Added 1 new A* page:Last week I got an email from TonyDoug Wright of Champion City Comics, who was canvassing some webcomic authors for their opinions on some comic questions of the day for a presentation this past Sunday at Gem City Comic Con. Never needing much prompting to start rattling words of the keyboard, I sent him what turned out to be a ridiculously long reply, but when I asked he said I could use it in my blog, so yay, now I can inflict it on you, my adorable readers!
The three questions were basically: 1) with a resurgence in print comics, interest in webcomics is declining: agree or disagree?, 2) has Kickstarter hurt webcomics, and 3) what makes webcomics better than print comics? You can see there's a bit of an edge even in these paraphrased versions; just the kind of thing, apparently, to spur me to write at length. :P Anyway here's what I came up with after much pacing around my apartment:
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I should start by pointing out that I don't have any really special insight into any of this, and I can only speak from the point of view of someone who makes a small comic on the web and doesn't make much money at it. I certainly don't have any more information on these topics than any other casual user of Google search, and in general these topics are probably so contentious precisely because nobody (aside from Google, perhaps, and they aren't talking ;) has real, hard data on them one way or the other.
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I have to disagree that interest in webcomics is on the decline, and that there is an inverse relationship between the number of print comic readers and webcomic readers, simply because I don't know of any data showing either of those assertions to be true.
Lacking any real data, I can, of course, speculate on these topics, and since it's fun and perhaps leads to some interesting points to think about, I see no reason not to indulge myself. :)
To start with, it depends on what is meant by "print comics." I am going to take this to mean comics of the type that have traditionally been managed by a small number of key publishers: newspaper comic syndicates, and, most particularly, the big superhero comic publishers, Marvel and DC. I suppose we could also throw in what have become traditional "alt" comic styles, such as those published by smaller houses like Fantagraphics.
But many of those have started to show up in digital forms as well, rather than on printed pages, so "print comics" becomes a bit of an outdated label for them; still, I'll stick to it here because it's handy.
Similarly, while "webcomic" traditionally means a comic that appears on the web, many webcomics are now available in print, some from major publishers--but I think we'll just have to be content to know that, by and large, the label means comics of a more individual stripe that began as, or became, independent little things on someone's more or less personal web site.
Having established that, I don't know of any real data showing that print comics pose a threat to webcomics--that if a webcomic reader happens to start looking at print comics, that reader then throws off webcomics and reads print comics exclusively. I've never even heard individual accounts of that happening, although I'm sure they must exist somewhere; I *have* heard personal accounts of people who started out reading webcomics, then discovered print comics, but they didn't stop reading webcomics as a result.
Furthermore, I'm not aware of data showing that webcomic reading is on the decline. I spent some time poking around Quantcast (quantcast.com), which is a service that people can use to directly and publicly measure traffic on their site, with records stretching back years, and tried to see what I could see about readers of popular webcomics. There aren't many that use Quantcast's service, alas, but Questionable Content and CTRL-Alt-Del do--and their numbers have indeed declined a bit in recent years.
That could support the point, but it's also perhaps not surprising in either case: Questionable Content is a long-running story comic, and the longer such things go, the less they feel inclined to market themselves to new readers, and the more complicated they get for a new reader to pick up. And CTRL-Alt-Del has had a major change in format of late, which would be expected to impact its numbers. So I'm not sure anything can be concluded from those; I would have liked to have had numbers from long-running gag comics, such as XKCD or Penny Arcade, but XKCD doesn't use Quantcast, and Penny Arcade appears to, but its data isn't loading.
Traffic for webcomic host Smackjeeves, as measured by Quantcast, has leveled off, and Gocomics, which puts syndicated newspaper comics online, has remained steady. So we can at least say that those two support the notion that online comic reading of those formats--smaller webcomics newspaper comics--and has not been skyrocketing, and I suppose from that you could say that if they did at some point have a honeymoon period of large growth, that period is indeed behind them.
