The end of Chronicle

Since I spoke to Joe Infurnari last week about the abrupt end of the Process, I thought it would be nice to talk to a creator who brought his work to a more deliberate end. For Way, Chronicle was a testing ground where he developed both his cartooning skills and the discipline to draw a daily comic. And now he is applying those lessons elsewhere: as it happens, Way is launching a new comic, Strewth!, on November 30 (but click now for the preview art).

Brigid Alverson: Why did you decide to end Chronicle?

Josh Way: I knew from the start that Chronicle would have an ending, though I was flexible about how and when that would happen. There was always a sense that Chronicle was a prelude to something else. Not that it was a throwaway or a false start, but it was as much about developing discipline as a cartoonist as it was about the story. For lack of a less dumb analogy, I suppose it was a kind of cartoonist boot camp I devised for myself.

The decision to actually end the strip came when I felt I had established some discipline in the daily work, and when the story was moving naturally into a kind of "third act." I started wishing I could apply the things I'd learned to something new, and the web platform gave me the freedom to move in that direction.

Brigid: Were there financial factors involved? Was it competing with paid comics work, or was it bringing in enough money that you felt it was worthwhile to keep it going for a while?

Josh: Chronicle was basically unprofitable. Ad sales paid for hosting and I sold some books, but it never successfully monetized. It might have been the limited appeal of the subject matter, but it was more likely my ignorance in marketing. I was working a full time job in web development and enjoying some freelance writing opportunities at the same time, so there was income elsewhere. That income plus the low cost and relative freedom of the webcomic model meant that unprofitability didn't have to kill Chronicle. Still, high on my list of priorities for the next project are finding a broader audience and monetizing. I would very much like to make money drawing a webcomic.

Brigid: Do you think the fact that it was a webcomic, rather than a print comic where you have to worry about issues, page counts, etc., affected your planning process? Is it easier to be open-ended with a webcomic than a print comic?

Josh: Yes, and yes. The freedom of the webcomic model gives the artist so much flexibility in terms of planning. This is a blessing and a curse, as many artists (even successful ones) seem to lapse into lethargy and the "strip's gonna be late today" syndrome. That was never a problem for me. I started with a three week buffer of completed strips and maintained it (give or take) until the end. It really paid off when a particular storyline wasn't working and I scrapped my entire buffer to fix it. I had to work hard to rebuild the buffer, but I never had to apologize to my readers or take a week off.

That's just one way the freedom can be an advantage. It also allows you to plan ahead in terms of writing and artwork. If I wanted to take a week-long detour storywise, no problem. If I knew I was going to be busy with other projects on a particular week, I could plan strips that required simpler artwork (or, if I may confess this, recycled artwork).

Brigid: What has happened to your site traffic since the comic ended? Are people still discovering Chronicle and reading it?

Josh: My traffic has only dropped about 30% since the end of the strip. Which is pretty remarkable, as I am not actively promoting it anymore. Traffic was never exactly booming. I seemed to find a core audience and I think I kept most of them on board til the end. The forum has gone silent, and I haven't heard from any new readers in the last six months. So I'm not sure if the traffic I'm still getting is old friends popping by to read their favorite strips, or newcomers stumbling upon it for the first time.

Brigid: How long do you think you will keep it up online?

Josh: I'll keep it online for the foreseeable future.

Brigid: Money aside, would you say that making the comic was worthwhile, in terms of experience, exposure, and other intangibles?

Josh: It was absolutely worthwhile, on many levels. I'm satisfied with the work. I enjoyed the learning process. And while it didn't exactly make a huge splash in the world of webcomics, it did give me some exposure and led to some great opportunities. Bill Corbett (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax.com) discovered the strip and contacted me, and that led to a stint as a contributing writer on a number of Rifftrax releases including Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight, and Harry Potter 3. That was a dream come true, and has led to other similar opportunities. (DVDs of my own movie riffing enterprise are available at http://www.joshway.com/dvds.)

For all of the aspects that were less than successful, I have no regrets and nothing but excitement for future projects.

Brigid: What are you doing now, and did your experience with Chronicle have any
influence on your current work?

Josh: I'm still working full time as a web developer for a private college. I'm also attending seminary which has taken up most of my time lately. On the creative front, I've been writing for an Internet show called Incognito Cinema Warriors XP and, of course, thinking about a new webcomic.

The new project is a gag comic called Strewth! It will be much more open and random than Chronicle (though some of the old familiar characters might show up now and then). There will be much more topical humor and cultural commentary, both of which were missing in Chronicle. I'm excited about the freedom of the premise (or lack thereof), but happy to have the lessons of Chronicle under my belt as I move ahead.

The beginning of Strewth!

The Process is not officially dead, but Joe Infurnari stopped updating it in mid-2008, right around the time it was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. The Process is thoughtful, well executed, and embedded in a stunningly beautiful website. So what happened? I went straight to the source and asked Infurnari, who was good enough to speak frankly about the creative and economic pressures of the webcomics creator’s lifestyle.

Brigid Alverson: First of all, what is the status of The Process? Is the story fully worked out in your head, as a script, as thumbnails?

Joe Infurnari: I would have to admit that the Process is on permanent hiatus for the time being. The story was intentionally loosely structured so that I could give myself room to meander throughout whatever story possibilities came up. The next two chapters are loosely defined (their objectives are set but how we would reach them is not fixed) and not written or thumbnailed. When I was doing the Process, I was very new to comics and was not approaching their creation with anything but my own intuition.

Brigid: Will you finish it, online or in print, or has it served its purpose already?

Joe: The Process was set up to be a very large epic story that tried to encompass as much of my imagination/psychology as I could get. It was an exercise that I created for myself to keep me making art and exploring new art styles and storytelling techniques. As such, the Process has been a success and has actually never stopped for me. I'm working on Ultra-lad, a character that comes directly out of the Process, and wherever possible the ideas that I had for the Process are incorporated into other projects. If I were to wax mythic/poetic about this, I would say that the passing of the Process is like the death of Orpheus whose dismembered head and hands continue to play and sing music as they float down then Hebrus. I've scavenged different pieces of it for different projects and its ideas still resonate with me and my work to this day.

