Cyanide & Happiness

I’m not going to mince words, the comedy that fuels Cyanide & Happiness is not for everyone. The webcomic which launched in 2004, is effectively characterized in the opening paragraph of Brigid Alverson’s recent Unbound review: “The Cyanide & Happiness formula is pretty simple: Stick men (and women) do shocking things to one another. There are four different artists, but the style and humor are fairly uniform; a situation is set up in the first panel and resolved, by stabbing, boob-grabbing, or shouting ‘You have cancer! LOL!’ in the last. My kids love this comic, because it’s what teenagers are all about: Working your way through every possible taboo, in public. So in C&H we have Seizure-Man falling down and frothing at the mouth, bungee-jumping childbirth, and lots and lots of stabbing.”

If that description gives you pause, I would advise you skip this interview. But if it doesn’t give you pause, jump on ahead. Last month, It Books released a collection that “highlights 150 of the best comics, including 30 brand-new strips, each packed with inappropriate jokes, irreverent characters, and deviant behavior, guaranteed to leave you laughing despite the gnawing guilt.” The strips are created by four different writers/illustrators who “live all over the world — Kris Wilson in Fort Bridger, Wyoming; Matt Melvin in San Diego, California; Rob DenBleyker in Dallas, Texas; and Dave McElfatrick in Belfast, Northern Ireland”. I was able to interview Dave, Kris and Matt via email. Before jumping in, though, I have to apologize to our female readership and the creators for my ignorant assumption (in one question) that the audience for this work was predominantly male.

Tim O’Shea: How do you develop a sense for when the shock value of the joke outweighs or obscures the comedy of the strip?

Dave: You don’t, really. You just kinda go with what you think is funny, and if that involves either something shocking or something incredibly tame, you go for it. We don’t focus on shock value, we just go with what makes us laugh.

Kris: The humor has to come first. It’s not as if we’re trying to offend people. More often than not, people just get offended at what’s funny.

O’Shea: Do any of you in retrospect think there was ever a joke that went too far?

Kris: Not yet as far as the strip goes. When it comes down to a joke that actually offends me personally, I save it for Depressing Comic Week.

Dave: I have before, but they’re always received positively by the fans. I guess I’m just paranoid!

O’Shea: To the other extreme, can you each single out a favorite strip of the many each of you have done?

Dave: People have asked me this over the years and I still say the same one. I adore a comic I made about Munch’s The Scream. I completely trivialized that painting in three panels.

O’Shea: Is there any subject that you guys won’t tackle for a punchline?

Matt: We tend to stay away from politics in general. Video games get touched on every now and then, but surprisingly less than one would expect.

Kris: Personally, I don’t like to go after things like racism unless it targets every race.

O’Shea: Do each of you excel at certain taboo subjects, for example are one of you considered the “cannibalism” go to guy?

Matt: I’ve done a ton of necrophilia jokes. I’d say a good majority of them are very sexual in nature, whether it be necrophilia, pedophilia, STDs or just good ol’ fashioned sex jokes.

Kris: I consider Matt the “buttsex” go to guy.

O’Shea: Am I wrong to assume that your audience is predominantly male?

Matt: Very much so, actually. We’re close to an even number of male-to-female fans — slightly favoring males, but not by much. Girls use the internet, too! Although, it might be due to our ever-present feminist slant.

Kris: Surveys and conventions have shown us that our audience is split pretty evenly. So, in theory, you’re about 52% wrong.

O’Shea: How do you split up the creative responsibilities on the strip–do each of you both write and draw? Do you try to all keep similar styles or do each of you have a signature style that makes it clear when each of you are drawing the strip?

Dave: We all help each other with writing sometimes, but generally each of us take turns in both writing and creating the comic on a given day. We all have our own little drawing styles and they can differ substantially, so fans can definitely tell who drew what.

O’Shea: How did you all pick the 30 new strips that got included in the collection?

Matt: Trial by fire.

O’Shea: Who would you say are your respective comedic and artistic influences are?

Dave: A lot of my artistic influences come from old English childrens comics called The Beano And The Dandy. A lot of their strips had very particular styles and I think a lot of that has rubbed off into my characters. They can be quite dynamic at times.

Matt: I never really read comics growing up, expect for The Far Side by Gary Larson and Life in Hell by Matt Groening. Comedy-wise, I’m a huge sketch comedy nerd, so I grew up idolizing The Kids in the Hall, Monty Python, UCB and Mr. Show.

Kris: For me, it’s Don Hertzfeldt, Bill Hicks, White Ninja Comics, Monty Python, and David Wong.

O’Shea: Given the stick nature of the strip’s characters, how many “Hangman” ideas were rejected before you finally went for it with the sausage punchline?

Dave: 3,593,769.

O’Shea: Anything I neglected to cover that any of you would like to discuss?

Dave: I’d just like to point out that a plumber gave me a brief history of the toilet earlier this afternoon. He was very passionate about toilets. I think that’s admirable.

Matt: Contrary to what it says on the back of the book, my mother is not, in fact, dead.

Tiede recently wrapped up the first act with volume 3 of the print edition, so it seemed like a good time to check in and ask some questions.

Brigid: What was your initial inspiration for Paradigm Shift?

Dirk: It wasn’t so much a single point of inspiration, but a rolling series of them ranging from superheroes, role-playing games, cop shows, ’80s action movies, horror novels, and eventually, anime and manga, too. The characters originally came from a tabletop superhero role-playing game I played at a time when I was reading X-Men and The New Mutants and watched way too much Law & Order. And while I was also a big fan of Stephen King’s earlier works like Carrie and Firestarter, I also ate up films like Robocop and Lethal Weapon. Later on I discovered works like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed, which played a big role in rekindling my interest in drawing comics. I was really into The X-Files when I finally started writing Paradigm Shift, but I also took more than a few cues from movies like Running Scared (the one from the ’80′s with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines) for the action/comedy elements.

However, it wasn’t until I moved to Chicago that I was finally motivated to pick up the pencil and draw the comic. There was something about living in a real, breathing city that suddenly got me excited about doing it. Bringing in real places was the thing that made telling the story much more compelling than just another experiment in genre remixing.

Strange as it sounds, I should also mention that aside from American Werewolf in London, werewolf films didn’t have much influence on the story until well after I was already posting Paradigm Shift on the web. While I’ve found a few gems, my opinion remains that most of them are dreadful.

All that said, like any good creator I’m constantly letting new books, films, comics, and other media inspire ways to make my stories more complex and compelling, and it’s an ever-changing list. I also am still a big fan of police procedurals, though these days my tastes range more towards shows like The Wire.

Brigid: What about the characters—were they based on people you know, or were they riffs on standard archetypes?

Dirk: A little of both, of course. Just as most characters are little pieces of the their authors, Kate and Mike embody different parts of my own personality; the deliberate, calculating left brain and intuitive, creative right brain intentionally echoing the Apollo vs. Dionysus dichotomy of intellect opposing emotion. Of course, this falls perfectly in line with cool-headed vs. fiery-tempered buddy cop stereotypes, too. The male/female pairing was also a conscious nod as well, though that’s definitely a more common trope these days.

Though, while using archetypes allowed for quick introductions, the idea was to stretch beyond them as the story progressed. Instead of just following a formula, I could let the situations expose new wrinkles on the characters. I also brought in elements from people around them to me. Dialogue was often gleaned from real conversations. Mike’s martial arts training and zen outlook borrow much from a couple of friends, and Kate’s grumpy side has roots in the real world as well.

Brigid: It seems like in the beginning, you use a lot of cop-show tropes—the wisecracks, people out on a walk finding the body, the chewing out by the superior, etc. Then later on the story turns in a different way. Were you consciously adopting that structure, and how did it help you (or constrain you) as you wrote?

Dirk: Yes. That was deliberate. The premise from the beginning was to shift genres mid-stream, so I wanted to use recognizable story elements to set up expectations, and then knock them down.

That said, considering the long timeframe it took to write and draw the series, my tastes and expectations also changed through the course of writing the story. What started out to be more of an action-comedy took on a much more serious tone towards the end.

Brigid: How did you plan out the story? Did you know from the beginning how it would end, and how you would get there, or are you improvising as you go?

Dirk: I originally wrote the entire plot out—first in outlined notes, and then in prose form. However, when it came to scripting, I would write it in fits and starts, often letting new inspiration shape the details of each scene. Because of this, there are elements in the story that play a much bigger role in the final pages than appeared in the original draft. For instance, the scene in Part Two where Kate and Mike interview the homeless witness Frederick was written after sharing dinner with a homeless man who told me his own story, but never appeared in the original outline.

I should also mention that I don’t do everything entirely alone. I have a friend who plays editor for me, who’s been looking over my scribbling ever since I handed her the original outline at a coffee shop in the fall of 1998. I bounce story ideas off her, and send her my scripts, and she sends back suggestions and dialogue changes. We go back and forth, and the story is much stronger for it. She likes to keep a low profile online, though I give her due credit in the books.

Brigid: More so than most comics, Paradigm Shift really has a sense of place—you set the different scenes in specific neighborhoods, and you include carefully rendered buildings and cityscapes in your backgrounds. Yet halfway through the comic, you moved to Massachusetts. Has that changed the comic’s sense of place?

Dirk: More so for the upcoming story line. I did some planning before we moved in 2008 to make sure I had all the reference material I needed in order to complete Part Three. At this point I have thousands of Chicago photos in my library, but it doesn’t hurt that I make it back there a few times a year for conventions since we left. I always bring my camera and snap more pictures when I’m visiting.

However, the new story line finds Kate and Mike on the road, and while some scenes will still take place in Chicago, I’ll be working in new locations. While I’m not strictly limiting myself to specific places I’ve been, I am trying to include regions for which I have at least some familiarity. I also plan to do some research on my travels to and from conventions this spring and summer, so I can continue to pay attention to the details of my settings.

Brigid: Also, you use a lot of unusual panels and devices, like the scene where Kate and Mike are chasing a bad guy, and Mike takes the stairs and Kate takes the elevator, and you use a stairstep pattern for the panels, with the elevator numbers counting off the floors. Which comes first in a scene like that—do you decide to draw the scene, then fit it into the story, or do you start with the scene and work toward the composition?

Dirk: While the story always comes first, I don’t always know how exactly I am going to depict a scene when I first write it. It depends. The trick with the stair-step panels vs. elevator numbers was just a spur of the moment inspiration that occurred to me one day while riding one up to my job on the 20th floor in downtown Chicago at the time. Whereas I had always planned to do away with the distinct panel order and borders in the nightmare sequences, though I didn’t know exactly how until I was drawing the final layouts.

Regardless, I always make sure my panel compositions somehow reflect what is going on in the story. For example, I tend to make the action scenes’ panels more energetic and angular, and overlap them to give a sense that all these chaotic events are happening all at once, and the panels themselves almost appear to fall down the page as a result.

Brigid: To what extent are you thinking about the eventual print edition as you work on the comic? Do you deliberately structure the story so each part will fit neatly into a single volume, for instance?

Dirk: The plan from the start was always to release the story in book form, and I wrote each part with that in mind. That said, I didn’t let specific page counts dictate how long each book went.

The first three books Part One: Equilibrium, Part Two: Agitation, and Part Three: Emergence make up what I call ACT I, which I initially intended to be a single book. However, after taking three years to just complete Equilibrium, I decided to release it in pieces.

I did alter Part Three’s story somewhat to allow for a more thematically complete end to ACT I. Admittedly, it’s still pretty open-ended, but it’s a vast improvement over the blatant cliff-hanger called for in the original outline.

Now that I have the first three volumes complete, I will probably opt for the original plan when I run out of copies of the current books, and reprint them as an ACT I omnibus.

Brigid: What sort of changes do you make to the comic when you go to the print edition?

Dirk: It’s varied from book to book. Part One: Equilibrium saw the most changes before its first edition, because it was my first foray into the professional comics world. I made substantial changes to the artwork in the first 20 pages of the story, including redrawing several panels, and completely re-doing the graytones on several pages. I also did touchups and updated the lettering throughout the book.

Part Two saw some touchups to artwork and dialogue, but nothing on the same scale as the first book. Part Three mostly just saw minor touchups, but I did re-kern all the lettering. It was probably more work than I really needed to do, but I’m a completionist. Once I started it, I had to finish.

