The Secret Origin of a Web Comic 

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week October 27, 2009 Sign up now!

by Todd Allen -- Publishers Weekly, 10/26/2009 9:21:00 PM

As fate would have it, I’ve recently started doing a Web-based comic. It was suggested people might find it useful to hear how it was arranged and set up.

The arranging part is an old, old story. The Chicago Tribune Media Group recently started up a new site called “ChicagoNow.” I’d liken it to a cross between the Huffington Post and Gawker. It collects a number of local bloggers, a few Chicago-based celebrities/athletes/personalities like the Huffington Post does, but it pays based on traffic in a manner similar to Gawker. I was suggested as a person who might have knowledge and interest in comics to a ChicagoNow editor and I was asked to pitch a serialized graphic novel. It probably didn’t hurt that my name was familiar to one or two other people at the Tribune or that I used to freelance for their business section. Yes, networking still counts. The traffic-based payment was a big part of my interest, allowing me to skip the all-too-typical unpaid start-up period for a story-based comic.   It doesn’t hurt that technically speaking, I’m now writing a comic for the Tribune. Not Tribune Media Services, which produces Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie, but close enough. 

ChicagoNow was looking for some satire, preferably political. I was looking at more of a continuing format and we agreed on a 16-week serial satirizing a local murder case where the defendant has been making the national talk show rounds on programs like the Today Show and Larry King, generally making an ass of himself. The feature is a darkly satirical detective comic, and it can easily switch to sending up our ever-indictable Illinois politicians or Oprah’s non-disclosure-form-addled employees if the launch is well-received and we decide to continue.

I called the feature “Division & Rush,” to give it a Chicago flavor, since it’s on a Chicago site (Division and Rush are the two main bar/nightlife streets, just off the north end of the Magnificent Mile). I also called it that because www.DivisionAndRush.com was available. I’m using that URL as a forward to the blog director the comic resides in at Chicago Now, since it’s a lot easier to remember and if a situation occurs where we would leave Chicago Now, the URL would come with me and I wouldn’t be completely starting over for promotion.

Event-based comics aren’t new—Obama comics are a clear example of that. It’s a little easier, certainly quicker, to do event-based comics online. You cut the solicitation and printing phases out of the equation and go from creative team right to the audience. Theoretically, you could do this the same day you post, although I really wouldn’t want to be that close to deadline. With print comics, you’re usually talking 3-4 months out for when the scripting is supposed to start.

Going into this, my built-in revenue stream is a set CPM rate based on traffic. (CPM—cost per thousand is a standard unit for Web advertising.) Think of it as the digital equivalent of royalties off sales. This isn’t an unusual arrangement for online content, but it does have certain implications for comics. The language used in my initial meeting was “graphic novel,” which connotes comic book-style pages. That’s a lot of art work for one page view. If you write a long text article online, the article gets broken up into pages of roughly 600-1000 words, depending on the website. I decided the thing to do was set up the comic as comic book pages laid out on a grid system. Two columns and two or three rows (4 panels or 6 panels). Then each row would be shown as a single page for viewing.

Advantages:

• Most of the general public is still used to reading comics as a strip format, and this closely approximates the strip format
• It increases the page count, which means it increases income (artists need money)
• It’s still focused on a page, so when it’s time for a print collection, less fuss.

In terms of delivery, I’ve bought into the idea of the “satisfying chunk” of comics reading. When I read Web comics, I like to sit down and read several pages at a time.— the model I was eyeing was Freak Angels, written by Warren Ellis with art by Paul Duffield and serialized on the Avatar website. (I suppose this gets a little meta, since Warren Ellis was thinking about the British weekly comics when he started Freak Angels.) With this in mind, I settled on 5-page chapters, one chapter per week, and roughly 12 page views of strips.

The next part was getting an artist. This is the fun part, because the plan basically calls for a 20-page comic each month. And getting an artist that can handle the output is a tricky thing. Eventually, Scott Beaderstadt signed on. You may remember Scott from his work on Trollords, which was a pretty popular book during the black & white boom.

The general idea with this strip is to seek media coverage at a time coinciding with the legal events we’re satirizing. The hope is that publicity brings in large chunks of people (and with an advertising base, coverage brings a revenue surge) and we can retain some of those people as regular readers. At a certain point, you need to have the comic appreciated as a dark comedy, not just a parody, but it is a hook. Then again, Robert B. Parker did send up Enron in the Spenser novel “Bad Business.”

Revenue-wise, I’m doing this backwards from most strips. A lot of strips emphasize merchandise over advertising. There are reasons for this, but looming large is the inability for most Web comics to get a reasonable advertising rate. I’m lucky: I’m in situation where this is taken care of for me. This means that while I do have to build the audience, I’m not sitting around for a couple months waiting to generate enough material to start doing a ton of merchandising.

Story-based comics tend to be a bit behind gag-a-day comics in exploitation of merchandise. A large reason for this is the popularity of t-shirts spinning out of the gag strips, that story strips just don’t lend themselves to. The merchandising mix for story-based comics tends to lean heavily on the collected print editions. This can mean a wait of years before the main revenue stream is in place.

After 2-3 weeks, I’m planning on pre-selling a collected edition book and experimenting with some basic merchandising, t-shirts and the like. In terms of merchandising, I’m seeing Division & Rush as more of a story strip, than a gag strip, but you need to test these things and see what sticks.

The x-factor, right now, is paid mobile downloads. The iPhone has had some respectable sales racked up for movie tie-in comics and I know of at least one independent comic book that isn’t an adaption which sells more as an iPhone download thanas a print comic. With a lot of the mobile carriers pushing Android phones as we near the holiday season, expect the download market to expand beyond primarily iPhone and hit an even wider audience. Will people pay to download a freely available Web comic onto a mobile phone? I have no idea, but if people pay to subscribe to blogs on Kindle, I see no reason why they wouldn’t. I have a mind to bundle 4 installments together for 20-page downloads, and will be investigating this before too very long. It’s an option Web cartoonists need to at least look at until there’s more available data.

Ultimately, for all comics, it does boil down to whether people like the actual comic itself and all the marketing and merchandising in the world will only get you so far. This is how I’m attempting to optimize the comic and leverage the environment it’s in. It just happens that my revenue environment looks a whole lot more like blogging for Gawker than it does for a more merchandise-oriented comic like, say, Finder.

[Todd Allen is a technology consultant and adjunct professor with Columbia College Chicago's Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department. Allen's book, The Economics of Web Comics, is taught at the college level. His further comics industry commentary is available at Indignant Online. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of PW Comics Week.]