A couple of good blog posts on why different flavors of comics get different types of coverage. One last week from The Beat, and one this weekend from The Comics Reporter.
It’d be interesting to talk about coverage of webcomics. Outside of a few dedicated websites like Comixpedia there are varying levels of coverage. Some more general comics websites do cover webcomics (noticeably The Comics Reporter and The Pulse) while others seem to ignore them. Coverage in the more general press seems to remain hit or miss with a very rare "hey there are comics on the web!" article in a national publication and more frequent "hey there’s a local dude putting his comics on the web" in local or college publications.
Why isn’t there more coverage? There’s almost no "machine" for publicity in webcomics. One of the things I would imagine that publishers like Wirepop, Keenspot and MT would do for their artists is promotion, but given the extremely lean staffing available I think it’s hard for even them to do a lot more than individual artists can do on their own.
Comics as a whole are pretty far down on the celebrity scale so you definitely have to work harder to get coverage. Obviously good work will get noticed but there’s no question that a certain level of press interest will always be driven by notoriety. I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert on how to approach this problem myself but maybe through all of our collective input we can generate some good ideas.
Comments are closed.