks to this site, a true testimony to the absolute waste of resources of human potential that the internet is.

Oh, by the way, I have been heartily and repeatedly corrected on my comment that the Monday Night Football flack went unreported on Tuesday. Don't know how I missed it, but I did, no less than three times.

RAW sent this awesome op-ed from the Washington Post about how depressed New Yorkers are right now. I agree on everything except the bit about the Goat Fuckers.

Anyway, that's about it for today. I think I had something else I wanted to talk about, but if it was of any import at all, it'll come back to me in the future. My Thanksgiving-ish is this Sunday, so I'll probably talk about that some on Monday despite the un-Thanksgiving themed strip I have planned. It's going to be a short week next week, as I'm taking Wednesday off to prepare for actual Thanksgiving, so I'll be posting the third and final strip of the week on Tuesday at about 5 pm, just an advance heads-up. Oh, and the Irish tip off the season tonight against Harvard, so, Go Irish, Beat Crimson!

bullfrog