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Checking on Modern Tales with Joey Manley, Part One

Posted: Monday, June 2
By: Tim O'Shea

One imagines that Modern Tales Publisher Joey Manley must sleep with one eye open, so as to make sure his various projects continue to run as smoothly as possible. When SBC first contacted Manley it was to discuss his role as sidekick on the new DivaLea Show starring Lea Hernandez (the weekly Internet radio show about webcomics and more). But upon reflection, it became apparent that while SBC had Manley’s attention, it’d do well to ask about the changes involving Adventurestrips.com, as well as the general state of Modern Tales--the site he launched in March 2002, along with about 30 web cartoonists, with the simple goal to “build a small but viable business around the idea of selling webcomics directly to an audience on a subscription basis”.

Before anyone knew it, the interview grew into a two-part Q&A.

In this first part, Manley discusses the causes behind AdventureStrips’ end, as well as his take on how the core and sister sites are performing in general. In the second part, which will be published tomorrow, SBC and Manley discuss Girlamatic and the overall road ahead for Modern Tales, as well as the details behind the DivaLea Show and two other planned Internet radio shows.

Tim O’Shea: I think with the unavoidable transition of AdventureStrips some people may not understand that doesn't mean Modern Tales and its other four or five offshoots are doing fairly well. Would you like to give folks an update on the state of Modern Tales?

Joey Manley: Sure!

Growth is steady. We have a net gain of about 150 subscribers (after counting cancellations) every month, and have had that same net growth for about nine months. (The only exceptions are months where we launch new sites, when our net growth bumps up a bit). Our fastest-growing sites are serializer.net (with about 500 subscribers), AmericanElf.com (with about 300), and girlamatic.com (getting close to 300 after one month in business). Modern Tales itself, the flagship site, is still far and away the most popular (with about 2000 subscribers), but has started to stabilize a bit. I expect serializer and girlamatic to catch up to Modern Tales within about a year. All of this, of course, is puny compared to mainstream print comics -- but pretty amazing, given that we were told "nobody" would pay for webcomics!

On the AdventureStrips cancellation: Each website is a tremendous drain of energy and resources, given that the business side of MT is one person -- just handling customer service alone takes up several hours a day for each site, not to mention the constant need for bugfixes and site improvements as well as accounting and check writing for the artists. Most of the sites return more resources than they consume, which means they are healthy publications. The only way we can survive, given that we don't have investment backing, is for every part of our enterprise to contribute as much as is possible. If one part isn't growing, it brings everything else down, in a low-resources situation. Part of being a bootstrap operation is that we don't have a lot of excess resources lying around -- hence the need to cancel the AdventureStrips site, which was consuming more resources than it was bringing in -- but that's also the reason we are going to be around for a long, long time. We don't have to make some investor's nut.

I think that most people understand this. Subscriptions to our other sites have proceeded unabated since we made the AdventureStrips announcement.

TO: Looking back on lessons learned with AdventureStrips, is there anything you would have done differently?

JM: AdventureStrips was a fine product that wasn't able to find an audience. Much of the motivation for launching it was to find out what works and what doesn't in the webcomics economy. I learned a lot of things in that regard (especially when comparing decisions made regarding AdventureStrips' business model, free content policy, etc., to the policies in place on our other sites). It would be easy to say now that I would have taken the lessons I've learned from the failure, and then applied them backwards to the AdventureStrips launch to avoid the failure -- but the fact is that if we hadn't worked through the AdventureStrips launch & ultimate cancellation, we wouldn't know a lot of things that we now know. So, no, I wouldn't have done anything differently.

TO: Do you think webcomics are starting to make inroads in terms of receiving nominations and overall industry recognition? What do you think needs to happen for that acceptance to grow, just the passage of time and people becoming familiar with the forum?

JM: I'm not sure if the audience for comic books will ever be exactly the same as the audience for webcomics -- in the same way that the audience for comic strips is not exactly the same as the audience for comic books. There's a lot of overlap, though, which will only grow over time. The field of comic books is many things to many people, and some of those things are absolutely incompatible with webcomics (collectability is very important to some comic book readers, for example, less important to others). I find it particularly telling that the one genre which dominates popular comic books, superheroes, is completely missing from mainstream webcomics. This tells me that the audiences are different, and that they are coming to webcomics for very different reasons. Which means that the creators come to webcomics for very different reasons, too. Which means, ultimately, that we may be a different industry altogether.

That said, I think it would be to the extreme benefit of the comic book industry to embrace webcomics: because the audiences for webcomics are much, much, much larger than the audiences for comic books. That's nothing I can prove scientifically, but anecdotal evidence is all over the place. Since webcomics have been free for such a long time, and since efforts are scattered across several thousand websites, the data is still coming in. But my feeling is that webcomics -- mostly the free webcomics -- have created an entirely new wave of readers, readers who have now become accustomed to getting entertainment in comic form on a regular basis. Getting those people into the comic book stores, and involved in the comic book community, should be a top priority.

Modern Tales considers itself a bridge between these two worlds.



Please click here for part two with Joey Manley.