Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.

Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.

Webcomics Round Table

By Park Cooper

Some months ago, I started getting some people in webcomics together. The main purpose was to create a round-table discussion for this interview. Well, the group came, grew a little, and finally fell apart through busy-ness, but I finally got around to putting the start of one of our conversations together.



Park Cooper (Wicker Man Studios): Just what exactly IS the audience for webcomics, anyway?

We KNOW it is, at LEAST:

--the people with Modern Tales/Keen subscriptions who read Comixpedia.

Shall we also feel safe in adding:

--a whole lot of gamers?
--furries?
--some manga readers?

Or, as I think, is it actually a whole lot more than all that?

What's more, are frustrated print comics readers:
--Ready for webcomics?
--Already into webcomics and no one's admitting it?
--Ready for only certain types of webcomics?

Also: Whom do you feel YOUR audience is? Whom do you feel your target audience is, too?

So let’s break that down to:

--Of what sort of constituency would you say your current audience is currently composed?

--Let's say you won the lottery and started crankin' out flimsies and graphic novels. Is your audience ready to follow you?

--Does your awareness of your own audience (if indeed you have any awareness of them at all, Gaz) affect any decisions you make about anything, ever?



Gaz (John Law): “1. Of what sort of constituency would you say your current audience is currently composed?”

The latter. People who've stumbled onto LAW in one way or another. People who aren't necessarily web comic readers, but are net-savvy. Eisner readers, pulp readers, movie/genre/comics history/film noir buffs (and all of these cross over and over-lap to certain degrees).

“2. Let's say you won the lottery and started crankin' out flimsies and graphic novels. Is your audience ready to follow you?”

Yep. If they had the money. For the kind of stories I do, 'print' is still the 'currency' and the 'comfort'.

“3. Does your awareness of your own audience (if indeed you have any awareness of them at all, Gaz) affect any decisions you make about anything, ever?”

I'd love to say yes to this, but being very honest with myself... no. I do what I do. If I have any grand plan, chances are my failure in meeting deadlines and my being easily distracted would put the kibosh on it pretty quickly. I've learnt through harsh experience what my strengths and weaknesses are. I've probably lost readers because of this, but the readers I do have, understand my faults and know I'm around for the long haul. I'm always contactable via my web site and various forums, so people know I'm still alive. So I think the readers that stick with me have developed a certain amount of patience and a desire to see what I do, as I do it. Can't ask for more than that.



Maritza Campos (College Roomies From Hell): I think the webcomic audience is the people who spend some time surfing the net everyday or every few days, out of divertimento. This includes fans of blogs, online news, chatters, online animation, jokes, and practically every other kind of entertainment, including ones such as file-sharing and porn.

In short: bored people.

Park, you refer to “frustrated print comics readers.” I think it depends why they are frustrated. In the case of newspaper comics, many print readers turn to the web for edgier content. There are some requisites print readers have to have.

* One is a willingness to forgive some things in exchange of others (they have to be willing to forgive amateurish mistakes in exchange for raw talent and originality, for example).

* They have to be accustomed to read on the screen. Believe it or not one of the big gripes of print comics readers is that they miss the tactical experience of holding a comic -the touch of paper and the smell of ink. I always answer to that that I never buy a comic because it smells good, but the complaint is valid: to some people is tremendously tiring reading on the screen, although I think it's more a psychological barrier than anything else.

* They have to get used to things/stories/characters/comics not acting in the way everybody is used to. There are no editors and no boundaries. There will be a few surprises, confusion, and new ways to look at things. Readers who like staying on the safe side of the street might not find webcomics enjoyable.

I have quite a broad audience. Mostly, college and high-school students, post graduates, and middle-agers even. I even have some youngsters and some older people. Basically, anybody with a liking for absurdist humor, sitcoms, and funny weirdness can get into CRFH, for example. There's the big obstacle of being serial, and that requires my audience to have a bit of patience while reading the -very crude- early years. Other than that, I hope it has some universal appeal. Practically everybody has at some point shared a room or a house with someone that is totally opposed/incompatible.



Steve Bryant (Athena Voltaire): About Maritza’s “bored people”: This is the drum that I've been banging forever. If people can forward a link of a kid with a lightsaber clowning around or another kid lip-synching an obscure Ukranian pop song all over the net, online comics should be receiving greater attention.

There's an existing audience that already enjoys entertainment similar to the work of many of the posters here. The guy in the cubicle next to you enjoys crime drama like THE SHIELD or classic film noir? Send him a hyperlink to JOHN LAW. The girl that's your lab partner in Chemestry that always reading the HARRY POTTER books? Send her a link to GUN STREET GIRL. (I apologize to Maritza, as I'm not familiar with her work.)

Unfortunately, I don't know how one would go about launching a grass roots campaign like this. From a comic marketing perspective, it's certainly a lot easier to get people to click on a hyperlink than it is to get them into a comic shop.

Online comics should work virally and the audience should grow at a geometric pace. It's the stealth attack of comics...when you send the hyperlink, you don't need to say "Check out this COMIC." the potential audience never needs to know what they're getting themselves into. Just hit 'em with kickass content and let it grow from there.

