Joined: 03 Mar 2003 Posts: 205 Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 1:14 pm Post subject: The Future Of Webcomics
Very interesting round-table on the future of webcomics. I got a kick out of William G's final words.
Quote:
William G: I think Amy Ganter, Hard, Fred Ghallager, and Ghastly are creating the sort of comics that will represent the future. The manga-style artists have tapped into the growing cultural juggernaut that is translated Japanese manga. And with all of the kids who are reading it now, what gets filtered through them will be what we'll be seeing in five to ten years.
So much so that I was inspired to create a little artwork.
[url=http://ghastlycomic.com]
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I, for one, welcome our new cyborg dick-girl overlords. _________________ Ghastly
--
Ghastly's Ghastly Comic
everything I do winds up creating robot chicks with dicks.
Actually, I'm going to step out of character here and try to make things a bit more serious.
I'm really curious if anyone has thought and opinions about our soothsaying about the future, and about our picks for the best of 2004. Did we miss anyone? Put up a comics you think are a huge hunk of crap? _________________ http://www.dimesfornickels.com
Joined: 14 May 2003 Posts: 425 Location: St Austell, Cornwall, Great Britain
Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 9:59 pm Post subject:
Reading the predictions put one thought in my head: I hope the "glut of non-serious hobbyist cartoonists" stays. I hope they don't all roll over and turn into good little paying readers. And not just because some of them might eventually turn into serious pros. Between the bored doodlers and the dedicated aspiring full-timers there are a lot of imperfect interesting hobbyists who will never be great and probably don't expect to become great, who don't have the time or the health, but who value what talent and skill they do have and who produce work that can be rough, awkward, imperfect, but still with ideas, humour, feeling, enough to make them worth creating and worth seeing. I hope there are always enough curious free-range readers to give them some audience. No serious professional cartoonist has any business resenting them.
Hey, you know Rikk would be on their side... _________________ I am large, I contain chocolate.
I agree absolutely with Tim about "Darwinism." The fact is, creative expression is a vital part of a healthy personality. It's completely perverse to want people to stop being creative and become passive consumers.
Joined: 03 Mar 2003 Posts: 205 Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 10:40 pm Post subject:
The only thing worse is when they stop being creative and become passive agressive consumers.
"No no, that's okay. I'll just sit here and read your strip and buy your merchandise and books. I mean I wanted to make a strip of my own, but that's okay. Far be it from me to stand in the way of you and your creative asperations. Don't worry, *sigh*, I'll be fine... over here... being uncreative..."
I'm not saying hobbiests need to go away completely. Technically, I'm a hobbiest as well. But I've given up on the idea of being able to expand our audience wide enough to support us all.
Hobbiests are like deer. They are majestic, lovely creatures that fill our eyes full of tears when we see them. There are just too many of them eating up the few resources that's there, and they keep getting splattered on people's car hoods.
Okay, the metaphor got away from me, but I simply dont think the audience is or ever will be big enough to support all of us in our monetary goals. That means we need to fight harder for what we have, and to succeed, we need less competition. Basically: Too many wolves, not enough sheep.
But I dont see it as something that MUST be done, I see it as something that will happen naturally. _________________ http://www.dimesfornickels.com
^ It smells like freedom
Last edited by William G on Wed Dec 15, 2004 4:26 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 14 May 2003 Posts: 425 Location: St Austell, Cornwall, Great Britain
Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2004 5:42 pm Post subject:
I'm thinking there might be an analogy with music here. As I understand it there's a wide spectrum there: full-timers, part timers and spare-timers; big and small names; genres and sub-to-the-power-of-N-genres; huge-audience music and nannoscale-niche music. If anything, the internet may make things more so; it lets anyone put up their stuff for anyone to hear, and it makes thinly-spread sales economical for little-known music that might not sell enough to cover shelf-space costs in a physical shop. I'm thinking of Chris Anderson's long-tail marketing here.
William G wrote:
I simply dont think the audience is or ever will be big enough to support all of us in our monetary goals.
Part of my point is that you don't all have those monetary goals. I was thinking of the spare-timers who aren't out to make a paying job of it and won't be forking out on banner ads or doing the full seven strips a week with full-page color Sundays. Their audience probably consists largely of each other. _________________ I am large, I contain chocolate.
Joined: 15 Dec 2002 Posts: 450 Location: Burlington VT
Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 1:35 pm Post subject:
With regards to the desireability of a weeding out process goes, I can sympathize with William G. Amateurs who haven't found their voice or mastered their tools are one thing, but there's a huge abundance of people in the medium who just don't give a shit about what they're doing. For them, webcomics are a means to an end, whether it's to get attention, feel like they are "Part of the scene" or to develop social connections with like minded people. These people essentially latch onto trends and then figure out how to do as little creative work as possible. The best example is the glut of comics which are essentially screen shots of popular video games with nonsensical humor grafted on. It's like competing in a gallery scene crowded up with paint by the number kits.