Then there’s the footnotes. I compile those once the artwork is complete.

Brigid: Do you go back and put those changes into the webcomic, or does it remain as an earlier version?

Dirk: Up until I launched my new website, only the most glaring ones. The archives at Webcomicsnation.com and ModernTales.com have the updated version of Part One: Equilibrium, but Parts Two and Three remain the same as when I first posted them.

However, my new website (www.paradigmshiftmanga.com) has updated versions of the artwork to all three books—as well as footnotes!

Brigid: The ending of volume 3 was more like a beginning! You still have a lot of questions to answer and situations to resolve. (Like, are there still man-made werewolves wandering at large in Chicago and elsewhere?) How do these three volumes fit into the story as a whole?

Dirk: While I altered ACT I’s story line so it would be complete enough that it could stand on its own should I get run over by that proverbial bus, it was always intended to be the setup for the larger story. If this had been a superhero book, it would have been Kate’s origin story, if you will.

ACT I ends with the first true—dare I say it?—”paradigm shift” as Kate and Mike discover the true nature of their investigations, and there’s distinct change in genres as ACT II begins. Where ACT I is a cop story, ACT II will be a fugitive story.

Rest assured there is more on the way! I’ll be starting up ACT II later this spring or early summer on my new website, starting with Part Four. And, assuming that I complete ACT II on schedule in a few years, there will also be an ACT III down the road.

First Second Books is publishing the story as a webcomic in seven languages, including English, Persian, and Arabic, and will publish it as a print comic next year. With the help of First Second’s Gina Gagliano, I interviewed Amir, the writer, and Mark Siegel, First Second’s editorial director, via e-mail to find out a bit more about the background and the future of this remarkable graphic narrative.

Brigid: What were your inspirations for this story? Were there particular people or incidents that sparked it?

Amir: The inspirations for the story are many. There’s context and culture. I’m deeply touched by the dreams of Iranian youth, by the nobility of Iranian women, the courage of the Iranian people. In one way or another, their stories of trauma and triumph, joy and genius, are woven into the fabric of my being.

When the revolution of 1979 happened, I was a kid. I saw a lot of people, on all sides, get hurt. And the violence seemed so senseless and unnecessary, and its consequences, the trauma, so vulgar and grotesque. So, I’ve known, since then, that one day I will do something about this nonsense. And that day seems to have finally come. After thirty years!!

In terms of immediate inspiration, there’s no way I was going to let the dreams of another generation of Iranian youth get shattered in the streets of Tehran. And there was no way I was going to let their memory get wiped out. That meant reconstructing their story—capturing and reflecting their image in some kind of mirror that could store and release their energy, their light. To me, Neda, Sohrab, Mohsen and others are only dead if we think of them and treat them as dead. But, if we don’t, if we tap into their life force, and raise its power by connecting their story back to the world, there’s no telling what their story can do.

Brigid: What is your view of Iran? Did you grow up there? Would you go back?

Amir: Most of my life, I have lived in between places, so I don’t feel as though I belong to any single place. And to be honest, in a global age, or frankly in any age, I find territorial and tribal notions of identity really primitive, bloody and revolting. So I can’t claim to have an extraordinary or exclusive view of Iran.

The Iran I know is the cradle of the family in which I grew up, mostly the love and touch of my grandmothers, a sense of abundance and joy, mixed with the smell of my grandfather’s old books. It was a very simple, stable and secure world that nothing could really shake or destroy, and it has remained a source of energy and inspiration that makes me feel great, happy, lucky and very very rich.

I don’t feel that I need to go back to Iran to find Iran. Iran’s always been around me, and it’s certainly present inside my imagination. I can tap into it whenever I want. Imagination is the best place to hide, find and discover the worlds we love.

Remember, I was kicked out of Iran when I was twelve, flung outside into a much bigger world, and this bigger world has been an incredible sanctuary. So many people around the world from Turkey and Pakistan to France and Germany to Australia and America have opened their hearts and homes to us Iranians—despite all the nonsense about Iranians as terrorists and fundamentalists—that there’s no way I can just live in a bubble called Iran. I’d find that awfully boring and very lonely.

Brigid: Were you in Iran during the presidential elections and the aftermath? How did you get information about what was going on?

Amir: No I was not in Iran during the elections. I got my information from multiple sources — Youtube, bloggers, activists and more.

Brigid: What is at the heart of the comic—what is the story you feel compelled to tell, even though it may put you at personal risk?

Amir: If I may, I will answer this question about risk using an analogy.

I spent years studying history and human rights, and then, after dropping out of university, I accidentally ended up working as a supply chain manager in a lemonade factory. I don’t wish that job on anybody but it was worth ten college degrees. I had to learn everything about the journey of a can of lemonade through the factory into the belly of the city. It’s really mundane stuff—from purchasing to marketing, accounting to shipping. How all these departments relate to each other as the team standing behind the can of lemonade is what would make the factory turn. It all got reduced into a simple equation—could we back the price of our claim and deliver on the promise of lemonade or not.

The heart of the system, as it turns out, was customer service—that’s where we’d interact with our clients and get complaints about defects. If for whatever reason you can of lemonade had a defect, you had to spot the can immediately, pull it out of circulation, and trace the defect to its source.

Now, for obvious reasons, nobody wants to hear that their lemonade sucks—that a bottle exploded in some fridge, or there was hairy guck inside the bottle or that some little girl turned orange drinking it. It’s so much trouble figuring out what went wrong with the can of lemonade. Nobody wants to accept the blame for what’s gone wrong. So, everyone starts hiding and hedging. Was it purchasing that bought bad bottles and lemons, was it quality control that used old lemons, was it production that had hired a hairy employee or was it maintenance that had used to much soap to rinse the lemon juicer? The risk of finding out the truth is too great, so much better to draw a veil over the complaints and get along in obscurity. Who, after all, wants to risk their department’s relations with production or purchasing, sales or shipping by identifying the defect? And if the problem gets to the CEO, then who wants to accept the personal risk of admitting to a fault when their budget, job, honor, mortgage is on the line. But what’s rational at the individual or departmental level is disastrous. You can end up with a city poisoned with a river of bad lemonade spewing out of your factory. The price of your name and brand collapses, the price of your promise erodes, your costs rise, and, sooner or later, you either have to shut down the factory or save it by firing its bankrupt and useless guardians—idiots who don’t know a thing about making or keeping a promise, let alone running a lemonade factory by respecting its promises to each and every single client.

So, to answer your question, by analogy, what compels me to write this story is that the Iranian people are being sold very poisonous lemonade. And the story I’m telling—the story of a single family moving through the belly of the Islamic Republic—allows me to expose processes and attitudes that make failure on such a grand scale possible. Imagine a lemonade factory that poisons its clients and then, instead of adjusting its operations by admitting fault, blames the clients by calling the lemonade “Islamic” because it bears the name and seal of the CEO. And then imagine the factory arresting and murdering its own department heads, as well as the clients, for insulting the CEO by questioning his right to sell bad lemonade in the name of the factory’s founder. That’s why so many Iranians are complaining, and why I accept my share of the risk. God has given us a nose and a sense of smell, and that sense of smell is what stands between us and the disgusting lemonade spewing out of Khamenei’s factory. If he can’t accept the risk his decisions create for millions of people, he has no business calling himself “Supreme Leader.” Grand coward should be enough. No? Ignoring the Iranian people, look at the stress he has placed on Iran’s security services and clergy. People like him are frauds—they cheapen everything and everyone. It’s time for him to drink his own lemonade.

Brigid: The elections and their immediate aftermath are over, but the opposition continues. How do you deal with that open-endedness? If something dramatic were to happen, would you revise the story to incorporate it?

Amir: Yes: I’ve been able to weave some events into the story, and I expect we can do more of the same. There’s also the blog aspect of the story, and that allows many other voices and stories to get incorporated in the story. That’s where Mark’s genius, his vision as an editor, kicks in.

Brigid: Many readers, especially American readers, have strong preconceptions about Iran and Islam. You refer to this briefly in your introduction when you point out that “Allahu Akbar” is “not the scream of the terrorist, but the Iranian people’s freedom song.” How does that affect your writing? Are there things you steer clear of for fear of misunderstanding?

Amir: No, I’m not afraid of the American people’s preconceptions or misunderstandings about Iran or Islam. And frankly, I’m not sure if I’m not without my preconceptions and misunderstandings about Iran and Islam, or for that matter, America. So, it’s a chance for us to learn, if from nothing else, then from each other’s mistakes. And the other side of it is that perception and perspective can open our ideas about space and time, and so a good story can expand our sense of boundaries, identity and the world, and we can only do that together. I think where the intentions are right, and where there is compassion, there’s room for growth…

Interview with Mark Siegel, editorial director of First Second

Brigid: How did this property come to you, and how did you know it was right for First Second?

Mark: Amir and I had been talking for some time, and various proposals were on the table for a project about Iran, but nothing quite seemed right for First Second. Then in June the events in Iran took a dramatic turn, our conversation sobered in some ways, and the next thing was Amir presented this project to me. And it was immediately obvious: this one was born of need. I couldn’t pass.

First Second, from its very first season in 2006, has always included a theme of world affairs, topical, human race issues. Deogratias was one, about the genocide in Rwanda, The Photographer was another, about Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan. There are more in the works, some of them heavy, some of them lighter in tone. Zahra’s Paradise felt right away like a major addition to this collection.

Brigid: Why are you making this available in so many different languages?

Mark: We knew we wanted the Persian version alongside the English, for an Iranian audience in Iran as well as around the world. Soon after that, Amir and Khalil realized that they were creating this for many kinds of readers, including the broad Arabic speaking audience, so we added that. But then several major foreign publishers responded immediately—great houses like Casterman in France, Rizzoli-Lizard in Italy, Norma in Spain, and now Darun in Korea, and more in talks… So naturally, I think the project is contagious, and important, and this reflects it.

The other side of this of course is that more languages means more exposure, right away. And if this can be a small thorn in the side of the Iranian regime, then 10 or more languages makes it an international thorn.

Brigid: How long will the story run?

Mark: As of now it will run at least 160 pages.

Brigid: When will it go to print, and what will the format be?

Mark: 2011 as of our latest plans, but that’s flexible. The web pages may end up being two-thirds of an actual book page.

Brigid: The writer and artist have chosen to remain anonymous. Are you concerned about any possible consequences for yourselves?

Mark: Although it pulls no punches with the Iranian government and its human rights practices, the project is very respectful of Islam and Iran’s religious facets. This isn’t some reckless polemic. What impresses me with Zahra’s Paradise above all is its quality. Its beauty and the depth of its writing make it a work that will last beyond our times, beyond the Iranian regime. Of course, with politics and the Middle East, passions run high everywhere, and opening up any conversation is potentially a tinder box. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a vital thing to do.

The Iranian regime conveniently keeps the focus on the nation’s nuclear program, goading everyone with it to keep the world’s attention away from its cruel crackdown on the opposition. Zahra’s Paradise returns the focus on human rights, and on daily life inside Iran. If anything, where an American audience is concerned, this should humanize our idea of who Iranians are, and help strengthen our connections to each other as human beings. Besides the current political issue, it’s a universal story, a mother’s love for her son, a brother grieving for a missing brother, hope and love in the face of oppression—again, it’s the human story.

Copper

While webcomics have certainly come into their own as a medium unto themselves, most creators eventually produce a print volume, either on their own or through a major publisher. Print publishers may put up part of a volume as a preview, or they may post an entire volume (as Viz does on its SigIKKI website) and then pull it down when the print edition arrives. Webcomics creators, on the other hand, generally leave the entire comic up on the web, which begs the question: Why pay for the book when the comic is free?

I recently received review copies of print editions of two well known webcomics, Cyanide & Happiness and Copper (links are to the web versions). In both cases, I had read the comic from time to time but didn’t follow it regularly. And in both cases, I felt that the print edition did indeed present extra value over the webcomic. Read on to see why.

*****

Cyanide & Happiness
By Kris Wilson, Matt Melvin, Rob Denbleyker, and Dave McElfatric
HarperCollins, 160 pages, $13.99

The Cyanide & Happiness formula is pretty simple: Stick men (and women) do shocking things to one another. There are four different artists, but the style and humor are fairly uniform; a situation is set up in the first panel and resolved, by stabbing, boob-grabbing, or shouting “You have cancer! LOL!” in the last. My kids love this comic, because it’s what teenagers are all about: Working your way through every possible taboo, in public. So in C&H we have Seizure-Man falling down and frothing at the mouth, bungee-jumping childbirth, and lots and lots of stabbing.