One comic site that is skyrocketing in Quantcast numbers, though, is Comixology--a site that publishes digital versions of traditional print comics, particularly superhero-style comics and graphic novels. Its numbers are way, way up; if there's a honeymoon going on, that's where it is.
Actual printed versions of "print comics," however, don't appear to be shooting upward, although they do seem to have stabilized after years of decline; I don't follow these numbers at all, though, and just gleaned this idea from a quick skim of some sites that sound like they do:
- http://blog.comichron.com/2013/02/overall-print-comics-market-topped-700.html
- http://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html
- http://goodereader.com/blog/digital-comic-news/the-digital-comics-surprise-sales-are-up-while-print-stays-stable/
- http://www.cnet.com/8301-34103_1-57472171/bizarro-world-print-comics-boom-as-digital-sales-rise/
- http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=43773
So if "print" is really up, it's up online--whereas webcomics online don't appear to be up to nearly such an extent in recent years.
However, as I was saying earlier, it isn't clear that webcomics and print comics--digital or otherwise--are actually in direct competition for readers. I mentioned that some of the biggest webcomics are daily gag comics, and, aside from a certain common language of drawings and word balloons, those have very little in common with comics published in print or on Comixology by the likes of Marvel and DC. It's hard to see a reader of Kate Beaton's one-off humor webcomics, for instance, chucking them in favor of digital downloads of Spider-Man or Batman.
But on the other hand there *is* that common language they share, and if any type of comic is able to attract a reader to reading things presented in paired pictures and words, it seems to me that that reader, versed now in the comic language, and knowing that there is value to be had in it, is now more likely to read any sort of comic, anywhere; in the broad scope of things, more comic readers of any type should be good for comics everywhere.
And, more particularly, if print-style comic reading is growing online, that could be quite a good thing for webcomics done more in the style of print comics; realistic or semi-realistic graphic adventure comics have been very under-represented in webcomics as compared to print, so it seems to me that they could stand to reap some fairly direct benefits from a larger online audience of adventure comic readers, even if that audience starts out on a different site.
Should it turn out that that audience *doesn't* migrate outward across the web, I've heard that print publishers have been increasingly finding new authors and artists who began in webcomics, and if the "print" business picks up, those publishers will be looking more and more for new talent to meet demand--and they'll most easily be able to find that talent online. That means webcomics becomes an increasingly attractive place for comic people to make their start.
Traditional comic authors and artists too, though, have been finding their way more and more into free webcomics, even if it's just as one-off stories now and then. With the rise of print comics coming online, and many webcomics coming out with print versions, or webcomics people being hired to produce books for traditional publishers, the lines between webcomics and print comics have been blurring more and more as time goes on.
Besides, it's hard to see the demand for free, high quality comics on the web going away. With the rise of Comixology there may be more competition for, say, selling pdfs, or putting your comics behind a paywall, but those have never been huge money makers for non-pornographic webcomics as far as I'm aware.
No, I would say that the real challenges for webcomics aren't coming from print comics, but from other online forces, and even other webcomics. From what I have heard, for instance, ad revenue--what someone running a web site can hope to get paid for putting someone else's advertisements on their site, traditionally a significant income source for webcomics--is down everywhere on the internet since the early glory days of web speculation and investment capital, and that's a blow right to the heart of the usual webcomic business model--one that has nothing to do with print comics.
And there are simply more and more webcomics as time goes on, so it seems logical to assume that it gets harder and harder to get potential new readers to pay any attention to your own comic, because there are many more free comics clamoring for their attention. While Marvel did a big free comic giveaway on Comixology recently, which had such a huge rush of readers that it knocked out Comixology's servers temporarily--and you can still see the spike in their numbers in Quantcast--there are many more free webcomics coming out all the time than there are free giveaways on Comixology, and it seems to me that it's those free webcomics that are the much more direct competition for other webcomics.
If the webcomic honeymoon is over, it seems to me that it's simply a stabilization after the initial period of rampant growth of the new genre, and in any case it's hard to find any evidence that print comics have caused an overall decline in webcomic readership.
