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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This Day in ComixTALK

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Hey what do you know – there are still 10 contenders left in the Daily Grind contest. 

A look back at other things from the past:

2007

The Perry Bible Fellowship collection – The Trial of Colonel Sweeto – was publisher Dark Horse’s third webcomic-to-print success (following Megatokyo  and Penny Arcade ). Story here.

2006

A review of the well-received play based on the webcomic Get Your War On from the Washington Post. 

2005

ComixTALK had an interview with Mike Rojas, creator of Natch Evil; a review of Jack, created by David Hopkins; and T Campbell discussed how to make action move in webcomics (Part One and Part Two).

Erik Melander’s Through the Looking Back Glass column covered the recent events in webcomics:

September held a number of news items which are worth mentioning. First and foremost, the Webcomic Telethon collected an impressive amount of money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The Penny Arcade Expo returned for its second year, this time bigger and with more media coverage. Keenspot is working towards fulfilling its plans announced at Comic-Con. Keen announced that they have signed with Fox Television to develop Owen Dunne’s webcomic You Damn Kid! for television. And both Keenspot and Modern Tales are looking for advertising sales representatives.

2004

Comixtalk had an interview with Eric Milikin, creator of Fetus X.

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Rich Stevens Will Pixel You a Portrait

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The Diesel Sweeties 8-Bit Maestro, Rich Stevens, is taking commissions:

If you’ve ever wanted to see yourself in hand-drawn 8-bit form, here’s your chance! I’m still digging out of a mountain of debt brought on from expenses incurred while I was syndicated, but hopefully this can put a dent in it.

The portrait studio is open and will run until October 31.

More details at Diesel Sweeties here.

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Whole Lotta Webcomic Stuff Goin’ On

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MILESTONES
Berke Breathed is bailing on the funny pages again.  NPR reports on Opus leaving the newspapers right around this year’s election.  Breathed says he will focus on children’s books.  I loved Bloom County growing up but to be honest haven’t been that enraptured by the two sequel strips.

BOO!
Sean Kleefeld talks up the horror-themed collective of webcomics, Split Lip.

TOOLS
The US Daily reports on two "comics" creation tools: "My Comic Book Creator" and "Comic Life".

INTERVIEWS

REVIEWS

BUSINESS
Sean Kleefeld muses about why one would buy the book after reading the webcomic?  He kind of stumbles onto Jon Rosenberg’s greater theory of swag support: have a bunch of physical stuff  for a reader to buy…

MOVIE MAYHEM
Reuben Bolling on watching a preview of The Watchmen movie:

It seems that it was the success of director Snyder’s "300" that gave him the clout to reject the studio’s re-imagining of Watchmen as a War on Terror shoot-’em-up, and go back to the source material.  Based on what I saw, it’s hard to imagine a fan of the comic book being angry or disappointed that the movie strayed from the comic.

AROUND THE BLOGS AND BACK
Chuck Rozakis has a column at ComicMix sprinkling a little bit of econo-speak over the fact that really good creators of webcomics get a disproportionate number of fans.  It is a nice way to put it — in a world of access to all choices available most people will take the "best" option as opposed to a second or third-rate option and so if you’re webcomic is the "best" you’re going to collect all the potential fans (Hence the use of "superstar" in his column title).  But of course, "best" is going to be somewhat subjective and not all "fans" or "readers" are going to be interested in the same things so it’s a bit more complicated.  We’ve also looked at this distribution as a power law (here, here for example) and had some discussion of how the "long tail" of it can still provide opportunities for creators to connect with readers by providing a smaller group of fans exactly what they’re looking for.

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Yeah, Copying Game Images Is A Copyright Violation…

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Blogger Kevin Huxford has an email exchange with Blizzard posing a hypothetical:

What is Blizzard’s policy on screen shots being used to create a webcomic and then selling advertisement on the webcomic site? I’m worried that compensation for ads on the same page as the webcomic would constitute commercial use.

Not shockingly, Blizzard says this is against their current policies.  Now have I heard of Blizzard going after people for this?  No, not really. But anytime you use copyrighted material in your work, under the current law of the land, you run a huge risk because the copyright holder holds a lot of cards.  Yes fair use can be a defense to what would otherwise be copyright infringement ,but it is a case by case analysis and you really need to know how to do that analysis (or have someone do it for you) to know whether you can make a plausible claim to that or not.

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Towards A More Perfect Comics

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Tom Spurgeon has a long post on how he, if he was "emperor of comics" would fix things.  It’s interesting and covers a range of topics from awards (Keep the Eisners, nix the Harveys) to direct market retailers to digital strategies.

I attended the Small Publishers panel at SPX this year and it was interesting — it included someone from Sparkplug, Buenaventure, Bodega, (and one more publisher I can’t remember this sec) but not encouraging.  It’s not surprising that it’s a barely profitable to profitless business (all four panelists were hoping that growing back catalogues would eventually sustain their business) but it was also revealing that there is a great deal of art and guesswork to making a go of it.  There were different approaches to selling through AMAZON, various levels of website-driven sales, different ideas on marketing.  All I think had a background in working for larger publishers and all said they were doing it for the love of comics.

I’ve sometimes given thought to getting into publishing but I would certainly do it from a web-heavy approach.  One of the publishers that seems very savvy so far is AVATAR which is handling Warren Ellis’ Freak Angels comic and I suspect will sell massive amounts of the print collection driven by the comic’s serialization on the web.

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