Brigid: Are there financial factors involved? I.e., is it competing with paid comics or non-comics work?

Joe: Certainly. This webcomics model of giving it away for free to sell it later as a book is a huge speculative gamble and most webcomics are not going to be able to cash in. So that means that I have to take paying work. My paying work is currently comics and that means long hours doing a very time intensive project that doesn't always pay a lot. That doesn't leave a lot of time for other projects. Something that I have to learn to do better is juggling more projects and proposals.

Brigid: Do you think the fact that it is a webcomic, rather than a print comic where you have to worry about issues, page counts, etc., affects your planning process? Is it easier to be open-ended with a webcomic than a print comic?

Joe: I think that's probably true. It's also tied into the fact that many of the webcomics that I do and my peers at Act-i-vate do are their most cherished ideas. Most people doing webcomics are taking their own pet projects and making them a reality. This is truly a labor of love and without the limitations linked to print that you already mentioned, it's likely that creators will meander a little and explore their stories. All artists should be open to new ideas so that their work can evolve in the process of it's creation. For webcomics, that can happen very naturally. The experience of creating a webcomic for professionals means squeezing in your web project into leftover time. Chances are you are not 20 pages ahead of your updating schedule so pages are often made very soon before going online. Even if you have a full script for the entire webcomic, I think this structure makes it difficult to be completely hermetic. The influence and inspiration that comes from comments, peer interactions and life in general is pretty much inevitable.

Because of this, I've often made the analogy that making a webcomic is sort of like making your roughcut of your movie. It's a way to open up your project to your audience as you are creating it and let the entire process inform and transform your story. I purposefully kept the structure of the Process so open ended so as to allow this kind of evolution to take over and sweep me up in its flow.

Brigid: Even if you don't come back to the Process, do you feel that it has had value for you, in terms of exposure, experience, and other intangibles?

Joe: Absolutely. I was able to attract readers, get industry recognition, join a prestigious online collective and get more professional work and exposure. I learned a ton of things, too. It's impossible for me to see this experience as anything but positive.

Brigid: What other things are you working on at the moment, and how does the Process fit (or not fit) into the mix?

Joe: I'm currently working on a graphic novel project for First Second with author, Glenn Eichler (Stuffed!). I have Ultra-lad! still in development and numerous proposals for future projects. One project I've very excited about directly relates to the Process. In my webcomic, I wanted it to be very personal and incorporate aspects of my real life as a Type I diabetic. I'm currently developing a book project with an author to tell her story about raising her son from a very young age with Type I diabetes. This is a very powerful story and telling it is very near and dear to my heart. I post about current projects on my blog all the time so the curious should visit me online at www.joeinfurnari.com/blog.

Brigid: Do you think of webcomics as your primary medium, or would you prefer to work in print?

Joe: Both have their advantages and I would be happy to work in either medium as long as it fits the project.

One topic that hardly ever comes up is how the comic ends. It’s not the sort of thing one thinks of with regard to print comics, because the vast majority are either one-shot graphic novels or endless series that have been running since FDR was president.

Webcomics are a different matter. “Over 15,000 webcomics now exist online,” Wikipedia tells us, but probably 14,000 of those stopped updating after six episodes. This is the dark side of The Promise of Webcomics: It is true that anyone can start a webcomic, and that without the usual barriers to publication, such as editors and budgets, the web has become a seething cauldron of creativity. However, things like slush piles and contracts and editors are there for a reason: Not just to keep the crap out, but also to make sure the creator finishes the damn comic. The internet imposes no such restrictions. Consequently, many webcomics start with a burst of enthusiasm and fizzle when the creator runs out of ideas or has to study for finals.

Killer Komics, last updated January 2008, with a promise to update more frequently soon.

Some webcomics die a peaceful, natural death: The comic has run its course and the creator ends it gracefully and moves on to something else. That’s what John Allison did with Scary Go Round earlier this year, and it’s worth reading this post to see why he decided to put an end to Scary Go Round and start a new comic, rather than trying to keep the title and take the comic in a new direction. Among other things, he suggests that webcomics can be too long:

Firstly, the huge archive and long history put off new readers, and I can't afford to put all the out of print books back into print. You'll always lose readers as the novelty wears off for them, but if you can't replace them, your audience will slowly diminish to a hard core. And it's hard to have people email you saying they'd buy the new books if they could still buy all the books, but they can't, so they won't.

The long goodbye is more common, though: Updates get less frequent, and the creator starts posting apologies, excuses, sketches, and guest strips, and then suddenly it's two years later and there haven't been any new comics. Readers find it particularly frustrating when they get invested in a story and it just stops. That's kind of an occupational hazard of being a webcomics fan—you get interested in a story and the creato leaves you hanging.

One way that creators stave off the Grim Reaper is by switching from regular updates to a more organic system of posting an entire chapter when it is done. That’s the path Meredith Gran has chosen for Octopus Pie. Busy preparing the print edition, going to cons, and doing all the things that creators do, she decided to post bigger chunks of the comic at longer intervals, rather than single pages three times a week, as she did when the comic first started.

But what is it? Tune in next January to find out!

One advantage to this is that even if the creator can’t keep the comic going indefinitely, it ends in a natural way with the close of a story arc. It seems much worse, somehow, when the comic goes into suspended animation in the middle of a dramatic sequence. The current page of Kitty Hawk features the discovery of a mysterious but obviously important object—but we won't be finding out what it is for a while yet. The last page went up on September 2, and the creators aren't promising more until January.

One problem is that the better your webcomic is, the more likely you are to get other jobs that take you away from it. “Paying work comes first” is the freelancer’s mantra, and while many webcomics creators do make money from their comics, most do not. Thus the success of a webcomic often leads to other commitments that take the creator away from the original comic.

And sometimes a webcomic simply isn't lucrative enough. After waxing enthusiastic about Pete Stathis’s Evenfall last week, I contacted Pete to find out when and if the site was going to update again. The answer: It will be a while. “I’m getting ready to have my first kid,” he said. “My wife is having a baby in February, so I decided I should do something to make more revenue, and making comics is not that thing.” Instead, Stathis is focusing on his business; like Phoebe, the heroine of Evenfall, he owns rental properties and does all the work on them himself.