...getting off my soapbox now...



Ping Teo (The Jaded): Another often overlooked audience that I think exists: Webcomic Creators.

It sounds odd, but a fair number of my readers are also people with webcomics of their own. I suppose one would say they enjoy comics so much they read and create them at the same time.

Webcomics do expand virally, I think. The gaming comics in particular get a lot of coverage from game sites. (Yours truly was drawn into webcomics by this method back in 1999.)

Those of us with pay comics do experience an audience restriction though. Everyone can click on a link and follow up a comic, but even if it's only a small amount to subscribe, not everyone has paypal account, so that does put a crimp on the rate of the viral expansion.



Maritza Campos: *runs away crying because Steve said he isn’t familiar with her work*

You do a great comic with eye-popping art, btw.

“Viral comics growing at a geometric pace”: Theoretically yes, but I think the thing is, there are a LOT of online comics. See it yourself, precisely with your previous statement. CRFH is pretty well known among certain circles - I am after all, a veteran of online comics, and one of the original Keenspotters... But it seems like the online comics community is split in many small groups, that don't necessarily interact or know each other, and the same goes for the readers. Readers of Modern Tales comics not necessarily will read Keenspot comics, and keenspot readers maybe don't know/read Dumbrella comics or PvP or Sluggy Freelance.

I do think we should have (as creators) more bridges among our communities, or we risk advertising our comics always to the same readers we already have.

What I meant with all this, of course, it's that the online comics readership might be actually a lot larger than we estimate.

(Hi Ping!)


Park Cooper: Responding to Maritza:

"* One is a willingness to forgive some things in exchange of others (they have to be willing to forgive amateurish mistakes in exchange for raw talent and originality, for example)."

Well... they USUALLY must... but must they every time? I'm not sure the people I've gathered here make a lot of amateurish mistakes... But then I guess you're talking about webcomics in general...

"* They have to be accustomed to read on the screen. Believe it or not one of the big gripes of print comics readers is that they miss the tactical experience of holding a comic -the touch of paper and the smell of ink."

I HATE that. And part of the reason I hate it is because I don't know what to do about it. And an entirely different reason I hate it is because part of it feels like a fear of technology itself... "Oh, no, NOW good ol' Action Comics and Detective Comics are under attack from the WEB, too! Won't someone think of... >choke< ...the MEMORIES?"

"I always answer to that that I never buy a comic because it smells good, but the complaint is valid: to some people it is tremendously tiring reading on the screen, although I think it's more a psychological barrier than anything else."

Darn right it is.

Yes, I suppose it can be tiring to look at a screen for too long... but geez, reading black and white comics in bad light and sometimes in good light (Antarctic's collected GOLD DIGGER comes to mind as does Marvel Essential Archive reprints) can also hurt your eyes before too long. Oh well...


Barb Lien-Cooper (Gun Street Girl): Funny how it doesn't hurt people's eyes to surf all night on the web or read the news on the web... 15 years ago I heard that no one would ever read news on a computer because of these same Luddite sort of tendencies... now, however, every newspaper has to deal with the challenge of "I can get my news on the web." I want to ask those people, how many hours a day do they spend reading OTHER things on the web? Being a bit of a student of history, the tactile argument reminds me a little bit of Hollywood whistling in the dark saying "well there's no danger to us from Television, who would want to have it on that little screen when they can experience it on the big screen?" Well, the convenience and the desire for new content led to TV winning out. And there's always someone who says ‘It'll never work, because…’


Park: "* They have to get used to things/stories/characters/comics not acting in the way everybody is used to. There are no editors and no boundaries. There will be a few surprises, confusion, and new ways to look at things. Readers who like staying on the safe side of the street might not find webcomics enjoyable."

And if I want to put those people in zoos and museums? Does that mean I need help?

Hi, I'm Park, and wife and I are both rather angry today.

"Another often overlooked audience that I think exists: Webcomic Creators."

Who overlooks that? Present company excepted, it drives me nuts to think of so many webcomics creators just going around reading and commenting on each other's webcomics. How can anyone read Comixpedia for five minutes and not notice?

I tell myself to calm down, that most manga fans want to make manga, too... but I can never sell to myself that that makes it okay.


Barb: What always shocks me is how many people read webcomics that have no print background, no interest in entering a comic store, but love sequential storytelling as strips or episodic series. And almost all of that came from word of mouth people who decided it was okay to try something different that don't care about print comics' glorious past or who Stan Lee or Jack Kirby are/were (which Park and I are rather tired of in print comics people)... ...in some ways I feel like webcomics have succeeded where manga comics have also succeeded which is getting to the type of people that are just casual readers, that haven't made print comic books part of their life nor lifestyle... in fact before the advent of manga and frankly webcomics, people told me it couldn't be done, that there was no way to get those nontraditional readers. And I could see webcomics as being a lot closer to being a 'gateway drug' to print comics than manga, because manga is even more self-sufficient than webcomics. And there is something interesting about webcomics that I think we've all been kind of hinting at which is that the web is kind of the ultimate brown paper bag: when you're reading webcomics you're reading... they are comics you can read at work, at home, on your little laptop wherever you take that... and no one will think it's half as strange that you're looking at a strip or comic online, because you gotta do something at work while you're waiting for a meeting to start or whatever, than if you pulled out a print flimsy or graphic novel, in which case people would thing (and wrongly) 'oh gee look at the case of arrested development over there'.

