GiantPanda

6 Comments

  1. Interesting little tidbit, although it still sounds like “How is Scott and the rest of the webcomics community going to fit into this box we’ve had for 150 years.”

  2. Is it just me, or does the reporter need to take some enunciation classes? He sounded like a gawky teen delivering his debate final.

  3. I found it very interesting that he’s only placed PvP in two papers and a zine.

    I’ve been trying not to shout from the rooftops about everyone giving Scott credit for this idea, but for the record, I did this with PartiallyClips in 2002 and got into 14 newspapers. I even talked with Scott and gave him the highlights of my experiences with “free” self-syndication after he made his announcement at SDCC.

  4. Things dont happen overnight, and right now, he’s going off word of mouth. If he REALLY wanted to push it, he could easily be in more papers, but I think it’s just a matter of his time at this point. He’s taking it slow and doing it right, there really is no rush.

    I had our old strip Gravity in 50 papers all on our own pretty much. But it still didnt make enough money to justify doing it full time.

    There’s only one question that needs to be asked. Why would you even WANT to be in papers now? The only answer that makes sense is… more people reading your strip. There is no money at all in newspaper syndication for cartoonists of the future.

  5. I go to admit that I think Kurtz is getting more attention from the talk about the idea of free selfsyndication than the actual strips in papers. Perhaps that will change but either way it’s a win win situation for him.

  6. Well, the papers that run PartiallyClips are free alternative weeklies. I could never get this strip into mainstream dailies, and wouldn’t try.

    I offered the strip for free for 8 months and then negotiated a weekly rate with the papers that wanted to keep it. The money is not insignificant. It would be enough to live on if I could get into maybe 45 or 50 papers.

    My understanding from the last time I talked with Scott about it (admittedly, many months ago) was that he did eventually plan to start charging the papers who carry PvP. For all I know, that has changed. I have certainly never heard him mention that part publicly.

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