That said, I tend to agree that if many of these people move on, they're just going to get replaced with other people equally unambitious. (Possibly worse, as they'll have grown up on prexisting bad webcomics..) The only thing I see changing this will be if there's some other, similar medium that lures them away. As bandwidth increases, I see cheap digital video being a possible, although that could spell trouble for webcomics as a whole. (Like what TV did to newspaper funnies.)
What tends to give me more hope is that the median age for webcomic readers is fairly young, and it's apparent that a lot of them are still fairly uninformed in their tastes. If we can hang on to some of that audience as they mature, it may open up possibilities for a wider range of material to find substantial audiences. _________________
Part of my point is that you don't all have those monetary goals.
Oh, I agree.
But my view was based on the idea that for those who want to earn cash from webcomics, they'll need to wait for the ranks to thin out a bit. So what they're producing becomes the supply for the demand.
It may or may not happen the way I see it. We'll have to check it out again in 2010 _________________ http://www.dimesfornickels.com
This is a big issue for me, because I'm one of those "hobbyists." I make comics, and put them on the internet because I'd like it if a few people read them. On the other hand, as a reader, I find myself pretty frusturated with the amount of shall we say, less than... good ...comics people are putting up, and worse, the fact that it's disheartening and frusturating cartoonists who are very commited to comics, or want to make a living from it. Even as a "hobbyist" the situation is daunting due to the virtual impossibility of ever gaining a readership far beyond people I know in real life.
I don't know what will happen next... But I think its a valid point that the biggest problem facing webcomics may be not that there's not enough mainstream interest or mainstream respect or print comics or anything like that, but there's too many damn people who think other people want to read the stuff they've made. I think Steve Hogan's right about the unlikely of the mass of bad-comics going away without being replaced, though.
I dunno, but, speaking as part of the problem, I really sympathize with people who are really commited to webcomics and feel frusturated by the current 10,000s of other people who are making stuff too..
Joined: 21 Oct 2002 Posts: 755 Location: Boston, MA
Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 7:55 pm Post subject:
I think this is one of the main reasons why the large publisher model isn't going to go away, despite some people's claims that the internet has made it obsolete. It used to be that publishers were needed because self-publishing was economically prohibitive. On the internet, publishers are needed because self-publishing is organizationally prohibitive. Pubishers provide a mechanism for sorting those tens-of-thousands of comics into managable groups of comics with similar appeal. _________________ TwentySevenLetters.com Gingerbread houses
I picked up a couple of mentions in this issue of the Examiner, all of which I'm greatful for (it was particularly flattering to see The Nile Journals make the 25 list - it's a weird little thing to put together and I'm seldom sure whether the results are actually any good or not, so it's nice to get a bit of positive encouragement like this).
Elsewhere in the issue, I found the discussion of sound in the Future of Webcomics article to be very interesting. I've been wanting to do something more fully realised with sound for a while and reading this discussion has left me with the determination to really take a decent crack at in 2005.
I was thinking specifically about this problem:
Quote:
there's no way of closely synchronizing sound to the story being told... ...you can't have the sound begin when the reader looks at a particular panel, because the computer has no idea where the reader is looking.
When I had one of those 2am trying to get to sleep moments of realisation - with the Tarquin Engine, the computer always knows exactly where the reader is looking because to look at that panel the reader will have had to have clicked on it.
I've been tinkering a bit with the engine and I think I've figured out a way to draw in a kind of solid sound score behind the panels of the comic. It should make it very easy to compose around the layout of a comic, with sound loops that activate only as specific panels or sequences of panels come into view.
The trick now is to come up with a narrative that really uses the potential of sound to enhance the story. I've got some definite ideas forming about the rules I need to follow in order for something like this to work, but no suitable spark of story idea yet. Hopefully something interesting will suggest itself soon. _________________ New Experiments In Fiction
Joined: 14 May 2003 Posts: 425 Location: St Austell, Cornwall, Great Britain
Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2004 7:42 pm Post subject:
I was interested by what Von Flue said about expanding the audience:
Quote:
I would like to see advertising targeted somewhere else than at existing comics book readers, or webcomics fans. I'd like to see ads in webzines and art mags, print ads, articles in your local papers. I think we have grown to fill our tank here. We've got about as much as we can out of the spillover from print. It's time to go out from our father's house and find new readers (especially readers that don't think $.25 is a lot to pay for a comic reading experience. Heck, even readers who remember paying $.25 for a comic!)
It sounds about right to me. _________________ I am large, I contain chocolate.
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