Bill Waterson on Webcomics
Hey, there’s a complete new QnA with Bill Waterson over HERE, but I wanted to talk about what he said about webcomics.
When asked about it his answer was:
To be honest, I don’t keep up with this. The Internet may well provide a new outlet for cartoonists, but I imagine it’s very hard to stand out from the sea of garbage, attract a large audience, or make money. Newspapers are still the major leagues for comic strips . . . but I wouldn’t care to bet how long they’ll stay that way.
Well, it does show that he hasn’t really been paying attention. I can’ t blame him, why would he? I’ve actually conversed a little with Berkely Breathed via e-mail on this matter as well (I hate to name drop him but it’s necessary for this rant), Berke’s points about webcomics were almost exactly the same as Watterson’s….. and if I only had the time to show these guys that if they were online in the capacity of being on their own and not sharing their money with a syndicate, could you imagine if there was an OPUS webcomic? Calvin and Hobbes? With the same setup that “The Norm” or even our own humble comic strip has setup? They’d be RICH. They’d also be able to make PvP and Penny Arcade look like crap stains on the history of webcomics. Somewhere along the lines, these print veterans have been duped into thinking you just can’t do it without the suits. It’s not so….. onto Watterson’s points:
#1 it’s pretty easy to stand out in the sea of garbage when you’re actually GOOD.
#2 You can attract a large audience VERY fast, especially if you don’t suck.
#3, you can make money if you’re both GOOD and SMART. —
#4, newspapers are now the dinosaurs. Why would you actively pursue a dying media form. It will never completely die, they will tell you, but for the love of god, the money has dried up for cartoonists. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The funny thing about WEBCOMICS is, there is no one cookie cutter way to turn a buck. It’s a little different for everyone, and on different levels of quality. And, alas, people are kinda guarded with their own secrets to success. Maybe that’s a GREAT thing for webcomics as a whole. Just as the syndicate world has convinced them that there is no other way, the webcomic world is quietly proving differently. We don’t really need a bunch of print guys coming in and stinking up the joint with candy coated comic strips….. but MAN, I will repeat, I would LOVE to see the heavy hitters like Watterson and Breathed online and kicking Ass. They’d be rich… and they wouldn’t have to answer to anyone. Bill Watterson wouldn’t have to worry about merchandising, he’d make enough money from comp subscriptions to see the strips ahead of time, or fresh as their produced. It does become a lack of being private though… privacy is kinda out the window a little when you actually have to communicate with your fans every day.
The technology is here… the readers are here… for those who can see it, I commend you.
September 28th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
If everyone took the same angle as you, DJ, I doubt any “traditional” newspaper comic artists would come to the online scene: you not only take time to communicate with us here, but send out personal emails to those you receive. You do this ALONGSIDE the “Daily Grind” (literally and figuratively) that is Yirmumah!, your caricatures, brickmaking, and all the other things you do in the scope of a normal day. This is an amazing feat that I find mostly unrivalled in ANY business in which I’ve experience, be it artistic or otherwise!
Imagine; as historically private and possessive as Watterson is, how would he fare in the online community? Do you think he could tolerate frat boy retard-o-trons telling him (in their oh-so-glowing AIM-Prose) how much they “
September 28th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
(damn, sorry for the double, DJ… forgot about angle brackets being dropped… delete the prev. if you like)
If everyone took the same angle as you, DJ, I doubt any “traditional” newspaper comic artists would come to the online scene: you not only take time to communicate with us here, but send out personal emails to those you receive. You do this ALONGSIDE the “Daily Grind” (literally and figuratively) that is Yirmumah!, your caricatures, brickmaking, and all the other things you do in the scope of a normal day. This is an amazing feat that I find mostly unrivalled in ANY business in which I’ve experience, be it artistic or otherwise!
Imagine; as historically private and possessive as Watterson is, how would he fare in the online community? Do you think he could tolerate frat boy retard-o-trons telling him (in their oh-so-glowing AIM-Prose) how much they “heart teh littul peein d00d” stuck on their truck? How many C&D letters would he - in his infinite n00bd0m - send to folks who linked him (thereby driving even MORE traffic to his site)?
I say forget Watterson and Wiley and the other cyber-pundits for their perfidious pedagoguery, and remember them only for their contribution to the artform.
They should leave the intarwebs to us young folk. ^_~ I say, “Watterson Go 127.0.0.1!!”
September 28th, 2005 at 5:25 pm
Hmm… I personally would indeed LOVE to see some of my favored syndicated strips easily accessible and fresh on the net. Any of those sites that compile the strips… yeuck. Thinking about zanbowser’s comments, yeah, interacting with the audience, emails and all of that, that would be needed to become great. But i think only from new comic artists. Honestly, if OPUS popped up online, Just the new, strip when it came out. No direct way to contact the artist about it. Just the strip, it would have a massive following. Someone with name recognition and quality work would not have to entice people to the site by all the other awesomeness, such as DJ does. It is a mixed pill.