The danger that collecting a bunch of C&H strips into a single book, of course, is that repeated exposure will lessen the impact. One stabbing joke is funny; five of them, not so much. Fortunately, the creators pace themselves, mixing different types of humor (including some clever wordplay and visual puns that aren’t at all bloody) so that when someone gets stabbed in the forehead, it actually does come as a surprise.

Also, there’s more to Cyanide & Happiness than blood and gore. The gags really are funny, in a laugh-out-loud sort of way, and the pacing is usually spot-on. Occasionally someone is left hanging for an extra panel, but usually it works.

So why buy the book when the comic is free? A couple of reasons. One is that you don’t have to read the comics on the C&H website, where they are reproduced just a hair too small for comfortable reading and are surrounded by animated ads, raw HTML for embedding the comic in your blog, and other crap. Another is that the book only includes the best strips, saving you the trouble of paging through the weak ones. And finally, it really is a very handsome book, with a nice matte cover, bright colors, and heavy paper.

I don’t really recommend reading this book cover to cover. Better to leave it lying around the house so you can dip into it from time to time—the humor will stay fresher that way. Just be sure to hide it when Grandma comes to visit, unless she has the same sense of humor as a 15-year-old.

Copper
by Kazu Kibuishi
Scholastic, 96 pages, $12.99 (paperback), $21.99 (hardback)

Despite being published by Scholastic, Copper is not really a children’s comic. It is more like the classic Little Nemo in Slumberland, to which it pays occasional homage: These stories are accessible to children but offer a lot more to adults.

This is a comic worth reading for the art alone; in each single-page story, creator Kazu Kubuishi creates a dreamlike world for his two characters, a boy named Copper and his dog Fred, to wander through. Sometimes they are in a boat on a vast sea, or an airship sailing through the clouds. Most often they are on foot: Taking the subway through the city, hiking up a mountain, or jumping from the top of one giant mushroom to another. Kibuishi varies the size and arrangement of his panels to create a framework for the story (another echo of Little Nemo). The stories themselves are fairly simple, mostly just three or four beats, and more conversation than action.

I was a little dubious as to how this comic would transfer to paper, but the folks at Scholastic did a nice job of putting the book together, including making the very intelligent decision to put each comic on a single page rather than breaking them across multiple pages. They are perfectly readable in the book’s 9”x9” format, and in fact the book is a bit better for me, because an entire page won’t fit on my browser screen. In addition, the book features four new comics that aren’t on the web. These are more than just bonus material—each of them is several pages long and has a more complex story than the one-page episodes on the web. In a final essay, Kibuishi talks about how he works on Copper and shows photos of the work in progress.

Unlike Cyanide & Happiness, Copper reads about as well on the web as in print. What puts this book over the edge is the handsome format and the extras. The one complaint I have always had about Copper is that there isn’t enough of it—Kibuishi last updated it in April 2009—and the new comics are among the strongest in the series. And unlike Cyanide & Happiness, this is a book that can be read over and over. At $12.99 for the paperback, it’s a steal.

So here is a sampling of gag comics that I have been reading lately. Some are thigh-slappers, while others are more likely to elicit a smile, but there’s a good deal of variation in style and topic, which hopefully means there’s a comic in here for every funnybone. And if you were to subscribe to the RSS feed of each of these, your news reader would have its own funny page every morning. Sort of like your local newspaper—only funnier.

Bug is a minimalist comic that is all about the joke. The characters are one step up from stick-men, and they are completely anonymous—there is no consistent character from one strip to another. The art is simple, but it does the job, which is to showcase creator Adam Huber’s deadpan humor. Every strip is a witty twist on some aspect of modern life, from what hang gliders are thinking to why canes are cooler than walkers, and every one so far has been dead on.

Josh Way’s Strewth has even less continuity—the style varies from day to day, sometimes drawings, sometimes old photos. Most of the gags are about pop culture, particularly geek culture. Sometimes the humor is a bit esoteric, but he also takes on Disney and even Santa Claus. And even though I don’t watch Lost, I got what he was talking about here.

On the Edge has been around for quite a while, but creator Leisl Adams seems to have really hit her stride in the past two years. It’s basically a romantic comedy featuring two cops, but the twist is that their universe is inhabited by a number of demons who personify various emotions—anxiety, jealousy, etc. Fortunately, Adams handles this concept with a light touch. The main character, O. Negative (a.k.a. Mr. Negs) has been reduced to quasi-human status and works as a therapist. Since he’s a demon, he’s the world’s worst therapist, continually encouraging his patients’ worst impulses. Adams interweaves his antics, and those of his fellow demons, with a love story between Jim, a hunky cop (who is also a cat, but just barely) and Alice, a human woman who is his partner until he moves up to detective. The story is hard to follow in the early strips—it almost looks as if some episodes are missing—and the gags aren’t as funny, but it looks like Adams really put the pedal to the metal in early 2008, and the writing improved a lot. (Start here and move forward, if you want to catch up.) One thing that is consistent from the beginning is her deft, linear style of drawing, which conveys a lot of emotion without a lot of fuss. If you like ensemble strips with a bit of continuity, give this one a try.

The gags are pretty mild in Squid Row, but it’s not so much a laugh-a-minute comic as a pleasant little stopover, the sort of thing you read because the characters are fun. The main character, Randie, is an aspiring artist who works in an art supply store and makes occasional stabs at being a Real Artist in between dealing with leaky roofs, an obnoxious cat, and other sitcom-like situations. Her best friend Ryan is a writer who seems to be a bit better off, and he supports her mentally as well as financially. A sprinkling of other characters round out the cast—her grouchy co-worker Grace, hyper art therapist Enid. There’s a glitch in the archives—some strips are repeated, others are missing—but as continuity is only a small part of this strip’s charm, that’s not a deal breaker.

Robot Beach is kind of like that too. You read it mainly for the characters and the story, and once in a while you get the occasional belly laugh. This is a young comic (only 61 strips up as of this writing), and creator Matt Forcum is still experimenting a bit, bringing in bits of narrative here and there. It’s about a robot who is stranded on an island and makes friends with the locals, a smart-alecky, cigar-smoking lobster and a smart-alecky seagull. The character designs are nice, and I like Forcum’s painterly backgrounds, so I’ll be following this one to see where it goes.

Finally, Max vs. Max is Wes Molebash’s new comic, and I’ll confess, I never thought a Christian comic could be so funny. Molebash steers clear of the preachy stuff; he writes like a grownup and isn’t afraid to let a character get whacked in the nuts once in a while. Max, the main character, is freshly divorced and trying to figure out how to deal with his new reality. The strip comes out of Molebash’s own experience with divorce, but what makes it is that he really is a good writer: The arc where he has a late-night conversation with a surprisingly snarky God (start here) hit my funnybone hard.

For instance, you can pick up a 200-page graphic novel and read it in pretty much one sitting, and usually that’s a pleasurable thing to do. Reading 200 pages worth of webcomic archives? Not so much. No matter how interesting a comic may be, a screenful of links to past episodes is a daunting sight to the new reader, and clicking, waiting for each page to load, and scrolling can become tedious pretty quickly.

So, for those who don’t have time to wade through pages of old comics, here are five promising startups, all new comics that have launched since the beginning of 2010. There’s a variety of styles and genres here, but all are so new that you can be up to speed in a few minutes. And all look like they will be worthy additions to any RSS feed.

Yellow Peril just started last week, so creator Jamie Noguchi has only posted a few strips so far. However, it looks like he has taken the basic webcomics model to heart and written the T-shirt right into the comic. In this case, it’s a Kamen Che Guevara T-shirt that seems to be keeping his lead character, Kane, from moving up the corporate ladder. (Well, that and general cluelessness.) Noguchi seems to have thought things through pretty well—there are some as-yet-unseen characters on the Cast page, and he even has explanations for the title and the navigational aids. That’s not surprising, as Noguchi is a seasoned comics artists, with stints on Fans, Erfworld, and some print things under his belt. (NSFW for language, as Noguchi makes the very bold choice to kick off the very first strip with the F-bomb.)

Sailor Twain got some good press at its launch because the creator is Mark Siegel, editorial director of First Second Books, which is the home of some mighty fine print comics. That was last week, though, which is 17 years in Internet Time, and you have probably forgotten all about it. Well, go check it out. The story is still just getting under way, so at the moment we only have a vague outline: A mysterious disappearance, a beautiful, possibly neurotic, woman, a taciturn sailor, a pendant of obscure but undeniable significance. It’s very readable, and Siegel’s art is interesting enough to carry the story while we wait for the big hook; he’s using charcoal (or something like it) to create a smoky, moody waterfront atmosphere, and it’s fun to just sit back and watch.

Christy Lijewski’s Samurai Host Club is the newest of the batch, with just two episodes up, so it’s too early to say much about it, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Lijewski is an accomplished artist who is just hitting her stride, and this will be a comic worth watching. She draws long, lean figures with plenty of energy, so her style is perfect for a story like this, which she describes as “Assassins, Mafia wars, gunfights, massive bleeding, hookers and hosts. Maybe a samurai or two thrown in for good measure.” Indeed, the comic comes with an adults-only warning, and there’s a bloody corpse on page one. Lijewski got her start with Tokyopop, and they just published the last volume of her well-received series RE:Play, a story about punk rockers with a supernatural twist. Samurai Host Club looks like a natural next step for Lijewski, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Outside Infinity is the heaviest of these comics, in terms of both mood and subject matter. Creator John Barber works in a painterly style, with overlapping panels and text boxes full of narration, to tell his story of a dying scientist searching for answers to a cosmological problem while stationed on the front lines of World War I. If advance notices are to be believed, it will be taking a sharp sci-fi turn shortly, but it’s definitely more Twilight Zone than space opera. The narrator seems a bit overbearing at first, but now that the prologue is over with, Barber is letting the characters take over, which is good. I like the choice of setting and the characters, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this story goes. If this piques your interest, Barber’s earlier, Flash-based comic Vicious Souvenirs is up on the same site, Modern Tales, but it has, you know, archives.

Let’s end with some laughs: Luci Phurr’s Imps is a light take on the old selling-your-soul-to-the-devil chestnut. It starts out with a cute prologue in which Hell is presented as a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies being what they are, nothing works our the way it’s supposed to, so when TV weatherman Lou C. Phurr makes a deal with the devil’s people, they take their time about getting back to him, and they wind up working for his daughter instead. What’s more, the imps assigned to the job are not exactly the best and the brightest. Things are just getting rolling, but already this strip has gotten some good digs in, and it looks like there are plenty of laughs to come. And the candy-colored palette is a good signal that this won’t be turning into Split Lip anytime soon.

The model worked for the Foglios, who have won numerous awards for Girl Genius, including the first-ever Hugo award for graphic fiction, and Phil Foglio has been posting his earlier comics work online as well, including Buck Godot and What’s New with Phil and Dixie. When Buck Godot wrapped up, a few weeks ago, he replaced it with the his first comic series, Myth Adventures, based on the humorous fantasy novels of Robert Asprin.

I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to talk to Foglio about why he is resurrecting a 20-year-old series, how he has managed to turn a profit with the free-comics model—and what’s up with his one subscription comic, the adult series XXXenophile. Read on for all the answers.

Brigid: How would you describe Myth Adventures to someone who isn’t already familiar with the series?

Phil: A bumbling apprentice magician finds himself hooked up with a magician from another dimension who has lost his powers, so the only way he can get anything done is teach the kid what needs to be done. So the kid has the ability, but the older magician has the knowledge and skills.

Brigid: What was the genesis of this series, and how did you become involved with it?

Phil: The Myth Adventures novels were originally written for a small company called Starblaze, which was a publishing house that was set up by science fiction illustrator Frank Kelly Freas. One of the books he picked was this light humorous fantasy [Another Fine Myth] by Bob Asprin. The two of them knew each other, so it was an easy sale, and it was head and shoulders the best seller this line had.