Evenfall isn’t dead; Stathis has completed the script for the last four issues, and eventually he plans to finish the series, although he may not put all the chapters online. Evenfall was originally a print series, and Stathis put it on the web to keep interest alive and attract new readers. That part of his strategy has worked, he said, and it has led to other work as well. “I get a lot of other one-shot jobs based on the fact that people know I am a comic book artist,” he said. “I got to do the cover of the Philadelphia City Paper last summer. These are things that would not have happened if I had not done Evenfall. But in terms of making comics a successful lucrative endeavor in and of itself, that certainly has not happened for me, and as I understand, it doesn't happen for many people at all. But it’s good fun.”

Of course, many people believe death is not an ending but a beginning, and that’s often true of webcomics; sometimes a creator takes a strip off the web or stops updating because they have signed a book contract. Raina Telgemeier’s Smile (A Dental Drama) stopped updating quite a while ago, but she made it official earlier this year when she announced a book deal with Scholastic/Graphix.

Indeed, while a webcomic is a great way to attract an audience and develop an idea, it is not necessarily the best way to present a long-form work. Reading a huge archive online is tiresome, and as Allison remarked above, it puts off new readers. That is a basic, if seldom noted difference between webcomics and print comics—when a print comic is complete, that's often the beginning of its life cycle. When a webcomic is complete, it's the end. So maybe metamorphosis is a better analogy than death—while many webcomics do wither on the vine, others make the transition to print, often in an enhanced form. Other times, as with Scary Go Round, the finished comic begets a new one. The vast majority of defunct webcomics, of course, will simply clutter up the internet with their corpses, but those that go out gracefully will more likely keep their following and, at the end of it all, be transformed into something better.

A happy ending for Smile

Now that's creepy.

Evenfall is full of moments like those. Phoebe is dealing with the death of her mother, and she has had to drop out of school to run her mother’s business. She is depressed, she drinks too much, and lashes out at those around her. And then, as she is clearing out a clogged drain in the basement of a rental property, a hand reaches out and grabs her by the ankle, dragging her into an alternate world. For all of book 1, she slides back and forth between normal life and a twisted nightmare world. These dreamlike episodes are night terrors that walk in the day: Phoebe hurtles through space, escapes from grasping claws, relives her mother's last illness, and almost forgets her sadness as she fights to survive. It’s great stuff, a powerful literary portrayal of depression and loss, with the supernatural elements reinforcing the feeling of unreality that depression brings on. The story moves in more of a straightforward fantasy direction in book 2, and then the comic ends abruptly. Even without a resolution, though, book 1 is good reading for the dreamlike atmosphere it evokes.

Warren Pleece’s episodic Montague Terrace is series of very short stories about the varied denizens of the titular building: A sinister puppeteer who controls the world, a washed-up folkie who dreams of humiliating his former manager, a floundering magician who is comforted by his taking magic rabbit (who has demons of his own). Pleece uses a subtler blend of everyday scenes and dreamlike twists than Stathis; his people are tired and shabby, but while there is drama in every piece. My favorite story so far is "Codename Babushka," in which a swindler picks the wrong old lady as his mark. Pleece's clean-lined art is easy to read, but like a good magician, he uses that clarity to mislead the reader. The series has been on hiatus but is due back soon; I’m looking forward to the next group of stories.

I put off looking at Split Lip for a long time because I figured if the name grossed me out, I probably wouldn’t like the comic. And indeed, the lurid red-and-black website signals that we are in a very different corner of the story universe than the quiet grayness of Montague Terrace. The stories are more like classic horror tales, with a fascination with death and disappearance: A man gets sucked through the looking glass, a grave-robbing doctor finds the tables turned on him, a murderous pair of bank robbers catches a ride… on the train to hell. All the stories are written by Sam Costello but they are illustrated by a variety of artists, so the style changes from one episode to the next. As in Montague Terrace, some are a little puzzling or leave loose ends dangling, but all are creepily enjoyable.

Like Evenfall, Cameron Stewart's Sin Titulo starts with a dream sequence, and it has that dreamlike quality in that the narrator is constantly grasping for something that is always just out of reach. The narrator, in this case, is Alex, a young man who goes to visit his grandfather in a nursing home and discovers that the old man has died. Everything is just a little bit off, though—when he asks about a photo of his grandfather with a strange woman, the staff becomes suddenly evasive and things go wobbling off in an odd direction. Curious, Alex follows an orderly after work, starting a chain of events that quickly spirals out of control. The story is part thriller but part mind game, as Alex pops in and out of dreams, recalls buried memories of his unhappy family, loses his moorings to everyday life and winds up a fugitive, running after a few wisps—a dream about a tree on a beach, the woman in sunglasses. In the most recent episode, the story takes a sharp turn into pure horror, so maybe Stewart will start showing his cards a bit more.

With the exception of Split Lip, none of these comics is classic horror, but the possibility they open up—that there are strange forces lurking beneath the veneer of everyday things—is far more disturbing, in its own way, than any zombie or vampire. When you can't tell if you're awake or dreaming any more, when surfaces dissolve and certainties become riddles—that's the scariest time of all.

What makes Tate’s comic tick is her characters, who stretch the Western archetypes with their quirks and flaws: Sheriff Doles, a former handyman whose intellectual curiosity and laid-back style rub the town fathers the wrong way; Jackson Stevens, the trigger-happy, over-privileged son of a wealthy rancher; Bob Schwartz, a seemingly upstanding lawyer with a hidden dark side; Mayor Wells, who suffers from a mysterious illness, and his wife, who seems to be running the show. The four episodes that are up so far are interconnected but can be read on their own as well; together they paint a fascinating picture of life in the Old West. I interviewed Tate by e-mail to find out how she comes up with her stories and puts everything together to make a sum that is greater than any of its parts.

Brigid Alverson: What was your inspiration for Red Plains?