September 28th, 2005 at 5:33 pm
I was gonna say relatively the same thing zanbowser laid out…
I always looked at Watterson as the JD Salinger of the comic world. Without the visceral aptitude to be able to actually converse with an online fanbase that includes individuals with IQs in the double and single digits, I wouldn’t predict much success from any syndicated artist.
There are some that this particular world is cut out for, and some it’s not.
You just happen to be the type that meshes well with it, and your considerable successes up until this point in time proves that much.
All we can really say to those who entertain us within these electronic walls is: keep up the good work and we’ll keep coming back. Pull a suck job outta your ass and we’ll eviscerate you in our angsty livejournal blawgs.
To be honest, there is some cross-overs I’d like to see (both that you mentioned and a few others) but I don’t see it happening unless there’s some kind of sea-change in the syndicated world. And traditionally anything to do with print media plods along as slowly as it can without changing, then has to sprint to catch up with everyone else. The unfortunate part is sometimes things we really love die in the process.
September 28th, 2005 at 7:46 pm
http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/wpopu/
Opus on the internet.
September 28th, 2005 at 9:15 pm
I wonder how popular Calvin and Hobbes would be on the internet. Most of it’s audience were old women. My mother and grandmother loved the strip. Don’t get me wrong. I thought it was a good strip as well but a majority of it’s audience dosen’t even know how to use a keyboard. DJ, you’d destroy Watterson and he knows it. That’s why he’d never venture into your waters.
September 28th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
Contrary to what Steve above think,s I doubt any webcomic could compete with Calvin and Hobbes. Steve is giving a great example of fan-boying gone bad.
Please everyone remember, just because you like something does not mean it is better than everything else in exsistance.
September 29th, 2005 at 4:22 am
Funny that you happened to mention both of my favorate print comic strip authors…
September 29th, 2005 at 8:50 am
This is the exact same debate that applies to bands seeking record contracts with major labels and radio airplay. You don’t need ‘em, they’re dinosaurs, they don’t understand new medium, the listener’s demands for control and content, nor do they seek to understand it.
Like the dinosaurs, they stand in herds and stare at the bright ball of fire hurtling toward them to bring about a flaming death to their industry and simply think “ooh. pretty light. — it’ll never hit us.”
September 29th, 2005 at 4:04 pm
I think a lot of the comments so far are from people in the comic scene, who are forgetting just how small that scene is in the grand scheme of things.
Something we are learning about the web is the inevitability of “aggregators” — sites or services which collect together a lot of content producers so that they can be easily found by an audience. Newspaper syndicates are dinosaurs, yes, and so are major commercial music labels, but their absence doesn’t mean that quality will automatically find an audience. People have to know about it, and that can be a very indirect process.
And in webcomics, there are aggregators, sites or places with a large audiences. There are explicit aggregators, like Yahoo and other web portals, KeenSpot/Space/Whatever, Boxcar comics, Blank Label, and whoever else, but there are also “natural aggregators” — popular sites on one genre which link to others in the same or similar genres. I don’t recall how I found Yirmumah, but it was probably linked-to from PennyArcade or something. Sure, I keep reading because I think it’s quality, but that’s not what brought me here.
Of course Calvin&Hobbes would wipe the floor with DJ any day of the week, but that’s because Calvin&Hobbes is already famous. Would an equivalent quality comic with the same broad family-friendly appeal to the same? I think it’s highly contingent on how that hypothetical new comic gets linked-to by others.
Aggregators, even informal ones, inevitably look like stuck-up cliques to people on the outside. The net might kill United Features or Warner Music or whoever, but it won’t be the end of content cliques.
October 1st, 2005 at 1:30 pm
I don’t think that Calvin or Opus would make PvP or PA a crap stain on the history of comics. Both of those comics have as much intelligent content as Calvin ever did, and rarely suffer the boring sophistry which plagues Opus. I personally prefer PvP to Opus, and think that Breathed should have quit while he was ahead, with Bloom County. Lord knows the world didn’t need another Doonesbury.
October 5th, 2005 at 2:13 am
I have to agree with DJ and say that web is the way to go. A good eample is ‘get fuzzy’ i enjoy that comic alot in the paper but know that if it were to go online the man could get away with alot more story arcs. Another problem i had with syndication is that i was searching for a particular stip of Calvin and hobbes to use for a power point presentation on bats (properly cited) and couldnt find anything online, and i dont own a scanner so i spent two hours finding zilch. Is it so wrong to have access to these things for uses as this. Its just more free publicity for the artist and site.
October 13th, 2007 at 7:19 am
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December 15th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Even if you aren’t a complete convert to digital media, you can still use online music to inform your purchases and sample new artists.
Wouldn’t it be great to know before you buy mp3 music if it was a great all-around album or just had one or two good singles? By using your online resources, you have this ability.
You can listen to short snippets of songs at online stores like Amazon.com, or you can stream entire tracks and albums at sites like MP3.com.