In 1983, Bob sold the comic rights to the Myth Adventures books to WaRP graphics [which was owned by Elfquest creators Wendy and Richard Pini]. By that time I had taken over the illustration. When Bob sold them the rights, they asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know a comic book artist who could do this, would you?” And Bob said “As a matter of fact, I do!” They called me up and said “Do you want to do this?” and I said “Sure!”

When they gave me the job they said “OK, here’s the novel. Adapt it into comic book form.” But there are certain things you just can’t transcribe from book to comic. Bob was very supportive about that. In the first scene, Skeeve, the apprentice, and his master Garkin are on this total backwards nowheresville dimension, and I said, “Garkin is really interesting. Why is he there?” And Bob said “He’s there to bring Aahz and Skeeve together.” I said “I get that, but why is this magician nowhere starving in a hut?” and Bob said “He’s there to bring Aahz and Skeeve together. After that, he dies.” I said “You don’t mind if I fill that out a bit?” and he said “Nah, he’s dead.” So there are changes in the story I had to make. The series was originally going to be six issues, but I filled it out so much it became eight. Every now and then I’d get a call from Bob saying “Well, this is a surprise,” but Bob was very cool about the whole thing and really liked the final product.

Brigid: What happened to the rights to these comics over the years?

Phil: The books first came out in black and white as 8 issues from WaRP graphics, and subsequently they were printed as two-color graphic novels from Donning Starblaze. They went out of print ages ago, and just recently we brought them back to print ourselves under the Airship Entertainment imprint.

The contract was actually decent in that the art and the stuff like that was copyrighted in my name, so that wasn’t really a problem. Even so, when I went over the contracts [to reprint the graphic novel], we sent [the Pinis] a note saying we were going to do it anyway, just to make sure, and Richard wrote back and said “Why are you telling me this?”

Of course the story and the property were Bob’s, so we had to get a contract with him, which we were able to do while he was still alive, and in fact he got to see the book reprinted. Subsequent to his death, his rights reverted to his executor, Bill Fawcett, whose wife, Jody Lynn Nye was collaborating with Bob on the last few Myth Adventures novels.

Brigid: What do you hope to accomplish by putting them on the web?

Phil: First of all, there are a lot of people who have been following my work who have never heard of Myth Adventures. We posted it online and already we are getting people who are like, “What the hell is this?” This is a good way to revitalize the sales of the printed books, so eventually I will be able to see my garage floor again.

Brigid: Will we be seeing Myth Adventures on the iPad?

Phil: I regard the web not as a medium so much as a means of distribution. So I think if the iPad helps get our comic in front of more people, hooray. We don’t have anything on the iPhone. We have had four or five people who have come to us and said “We want to make a Girl Genius iPhone app,” and we say “Great, tell us what you want to do,” and they all fall apart. I haven’t heard of anybody who has figured out a way to make serious money off a comic book iPhone app.

The iPad, is bigger, and for us bigger is better. We do sell PDF copies of our books through DriveThruComics, where we are consistently one of the best sellers. That’s nice: We send them the PDFs and that’s it, we’re done, and every month we get a nice little check from them—little, but they come month after month. And in this age, I really think nobody who is in it for the long haul is going to get rich in one fell swoop. What has worked best for us is just trying to come up with as many different things as possible. None of them makes a million dollars, but we get a thousand dollars here and a hundred dollars there and it all adds up. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.

Brigid: You were one of the first creators to make money by putting a comic online for free. How did that work?

Phil: Girl Genius was an established book. We put out 14 issues as a comic book periodical. It came out on a regular basis, and as an independent comic book goes, it was doing pretty darn well: We were selling, like 9,000 copies. About a third of them we were selling retail, off of our website or at conventions, the other two-thirds we were selling through distributors like Diamond. In 2005 we just stopped printing the comics, and we took this already established property that we had been selling for money and put it online for free and said no firewall, no subscriptions, no nothing—we are giving it away.

Brigid: Why?

Phil: First of all, printing comic books is expensive. I figured that by not having to do the comic book we were saving close to $20,000 a year. When you lay out a comic book and then lay out a graphic novel, it’s two entirely different jobs. You have to do it all over again. All we do now is sell the collections. Also, printing the comic was really expensive, and we were in a cash crunch at a particular time and we were like, “Is this really worth it?”

And thirdly, for years people had been coming up to me and saying “I would like to get into comics” and I had been saying “Screw comics. Do a webcomic. It’s the wave of the future and your production costs are super low,” and eventually I realized that instead of just giving this advice I should take it.

A lot of the success of Girl Genius I think could only have been done by a person like myself who had a long career building up an established name and being in independent publishing, because that meant I was publishing my own books. So when Girl Genius went online, we were able to sell people Girl Genius books from day one, whereas almost everybody, who starts a webcomic has to collect material before they get a book. It takes them sometimes up to two years before they can begin to monetize our core product. We went in with a functioning store, and all we had to do was say “Like it? Buy it now.”

Brigid: What part does your wife Kaja play in all this?

Phil: She’s a co-writer, a co-plotter. We talk out the story. We were talking the story out for six years before we put out issue 1, so she’s pretty much the co-writer. She does all the lettering, she does all the computer production, she does all the book layout. She runs the website. That’s the way to do it. if you’re going to marry someone in the same business as you, the best thing to do is work with them.

Brigid: Why did you make your adult comic, XXXenophile, available via a subscription model?

Phil: XXXenophile was a bachelor’s toy. I was sitting around arguing with some friends about adult comics, and I said, you know, everybody really likes to read adult comics but they are all so horrible. I’ll bet people would really like to see a happy, fun, well made story that happens to have lots of sex in it. They were like, “Well, maybe, but nobody has actually done that.” It was something I wanted to do, so I did it kind of as an experiment, to see if I could and would there be a response, and holy cow was there a response! It did very well. I did 11 issues, and then I decided I had proved my point and I stopped. XXXenophile is out of print; we ran out of issues and I’m not doing any more of them.

There’s this pay site called Slipshine, run by another cartoonist called Josh Lesnick, and he said “XXXenophile is getting pirated let right and center. I would be willing to pay you to run it, and if you have an authorized site charging money for it, if nothing else it would be easier to police these sites.” So I basically licensed it to him, and every month I get a check and he puts up some more pages. It’s money for stuff I did ten years ago. Holy cow, what a deal! And it’s in a regulated site. They make an effort to keep it behind a firewall, and the rest of the stuff on the site is reasonably good. The ethos behind XXXenophile was no rape, no violence, no coercion, no guilt, just everybody having a good time, and pretty much everything else on that site follows the same ethos, as it were.

XXXenophile did very well indeed. We had much higher production values, we had stories people weren’t afraid to be caught reading, we had an incredibly high female readership, which for comics is strange and for porno is unheard of. I had a pediatrician tell me if she had a choice between a young teenage boy finding XXXenophile and Batman, she’d throw him XXXenophile because it teaches much healthier interactions. Of course, this particular pediatrician would not go on the record, and I would not ask her to, but it still gave me good feelings for the day.

After wrapping up Araknid Kid, Alves launched a new comic, Heropotamus, last Christmas. When I saw that go up, I decided it would be interesting to talk to Alves about his work and the challenges of all-ages webcomics in general.

Brigid: Let’s start with a quick “comics biography”: what comics did you read as a child, how did your tastes evolve, and how did you start drawing comics?

Josh: I was a big fan of the comics pages growing up. The Far Side was always the first strip I’d look for (it was on the front page of the entertainment section… bottom left corner. For some reason that position has stuck with me), then to the back for Calvin and Hobbes and the Amazing Spider-Man dailies. I didn’t read many comic books growing up… it was later when I started picking up trade paperbacks.

Not sure how much my tastes have evolved… I’m still a big fan of those strips I read as a kid. I guess you can say my appreciation for them has evolved.

Like many other artists, I’ve been drawing/doodling for as long as I can remember. Making my own comics as a kid, drawing out word problems on math tests (that earned me points for creativity in high school), doodling on scraps of paper on my desk at work. I think I started taking it more seriously in 2002. I was looking for a job when my wife suggested I start a comic strip. Zeek And Dent first started on the web and after a chain of events, it ended up being published starting in 2004 in the local newspaper. It ran for a year and a half (500 strips) before I ended it.

I had the chance to talk with a syndicate editor who suggested I explore my single panel gags so I started Tastes Like Chicken the day my first strip ended.

Brigid: Are you making a living as a cartoonist right now?

Josh: Currently cartooning is something I do on the side right now. I’m a graphic designer by trade, “Creative Services Manager” by title. I also freelance design and illustrate as well.

Brigid: I notice you list “father” prominently in your bio. How has having children affected your work?

Josh: If anything it’s given me more of a passion to create all-ages material. I love drawing with my girls and trying to tap into some of their creativity and how they see things. Kids are pretty observant and it’s fun seeing what they put together. They definitely serve as inspiration.

Brigid: What are the challenges of creating all-ages comics on the web? How do kids find your comics?

Josh: I think it’s pretty similar to the challenges of creating any comic on the web. Finding an audience, connecting with the audience, etc. Part of it is dealing with the stereotype of webcomics in general, and another part confronting assumptions on what “all-ages” means.

Kids usually find my comics through their parents, teachers or librarians. And their friends.

I’ve also been fortunate to participate in a few kid-friendly cons and most recently part of the “Kids Love Comics” area at the Baltimore Comic Con.

Brigid: Where did you come up with the idea for Araknid Kid, and why did you decide to have him talk in rebuses?

Josh: Araknid Kid was an idea that evolved from a character I created in high school called Bug Boy (an animated series I had created). He originally started as a sidekick to Bug Boy, then as a sidekick to another character and eventually became the web-shooting-trapeze-bar-swinging western hero

The picto-speak came a little bit later… the character never talked until I started using symbols to show expressions. As it progressed I thought it’d be a fun challenge to try to communicate what a character was saying using a picto-puzzle. It ended up tying together with the character’s origin and so I’ve gone with it.

I enjoy brain teasers and thought that it might be a fun addition to a comic to encourage creative thinking and problem solving. Plus, I enjoy trying to convey what’s being communicated in a way that other people would understand.

Brigid: What did you learn from your experience with Zuda?

Josh: Zuda was a fantastic experience for me. When I first heard about it, it motivated me enough to take a character and concept I had created and actually DO something with it! I was really encouraged by the response and was excited that it had the rare opportunity to have a second chance in the Invitational. I think the most important thing I learned was how important marketing and promotion is.

Brigid: And what did you learn from being on Sugary Serials?

Josh: It sounds kind of basic, but I learned how to break my story up into a beginning, middle and end.

The way the publishing schedule was set up, I had three 8-page installments posted over three months. For me, that meant that that 8th page of the first and second batches needed to tie up that particular segment while leaving a bit of a cliffhanger to lead into the next one.

I think it really helped me to section things out. Again, it sounds so basic, but that’s what sticks out for me.

Brigid: I see from your website that you are involved in two Christian projects, Parable and Mecha Manga Bible Heroes. Can you talk a bit about that side of your work?

Josh: My faith in Jesus Christ is a very important part of my life and these projects are a couple that I’ve had the opportunity to be part of. Parable is a fantastic collection of stories about faith, love and grace from creators all over the world (quite unlike what I think people might think when they hear “Christian comic”). And Mecha Manga Bible Heroes is a fun re-telling of classic Bible stories.

Brigid: OK, Heropotamus. What inspired this comic?

Josh: Well, it was pretty spontaneous! A couple weeks before last Christmas my girls and I were listening to the novelty song “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”. It’s been a fun favorite of mine for years and this was the first time I introduced it to my kids. It’s a silly song and as I was listening to the words, there’s a line that goes “And see a hippo hero standing there” and I thought “Hey! This little girl is looking to get a SUPERHERO hippo for Christmas”.

Anyway, this idea of a little girl and a superhero hippo bit me and I couldn’t shake it. All these ideas started popping up and a few quick doodles later it all seemed to click for me.

I’ve been itching to do another strip for a while and thought “Why not” – a couple weeks later, I had a handful of strips drawn and with the help of some creative friends (Jamie Cosley, Eric Merced, and Tommy Flick) I had the strip’s name, and with my brother’s assistance, we had a site up and running!

Brigid: What are your goals for Heropotamus?

Josh: Right now I’m just looking to have fun with it and hope it finds readers that enjoy it too! Unlike Tastes Like Chicken (which I’m hoping to get syndicated) or Araknid Kid (which I’ve been querying in hopes of finding a publisher) I don’t have any definitive aspirations for it. I’m sure that will change as I delve deeper into it.