Caryn A. Tate: Well, I grew up on traditional working ranches and farms in the West, so the West and its people are truly my inspiration. I've always had an abiding love of westerns as a genre, and the ones that are done well are stunning—not only are they mythological, but they have so much relevance to our lives and our culture today.

Aside from westerns, I'm inspired by a wide variety of quality storytelling—the TV series The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street chief among them. I'm enthralled by the writing on those shows, and the epic and realistic feel of them as well as the underlying meaning have been major influences for Red Plains. There's more to it than you might initially expect. Despite the action and adventure inherent in the stories, Red Plains is more than a typical western shoot 'em up.

Brigid: Do you have a specific location and period in mind for this comic, or is it more generically 19th-century and Western?

Caryn: It's funny that you ask, because I've done a lot of thinking about the location of the town of Red Plains. It's actually an amalgam of all of my favorite landscapes and locations of the West. For instance, the town itself is where the name implies—in the grasslands of the plains. Nearby is an immense mountain range, much like the Rockies, where many of the larger ranches are located. The Escovidos live in high desert country. While I do have a real life location in mind for the town I wanted Red Plains to be iconic and classic, so that stories wouldn't be limited by too specific of a location. It is the West.

As far as time period, it begins around 1879, 1880-ish. It is the heyday of the cowboy and the Wild West.

Brigid: Did you have all the characters in mind from the beginning, or did the cast grow organically as the comic went on?

Caryn: Most of them I had in mind, yes, but several of them surprised me. The Escovidos, now some of my favorite characters, are prime examples of that. Luis was partially inspired by Zorro, one of my favorite works of fiction—I wanted to explore the concept of the prominent and wealthy Latino family, rather than the more prevalent bandit or peasant portrayal. His daughters grew organically from there, and are now some of the most enjoyable characters in the series for me. They're all so drastically different from each other!

Characters like Sheriff Doles, Jackson and Doug Stevens, Mayor Wells, and Books were all in my mind from the get go, along with much of their personalities and histories. It's so fun to create a character for a specific purpose—like Deputy Tom Bennett, or Rand the cowboy—and then have them grow and change and become someone so real and three dimensional. You'll see both of these characters a bit more in upcoming stories, but as always, the focus of Red Plains isn't on any one character or group of characters - it's about everyone here. This is a town full of people of various ethnicities, backgrounds, personalities, and goals. We have cowboys, ranchers, farmers, prostitutes, businessmen, soldiers, politicians, bounty hunters, traders, outlaws, gamblers, and of course those "outcasts" of society - women who don't have paid jobs because of society's restrictions, and Native Americans who are caught between two worlds.

Brigid: Each of the chapters so far centers around a conflict that has some resonance for today's readers—the settlers versus the ranchers, racism, violence against women, corrupt businessmen who consider themselves above the law. Are these themes that interest you in real life, or do they just make good material for stories?

Caryn: To my way of thinking, it's vital to ensure that every story of Red Plains is pertinent while still being entertaining and enjoyable. There are reasons that Red Plains is an important story to be told right now, and I want to be sure those reasons shine through in the storytelling.

The Old West has become a bit more of a myth than I think is good—we tend to romanticize it and think of it as a time period that's long past, that has no bearing on our lives and culture today. But so much of it clearly resonates, including the subjects you mentioned. Racism, violence against women—and violence in general—and corrupt leadership are all examples of this. Something I've become very interested in upon starting the Red Plains project is the culture of violence in America and, more specifically, the gun. The use of violence and firearms, in particular, as a means of solving conflict is so ingrained in our culture and it's fascinating to explore part of that mentality.

So, yes, definitely, these themes interest me in real life, and the bonus is they make great story material too!

Brigid: I particularly liked the story arc “One of Us,” because it reminded me a bit of a Western version of Law and Order. How do you develop your stories, and how do they change from initial idea to finished pages?

Caryn: Wow, I'm so glad you say that, because that's just what I was going for. I love great detective stories, especially when intermingled with the exploration of corruption and inequality.

Usually my story ideas start from something I see in real life or anywhere—the news, a real historic event... it could be anything that sparks the idea. After that it's a matter of fleshing it out, creating an outline and/or treatment that helps me see any areas that need to be further built upon. From that point, the characters make it all come to life and make it exciting.

They're very fluid, so they change constantly from the initial idea to the finished page. A bonus is that I letter my own comic, so I have one last chance to change anything that I think may work better. Sometimes it's just a single word of dialogue that makes all the difference.

Brigid: Each of the artists you have worked with so far has a distinct style. Has working with different artists changed the tone and content of your stories?

Caryn: Not on the content side, but I do sometimes adjust the tone a bit to try to play up an artist's strengths. For instance, Larry Watts, the artist on the current "Nice Place to Raise Your Kids Up" storyline, excels at the action scenes. So while I had a ton of action already planned for the story, I try to portray it in a certain way in the script so that Larry can really make it shine the way he knows how. He's also great with facial expressions and getting the characters to "act", which is so important for showing the audience how a character feels rather than telling them.

All the artists I've worked with are fantastic. It's really fun to work with such a variety of talent and see their take on the world of Red Plains.

Brigid: It took a while for the sheriff to come into focus, but he seems to be a key character. Tell us a bit about him.

That was deliberate because I wanted it to be clear that Red Plains is not just the sheriff's story. He is a key player, to be sure, but so are many other characters. Because of the nature of the western it's natural for the sheriff to play a part in most stories but in the case of Red Plains I wanted to keep him out of the spotlight initially to give the rest of the cast a little more exposure. This comic is truly an ensemble piece—this is a world, and it's stories are not told from one person's point of view.

I also wanted to avoid the usual "Hero Sheriff" approach as that didn't resonate for me. Sheriff Doles is a flawed man, though a good one, and we don't shy away from showing him as he truly is throughout the series. He's got some kind of weight on his shoulders, and we'll gradually learn more about that as the series continues.

Brigid: There is a lot of violence in Red Plains, which is in keeping with the genre. How do you write convincingly about something so far removed from everyday life?

