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Paying for It: Webcomics Are Still Cheap Thrills

Xaviar Xerexes 3 Comments

There are plenty of webcomics you can read for free, but a growing number of sites are beginning to charge for some or all of the webcomics they publish. Now that you may have to hand over your hard-earned cash to read your favorite webcomics, it’s important that you know what you’re getting so you can decide where to hand over your hard-earned cash. This article is part one in a series that will review sites where you pay for webcomics. We will tell you the costs of joining such sites. Continue Reading →

Time For Webcomics To Hop on the Hollywood Hobbyhorse?

Xaviar Xerexes 10 Comments

Underground. Edgy. Raw. Inventive. Independent. Webcomics have all of that and more. That said, the following may seem like an absurd question, but it needs to be asked: are webcomics having an impact on mainstream popular culture? When do we get to pay 8 dollars to watch Sluggy Freelance II: The Search for Oasis or an animated Fanciest Froglin on the big screen, or flip the channel to Mad Science with Doctor Helen Narbon on the television?
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Measuring the Webcomic Audience

Xaviar Xerexes 17 Comments

Let's cut to the chase. Quantity does not necessarily equal quality. Of course, it does not necessarily preclude quality, either. In fact, some might argue that 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong. It's certainly a well-worn question in every medium of popular entertainment: "how'd you do last night, kid?"

In almost every other medium there's an established mechanism for counting the audience and providing information on what the audience is watching or buying or reading or clicking on. So why not a bestsellers' list for webcomics, an Arbitron system focused on our particular universe? Regardless of whether we love, like, hate, or are indifferent to the most popular webcomics being produced today, it is information that ought to be available to the interested members of the reading public. It could provide some clues as to where the online audience is today versus six months versus two years from now. It could help to keep score of the growth (or decline) of our overall webcomic reader audience. Continue Reading →

All I Got For Free Comic Book Day Was the Creeps

Xaviar Xerexes 10 Comments

I haven’t been in a comic book store in years. Years! In fact, the last time I actively bought, read and collected comic books was back in the mid-eighties. Don’t get me wrong. I love the comic medium. I’ve never stopped reading comic strips. Comic strips in the daily newspaper, the weekly alternative rag (you know the freebie paper with the sex ads and Red Meat inside?), and my school newspapers eventually led me to webcomics, and finally re-peaked my interest in what I had been missing all these years from comic book-land.

For whatever reason, last year’s first annual Free Comic Book Day didn’t draw me in, but this year? This year I was ready. As you might gather from the title of this piece, however, I won’t be counting the days until the third annual FCBD. Continue Reading →