Brigid: Do you have any forthcoming projects you want us to know about?

Josh: None that come to mind, I’ve got a few things in the works ranging from my own personal ideas to a couple of collaborations. Nothing ready to plug quite yet…

On the plus side, there was free coffee and pastries, free internet and… comics! Graphic novels, actually, because that’s what librarians like (the traditional 32-page comic book doesn’t hold up too well under the stress of repeated readings). Librarians have long been enthusiastic supporters of the ninth art, and this year they gave it a boost by giving two of their traditional book awards to graphic novels: David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir won an Alex Award (for adult books with strong teen appeal) and the Toon book Benny and Penny in The Big No-No won the Geisel Award (named after Dr. Seuss) for “the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year.” The good times will continue later this month when the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) presents their Great Graphic Novels for Teens list.

Given that a big-city librarian may buy hundreds of copies of a single title—in hardback—it’s not hard to see why publishers felt it was worth their while to make the trek to Boston for the midwinter meeting. Only two of the large independent publishers, Boom! Studios and Viz, came to this show, but this is actually a smaller event than the ALA Annual Conference, which takes place in June. But a number of other major publishers were there—Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins—and they all publish or distribute graphic novels, so there was lots to see if you knew how to look.

Boom! had a large booth with tables laden with their graphic novels: Irredeemable, Farscape, and their varied adventure and horror titles for the adults, Pixar and Muppet Show trades, and the new Scrooge McDuck hardback that just came out this month (embossed cover, stitched spine, deluxe all the way). Interestingly, both the children’s and the adults’ books were getting plenty of attention from attendees. Realizing that the library trade is an important part of any publisher’s business, Boom has made the shrewd move of providing cataloging information for their graphic novels on their website.

At the Viz booth, the staff was busy promoting an interesting array of recent releases: Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster, the beautifully drawn Children of the Sea, and the shonen manga Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee. They were also handing out previews of Ultimo, the Stan Lee-Hiroyuki Takei collaboration that started in Japan and runs here in Viz’s Shonen Jump magazine, and the latest Death Note light novel. (One editor observed that the Death Note manga series ended in 2007, yet the first volume made last week’s New York Times manga best-seller list.)

Once I walked away from the Viz booth, though, I didn’t see much manga. Although Random House is the parent company of Del Rey, the most prominent display of graphic novels was their kids’ line, and no one seemed to be promoting or even showing off the Del Rey titles. Similarly, the only Yen Press manga at the Hachette booth was their adaptation of Maximum Ride.

Traditional graphic novels were more in evidence. W.W. Norton had a small display of Fantagraphics books, and the reps there were quite knowledgeable about the line; we discussed the success of R. Crumb’s Genesis, and they encouraged me to look out for Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales later this spring. At the Penguin booth, I picked up a copy of Dragonbreath, a hybrid chapter book/graphic novel by Ursula Vernon, the creator of the webcomic Digger. Alongside an array of Babymouse and Stone Rabbit books, Random House had a preview of a new graphic novel, Sons of Liberty, set in pre-Revolutionary America and featuring two escaped slaves with ninja-like powers (they practice “the African martial art dambe” and wear masks). Tundra, I learned, will be re-releasing J. Torres’s Alison Dare graphic novels, and Sterling had a very nice line of illustrated versions of the classics—I picked up a nicely illustrated version of the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet. And First Second had the usual array of thoughtful, beautifully produced books, including George O’Connor’s Zeus: King of the Gods, Jane Yolen’s Foiled, and a graphic novel biography of John Wilkes Booth.

There are a number of graphic novel publishers who focus almost exclusively on the school and library market. You’re not likely to find copies of Max Axiom’s science books, Manga Math Mysteries, or the Sports Illustrated Kids graphic novels in your local comics shop. So I am here to tell you that the quality of these books has gone sharply upward in recent years, and that many boast quality art and unusual topics. Manga Math Mysteries, for instance, is illustrated by Tintin Pantoja, whose manga Wonder Woman pitch got her quite a bit of favorable notice a few years ago. And Stone Arch Press publishes graphic novels of fairy tales that are the very opposite of Disney, with more traditional stories and unusual art. While most of these are aimed at children, Classical Comics has a product that should interest older readers—graphic-novel versions of literary classics. Not a novelty, you say? Well, Classical offers the same book in several versions, one with simplified language, the other with the original, so you can work your way up to the original text.

Unlike your standard comic con, ALA is strictly for professionals; I was one of the few non-librarians there. That makes for a different type of atmosphere, more professional and insider-y than fannish. There was no cosplay, but there were animated conversations and author signings—I was pleased to run into the writers of several non-comics books that I have enjoyed, as well as the creators of the Unshelved webcomic (a natural for this event).

Life is not all tea and crumpets for librarians, but it has its compensations. I spoke to a young-adult librarian from a big city library that serves a varied immigrant population, and he said that when teenagers read graphic novels, they tend to relate to them in the same way, and cultural differences drop away. The same happens with librarians and the public as well; nothing brings people together like a good squee over a new comic. It may not be Comic-Con, but in its own, not always quiet, way, ALA was pretty damn awesome.

So Hipp decided to take matters into his own hands and use the web to build an audience. This week, with Tokyopop’s permission, he put the first two volumes online in their entirety, along with a preview of the third volume. We were curious about this and e-mailed Hipp to find out what he is up to. In addition to Gyakushu!, Hipp is the artist for The Amazing Joy Buzzards and Ben 10 Alien Force: Doom Dimension, which was scripted by Peter David and is due out in February from Del Rey. He is also the creator of Bonehead.

Brigid: Why did you decide to put the first two volumes online in their entirety?

Dan: When I found out that volume 3 of Gyakushu! would be making its initial bow online, I wanted to make the first two volumes available to read online so that anyone checking out the 3rd volume would actually understand it. Okay, actually my first thought was “BOOOO!!” but I recovered quickly and immediately saw the silver lining; that if I was able to get the whole series online, there was a greater likelihood that more people would see it. I’m really proud of the entire series, but I’m not going to pretend that everyone ran out and grabbed the second volume when it came out. I’m a terrible promoter, so I’m looking at this as a second chance to promote something I’m proud of.

Brigid: What are your plans for the third volume—will you finish the story online or in graphic novel form?

Dan: The 3rd volume has been done for some time, and I’ve already seen the book in print, in Italian, so naturally I’ve been hoping that the English language version will magically appear in book stores. However, since that scenario seems as immediate as the live-action Akira actually being made, I’m going to make sure that the series conclusion will be seen online, in conjunction with the plans that Tokyopop have for it. At least that’s the plan. Regardless, the fate of the Thief will be seen in English, in one form or another.  

Brigid: Who has the rights to the series right now, and what sort of negotiations did you have to do with Tokyopop?

Dan: Considering the situation, Tokyopop has been great to deal with. They understand my need to hook-up the readers of the series, and I understand their position to protect their investment. There haven’t been any official negotiations, just me asking them politely if I can post the book online. They agreed, and encouraged my promotion of the book. The rights remain as they were. We both look at this promotion as a way to spread the word about a book that a lot of people missed out on the first time around. Hopefully, it picks up a few new fans and they tell their friends about it. 

Brigid: Are the first two volumes still available in print?

Dan: Yes, the first two volumes are still available in print. In the perfect world, anyone willing to read through hundreds of pages online and liked what they saw might feel the need to order a hard copy. If not, hey, I hope you enjoyed the story, or at least a decapitation, or whatever.  Just saying, there are a lot of decapitations in the series.

Brigid: I noticed you added some red to some of the pages, but did you go back and make any other changes?

Dan: I didn’t re-draw anything, but I shuffled around a few panels and simplified a few lines of dialogue in the first volume. I think it’s mostly just in the first chapter. Actually, here’s the interesting story about that: when the King City deal was announced at Image, I did start thinking about how my series could make the transition to the monthly floppy format. So I took the first chapter of volume 1 and re-shuffled the panels and such to get it in better shape for the monthly format. I liked how it looked, since the first chapter had some excess baggage to it (come on, it was the first thing I wrote), but it took long enough that I stopped right there. Still, I kept it for the online version. On top of that, I switched a few images around, and threw one in that I hadn’t used from Volume 3. Anyway, the quicker answer to the question is yes(ish).

Brigid: If you had the chance, do you think you would make major changes, or are you happy with it the way it is?

Dan: There are some bits in volume 1 that are probably clunkier than they need to be, but here’s the thing: I designed the narrative to allow somewhat for that, considering that by the end of volume 2, you’ve been through a series of twists and see who the narrator is talking to, and in volume 3 you find out why he is telling the story the way he is. That probably seems like a cheat, but volume 1 was set up as a somewhat straight forward revenge narrative so that I could get some confidence in my writing for when I flipped the whole thing on its head later in the series. It was probably a strange way to do things, but I had the plan for the whole series from the beginning, I just 1) didn’t know if I could pull it off, and 2) didn’t know if Tokyopop was going to give the green light for the rest of the series after volume one, so it had to be a SOMEwhat self-contained story. All that said, I love it, and I’m really happy with it. I probably should have just said that:)

Brigid: Tell us a bit about your background—how did you come to work in comics?

Dan: I was a nerdy kid, read comics, blah, blah, blah.  Majored in art, didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I made a comic for myself called Bonehead that I took to Comic-Con to show around.  What I hoped to get from that I don’t know, but I ended up meeting Mark Smith and we created The Amazing Joy Buzzards together and got it published at Image comics.  The rest is…well, still being written I guess. Soon after that I went to Tokyopop and created Gyakushu!, and here we are. There have been some other books and projects along the way, but there you go, my background in a minute.

Brigid: What was your inspiration for Gyakushu?

Dan: Gyakushu! started as a series of action set pieces that I had in my head, and evolved into most of the cool things that I love rolled into an icy ball of revenge. My favorite movie is The Empire Strikes Back, so the story is basically set on Hoth. I LOVE the beginning to Once Upon a Time in the West, so the second volume starts with three guys waiting for a man with no-name, and all we “hear” are sound effects.  The third volume jumps from Princess Mononoke and Akira, back to Return of the Jedi and Return of the King. The whole series is my love-letter to every samurai/spaghetti-western/action/thriller/sci-fi/horror/fantasy that is running around in my brain.  That’s the short answer.

Brigid: How did you get involved in the Ben 10 comic?

Dan: Del Rey Books came to me and asked if I’d be interested in drawing a book based on the Ben 10 cartoon, written by Peter David, and drawn in my own style. That was enough. Thankfully, I loved the script, and fell in love with the cartoon, but really, I was already sold.

Brigid: What are your plans for Ben 10—how will your comic be similar to and different from the cartoon?

Dan: The two volumes read like a giant two-part adventure from the cartoon series, so in many ways it is VERY similar to the actual show. The stakes are raised a bit, and some serious things go down that should excite the fans. The biggest difference is that I’m drawing it, so it has a slightly different look to it. That said, Cartoon Network was there for approval at every stage, and they loved the pages. There is a lot of energy in every page, and I tried my best to be respectful of the world and characters that the show is loved for. If the fans can make the style adjustment, then they will have a lot of fun with the book. It was a blast to work on!

Brigid: Do you have any other projects in the works that we should know about?

Dan: There are some secret projects in the planning stages, but nothing official, outside of the new volume of The Amazing Joy Buzzards: Monster Love that I have been working on forever.  It is all sorts of crazy, so I can’t wait for people to finally see it.  When I, you know, err, finish it.

But you will have to pay to see it.

The standard model for creator-owned webcomics is to put the comic up for free and make money via ads and the sale of books, T-shirts, and other merchandise. And one of the most influential guides to that model is How to Make Webcomics, authored by the four members of the Halfpixel collective: Brad Guigar (Evil, Inc.), Dave Kellett (Sheldon), Scott Kurtz (PvP), and Kris Straub (Starslip).

In late 2008, Halfpixel took over the domain webcomics.com (previously owned by T Campbell) and reconfigured it as a how-to site for webcomics creators, providing advice on everything from how to draw word balloons to how to build an audience. Guigar is the editor-in-chief and writes most of the articles, with Kurtz and occasionally the others also providing content.