Caryn: While not everyone, thankfully, has been directly involved in crimes of violence, we're all human and we can all relate to how it might feel to be involved, on every level—whether it's as the victim or the victim's family, or the perpetrator. The most important thing I try to convey with this violence is the aftermath and that hanging question mark: Why did this happen? What were the alternatives? What happens next? Seeing the impact of violence on those left living is something that is and will continue to be prevalent in Red Plains.

That's why it's important to me to portray all violence in Red Plains as realistically as possible. There are no high noon gunfights in the middle of the street, no easy, bloodless battles. When someone gets shot or stabbed, it's a bloody, ugly thing. The person holding the gun or knife has to deal with what they did. Everyone else affected has to deal with it, however they decide to do that. That moment of passion can't be taken away, and its effect on everyone involved is something we'll constantly be dealing with.

For more of Caryn's work, visit her website, carynatate.com.

The folks behind the manga site ComiPress have just unveiled Inside Scanlation, an impressive website that chronicles the history of scanlation, that is, bootleg fan translations of Japanese manga (and later, Korean manhwa as well). It’s an amazingly detailed and textured history, complete with interviews with scanlators and industry figures, a glossary, and a timeline.

One of the things it chronicles is the way scanlation groups helped create and maintain the market for translated manga in this country. Licensed manga is just a bit behind the bootlegs—scanlation sites were doing a brisk business by 1998, while the bookstore boom in manga took off around 2000. Coincidence? I think not. Here’s Del Rey editor Dallas Middaugh reminiscing about his early days at Viz in an interview with Dirk Deppey of The Comics Journal:

To be honest, when I was at Viz back in 2001, 2002, we were following scanlations as a way of discovering new titles. [Deppey laughs.] Hey, I don't read Japanese, and the people making scanlations were finding good manga.

In fact, scanlators played a dual role, as providers and as tastemakers. Without intending to, they were doing viral marketing, turning their friends on to new series, drawing new members into the expanding community, and spinning off smaller groups to work on projects of their own. In the beginning, much of this took place via IRC (internet relay chat), and the comics were distributed as downloads. The recent shift to online reading has drastically changed the scanlation scene and may also have led to the current trend of publishers putting new manga online, sometimes before it goes into print.

Cover of Viz's licensed edition of Phoenix

Scanlations started out as small, personal projects, and they predate the internet: Someone would make a translation and distribute it to friends and fellow anime-club members. The first known example of this was a 1977 translation of Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix by the four-person group Dadakai. (One of the members of that group was Frederick Schodt, who has since emerged as one of the pre-eminent manga scholars in the country. Right there is one of the ways that scanlation has affected the industry—a number of professiona manga translators started out as scanlators.) By the 1990s, Usenet groups were doing a brisk business in fan translations, and toward the end of that decade they started to spill over into a different channel, IRC, which was the main means of distribution for a long time.

From the outset, the scanlation scene had a strong social aspect. Scanlations were produced by small groups of people, many of whom knew each other only through the internet. The cliquish nature of scanlation and the choice of IRC as a distribution channel kept a lot of outsiders out, which may be one reason why publishers left them alone. You had to be pretty motivated to read scanlations—IRC isn’t that easy to use, and “leechers,” who download manga but never contribute to the group, were held in some disdain. The result was a community of enthusiasts, with its own hierarchy and splinter groups, that existed more or less out of the public eye but was able to grow enough to help create the manga market.

As time went on, and licensed manga became more popular in the outside world, the scanlation scene shifted. Around 2005, when raws (untranslated Japanese originals) became widely available, the number of scanlators exploded. While old-guard scanlators had a policy of taking down a series as soon as it was licensed for U.S. publication, a new group of speed-scanners emerged who were focused on getting their readers the latest episodes of already-licensed series such as Naruto and One Piece, often before they were published in Japan.

Another fairly recent phenomenon is the migration of scanlations from IRC to the web. Starting in about 2007, online reading sites took over as the main means of distribution. The owners of these sites simply uploaded scanlations done by others and put them online, and some added scans of English-language manga as well. This made reading free manga online much easier but also hastened the demise of the older scanlation groups, as readers no longer sought them out or visited their IRC channels.

Many of the online manga sites make money off their scanlations, some through ads and some through a premium membership model. One of the defining characteristics of the original scanlation scene was that scanlators did their work for love, not money. When an aggregator started putting their scans online and charging for access—in effect, pirating from the pirates—scanlators protested by setting up a competing site that allowed users to read manga online for free. This has become the dominant model, with ads supporting a free manga reader.

Saint Young Men

There does remain a robust community of groups and individuals who are working on niche manga that are unlikely to ever be published in the U.S., things like horror manga, yaoi and yuri, and culturally problematic series like Saint Young Men (which chronicles the daily adventures of Jesus and Buddha, who have taken a break from their duties as deities and are sharing an apartment in modern-day Tokyo).

Although the digital distribution of scans originally came via IRC, not the web, there are a couple of interesting analogies to webcomics here: Community-building was an important factor in the growth of the market, as different scanlation groups developed reputations and attracted followings. The unpaid nature of the work meant that many participants took it up as a hobby and abandoned it when they no longer had the time, just as webcomics creators often drop their series when they get busy. Like webcomics artists, a few scanlators went pro with print publishers. And the subscription-vs-ads question went the usual way; today, the vast majority of online websites are free.

The chief difference, of course, is that none of the comics are original. It should be said that every scanlation violates the law. Over the years, scanlators have come up with a richly textured set of arguments as to why that doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, but publishers regard those with disdain. As long as scanlators stuck to the IRC channels and stopped distributing series once they were licensed, publishers tended to ignore them, but they do chafe at the online reading sites, which they fear are stealing away paying customers. On the other hand, several have developed their own online manga sites, such as Viz’s Sigikki and Shonen Sunday sites, which are free, and Digital’s eManga site, which charges for access. When popular creator Rumiko Takahashi launched a new series, Rin-ne, earlier this year, Viz put each chapter online, for free, on the day it was released in Japan, possibly to preempt the speed-scanners.

