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By Sean Kleefeld

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm. They consult with lots of big companies and even some governments about market trends and what needs to be done to stay ahead of the curve. Now, whether or not their advice is always sound and unbiased is an issue beyond the scope of this column and, in any case, probably far too expensive for anyone besides large corporations and governments to afford anyway.

But one of the reasons McKinsey is a sought-after consultant is because they do a lot of research. Their research studies often include hundreds of thousands of participants across multiple continents. Earlier this month, they released the findings of one such study focusing on “how consumers conduct a range of activities, from core communications like e-mailing or socializing, to consumption of types of content (video, audio, games, etc.) to commerce and creative applications.” In other words, how people live and work online. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

From time to time, I’ve seen a debate pop up online that we should kill the term “webcomics.” That no one except those folks in the business actually runs Google searches on “webcomics” so we should just call them simply “comics.” Since webcomics are becoming the dominant form of the medium that people regularly encounter, the “web” portion of the term is effectively redundant. So let’s take some time to talk about terminology. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

For much of the 20th century, comics in America were largely by and for Caucasian men. Very few women and minorities could be found working in the field and some of those that did tried to hide their identities to some extent. Krazy Kat creator George Herriman usually tried to dodge questions about his race and took to wearing a hat almost all the time to hide his tightly coiled hair. Dalia Messick used the more androgynous pseudonym of Dale Messick when she began work on Brenda Starr. Even Zelda Jackson, the first female African-American cartoonist whose comics were created specifically for black-owned newspapers, deliberately used her old family nickname to become the more masculine sounding Jackie Ormes, creator of Torchy in Heartbeats.

Formally, that’s not as much a concern any more. The comics pages contain works by the likes of Ray Billingsley, Keith Knight, Cory Thomas, Charlos Gary, Lalo Alcaraz, Lynn Johnston, Rina Piccolo, Hilary Price and Stephanie Piro to name a few. Which is, of course, fantastic but they still all reside in a distinct minority against an industry that predominantly favors (albeit only informally) Caucasian men. The thinking, historically, was that newspapers were primarily purchased and read by affluent white men, so they would prefer seeing something of themselves reflected in the comics pages. Regardless of how accurate that may have been, it was the general mindset of editors for many years. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

About a year ago, a new comic app called DailyComix launched for the Android. It was basically a webcomic browser that allowed users to sort through around 100 different titles. Users could mark favorites as well as discover new titles they might not have heard of before. The app came in two flavors: one version that sold for $1.99 and another that was available for free. They both worked pretty much the same, but the free version was supported by advertisements in the app. It seemed like a pretty nice package for webcomic fans.

Except, of course, that the author was stealing all of the content.

Chris Hanel exposed the story earlier this week, noting that despite some lip service to supporting the original copyright holders, DailyComix publisher Klaymore had not actually gotten permission to use any of the webcomics in the app. The content was being “scraped” from the respective sites and reconfigured for use in DailyComix. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

A few months ago, I reviewed T Campbell’s book, A History of Webcomics. Though it was published in 2006, it holds up fairly well considering everything that’s transpired in the industry since then. Interestingly, Sébastien Dumesnil’s documentary about webcomics, Adventures into Digital Comics, was being worked on about the same time, premiering in October of that same year.

The solicitation copy on the DVD box says the movie, “tells the story of the collapse of the print comic book inddustry ands the subsequent rebirth of the comic book as an art form in the digital realm.” This is done almost exclusively through creator interviews, with a few intertitles to elaborate on some key points or provide specific numbers that creators allude to. The list of creators is pretty impressive, ranging from veterans like Marv Wolfman to relative newcomers like Tricia Hale. Not surprisingly, Scott McCloud is included as one of the most vocal advocates of webcomics as well.

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By Sean Kleefeld

The generally accepted model for webcomics these days is to put the comic online for free, and then try to make money selling ancillary material and/or advertising. Whether that’s the only viable model and how long it might last are up for debate, certainly, but the idea of actually paying for webcomics hasn’t really panned out.

In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud talked about the notion of micropayments. Basically, the idea that a creator could, theoretically, charge a very small amount (upwards of perhaps a quarter) for a nugget of information. In this case, a single installment of a webcomic. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

One of the difficulties in producing a webcomic is that it’s generally a one-person operation. You might say that makes sense, as many of the webcomics you’ve likely read have the same person writing and drawing it. But when you start putting in perspective relative to the whole process, it’s quite an impressive list of skills that’s actually needed.

Once the comic is written and drawn, it needs to be formatted for the final production. Making sure it’s the right size and format, of course, but also things like compression and color optimization need to be considered as well. These are typical procedures for any graphics designed for the web, but it’s still a somewhat different skillset than drawing. As is the page layout and user interface for the site.

Then there’s some technical things to set up like establishing a good format for an RSS feed, the functionality of an ongoing archive, upload procedures... Fortunately, here, there are a number of existing packages that help to take care of that.

But then there’s the marketing. Getting the comic’s name and link out there. While it’s easy enough to set up a Twitter account and a Facebook page and all that, there’s the difficulty in getting others to follow that account. And once they do, then there’s the difficulty in getting them to click on the links back to the comic on an ongoing basis. Read More...

By Sean Kleefeld

It’s customary for folks to come up with “Best of” lists towards the end of each calendar year. I’m not one to do that myself, but I can mostly understand why people like them. Derik Badman, in trying to come up with his “Best Webcomics of 2011” noted that he found it difficult because there were so many different types of webcomics, and he ultimately winds up following creator blogs, Tumblrs, etc. to see what they’re up to. He doesn’t expressly say so in his post, but there seems to be almost a sense of lamentation about this. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but it comes across to me as frustration in having to sort through various venues rather than the ease of having everything pop up in a feed reader.

Badman’s right, of course, with regards to the fragmentation that’s occurred in webcomics. The earliest strips generally fell neatly into either the long-running serial or gag-a-day strip categories. As he notes, there are now “single pages, short projects, excerpts, one-off issues, journal comics, etc.” Indeed, I recently discovered Ulf Andersson’s Portraits, which isn’t really a comic as many would define them, but a series of, well, portraits with some accompanying dialogue from the individual. Despite a somewhat cartoony style, it would take some people a lot of convincing to agree that they’re comics. Regardless, though, it’s hardly the type of thing one would have found on the web when Sluggy Freelance started. Read More...