On January 3, literally overnight, Guigar put all the content behind a pay wall and announced that henceforth, readers must pay a $30 annual subscription fee to access it. The internets swelled with outrage, but Guigar pointed out that the site is a professional tool, not a webcomic, and thus of monetary value to creators.

I interviewed Guigar via e-mail about his reasons for the change and his reaction to the criticism that followed.

Brigid: OK, let’s get the obvious question out of the way—webcomics are free, so why are you charging for your site?

Brad: That’s a misunderstanding that I’ve been dreading ever since I decided to do this. Webcomics.com isn’t a webcomics site. It’s a site about webcomics.

In other words, it’s not an entertainment site; it’s a site that tries to help people who want to build their webcomics into a successful business by giving them the tools and advice that they need. I have three other sites that are webcomic sites. Those will continue to operate as free sites just as we discussed in our How To Make Webcomics book—which also must be purchased.

And, in order to continue doing a Monday-through-Friday update schedule, like I have done for the past two years with few exceptions, I had to find a way to make the site generate revenue.

I couldn’t use advertising. The site is very much aimed at a niche market. It doesn’t generate the volume or the type of traffic that an advertiser would find attractive.

So that left subscriptions. Or closing the site so I could direct my attention towards something that was going to give me the financial return on my investment of time that I needed.

I like doing Webcomics.com. I wanted to keep it going.

So this was the option I chose.

Brigid: Historically, not only webcomics but newspapers and magazines have had a lot of trouble getting readers to pay for content. Why do you think this will work for your site?

Brad: Newspapers and magazines offer content that can be easily found elsewhere—and much of it is information that readers may not feel as if they need. That’s not the case with Webcomics.com. I think the quality of what I’m doing on that site will prove to be worth well more than $30 per year to my readers.

Brigid: What will readers get for their $30?

Brad: — Frequent updates of news, advice, tutorials and strategies by webcomics veteran Brad Guigar.

— Monthly contributions by webcomics pioneer Scott Kurtz and Penny Arcade’s Business Guy, Robert Khoo.

— Personalized features like a new e-mail-based organizer to help you plan for upcoming conventions.

— Feedback and guidance for your comic and the small business you’ll create running it.

— A fully rounded, indexed repository of two year’s worth of information that you can use to help improve your work.

— A moderated, passionate, supportive community of webcomics creators.

— Inside information on conventions, vendors and other entities that webcartoonists access to advance their businesses.

— Deals on merchandise.

— You will have access to all of this plus the entire Webcomics.com archives, one of the most helpful and supportive forums for creative people on the Web, and several members-only offers.

Brigid: How will the premium site be different from its previous free incarnation?

Brad: It will be very similar to the traditional Webcomics.com, with a more intense focus on helping members get organized and build their webcomics.

Brigid: In the past, you had guest writers on the site. Did you pay them? Will you be paying your guest writers going forward?

Brad: We accepted submissions on the site. Participants were not paid, and we have no plans to pay anyone who wishes to submit items in the new site. Truthfully, I’ve written the vast majority of the site posts on Webccomics.com. I was happy to get submissions, but they comprised a very small percentage of the content. I’ve already stated on the site that if anyone feels awkward having their submitted material behind the subscription wall, they only need alert me, and I’ll happily take it down.

[Note: Brad answered this question on Sunday night. On Monday, he changed the policy and removed all content from guest writers unless they specifically authorize its use. “We decided that it was better to allow them an opt-in,” he said.]

Brigid: Why did you make the change so abruptly, rather than letting people know in advance that it was going to happen?

Brad: My fault completely. I was completely caught by surprise by that—and I’m embarrassed about that. In hindsight, it was a no-brainer. As soon as people stated that it made them uncomfortable, I did what I learned in kindergarten. I apologized, and I did what I could to make it better. All submitted posts are hidden unless the authors release the content.

Which amounts to a small fraction of the Webcomics.com posts.

Brigid: Why did you decide to put all the material behind a pay wall, rather than going with a partially free model with premium content?

Brad: Honestly, because the decision was between continuing the site and ending it. See, I could take the time I put into Webcomics.com and launch another webcomic and build it into a revenue stream quite easily. And, honestly, over the long haul, I’d probably make more money. But I really think what I’m doing on Webcomics.com is significant. I just needed a way to justify the time I was putting into it.

Brigid: Why are you choosing not to use ads to support the site?

Brad: I couldn’t use advertising. The site is very much aimed at a niche market. It doesn’t generate the volume or the type of traffic that an advertiser would find attractive.

Brigid: What about the podcast and the forum? What will happen to them?

Brad: The forum is part of the subscription. The podcast is a completely separate entity.

Brigid: Are you concerned that having all your content behind a pay wall will make you less visible (via Google, Twitter, blog links, etc.)?

Brad: We’re trying to build it in such a way that we can accommodate those things, but again, I’m writing for a very concentrated market. The things you’re mentioning are very useful for casting a large net, but our net is quite small.

Brigid: How did you come to this decision, and how long has it been in the works—was it your intention all along to convert Webcomics.com to a paid site?

Brad: It wasn’t the intention when we launched the site a couple years ago. It’s something I’ve been mulling for months. I talked about it with Scott Kurtz and Robert Khoo (both of whom will be contributors) and we agreed that this was worth pursuing.

Brigid: Why did you go with a flat fee for the year rather than a lower monthly fee?

Brad: Charging $2.50 a month through PayPal just seemed as if it would cause more problems than it would solve.

Brigid: What will non-subscribers see when they go to the front page?

Brad: The introduction to each topic we’re discussing.

Brigid: Do you feel that limiting the site to paid subscribers will raise the level of the conversation (both the technical content of the posts and the conversation with commenters)?

Brad: That’s the one thing I’m absolutely sure of.

Brigid: Do you subscribe to any paid sites to help you in your career? If so, which ones? If not, what would make such a site worth the money?

Brad: Man, I wish there had been such sites available when I was learning this over the last ten years! I’d like to think I would have signed up in a heartbeat. Instead, I had to learn what I know from an awful lot of trial-and-error. That and getting advice from my peers—some of which was good and some of which was not-so-good.

To get my subscription, I think the site would have to offer me something that I couldn’t find elsewhere—like Webcomics.com. Webcomics.com has a very high quality to its posts. And it’s that quality that has brought subscribers in already.

Brigid: How are subscriptions going so far? Do you have a goal, and if so, how close are you to reaching it?

Brad: I’m completely astounded by the response. It’s easily double what I expected for the launch. And the kind words of support and encouragement I’ve received from those people as well has been downright humbling.

I don’t have a subscription goal in mind. I’m doing something that everybody says can’t be done. Hitting a specific number isn’t a goal. Surviving the week is my goal. Making those new subscribers feel as if they made a good decision is a goal.

Brigid: From what I’m seeing in comments, a lot of your longtime readers are signing up. But with most of your content out of sight, how will you attract new subscribers?

Brad: People will be able to see the topics and the first couple paragraphs to every post. If it intrigues them, they can subscribe.

(In addition to Evil, Inc., Brad is the creator of Courting Disaster, Phables, and Greystone Inn. You can see more of his work at his own site.)

And yet, here I am at the end of December, surrounded by so much good manga that I don’t know where to start.

Tokypop rallied nicely and, despite losing some licenses, is bringing back series that everyone was convinced were heading to limbo. Yen Press rescued Yotsuba&! and republished the earlier volumes as well. Del Rey tested the waters with a variety of global titles (with more to come next year) and kept cranking out solid shoujo and shonen series from Japan. CMX kept up a steady stream of tween- and teen-friendly titles as well as the more mature suspense series Fire Investigator Nanase and Astral Project. Vertical was the darling of New York Anime Fest with their announcement that they had licensed the cute cat manga Chi’s Sweet Home and Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo; they kept fans busy in the meantime with a steady stream of new volumes of Black Jack.

And Viz! Viz outdid them all, launching series after series to enthusiastic response: Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto and 20th Century Boys; the foodie manga Oishinbo; the beautifully drawn Children of the Sea; the new Rumiko Takahashi series Rin-ne (released online simultaneously with the Japanese releases); Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers. You could go broke trying to keep up with Viz’s output, but if you did, you could console yourself with the free manga on their SigIKKI and Shonen Sunday websites.

While a few publishers responded to the grim economy by circling the wagons or just throwing up their hands, others took a more aggressive approach, licensing new series by established creators, putting marginal properties on the web, responding to fan feedback, and publishing manga that appeals to audiences beyond the traditional teenage readers.

Tokyopop, for instance, had a tough first half of the year. In January, bloggers started circulating lists of manga solicitations that had been cancelled from Diamond’s Previews catalogue. Then in August, Tokyopop revealed that Kodansha had cancelled a number of its licenses with them.

That could have been the end of everything, but Tokyopop followed up almost immediately with the news that they would be bringing back a number of non-Kodansha series, including one of my favorites, Suppli. They hosted a series of “webinars,” interactive online conversations with fans, and they seem to have really listened to the feedback; one immediate effect was an improvement in their paper quality. They also ended the limbo for many of their global manga properties by putting them online.

Viz also got off to a bumpy start, with Diamond announcing in February that over 1,000 Viz titles were being de-listed from their catalog. This sounds ominous, but they were mostly older titles and finished series, and they were still available through other retail channels The company also did some “restructuring,” which was largely opaque to the outside world but did seem to involve layoffs. Later in the year, they folded Shojo Beat magazine, although the brand lives on as a book imprint.

On the other hand, Viz has been heading off in some unexpected new directions. In February, at New York Comic-Con, they unveiled a slate of manga that was largely aimed at older, more sophisticated readers, from Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters to Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster, and all year they kept up a steady stream of high-quality titles. In April, they announced that they would be publishing Rumiko Takahashi’s new series Rin-ne online, posting each chapter the same week it was published in Japan and thus putting them one step ahead of the scanlators. They also launched two online manga sites, Shonen Sunday and SigIKKI, and they expanded their children’s manga line, VizKids. And they sped up their releases of the top-selling series Naruto and One Piece, which probably added some cash to the coffers.

Yen Press, a publisher that knows a winner when they see one, published new editions of the first five volumes of Yotsuba&! in addition to bringing out the new ones; Yen’s new translations, which are more literal than ADVs, have caused some discussion, but that just keeps people talking. They also brought out an omnibus edition of Azumanga Daioh, by the same creator, for good measure. Their manga adaptation of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride novels has been a commercial success, with both volumes making it on to the New York Times “graphic books” best-seller list, and they have followed with announcements of manga based on the Twilight, Clique, and Gossip Girls novels.

Del Rey published its Wolverine and X-Men manga to mixed reviews, and at New York Anime Fest they announced a new approach to their manga based on the animated cartoons Ben 10 and Bakugan; rather than screen-caps of existing stories, they will be doing original stories based on the series, with an interesting array of artists and writers: Peter David, Dan Hipp, and the team of Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir. Their manga adaptations of the Avatar movie and its prequel also look promising. And like other publishers, they continue to rely on established Japanese creators, with new series in the offing by Ema Toyama (Pixie Pop) and Natsumi Ando (Kitchen Princess) among others. And their fall releases included the second volume of Nina Matsumoto’s much-acclaimed Yokaiden and the award-winning Moyasimon.

Digital Manga relaunched its eManga online manga site and also tried a new tack: allowing fans to push up publication of some books by pre-ordering. Digital continued to publish a solid line of yaoi manga under several imprints throughout the year, and, like the other publishers, diversified a bit with its license of the classic shoujo manga Itazura na Kiss and its online-only editions of Harlequin manga.

Aurora, which publishes a variety of different types of manga under its own name, plus yaoi manga under the Deux imprint and Teen Love stories under the LuvLuv name, had a big sale in March and has offered manga at bargain-basement prices several times since then. An Aurora employee admitted that the company was in danger of going out of business, but it managed to make it through the year, although it doesn’t seem to have released any new manga since Cigarette Kisses in September.

Pioneer manga and anime publisher Central Park Media had been comatose for some time, and they finally made it official in April by filing for bankruptcy. Erica Friedman wrote a nice eulogy for them at Anime Vice.

There were some other interesting stories this year. We bid farewell to a number of long-runnng manga series, including Fruits Basket, After School Nightmare, Parasyte, Emma, and Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.