Scanlators were by no means the only reason for the popularity of licensed manga in this country; the popularity of anime, especially anime on broadcast TV, and the Pokemon phenomenon had a lot to do with it as well. But there is no denying that scanlators helped create an audience and gave publishers an idea of which series would do well with American readers, providing the original viral marketing for one of the most successful areas of the comics industry.

Paradigm Shift

Paradigm Shift starts out like any other buddy-cop story, with donuts, wisecracks, and corpses turning up in the bushes, but halfway through, it lives up to its name and crosses over into darker territory.

In the beginning, the detectives in question, Kate McAllister and Mike Stuart, are as smooth as they come. They have their differences—Kate’s a bit tougher, Mike’s a bit cooler—but their relationship runs on easy patter and unspoken coordination. Tiede is subtle, introducing Kate’s demons a little at a time—a sudden flash of dizziness, a wound that heals too quickly—but as the story goes on, we see her unravel more and more until it’s hard to say what is nightmare and what is real. Mike, on the other hand, starts out as an understated character, but his quietness conceals his strength. Again, there is a slow build; his offhand mentions of martial arts and Zen Buddhism foreshadow his full development as a character later in the story.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The central mystery of this series is a series of murders that seem to be done by a wild animal—the victims’ necks are snapped and their bodies are severely clawed. The medical examiner is convinced that only an animal could have inflicted this particular type of wound, but Kate isn’t so sure, and her intuition leads her to believe that a human is behind the murders. As the case goes on, her insights become too good—in nightmares and blackouts she becomes a werewolf, and as the story goes on, it gets harder to sort out dream from reality. By the most recent episodes, Kate is staring at the possibility that she herself may be one of the murderers.

That possibility is the paradigm shift of the title. As in all good cop stories, Tiede spends a lot of time developing a cast of characters with different personalities—Gina, the uptight medical examiner; Ed and Vince, the tough-guy detectives from a different precinct; the beleaguered captain—a whole ecosystem of cops that are bound together despite their personality conflicts. Kate may be a bit of a loose cannon, but she works with her partners, protecting them in times of danger. The thought that she might have an alternate self is shattering, and she tries to bury it, with decreasing success as the story goes on.

Tiede is an excellent storyteller, and the central mystery is a good one that he develops well, but the subplot (which begins the story) is flabby. Kate and Mike find out that Alfonse, a known bad guy, is living in a posh building on the Magnificent Mile, so they go pay him a visit. Kate’s protestation aside, renting a fancy apartment is not probable cause for anything. A pal comes to the door, Alfonse warns him off, and the detectives chase him, Mike taking the stairs, Kate taking the elevator. It’s a great scene—Tiede’s scattered, slanted panels made me feel like I was hurtling down 12 floors—but at the end, when they haul the bad guys off to the police station, I still wasn’t sure what anyone had done. Similarly, the interrogation scene, in which Tiede uses symmetrically arranged panels to show Kate and Mike questioning the two suspects in separate rooms—is beautifully laid out, but they seem to be fishing around. This part of the story seems to be a case of form over function—there are great fights, chase scenes, the interrogation of a hospitalized suspect in Mandarin, all beautifully drawn, but the underlying plot lacks enough detail to be convincing. It seems like it's just an excuse for some kickass fight scenes, although there are hints that it will tie into the other storyline by the end.

Also, Tiede wrote this comic over a period of years, and naturally his style develops over the course of the story. Kate's nightmare sequences are some of the strongest pages in the comic, in terms of composition and art as well as storytelling.

Paradigm Shift has a manga look to it; Kate’s hair is straight out of Akihabara, and Tiede uses sound effects, speed lines, and other standard manga techniques. His style is fairly mature, though, close to the look of seinen (young men’s) manga in Japan. And he avoids the two standard bugaboos of global manga creators, overusing screentones and using character design to mask weaknesses in basic anatomy. Tiede’s figures are stylized, but they are also solid, if a bit stiff in places. Most of the time they move convincingly, and the action scenes are nicely choreographed.

Where Tiede's technique really shines, though, is in the composition of his pages and his creative use of different panel shapes and formats to advance the story. He breaks the action into small panels and pulls back for the big picture; he overlaps the panels in creative ways, and he uses diagonals and diamond-shaped panels both for action scenes and for strong emotions. These techniques pull the reader through the story and also result in pages that are quite beautiful in their own right, as works of art.

Paradigm Shift is set in Chicago, and each chapter is set in a specific area of the city. While his backgrounds are cleaner than the real thing, Tiede has a good sense of the architecture and the feel of the different parts of the city, and many of his establishing shots are lovely, even the drawings of the grittier areas.

Although Paradigm Shift is a webcomic, it looks better in print. I bought the first two volumes at NYAF and was very pleased with my purchase; Tiede really knows how to put a book together. A lot of self-published comics look like crap (paper that’s too white, iffy print quality). Tiede picked a nice, creamy paper with a bit of texture for his books, and the lines are smoother in the book than on the web, where the diagonals take on a jagged look. More importantly, the pages in the book are presented as single pages, whereas online Tiede lays out each chapter as one long vertical scroll. That makes a difference: Online, because of Tiede’s creative paneling, the page breaks are not as obvious, so it’s hard to grasp each page as a unit. And of course the pages are a bit longer than my monitor is deep, so I can’t see the entire page at once. All that goes away in the book. What’s more, Tiede loads his books with extras—character bios, notes on the setting and action, even a comics drawing tutorial. It’s like getting the director’s cut, with extra commentary.

As I write this, the online story is drawing to a close, and I feel the same way I do toward the end of a Preston Sturges film: The characters have gone so far from their starting points that I don’t see how this could possibly end. Unfortunately, Tiede doesn’t seem to have updated the comic in a couple of months. With the denouement so close, I hope he picks up the pen pretty soon and wraps up this story. Then I’m going to track him down and buy the third volume, because it really is that good.

