July 30, 2012   87 notes
This is a little editorial post Dan Nadel on the Comics Journal website from last Friday. Part of it is Nadel being frustrated with artists who use Kickstarter— “Guess what? You don’t get to call yourself underground if you’re on Kickstarter. Guess what else? You don’t get to call yourself a publisher either; you’re just someone who pays a printing bill.” Read the article and then read the comments underneath it, there are people going back and forth on both sides about whether or not it’s a viable funding option. MY TWO CENTS, though probably far too uninformed to post on a site like TCJ, is this: Breaking into the industry hasn’t been easy for people like me. I’m an independent cartoonist who’s just paid out the nose to get a degree in comics (something else that probably makes me completely “un-legit”, but whatever), and I don’t live somewhere like Portland or New York City with an active, thriving underground comics community. I’ve tried to show my work to editors and publishers while I was at SCAD, but it never led to anything significant— partially because I was (and AM) still a work in progress, but also because I hadn’t really built up much personal ethos. Comics is a tricky, highly subjective business, and while I’ve seen some of my friends get picked up by companies, that sort of opportunity doesn’t always come to all of us right away.  I didn’t use a crowdsourcing campaign to fund my book because I was some money-grubbing shithead who wanted to scam my readers out of their hard-earned cash. (Though there are people out there who do that, I don’t doubt.) I did it because I wanted a way for readers to enjoy my comics in the best way possible. To someone experienced in the industry,making that happen— printing off books or buying offset presses or whatever— might be a matter of moving some numbers around. For me, a dude with barely any savings and the constant fear that I won’t be able to pay the rent, dropping a giant wad of money on printing books is something I can’t do by myself. With Indiegogo, I raised enough money to print the book and then some, while my supporters got first-run copies and an assortment of neat swag. The fact that there are enough people out there who were willing to pay to make it happen is, in my opinion, just as credible and ethos-boosting as if one publishing company had decided to send it to print, if not more so.  Maybe this makes me an anti-underground dingus for trying to hawk myself and my products incessantly, but that’s what it takes to get ahead on the internet. A musician friend of mine once lamented that, with the advent of Bandcamp and the explosion of independent musical artists all vying for the same scrap of listener attention on the Web, it can be next to impossible to get one’s work heard over the din. With comics it’s no different! This is the seventh year I’ve been putting comics online, and while I’ve made great strides recently, I’m still pretty obscure. Every time I go to a convention, I run into other webcomic artists with AMAZING work who have been busting their asses just as long as me (or longer!) and still are basically unknowns outside of their devoted fanbases. We all have to keep marketing ourselves to get noticed by anything other than a sliver of a fraction of a tiny, tiny piece of pop culture consumers at large. For some of us that means “working hard and making strong connections with readers”, and for others that means “getting editors hammered in convention hotel bars and then slipping them your space opera pitch”. Whatever works, I guess. To discourage comics creators from using crowdsourcing is stupid. It’s a service that allows a direct connection between artists and their readers, with only minimal financial canoodling from a third party. It gives creators like me (and maybe you!) the potential to put out work on our terms, and it gives readers the ability to respond with their words and wallets on whether or not said work should become a reality. I don’t think crowdsourcing is the permanent last word on indie comics publishing, and there are ways the system can be abused… and maybe that makes it less legitimate, I don’t know. I just don’t see any reason to shit on comics that were created with it, or creators who use it. My comic is pretty niche, and most other successfully crowdsourced comics are the same way, but people loved them (and loved the comics medium in general) enough to make them a reality. Doesn’t that count for anything?

This is a little editorial post Dan Nadel on the Comics Journal website from last Friday. Part of it is Nadel being frustrated with artists who use Kickstarter— “Guess what? You don’t get to call yourself underground if you’re on Kickstarter. Guess what else? You don’t get to call yourself a publisher either; you’re just someone who pays a printing bill.” Read the article and then read the comments underneath it, there are people going back and forth on both sides about whether or not it’s a viable funding option.

MY TWO CENTS, though probably far too uninformed to post on a site like TCJ, is this: Breaking into the industry hasn’t been easy for people like me. I’m an independent cartoonist who’s just paid out the nose to get a degree in comics (something else that probably makes me completely “un-legit”, but whatever), and I don’t live somewhere like Portland or New York City with an active, thriving underground comics community. I’ve tried to show my work to editors and publishers while I was at SCAD, but it never led to anything significant— partially because I was (and AM) still a work in progress, but also because I hadn’t really built up much personal ethos. Comics is a tricky, highly subjective business, and while I’ve seen some of my friends get picked up by companies, that sort of opportunity doesn’t always come to all of us right away. 

I didn’t use a crowdsourcing campaign to fund my book because I was some money-grubbing shithead who wanted to scam my readers out of their hard-earned cash. (Though there are people out there who do that, I don’t doubt.) I did it because I wanted a way for readers to enjoy my comics in the best way possible. To someone experienced in the industry,making that happen— printing off books or buying offset presses or whatever— might be a matter of moving some numbers around. For me, a dude with barely any savings and the constant fear that I won’t be able to pay the rent, dropping a giant wad of money on printing books is something I can’t do by myself. With Indiegogo, I raised enough money to print the book and then some, while my supporters got first-run copies and an assortment of neat swag. The fact that there are enough people out there who were willing to pay to make it happen is, in my opinion, just as credible and ethos-boosting as if one publishing company had decided to send it to print, if not more so. 

Maybe this makes me an anti-underground dingus for trying to hawk myself and my products incessantly, but that’s what it takes to get ahead on the internet. A musician friend of mine once lamented that, with the advent of Bandcamp and the explosion of independent musical artists all vying for the same scrap of listener attention on the Web, it can be next to impossible to get one’s work heard over the din. With comics it’s no different! This is the seventh year I’ve been putting comics online, and while I’ve made great strides recently, I’m still pretty obscure. Every time I go to a convention, I run into other webcomic artists with AMAZING work who have been busting their asses just as long as me (or longer!) and still are basically unknowns outside of their devoted fanbases. We all have to keep marketing ourselves to get noticed by anything other than a sliver of a fraction of a tiny, tiny piece of pop culture consumers at large. For some of us that means “working hard and making strong connections with readers”, and for others that means “getting editors hammered in convention hotel bars and then slipping them your space opera pitch”. Whatever works, I guess.

To discourage comics creators from using crowdsourcing is stupid. It’s a service that allows a direct connection between artists and their readers, with only minimal financial canoodling from a third party. It gives creators like me (and maybe you!) the potential to put out work on our terms, and it gives readers the ability to respond with their words and wallets on whether or not said work should become a reality. I don’t think crowdsourcing is the permanent last word on indie comics publishing, and there are ways the system can be abused… and maybe that makes it less legitimate, I don’t know. I just don’t see any reason to shit on comics that were created with it, or creators who use it. My comic is pretty niche, and most other successfully crowdsourced comics are the same way, but people loved them (and loved the comics medium in general) enough to make them a reality. Doesn’t that count for anything?

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