The New York Times launched its graphic books best-seller list in March, and the first edition elicited a round of WTF? from around the blogosphere, as it consisted of eight volumes of Naruto and one each of MPD-Psycho and Eden, two books with rather narrow followings.

Manga collector Christopher Handley pled guilty to possession of child pornography, a case that caused extensive debate online. The question raised by the case was whether manga that depicts children having sex should be illegal, despite the fact that the images are completely imaginary—no children were exploited in creating them. Just before the plea, ComiPress published a lengthy article (images may be disturbing) by lawyer Lawrence Stanley arguing that such images should not be criminal. Neil Gaiman and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund also came to Handley’s defense.

Dragon Ball was pulled from an elementary-school library because of some sexual content in the first volume. The book shouldn’t have been there to begin with (it’s rated 13+), but thanks to the grandstanding of a local politician, copies were removed from all the local school libraries and the public library as well.

The results of the Third Morning International Manga Competition were released, and the judges had some sharp commentary, refusing to award a third prize because the gap in quality was so great between the top two and everyone else. And they changed the name of the competition to the Morning International Comics Competition, because they were tired of looking at the usual stereotyped array of subjects—schoolgirls, ninjas, etc.

Junko Mizuno drew a Spider-Man story for Strange Tales. No, really!

Crayon Shin-chan creator Yoshito Usui died, apparently in a fall from a cliff while hiking

Astro-Boy Magazine launched on the iPhone/iPod Touch

The ero-manga anthology Comics AG folded.

Finally, the non-story of the year was Kodansha’s entry into publishing manga directly in the U.S., which had been rumored since mid-2008. They finally announced the formation of Kodansha Comics in October, but the only books they have published so far are reissues of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and they don’t seem to have much of an infrastructure yet. I couldn’t even find a website. But 2009 was full of surprises, and maybe Kodansha will surprise me in 2010.

Speaking of which, one of the big trends of the year was the diversification of digital media. Publishers and creators started putting comics on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android systems, as well as the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s e-book reader, the Nook. And just in time for Christmas, Sony unveiled its comics store for the PSP. We’re still waiting for the Apple tablet, though, which is rumored to be the killer app for digital comics—if it even exists.

One of the first big successes was Star Trek: Countdown, produced by IDW Comics in collaboration with iVerse. Here’s IDW publisher Ted Adams saying the magic words in an interview with Heidi MacDonald for Publishers Weekly Comics Week:

“We will sell as many iTunes apps [of Countdown] as we will of as the print version,” says Adams. “That’s a lot of apps.” The book—each issue is sold as an individual app—is regularly listed among the top 100 apps on iTunes and the first print issue of Star Trek: Countdown sold about 15,000 copies upon initial release, according to figures at the comics business site ICv2.com.

For the first half of the year, every comic on the iPhone/iPod was a single app, which led to confusion and cluttered screens. During the summer, a new operating system allowed in-app buying, so a single app could become a portal to many comics. The first publisher to jump in with this was comiXology, which had already set up a website that integrated Previews solicitations, actual previews, and links to bricks-and-mortar stores. ComiXology’s comics reader/storefront was a big hit, and iVerse and Panelfly soon brought out similar products. Many comics publishers are covering their bets by releasing content on one or more of these platforms as well as on the web and in print.

Back on the big screen, the paradigm continued to shift and evolve. The webcomic site Girlamatic, which had put some of its comics behind a pay wall, relaunched as a free webcomics site, and publisher Joey Manley has similar plans for the rest of the sites in the Modern Tales family. Octopus Pie became one of several comics to shift from regular to irregular updates, when creator Meredith Gran decided it was more efficient to update when she finished a chapter rather than three times a week.

Rin-ne

Viz, the powerhouse of manga publishers, also went the free-webcomic route in a big way this year, starting with Rin-ne, a new series from manga powerhouse Rumiko Takahashi (InuYasha, Ranma 1/2). In a move that may have been designed to pre-empt scanlators, Viz put each chapter of the new series online, for free, the same day it was released in Japan. They took the chapters down once the print edition was released, but they continue to put up new chapters weekly. Later in the year, Viz launched a second website, SigIKKI, which is an anthology of manga for older readers, with the idea that the more popular series from that site will eventually make it into print as well.

Digital Manga Publishing, which despite its name is primarily a print publisher, revamped its eManga webcomics site and recently added a new feature: Harlequin manga (Japanese adaptations of American Harlequin romances). Dark Horse published some of these a few years ago, and they didn’t do well, but Digital’s audience is probably closer to the sweet spot for that type of comic. Tokyopop also moved its global manga program online.

Despite being spread out across the entire internet, webcomickers did some community-building this year. At the end of March, webcomics folks from all over converged on Easthampton, Massachusetts, for New England Webcomics Weekend. Bobby Timony covered it well for Robot 6, and back at my old home, Digital Strips, Jason the Midnight Cartooner did a marathon set of interviews with fellow creators. In November, Least I Could Do creators Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza announced they were establishing a webcomic scholarship at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. And when swine flu (a.k.a. H1Nerd1) struck attendees at the Penny Arcade Expo, the organizers used their blog to list the flights that confirmed sufferers had taken and keep folks up to date on the spread of the disease.

2009 was a good year for lively internet debates. In February, Valerie D’Orazio predicted that within the next two years, Big Media will buy up all the good webcomics and put them behind a pay wall. Several webcomics creators commented to her original post, basically saying “Big Media can’t afford us.” What emerged is that the top tier of webcomics creators seem to be doing very, very well, and there is a substantial group who are making all or most of their living from comics alone.

My column about the Zuda test—at the end of eight pages, do I know what the comic is about?—generated some lively conversations as well.

It was a bad year for editorial cartoonists, as economic factors led to a number of veteran cartoonists being shown the door. This got ugly in April, when webcomickers and newspaper folks got into a shouting match after Gary Brookins lost his job. And in the most recent issue of The Comics Journal (unfortunately, not available online at the moment), Ted Rall blasts the free-webcomics model, complaining that webcomics suck and they are ruining things for everyone else.

But by far the most entertaining internet flame war was the one launched single-handedly by David Rees after he learned that Jamba Juice was ripping off his comic for their ads. Just keep clicking forward to read his escalating campaign against the purveyors of faux smoothies. Of course, Rees’s comic, Get Your War On, is a clip-art comic, but that just makes the whole thing even more ironic.

If anything, Rees sums up the webcomics paradigm this year, which was to take a crappy situation, turn it into profit, and leave ‘em laughing. Well played, sir.

And if adversity breeds creativity, 2010 should be an excellent year. Bring it on.

Trinidad was nominated for an Eisner Award for his haunting comic Speak No Evil: Melancholy of a Space Mexican, in which he illustrated the voicelessness of illegal aliens by creating a society that literally removed their mouths. He handled that heavy metaphor with great delicacy, creating a surrealistic world where such things are almost plausible.

While Speak No Evil was compact and self-contained, God™, is a sprawling and ambitious satire that takes on both commercialism and religiosity. It’s also wickedly funny. The basic idea is that a large multinational corporation has bought up all the intellectual property rights to God and the whole cast of characters of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The comic intersperses slices of broad satire about commerce and religion with slices of a day in the life of accountant-priest Joeb Kim, who is having a tough day to say the least. I checked in with Elan’ via e-mail to see what he is up to and where he is going with God™.

Brigid Alverson: Summarizing this comic defies me. Can you please explain briefly what it is about?

Elan’ Trinidad: It often defies me too, so this is the simplest summary I could create:

Some day the intellectual property of God will be owned by a certain animation, media, and theme park corporation. The Apocalypse is looming and it is up to Reverend Joeb Kim CPA, a minister in the Sacred Order of Accounting, to stop it. (But I haven’t gotten to that bit yet.)

Brigid: Your storytelling is really nonlinear—there have been lots of side trips so far, and the format and style vary from chapter to chapter. Do you have a master plan for all this, and what sort of other works are you looking at for inspiration?

Elan’: I plan for the story to get a little simpler after Joeb finally gets to work and has a mental breakdown. There will be more religious symbolism later on. I predict an ending for the entire story, but I’ll let my characters dictate if that actually becomes the ending.

After I decided that the underlying concept would best be told as a comedy, I was really inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a lot of lesser known works of Douglas Adams and Monty Python. “And now for something completely different” is a funny way of telling a story and it keeps your audience awake.

Stylewise, there’s a strong Hong Kong comics influence and obvious homages to 80′s cartoons. I’m also inspired by Harold Sakuishi’s Stopper Busujima. I found a volume of the manga in a Japanese restaurant and asked the waitress if I could have it. He draws funny but not too cartoony—a skill that wasn’t as developed in the Hitchhiker’s Guide comic book adaptation.

Brigid: How far ahead have you mapped out the story? It feels like we haven’t seen a lot of Joeb so far—do you have plans for him?

Elan’: We’ll see a lot more of him. He’s the central character, but so far, the humor, pacing and the world this is set in is more of a hook than a Reverend/Accountant who has had his Segway stolen. I have a rather large story in my head: romantic interests, depictions of the afterlife, robots transforming at unpredictable times. I have no idea when I’ll finish it or exactly how long it will take, but its one of those things I need to tell..

Brigid: Religion is a notoriously touchy subject. I see your comic as more of a satire of religiosity than religion itself, but have you gotten any pushback or hate mail because of it?

Elan’: I had six angry letters about the depiction of Jews for “Marketing Strategy”. All of them were written by people who were not Jewish. I’ll post them up on my blog as soon as I’m finished writing them.

Jokes aside, a Mormon at San Diego Comic Con told me that the Mormon Robots were a funny idea, though he didn’t read the comic at that point and only heard me talk about it at a panel discussion. The clergymen and women at my church approve of what I’m doing and planning to do.

Brigid: This comic is very “webby” compared to your previous comic, Speak No Evil. You use motion, you change the format of the comic and the background color of the website for different episodes, you even have fake ads on the website. Where do these ideas come from, and how hard are they to incorporate into the comic?

Elan’: Speak No Evil was an exercise. Back then, I didn’t do comics for a while. It was more traditional because I wasn’t considering the little nuances of the web and how people enjoy the Internet.

I hate to sound all airy about it, but the ideas are coming from everywhere. They sort of mix and match and you visit a site that’s somewhat amusing and then say to yourself “Wouldn’t it be funny if…”

It isn’t too hard for me to incorporate animation because I majored in Digital Media in art school and worked in commercials, broadcast design, and character animation. Some of these programs are second nature to me.

Brigid: You take commercialism as your subject matter and then blur out all the logos and trade names. Why?

Elan’: How do you know that I didn’t make a parody of the existing logo and then blur it out?
That’s the beauty of those corporate logos, they’re designed so well that you could still recognize them when you squint your eyes.

When you see a fake logo, they’re always trying to be clever with the name and symbols. It takes you out of the world. There’s something very real and nearly pornographic about using a mosaic filter.

I’m also afraid of getting sued.

Brigid: You have ad links on your website to   products and services that tie in with the plot. I think the McCafe ad was a particularly brilliant choice, but these ads aren’t bringing in money and might bring in hostile attention. Why did you do this?

Elan’: Ads are part of our culture. They’re the flora and fauna of the 21st century.

I think, “think” meaning I’m making up this answer as I go along, why I put those ads is 1) It is funny, like Saturday Night Live funny. 2) It just seemed natural to this particular story. 3) The “artifacts” of a world can sort of tell more about that world than the characters and plot. Sometimes I use them as a sort of footnote.

I don’t think certain companies would be angry at free publicity. Plus I talked to a lawyer about parody and fair use— that’s what the disclaimers are for. But we’ll see what happens.

Brigid: I gather that your day job is working as an artist for an animation company that is not the one you are satirizing in God™. Are you concerned that the comic will affect you professionally?

Elan’: A little. Its not my childhood dream to work for a certain company. But I have a friend who was trying to get me a job there. Most likely, if a certain company actually hired me, I would try to stay way at the bottom, try not to bring too much attention to myself, and prepare for the day they lay me off.

Brigid: You have mentioned the possibility of a print comic. Are you designing the comic with that in mind? How will you reconcile the different formats, use of motion, web features, etc. with a print comic?