Peepo Choo: Vertical, which has mostly published classic manga up to now, caused a stir with their announcement that they had licensed this Japanese manga by American creator Felipe Smith. Smith was one of Tokyopop’s early global manga creators, and his first manga, MBQ, showed a lot of promise. A year ago, the editors of Kodansha’s Morning 2 magazine decided they wanted to add an American to their lineup, and Smith was their choice. Peepo Choo is an adventure/comedy about an otaku in Japan, and much of the humor turns on his bad Japanese, which will make translating a challenge despite the fact that Smith partially wrote it in English. However, Vertical is uniquely suited to publish this book as its marketing director, Ed Chavez, helped edit it during a stint at Kodansha. (Here is the author showing off a sample at his MySpace page.)

Del Rey’s kids’ lineup: Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be all that excited about another round of Ben 10 manga; I read the first one and was pretty unimpressed. But Del Rey is taking a new tack: They are setting real comics creators loose on these properties and letting them use their own styles. So the next Ben 10 manga will be written by Peter David and illustrated by Dan Hipp. Are you wondering what a Hulk writer and the creator of Gyakushu! are going to do with Ben 10? Because I sure am. Along the same lines, the next Bakugan Battle Brawlers will be written by the veteran team of Nunzio DeFillippis and Christina Weir and illustrated by Kriss Sison, and the team working on their manga prequel and novelization of the movie The Last Airbender will include X-Men: Misfits writer (and veteran Nickelodeon magazine editor) Dave Roman and Yokaiden artist Nina Matsumoto. In other words, Del Rey is throwing a lot of talent at these books.

Library Wars: Viz’s announcement that it had licensed this manga, which is based on the novels by Hiro Arikawa, caused a stir of excitement in the audience. The anime has already created a following for this tale of heroic librarians fighting a coercive government “information management” agency. Is this every librarian’s secret fantasy coming to life? Time will tell…

New stories from old favorites: No question, publishers are playing it safe, and many of the new manga that were announced at the show were by established creators. Viz announced Grand Guignol Orchestra, by Godchild creator Kaori Yuki, and Del Rey announced Here I Am, by Ema Toyama (Pixie Pop), Yokai Navi Runa, by Michiyo Kikuta (Mamotte! Lollipop) and Miyoko Ikeda, and Arisa, by Natsumi Ando, creator of their most popular manga evarr, Kitchen Princess. Tokyopop had yet another manga from Fruits Basket creator Natsuki Takaya; this one, Songs and Laughter, is a collection of short stories. In a different vein, they also announced Qwasar of Stigmata, by My-Hime creator Hiroyuki Yoshino, which promises an odd mashup of extreme fanservice and Russian Orthodoxy. In the future, every taste will be catered to.

Del Rey’s license rescues: Tokyopop recently announced that Kodansha had let its licenses with them expire, leaving a number of long-running series unfinished. Del Rey has already picked up one of those licenses, Samurai Deeper Kyo, and at NYAF they announced another one, Rave Master. Fans asked about numerous other series, including Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, at the Del Rey panel, and marketing director Ali T. Kokmen politely feigned surprise and wrote everything down. We’ll see.

Tokyopop’s turnaround: Tokyopop is back from its near-death experience with an interesting mix of licensed and original properties: Priest: Purgatory, an original global manga based on the movie Priest, which itself is based on a manhwa series; a graphic novel version of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island; and a gaggle of Japanese titles for their yaoi line, BLU, which has been quiet of late.

Chi’s Sweet Home: Another win for Vertical. Manga bloggers have been clamoring for someone to license this super-cute cat manga, and Vertical is stepping up to the plate, publishing it in full color in a flipped format to increase its appeal beyond the usual manga circles. That makes a lot of sense, as cat lovers seem to be a huge share of the market, and the all-ages title may turn out to have broad appeal.

Artists Alley: This is where the comics of the future come from. As is the case at many anime cons, this one was heavy on merch—cat ears, manga posters, etc.—and a lot of folks chose to go to SPX instead, but there were a few bright spots. Dirk Tiede was there, selling beautifully produced print editions of Paradigm Shift—think Law & Order with a supernatural twist. I had a nice chat with Jorge Vega, one of the creators of KaeruBoy, a kid-friendly comic about a dyslexic boy who discovers he can understand the secret language of superheroes. And I loved the art for The Oswald Chronicles, a fantasy tale featuring super-cute mice, told as graphic novels and illustrated text novels. On a completely different note, I was very taken by David Reisman's odd book of cartoons based on his dreams.

The Oswald Chronicles

The kids, they are the future: I was also delighted to meet an animated group of students from the School for Visual Arts who had a table loaded with mini-comics and graphic novels, many produced as class projects. I’ll be honest, there was a lot of weak manga-style art on display, but these are undergraduates, after all, and they have a lot of room to grow. And they will—the level of sophistication and craftsmanship was impressive. Although I only had time for a quick glance over the table, I was struck by the beautiful cover of Kasey van Hise’s Winters in Lavelle and the strong art in Ashley Quigg’s Fish Food. Even better, it was delightful to see so much talent and enthusiasm on display.

iVerse's comics store

Even with the small screen, though, my iPod is evolving. Back in the Stone Age (six months ago), each comic or section of a comic was a single app, which led to a lot of little icons cluttering up the screen. Now a reader can use a single app such as comiXology’s Comics app, iVerse, or Panelfly, to buy, download, and organize comics, which is a more elegant solution. ComiXology has just released a free version of its app, which allows readers access to all the free comics in its app store, and it also has a Lite version that is 12+, as opposed to 17+, presumably for younger readers.

I assume the hidden hand of Apple has something to do with the fact that these apps have similar design and functionality: You pick your function from a navigation strip across the bottom, with icons for the store, featured items, etc., and you move from a list of comics to catalog listings by tapping and swiping, just as with other apps.

These apps solve a glaring problem, which is that there is no obvious way to find comics in the iTunes store. (Of course, there is no obvious way to find these apps, either—that’s why you need columns like this.) Comics are classed as books, and books are a genre within the App Store, which is the sort of tortured logic that only a software engineer could love. The book section is dominated by other types of books, and comics are not necessarily marked as such, so trolling through the iTunes store in search of something interesting to read is pretty much out. You have to know what you want before you go there, which makes it uncomfortably like the direct market, i.e., uncomfortably lacking in serendipity.

