One of my favorite cartoons of all time, from Fleischer Studios circa 1931.
THE CARTOON CRYPT: Bimbo’s Initiation (1931)
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Author Archives: STWALLSKULL
Barney Google, the Song
I love the Barney Google Comic strip (which really needs a complete reprinting, but you can get a good taste of it by joining the yahoo group “GoogleGang” here).
In its heyday in the 20’s, it was one of the most popular comic strips in the country, and as a result it was also a merchandising phenomenon.
This merchandising included, among other things, a song.
My Grandpa likes to sing a refrain from the song “Barney Google” every once in a while, and I recently started singing it to my daughter along with a lot of eye rolling at the appropriate points, which she finds hilarious. I thought I’d see what I could find out about it around the interweb.
BARNEY GOOGLE
(Rose / De Beck / Con Conrad)
Billy Jones & Ernest Hare, Thomas & West
Who’s the most important man this country ever knew?
Do you know what politician I have reference to?
Well, it isn’t Mr. Bryan, and it isn’t Mr. Hughes.
I’ve got a hunch that to that bunch I’m going to introduce:
(Again you’re wrong and to this throng I’m going to Introduce:)
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google bet his horse would win the prize.
When the horses ran that day, Spark Plug ran the other way.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google had a wife three times his size
She sued Barney for divorce
Now he’s living with his horse.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Who’s the greatest lover that this country ever knew?
And who’s the man that Valentino takes his hat off to?
No, it isn’t Douglas Fairbanks that the ladies rave about.
When he arrives, who makes the wives chase all their husbands
out?
Why, it’s Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google is the guy who never buys.
Women take him out to dine, then he steals the waiter’s dime.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google is the luckiest of guys.
If he fell in to the mud, he’d come up with a diamond stud.
Barney Google with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Who’s the greatest fire chief this country ever saw?
Who’s the man who loves to hear the blazing buildings roar?
Anytime the house is burning, and the flames leap all about,
Say, tell me do, who goes, “kerchoo!” and puts the fire out?
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google, thought his horse could win the prize.
He got odds of ten to eight; Spark Plug came in three days late.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
Barney Google tried to enter paradise.
When Saint Peter saw his face, he said, “Go to the other place”.
Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes.
I’ve got four versions of this song for your listening enjoyment (courtesy of archive.org and juneberry78s.com).
Here are download links:
Barney Google Version 1: Billy Jones and Ernest Hare
Barney Google Version 2: Billy Jones and Ernest Hare Alternate Version
Barney Google Version 3: Great White Way Orchestra with Billy Murray
Barney Google Version 4: Georgie Martin
Hogan’s Alley has a nice gallery of old sheet music covers featuring old cartoon characters… there are a ton of them. Looking at the gallery, it reveals that there was a second Barney Google song… “The Brotherhood of Billy Goats.” If anyone has a recording of that out there, I’d love to share it.
Fantagraphics to Reprint Complete George Herriman Stumble Inn Sundays!
As if their announcement about publishing the compete Pogo the other week wasn’t exciting enough, Fantagraphics Books’ Kim Thompson just announced on the Comics Journal message board that they will be reprinting the Sundays of George Herriman’s second greatest strip, Stumble Inn, for the first time as part of their Krazy Kat reprint series (in the volumes containing Kat material already reprinted by Eclipse). The first greatest is, of course Krazy Kat… that said, from what I’ve seen of Stumble Inn, it still was better than 99.9% of everything else on the comic page, which is saying a lot since there were a lot of great comics in the day. It’s like acknowledging that Romeo and Juliet wasn’t Shakespeare’s best play. Click on the picture below for a sample strip from Coconino County.
Ezekiel Fishman Versus The Martians Part One: A Gross Comics Project
 
Inspired by my friend Kevin Cannon‘s work on his 288 hour graphic novel, Far Arden (read more about that project here), I’ve embarked with some of my comrades in the Minneapolis cell of the International Cartoonist Conspiracy in THE GROSS COMIC PROJECT. It isn’t what it sounds like.
Like 24 hour comic day, the goal of the Gross Comic Project is to produce a certain number of pages in a certain amount of time… in this case 144 pages in 144 hours… a gross of pages, get it? 12 hours a month for a year.
Unlike 24 hour comic day, however, the goal of these comics is quality more than speed… if we are going to invest this much time in it, we want to produce something fun, readable and well-drawn, Â rather that just quickly produced. To that end, we allow all the planning, drawing, and even working on actual pages outside of the monthly 12 hour sessions that a cartoonist chooses to do. However, the 12 pages should be completed by the end of the 12 hours.