Elan’: Yes. One web page is actually 1/2 or sometimes 1/3 of a print page. When I’m doing the art, its formatted to 11×17 but I just crop the page for web. Most of the animation I’m doing are subtle enough so that they’re not important to the story, but noticeable enough to appreciate the “web experience”. I don’t want to make motion comics because that’s too much work. I’ve made it a rule that no character elements will be animated. Although, when we hit a climax in the story (I have no idea when I’ll get to it) I’ll have to break that rule and make a seperate version for print.

Brigid: OK, God™ makes me laugh, but is it strictly a comedy or do you have a serious theme underlying it all?

Elan’: There was a time when I made funny comics and people thought they were sad. There was a time when I made serious comics and people thought they were funny. Alan Watts once said something like, “Everything is hilariously funny and deadly serious all at the same time”.

The first is The Princess Planet. I saw people recommending it here and there, but I resisted for a long time because anything involving princesses reeks of kid stuff. Having survived my daughters’ princess phase, I was more than happy to pack it in.

As it turns out, though The Princess Planet channeled what I was muttering all those years and turned it into funny. The star of the show is Princess Christi, who gets bored on the very second page and turns herself into a superhero, leaving her attendants behind to draw moustaches on the skinny girls in her magazines. That sort of deliberate anachronism, drawing bits of modern life into the faux-medieval world of fairy tales, is the straw that Brian McLachlan has been spinning into gold for the past four years. The jokes mostly turn on the characters’ self-awareness that they are fairy-tale clichés, and running gags include one-upmanship among the princesses and the king and queen’s quest to find a new heraldic symbol for their kingdom to replace the current one, a pile of grass eating a sandwich.

Princess Christi shows up a lot, but this is really an ensemble comic, with a wide variety of characters taking their turns. Actually, I find the funniest strips to be the ones where McLachlan takes a twisted look at a well-known story: Medusa gets a mohawk, Bigfoot hates his name, and of course, Rapunzel as Siamese twins (only half of her can get away). My only complaints are that the comic is drawn a bit too small for my tastes—the six panels always look cramped to me—and the princesses’ Valley Girl argot (“Stupids!” “everypeoples”) is kind of annoying. But it seems churlish to lodge these minor complaints about a comic that makes me laugh so often. Furthermore, because these characters will be familiar to children as well as adults, and because the humor is goofy but squeaky-clean, The Princess Planet is one of those rare comics that really is fun for all ages.

All Knowledge is Strange is a different type of humor altogether, dry, witty, and usually absurd, as cerebral as The Princess Planet is goofy. It actually rolls up a number of webcomic tropes that I hate—clip art, dinosaurs, typeset word balloons—but because creator Daniel Merlin Goodbrey takes the time to make them look attractive, I don’t hate them in this context. In fact, the smoothed-out lines and flat areas of color add a faux-post-modern look to the comic that accentuate the humor; when you look at something that slick, you don’t expect to have a giraffe saying “fuck” in the middle of it.

The formula never varies. Each strip consists of the same nicely smoothed-out art repeated three times, with a slight tweak in each panel and a big turnaround in the third. It’s the webcomic embodiment of the Rule of Three. The title of each strip is an integral part of the humor, and it generally sounds more reasonable than it really is: What Wouldn’t Jesus Do? or Zombie Stereotypes Debunked. Goodbrey constructs a three-part drama based on that title, with the third strip turning the whole premise on its head or introducing a random note of absurdity. Sometimes the humor turns on a literal interpretation of the title, as in Problems Guns Can’t Solve or How to Die With Your Boots On. And some, such as How Many Angels Can You Fit on the Head of a Pin?, take a fresh look at a silly cliché.

Goodbrey also has a number of running jokes. He likes to pick on Werner Herzog, and he has an unhealthy obsession with giraffes. Lincoln, Jesus, dolphins, and puffins show up a lot, first in context and later almost randomly, say, as sandwich fillings.

Aside from their reliance on running gags, these two comics couldn’t be more different. The Princess Planet is crowded, messy, and goofy. All Knowledge Is Strange is cool, distanced, and ironic. But pick a random episode of either one and you’re likely to end up laughing, and with comics, that’s all that counts.

Where Grows the Bitter Herb

Here’s a post-Thanksgiving special that won’t cost you a dime: Robot Comics is offering the iPhone/iPod Touch version of British artist Ben Powis’s Where Grows the Bitter Herb for free until December 8. Another Powis comic, Turtle Guitar, is always free. (Both comics are also available for Android at the standard price of 99 cents.)

Both stories are little folkloric tales brought to life with lovely art. Powis uses simple shapes with heavy outlines, textured backgrounds, and varied hatching to create comics panels that look like drawings from a picture book. The watercolor-like textures show up nicely on the backlit screen of the iPhone, and the panels also appear to be cropped differently than they were in the print edition of the book, providing a different type of reading experience.

Powis’s characters are little creatures that look vaguely like mice, drawn so simply that they are one step away from stick-men. In Where Grows the Bitter Herb, the nameless mouse must travel to a mountaintop to get a special herb that will heal his sick mother. That’s an ancient plot, but the little creature’s complicated journey, which starts on a ship powered by a puffer-fish balloon and ends on an icy ledge, makes entertaining reading.

Turtle Guitar

Turtle Guitar is shorter and more enigmatic. It’s the story of a farmer whose fields are parched because of a drought. One day he hears beautiful music (represented visually as a colored swirl) coming from the woods. Following the sound, he comes across a turtle who is singing so beautifully that it brings the dead trees back to life. Somehow the mouse converts this turtle into a guitar and sings the whole landscape back into bloom. It’s a nice little picture-poem but falls short of a story, because it lacks any conflict whatsoever. Wouldn’t turning the turtle into a guitar harm it? Wouldn’t the turtle resist? It seems like Powis missed an opportunity here.

Both stories are simple enough for a child to enjoy, and I think Where Grows the Bitter Herb would be the more entertaining of the two, with its cute little balloon and perilous journey. At the same time, they are sophisticated enough for adults who appreciate artsy indy comics. I particularly like Powis’s patchwork surface and his way of hatching over watercolor, creating a lines-over-colors look.

Powis doesn’t use word balloons at all, choosing instead to narrate the story entirely through text boxes. That distances the reader a bit. Furthermore, his characters are very generic and deadpan. They don’t have names, or personality quirks, or emotions, even though both stories have a lot of scope for that sort of thing. These choices limit the reader’s emotional involvement in the story, which is unfortunate. Powis has a nice set of techniques at his fingertips, and I’d like to see him do more with them.

Both stories were originally published as print comics and converted to iPhone format by hand, and mostly that works pretty well. There were a few instances in Turtle Guitar where the point of view pulls in too tight, so the mouse character looks too big and the reader sees too much detail. This is distracting, but it only happens for a few frames. Sometimes the same panel appears twice, but with different cropping, so it looks like two panels in sequence. This happens a lot in iPhone adaptations and is annoying when it is horribly obvious, but here it was done pretty well and doesn’t detract from the flow of the story at all.

Page from the print version of Where Grows the Bitter Herb

When I saw the pages from Where Grows the Bitter Herb reproduced in this review at the Forbidden Planet blog, though, I realized that the shift to iPhone format changes the reading experience quite a bit. The obvious difference is that the reader experiences the story one panel at a time, while Powis composed it in entire pages. In this printed page from Where Grows the Bitter Herb, the bulk of the ship, repeated three times, creates a diagonal movement, while the small, dark figures silhouetted against the sky form a nice counterpoint. The experience on the iPhone is completely different: Not only are the panels shown one at a time, but the image is cropped to focus more tightly on one or two characters. That means that a lot of the negative space is gone. Since the sky surrounding the characters suggests the vastness of space they are about to journey into, the meaning of the panel changes quite a bit. While it’s natural to focus on the characters, Powis’s expressionless mice don’t provide the drama that is lost by the original framing.

On the other hand, reading the comics on the iPod is a more intimate experience because you have no choice but to pull in close to the panel, and you see the details of the artwork more closely than if you were looking at a printed page. As I mentioned above, the backlit screen really shows the textures Powis is so fond of. And there are some panels where the cropping makes for interesting compositions. I think there must be a temptation for iPhone adaptors to always put the image in the center of the screen, but these comics have some nice diagonal and offset compositions. (You can see more of Powis’s full-page compositions on the comics section of his website.)

In the end, the iPhone and the printed page really are two different ways of reading the same story. The iPhone’s limitation on panel size and shape dictate a different set of compositional choices, choices that Powis might have made differently had the story been designed for the iPhone first. On one hand, the close-up view makes the lack of drama in faces and gestures more apparent. On the other hand, the backlit screen shows the art off better, magnifying the textures that underlie Powis’s backgrounds and his hatching. I suspect it also changes the colors, but without an actual print copy, it’s hard to say.

A look at Powis’s website shows that he is continuing to develop and grow. His art is quite lovely, and these two graphic novels make a nice beginning to what I hope will be a fruitful career. So enjoy the freebie, and watch out for more to come.

Breakfast of the Gods: Snap, Crackle, and Pop have been kidnapped (and tortured!), the Honey Bee turns up dead, Count Chocula paces the ramparts in his castle—and Boo Berry shows up to needle him. In Breakfast of the Gods, Brendan Douglas Jones shows the darker side of the cereal mascots of the 1960s and 70s in a fantasy adventure that’s part Lord of the Rings, part nutritious breakfast.

Unshelved: Bill Barnes’s art is simple to the point of being rudimentary, but he still manages to endow each of the characters in this library-themed comic with a unique and believable personality. Even better, he and co-writer Gene Ambaum really nail the feeling of working in a place where you have to deal with the varied whims of the public as well as your own wacky co-workers.

Smash: I’m not much of a superhero fan—yes, the genre has gotten too dark for me—but I love this sort of comic, where a kid acquires superpowers and has to learn how to use his newfound skills and make the necessary mental adjustments as well. It’s been done before, but Chris and Kyle Bolton do it very well in Smash, which just wound up its first story arc.

Sin Titulo: Reading this graphic novel is like going down a series of corridors, each one leading you to somewhere unexpected—and another corridor. People compare this to Lost, a show I have never watched; I just read it because I’m so caught up in the mystery that I can’t stop.

Zip and Li’l Bit: Trade Loeffler has a lovely, old fashioned style and a quirky sensibility that bring these webcomics into the realm of classic children’s literature. Unfortunately, he has only completed two story arcs and it looks like he won’t be doing any more, but he has kindly left these up for the world to enjoy.

Weesh

Weesh: This is a gag comic that takes a fresh turn on an old idea: Three children have an invisible creature who can grant any wish, although the wishes wear off after ten minutes. That’s just as well, as most of the wishes lead to unintended consequences. What really makes this comic, though, is the characters: Tate, who wishes his house was made of Legos; five-year-old Olivia, who wants the Legos to have a tea party rather than stick together, and especially Zoey, who is on the cusp of teenagerhood and takes a dim view of pretty much everything.

Hark, a vagrant: Kate Beaton makes me laugh and feel smart at the same time. I think that’s my definition of the perfect comic.

Dovecote Crest: Most relationship comics bore me, but Dovecote Crest is about Civil War re-enactors, and that makes it so much better. I love Bridget Underwood’s loose, economical style, and I love the characters. Everyone in this comic is solid, angst is strictly played for laughs, and the Civil War thing provides a nice counterpoint to the action.

Family Man: I cannot get enough of Dylan Meconis’s beautifully drawn comic about werewolves and religious dissenters in 18th-century Germany. In fact, instead of going shopping on Black Friday, I plan to sit down and re-read it from the beginning. Even the fillers are good!

Everyone knows the computers run faster on holidays

PHD Comics: OK, I’m the intended audience for this comic, since I come from a family of academics—and I was a student when I met my husband, who is a professor. But PHD Comics is really just a well-done ensemble comedy that happens to have an academic setting; the fact that such a setting is rich in quirky characters just makes it that much better.

Good Ship Chronicles: My colleagues at Digital Strips put me on to this one, and I will be forever grateful. It’s a hilarious sendup of the spaceship genre with over-the-top characters drawn in a cool, deadpan style. And creator Tauhid R. Bondia just started updating again after a hiatus, so there will be fresh content this week!

Copper: This has a small archive, but each comic is a full-page composition, so it feels like more. Kazu Kibuishi, who is spending more time these days on his Amulet books and his new baby, really composes these comics, using deep and shallow space, varied panels, and other techniques to make the whole page work together. The art is lovely and the writing is clever. I just wish there were more.

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.