It's kind of been interesting to me that the whole print-comicbook-audience-won't-read-webcomics thing is in some ways the thing that I heard about 5 years ago with manga: "well that's not a REAL comic"... but it was real enough to get into bookstores... it feels like the print comics industry's and frankly the readership's first response is to decry the authenticity of something or sneer at how much impact it can have and then someone, say a publisher with vision, or a trend changes, or times change, and then ta da manga is a huge force to be reckoned with because it does offer some difference and variety... And things do change... just to use the manga example again, 3 years ago I talked to comics reviewers and none of them would review manga because they weren't REAL comics. And now you can't shake a stick without finding a manga review on the web.

I think that a lot of readers, be they longtime print comic readers or just casual readers are looking for a lot more variety than the industry is currently providing... and while it might not seem like much now, to an extent webcomics have exploded... to the point where I'm actually starting to see little comic book website news articles like "uh... what is a 'webcomic', where can one find this 'webcomic' thing" etc.

It really gets to my causey sort of nature to be a part of the 'new technology', another way of providing choice. Because I stopped finding enough choice, when I was reading print comics, and it's nice to be able to be one of the real alternatives...

But being one of said real alternative does present the challenge of how to market your work, whom to market it to, and, if you do come from a print comics background like I do, trying to get comic book news websites to even recognize your right to exist is very frustrating.

We know that passive marketing works to an extent, but is that really the only or best alternative that creators who want to expand their audience have? Is this "Build it and they will come" approach the only approach that can be used? The only approach that makes any difference? I mean do the other approaches such as trying to get proactive about getting your name and your work out there work? Or what?

Is trying to market toward the traditional print comic book audience a lost cause? Is the wrongful perception that 'webcomics creators are really just a bunch of losers and wannabes that didn't have the right commercial stuff to get into print' insurmountable?

What I guess I'm asking here is, is it a waste of time to try to court the print comics readers? Should I go straight for the average, mainstream, Entertainment Weekly-reading, Starbucks-sipping, bored people on the web who don't know or care who's in the Fantastic Four?



Ping: One advantage of webcomics many people have we all know is that it's easily accessible. Eventually it's going to dawn on a (semi)serious fan that they too can give making a webcomic a go, and sites like Keenspace and Drunkduck make it even easier to have their own webcomic.

I'm sure a lot of us here started drawing comics of our own after falling in love with the comic form. I know I was doing the same long before the web came into play, but before the web, I never had much intention of my comics of being published or read by anyone who wasn't in my immediate vicinity. It was more of a self-amusement thing.

What I see happening in webcomics is a similar thing, but now because the tools for public display are there and ready to be used... Why not? The philosophy of thought goes: "It may not be the best thing in the world, but a few people may like it. And it doesn't hurt to try..." So into the fray we jump!

Most of them don't last of course, but my point is, the reason sites like Comixpedia seem oversaturated with creators is because they tend to attract more hardcore followers of webcomics. And because it's so easy to start a webcomic, most of the hardcore followers will have at one time attempted or are attempting a webcomic of their own. (Keeping one running, another story all together)

But I don't see necessarily it as a bad or unnatural thing. A lot of people see it as just fun hobbies, and have no plans for anything going anywhere. It would be good if we could have more vocal non-webcomic creator readers, of course, but the nature of the web makes creating a webcomic such a tempting activity that anyone serious enough to talk about comics eventually tries it themselves.

Or at least, that's what I think from my perspective as a web-only person.

About web comics people who have nothing to do with print comics: You've just about described me.

I still remember one of my online friend's horrified reaction when I asked casually "Who's Jack Kirby?" in response to something he said:

I think he said something like "Jack Kirby, blah blah the father of all comics, blah blah, world of comics would not be the same without Kirby."

To which I replied "Well... the world of American Superhero comics, maybe. But I wouldn't say ALL comics. I'm sure the comics in Europe and Asia would have soldiered on anyway."

Same friend who recently tried to tell me about the history of the multiple Batwomen and Batgirls in the Silver or Golden Age something like that, and evolution of their bodytypes, to which I replied: "Uh... You know I don't read those comics. And I don't plan on doing so anytime in the near future, why would I care if Batgirl has smaller boobs than the original Batwoman?"

I don't see webcomics as a gateway drug to print comics at all. (It seems to smack of the webcomics are substandard/on the web because they can't get on print school of thought to me.) In fact, if it had to be a 'gateway drug' to anything, I see it as a gateway drug to MORE webcomics.

But that's just me. Maybe there will come a time when webcomics in print will return to bookstores and comic shops as something more than a novelty, but right now I see the web as the web.











http://wickermanstudios.com/

http://www.willeisner.com/johnlaw/

http://www.crfh.net/

http://www.athenavoltaire.com/

http://www.thejaded.co.uk/

http://www.panel2panel.com/gsg-archives.html