Panelfly's comics store

The individual comics apps make it easier to find comics, although each has its limitations. Once you get the app, you can browse the in-app store for interesting titles. If you’re more comfortable navigating on the big screen, both comiXology and iVerse have regular updates on their websites and offer e-mail updates as well. Panelfly lists available comics on the website but doesn’t seem to have any sort of notification. In addition, all three use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

As for content, comiXology and iVerse are definitely shooting for the Wednesday crowd, with lots of of individual comics issues priced at 99 cents each. Panelfly is more artsy, with a handsome, deep-red interface and a list that includes NBM, SLG and Picturebox. In addition to single issues, Panelfly offers full-length graphic novels such as Faith Erin Hicks’s The War at Ellsmere or Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel. There is some overlap between the three; both comiXology and iVerse carry comics from Antarctic, Bluewater, and Image, for instance, and SLG titles are available via both comiXology and Panelfly. If you want Top Cow, though, comiXology is the place to be, and iVerse seems to be the only place to get comics from Archie or Boom! Studios.

The comics readers are different, though. Panelfly and comiXology have different readers, but they work in more or less the same way: Both zip you around from panel to panel on the page, following the same path your eye would. This takes a bit of getting used to. The comiXology reader has an optional page view feature as well, which shows the entire page before going from panel to panel; this is useful for orientation but is generally too small to be readable. Panelfly has the same thing but it doesn’t seem to be optional. The iVerse app gives the reader the option of viewing the entire page in the vertical mode or single panels in the landscape mode. Of the three, I find iVerse to be the clearest; their full-page view is actually readable, and their single-panel views are exceptionally sharp and clear. The downside is that they have to chop the comic up into horizontal strips; you can’t use the iPod’s zoom feature on the full-page view, and you have to rotate the device to landscape mode to read the single panels.

For those who are curious, but not ready to make a commitment, comiXology’s free app is probably a good place to start. I e-mailed CEO David Steinberger yesterday with some questions, and he confirmed that the app is a way for iPhone users who don’t want to pay 99 cents can see how the paid app works; the free app is the same except it only offers the free comics. As expected, the free version is being downloaded more than the paid app, and in fact, it’s number 18 on today’s Top Free Apps list, while iVerse and comiXology’s paid app rank a bit higher on the paid apps chart.

Free comics up on comiXology at the moment include a preview of FCHS, a new high school drama from AdHouse books, and all of issue 1 of The Darkness/Pitt, from Top Cow. “Top Cow didn't want to do a second print of #1, so this is an ideal way for them to get more people exposed to the series and hopefully go out to their local comic store to buy #2,” Steinberger explained.

At 99 cents each, none of these apps is going to break the bank. Be aware, though, that the much-touted “free comics” include a lot of previews and issue #1’s, so they are very much a marketing tool. For those who appreciate the portability of the iPod and are comfortable reading comics on a small screen, though, these apps are a good way to sample new comics and buy individual issues at a considerable discount from the dead-tree price.

Mock history has proven to be a fertile vein on the web as well. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t love Kate Beaton’s Hark, A Vagrant. Reading her irreverent takes on historical topics is sort of like sitting in the back of class drawing moustaches on the Founding Fathers.

Beaton’s comics are pretty minimalist. Her style is deliberately loose, each comic is a single-page gag, and the gags reliably turn popular concepts of history on their head, mostly showing iconic figures acting in ignoble (but funny!) ways. Her brand of humor, of course, depends on the reader understanding the setup instantly, so she generally sticks with recognizable characters (although we south-of-the-border types appreciate her explanatory notes on Canadian history).

Not so with Sydney Padua; the title characters in her loose series of comics, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, are not household names in most homes. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Byron and is regarded by historians as the first computer programmer; Charles Babbage designed, but never built, the first programmable computer. Both lived in Victorian times and were quirky but somewhat less exciting than Padua makes them seem in her action-packed steampunk comic.

In Padua's fevered imagination, the pipe-smoking Ada and rather more diffident Charles do build a Difference Machine, a steampunk version of a computer, and they use it to resolve the financial crisis of 1837 and impress Queen Victoria. The comics are funny in an escalating-chaos kind of way with some computer humor on the side that most peopel will get, and Padua’s confident style works well with her complicated subject matter. One of the things I like the best about this comic, though, is her extensive historical notes and her delight in finding new and odd facts about Babbage and Lovelace (who certainly do offer plenty of scope for that sort of thing). I do wish that she would take all this a bit more seriously as a webcomic and introduce such modern conveniences as a “next” button, but I guess I’m happy that someone is doing this at all.

Dylan Meconis’s Bite Me is a vampire comedy set in the French Revolution. I’m already on record as being a fan of Meconis’s more serious historical comic Family Man. Bite Me, is an earlier comic, and although some characters overlap, the feel is totally different—it’s a comedy drawn in a loose, comic-book style. Think rollicking, bawdy 18th-century humor, with vampires thrown in. The story is pretty straightforward: Claire, a serving wench in a French inn, takes a liking to Lucien, a mysterious visitor who sleeps all day—in the wine cellar. When Lucien’s desire for a snack overtakes him, he brings Claire over to the dark side and she leaves her dead-end job to help Lucien and the abrasive Ginevra free their vampire castle from a rapacious noble. The story moves slowly at first, but Meconis tosses in plenty of gags and side trips to keep the readers entertained. The humor is witty and knowingly anachronistic, and like most real historical figures, Meconis’s vivid characters are more interested in their own preoccupations than in the events swirling around them.

Each of these comics is a nudge to the ribs of the educated reader. They puncture the iconic images we were presented with in school, reimagining historical figures as actual human beings and acknowledging that we look back at the past with modern eyes, and therefore with imperfect understanding. At the same time, all three cartoonists clearly enjoy researching their topics and turning up odd bits of historical trivia. That affection for their subject matter, I think, is what sets these comics above your standard gag comic—when you're done laughing, you know a little bit more than you did before, which is more than I can say about any history class I ever took.

First recorded instance of "It's not a bug, it's a feature."