That said, I ran late a few hours on mine… thankfully, this project is self-policed. I repeat… the point is to make the pages, not be a ninny about how much time it takes… just get it done, already, dammit!
Here are the first 12 pages of my new Gross Comic, Ezekiel Fishman Versus the Martians.
We have 6 other cartoonists joining us in this undertaking next month… Dank!, Shad Petosky, Tim Sievert, Maxeem, Curtis Square-Briggs and Eric Lappegard.
Some will be playing catch up and doing 12 pages this month, some will be starting next month. Other cartoonists around the world are encouraged to join in as well, and we’ll post links to all the comics on the Cartoonist Conspiracy blog.
Solid Potato Salad
Classic Comics on the Web
In a post on his site expressing the joy of living in a world full of an untold wealth of classic comics reprint books, Mike Lynch just provided a nice list of places to find great old comics on the web as well as in print… most of these I knew about, but he had a couple that were new to me. Here are his links:
Coconino World is a huge site, in French and English, that celebrates a lot of classic cartoonists. If you go to this page, you can start looking at Swinnerton, McManus, etc.
Shane Glines’ Cartoon Retro (subscription only), celebrates classic cartoon illustrators. Lots of stuff here. Join up for a month. I did.
Andy’s Early Comics Archive is an incredible collection of cartoons through the centuries with tremendously large scan for much oohing and aahing. I love the page of photos and caricatures of cartoonists here.
Craig Yoe’s Arf Lover’s Blog is a wonderful collection of cool stuff. I always wind up spending time looking at old gag cartoons, old comics and other items of delight that Craig has.
Stripper’s Guide by Allan Holtz is not as racy as it sounds. Lots of great old comic strips here.
Barnacle Press is a trove of old features from the comics pages.
Arnold Wagner’s Cartoonology always has the insider stories about cartooning and comics.
Leif Peng’s Today’s Inspiration blog tends to be more about post-war illustration, but the site is such an interesting place to visit and it’s full of vintage material, that it’s worth a looksee.
These site all have a wealth of great stuff on them… some of them, like the amazing Barnacle Press, have rss feeds you can subscribe to too. check them out. Here are some additional places you can find classic comics on the web:
1) Yahoo Groups has a number of great classic comics groups that will deliver great comics to your email box (I just wish that Yahoo did a better job of archiving these posts for viewing on the web). There are far too many to list here, but here are some of highlights:
PlatinumAgeComics is a GREAT group featuring pre-1938 comics that sends stuff all the time… most of which you are highly unlikely to have ever seen before. You have to request membership to the group… and what a membership they have! Many notable comics historians and cartoonists are vary active participants in this excellent group. If you find this interesting, you’ll also want to subscribe to PlatPics, their related picture posting group.
There are a number of Yahoo groups with posts for various old strips… the regularity of the posts vary greatly from group to group… search around for your favorite old strips and there may be a group for them. One of the best I’ve subscribed to is Roger Langridge‘s GoogleGang group which sends out dailies of Billy DeBeck’s great, hilarious strip Barney Google (which is in desperate need of a good, complete print reprinting).
2) Scans Daily offers frequently updated scans of old and new comics, generally from comic books.
3) The guide to the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection (founded by Comics Historian Bill Blackbeard) doesn’t have complete comics, but has panel samples and references to work by many artists that you won’t find anywhere else on the web. The offline collection is almost certainly the most complete collection of newspaper comics history anywhere. Most of comics history would have been obliterated if it hadn’t been for the pioneering collecting efforts of Blackbeard and a handful of other comics historians. Indeed, virtually all classic comics reprints owe a debt to Blackbeard and his collection. Thanks Bill!
Note that some or all of this collection was donated a while ago to the Ohio State University Comics Research Library, the biggest library of comics-related research materials in the world (you can read more about some of their amazing collection at this link).
I wish they did a better job of representing this amazing collection online… it’s a good reason to visit Ohio, though! They also host the Festival of Cartoon Art, if you want another reason to visit them. There is also a large collection of ancient strip clippings at Michigan State University.
4) Comicsresearch.org has a huge list of cartoonists around the web (along with a lot of other interesting stuff), with links to their works and related information.
5) I’ve never ordered anything from them but this site and this site offer a number of very obscure old comic books on cd.
6) Here’s a free classic comic book of the week from comic-art.com (although I don’t know if they actually update it weekly or not).
7) For an enormous treasure trove of comic book cover images, see the Grand Comic Book Database. It’s a great project amassing a huge amount of information about every comic ever printed, similar to the Internet Movie Database, but for comics.
