Author: Xaviar Xerexes

A Few Thoughts On Gender and Readership

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I just wanted to point folks to a couple of good posts on gender and webcomics readership.  First there’s a post by Brooke Spangler of A Girl And Her Fed on gender and webcomic popularity which looks at the Most Read list of webcomics I posted this month.  Then Gary Tyrrell of FLEEN riffs on some ideas of how different types of readers (reader versus, say, SUPERFAN) might explain some of the differences (plus Gary does a good job of explaining some of the issues with using Project Wonderful data for a most read list — all of which seem like reasonable criticisms to me).

Brooke’s essay is well worth reading because it’s a conundrum to the extent it’s true (although again I think Gary is positing why it’s hard to tell if it’s really true based on the type of limited data we have to work with). 

One article from ComixTalk’s archives I would recomend everyone take another look at is Erik Melander’s look at gender and comics from our April 2005 issue.  He took a look at the numbers of creators in different segments of comics to find that women made up a larger percentage of the number of creators in webcomics than other segments.  I’d say Brooke’s question goes to the gender breakdown of successful webcomic creators — which would be a subset of Erik’s dataset (which would be a great idea to update).  Circling back to Gary, I’m not entirely sure that the Most Read list is the way to determine that subset of successful webcomic creators — other variables are probably more important — like cumulative income associated with making comics for starters.

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The Daily Cartoonist on the future of the Daily Newspaper

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Alan Gardner’s blog is usually a good gauge of what’s going on with syndicated newspaper comics and by association newspapers in general.  He has a recent post with links to speculation on the future of the newsprint biz.  The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the future won’t look like the past.

Alan also noted he’s going to start a weekly roundup of webcomic news — it might be worth sending him your blurbs for exposure to a little different audience than blogs like ComixTALK or FLEEN.  On the other hand if you do, be prepared to run the unyielding Wiley/Rall gauntlet of doubt about all comics not printed on sweet, sweet dead trees.  Ah, I love me the smell of printer’s ink in the morning!

UPDATE: the first of Alan’s webcomic linkfests is up today.

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Scary Go Round Book Preview

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I noticed that John Allison posted an abandoned cover effort for his forthcoming print collection of Scary Go Round comics.  It's not clear from his post if the title of "Peloton" is set or not but dang – it'll be the 7th collection of SGR.  That means SGR is about 100 years old in webcomic years.

And whilst we're on the subject of Allison's saga of Tackleford, did everyone catch the 'zine comic he recently posted as part of the current storyline.  The 'zine strips start here;  you can pick up the storyline here, but the storyline probably starts here (although it jumps to other events from time to time).

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To The Webcomicmobile!

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BUSINESS
I have been losing interest in tracking the latest Platinum Studios/WOWIO outrage but for what its worth FLEEN points to some recent links on creators allegedly still not getting paid.  Journalista! links to Todd Allen’s take on the current PLATINUM-ized WOWIO business and finds a lot to be pessimistic about.  And Sean Kleefeld looks at some metrics that show a serious drop-off in WOWIO’s traffic.

INTERVIEWS
Youth Radio has an interview with Lela Lee of Angry Little Asian Girl. (h/t Journalista!)

The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs blog writes about the online comics category nominees at the recent Ignatz awards and has a mini-interview with nominee Tracy White of TRACED.

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS
The same Washington Post blog is running a poll on what to replace Opus with now that Berke Breathed has vacated the funny pages again.

JUSTIFY MY HYPE
Prism Comics debuts its latest comic, Joe Carr’s The Catty Corner.

ComicMix discovers Rich Burlew’s Order Of The Stick.

NOT QUITE WEBCOMICS
FLEEN also has a short, interesting bit on the intersection of videogames and webcomics.  In particular there’s a link to BRAID a new game that David Hellman, the artist from the too-short-lived A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible,  was the art director for.  While FLEEN did note the Penny Arcade plug for BRAID, they didn’t mention the all important endorsement from rapper Soulja Boy.

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Most Read: Final Version

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Back in 2003-2004, ComixTALK ran a series of articles under the banner of "Most Read" trying to work through how to measure the respective audience shares of various webcomics.  More recently, T Campbell borrowed the idea to generate a list of such webcomics for the former version of webcomics.com.

I’ve pulled together one more Most Read list, this time relying fairly heavily on Project Wonderful data.  Mostly though I went to the trouble of compiling this to point out how someone else could do a better job of it in the future.

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Make Comics Online With Comicbrush

Xaviar Xerexes

Tim Demeter is a cartoonist and the editor* of the anthology site, Graphic Smash.  More recently he's been the Editor-in-Chief of Clickwheel, a site that publishes comics for the iPhone/iPod format.  Now he's leading the roll out of Comicbrush, a website designed for anyone to create comics from its online toolset. 

I've gotten a chance to play around with ComicBrush since it was in beta and it's a pretty fun tool to use.  It's certainly not going to replace the toolset of many skilled and successful creators but it should be a solid platform for a lot of people with an interest in making comics to do so easily and quickly and post them into a community that can provide feedback.

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Of Hipster Kings and Rabbit Detectives: An Interview with Ben Gamboa of Tweep

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Ben Gamboa is the creator of Tweep, a comic he's been creating and posting to the web for over five years now.  It's about a group of friends who the comic looks in on as they go about their day to day lives.  I really like the description offered by Gilead Pellaeon in his review of the comic:

Tweep is a really sweet strip about friends who care about each other, relationships that make sense, and, of course, The Rabbit Detective. And I've gotta say, I'm loving it. It's not as edgy as Questionable Content, it's not as funny as PvP. It's definitely not as dramatic and emotionally charged as Megatokyo. While all of those strips qualify as relationship strips, in them the relationships are the vehicle by which the purpose of the strip is delivered, be it humor or drama. In Tweep, the relationships ARE the strip, and any drama or comedy that arises is simply the result of natural interaction between the characters.

And I don't think that description is intended to damn with faint praise.  Tweep is often disarmingly aimless as its characters go about their day, and while the characters do stuff, it's much more about this small clique of characters and their interaction with each other than what they do.

I was really happy to get Ben to do the cover for ComixTALK this month and talk to him about Tweep.

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