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Regarding Kickstarter, I have to confess that I object to the way Kickstarter does things. Still, I can't claim that I know the things to which I object about Kickstarter harm webcomics in any really tangible way, and if Kickstarter helps comic authors keep making comics by giving them an income they wouldn't otherwise have had--and that certainly seems to have been the case for a number of people--that can only be a good thing.
My objection to Kickstarter comes mainly from the way in which projects are allowed to be "over funded," and so people who use Kickstarter spend a great deal of time trying to persuade a relatively small audience to throw more and more money at them for additional gewgaws and claptrap that really have very little to do with actual, quality comics. Everyone saw, for instance, that Order of the Stick made millions, and since then it has seemed to me that there's been this feeding frenzy of people looking to cash in; I've seen even certain big and successful webcomics running campaigns not for publishing books, which is what Order of the Stick was doing, but for things that aren't really comics, like "art books," or removing ads from their already massively profitable sites.
That's great and all but part of me fears that the actual comics get forgotten in the gold rush; you see now comic authors taking breaks from their regular webcomic publishing schedule to work on their next Kickstarter campaign, or withholding work they would ordinarily have put on the web to save as bonus content for their next Kickstarter. You even see people rearranging their entire business model to base it around regular Kickstarter campaigns, and I worry that these people thus become entirely dependent on Kickstarter and its parent Amazon for their livelihood, and that there's no guarantee that couldn't just stop some day--and then maybe we lose the comic altogether, free or otherwise.
I've also seen or heard of many cases in which the manager of a "successful" Kickstarter campaign has found that in the end, after all the time and money spent on the campaign and rewards and extras and the percentage that goes to Amazon, they haven't actually made any money at it. You could say that these people have simply mismanaged things, but as we see more and bigger people and companies jumping onto the Kickstarter bandwagon, that increase in competition will inevitably make it harder and harder to make a clear profit at it.
Another thing I don't think is a good trend in the long run is an increased price of comic books; I mean that, if you look at the total money a successful Kickstarter takes in, and divide that by the number of contributors, you find that people have spent an average of maybe something like $50 on what is really simply a collected comic volume! Sure you could contribute at the lowest level and get just the comic, at a reasonable price, but many people seem tempted to overspend through Kickstarter, and it seems to me that they may very well end up buying fewer comics as a result, since they simply can't afford it after throwing a great deal of money into a few campaigns. And if comics are encouraged to become, in essence, more and more overpriced, eventually we could reach a point where what began, in the olden days, as a widely affordable entertainment medium, is now exclusively for the well-to-do.
In short, it seems to me that before Kickstarter it was more about the comics, and since Kickstarter, for some it has been more about the money. That's to be expected when money comes knocking, and, again, it's great that some people have found a new livelihood in comics, but from a poor idealist's admittedly mean, spiteful, and jealous point of view, it's a bit of a come-down.
It would be hard to argue that Kickstarter hasn't helped comics, but has it helped free comics on the web? I'm less sure about that.
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I don't see that webcomics are inherently better or worse than print comics; if I find myself reading more webcomics than print comics these days, that's because I'm poor and can't afford all the print comics I'd love to have. Okay, so I guess I really have to say webcomics are better, because I can afford them. :) But content-wise, there's at least as much stuff in print that I would love to be able to read.
Well, I will admit that there's one print comic I do have--a lovely reader bought it for me from my Amazon wish list--that I haven't read as much as I'd intended, simply because the thing is so huge and heavy that I don't actually have a way to read it comfortably! Poor planning on my part, you could say, but in that sense webcomics can sometimes be more convenient to read--on the other hand, I have smaller comic compendiums that are more convenient to read in certain situations than things on my computer or smart phone screens. So I suppose I can't say I see either side having a clear advantage there...although come again, I have limited shelf space, so in the long run, comics in digital form may have the advantage just in terms of storage room--although these *could* be webcomics or digital downloads of print-style comics, now that I think of it, so again, maybe there's no clear victor!
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(You made it to the end!~ :ooo )
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