8) Excellent comics and comics history magazine Hogan’s Alley offers a number of interesting features on their website, including some great classic comics reprints.
Know of more great places to look at old comics online? Let us hear about them in the comments!
HOW TO GET YOUR COMICS ONLINE PART TWO: Publishing Options, and the Necessity of RSS Subscriptions
This is the second part of a series on publishing your comics online… the first part can be found here.
The first thing you most likely will want to consider once you’ve decided to put some of your work online is how you want to get it there. There are a number of options for doing so, which I will discuss in this installment.
FREE COMIC HOSTING
Some of the options cost money, some of them don’t. There are five major free comics hosting sites that I have heard of:
Webcomics Nation
Comic Genesis
Drunk Duck
Smack Jeeves
Comicspace
(Comicspace also serves as a “social networking†site for cartoonists, and is very widely used, and possibly worth having an account at for reasons other than just posting your comics … you can see my page on it here. I don’t host comics there, or really update it, however… I’m just using it to attempt to drive traffic here).
Other options will certainly appear, so if you’re interested in doing this, you may want to try putting “free comic hosting” into your search engine of choice as well.
I have no experience with any of these free hosting options… I guess I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Some of them offer expanded options for paid accounts as well, and I’m not sure what additional control that would get you. Thus, I am not qualified to discuss the nuances of each option here… if you are interested in them, you will have to explore them yourself. However, I will list briefly here some advantages and disadvantages that I see of using the free comics hosting services.
ADVANTAGES OF USING FREE COMIC HOSTING
1) They’re free.
2) I believe all of the options above add you in their comics listings and promotions, which is most likely quite advantageous for building an audience.
3) I would guess they are all pretty easy for a beginner to use… presumably you just start an account and start posting.
4) It is a lot easier and quicker to use a templated site like these all provide than to build a unique site yourself.
5) You will have an automated archive of your previous strips, so people can easily start at the beginning.
DISADVANTAGES OF USING FREE COMIC HOSTING
1) “You get what you pay for.” Your options are limited to what your host provides.
2) You won’t get a particularly intuitive URL for your site for free (like yourcomiccharacter.com or yourname.com).
3) You are most likely limited to the design, functionality, and the template or templates provided. A templated site may not be particularly attractive, and the limitations in functionality may frustrate you. A templated site is unlikely to present your unique character and creativity as well as one you have designed yourself.
4) I don’t believe most of the free options offer rss feeds, which are key to building your audience (Web Comics Nation does offer them). All free blog systems will offer this, however, which is a good reason to use a blog for posting your comics.
The advantages and disadvantages are pretty equally weighted on this one… it really depends on what you want to pursue. Free comic hosting is probably the easiest option for getting your work online, though.
ABOUT ONLINE SYNDICATION
One thing I would consider carefully in choosing your free host, if you decide to use one, is whether or not they offer RSS feeds. The only one I know of that does this currently is Webcomics Nation, although some of the others may as well. I would strongly advise you not to use any service that does not provide an rss feed of what you post.
Unfortunately, in the rss feeds I have subscribed to from Webcomics Nation, the rss feeds do not display the comics, but rather just let you know when a comic has been updated and lets you know to visit the site. I don’t know if it is optional or a requirement to not include the comics in the feeds, but I see this as a serious tactical error.
You want your readers to be able to access your work wherever they want to access it… forcing people to visit your site to see your content defeats the point of having an rss feed. That point is making your content easily available to anyone who wants to see it, however they want to see it… rss separates the content of a site from the presentation of the site, so that content can be viewed anywhere. If subscribers have to visit your site every time you post something rather than just viewing it in their newsreader of choice, I guarantee you will only have a fraction of the readers you would otherwise.
RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” It is the standard for syndicating your content around the web… you can read more about it here.
The concept of syndicating on the web is much different than the traditional concepts you may have with syndication. As with the traditional syndication of newspaper comics, for example, offering your content for syndication does indeed make it so others can repurpose all or part of your feed on their websites. Unlike newspaper syndication, if someone did use your feed, you would not get paid for it. Indeed, if you have a feed of your comics, someone can easily display your feed on their website without your permission, so if this loss of control bugs you, you may not want to offer a feed. It is a VERY good idea (and one that I have widely neglected myself) to put your domain name and copyright information inside of all images you publish, so wherever someone sees the image they will know where it came from.
The primary use of an rss feed, at least for a cartoonist, is to build a subscriber base. Your feed makes it so anyone using a newsreader on the web can subscribe to your comics and other postings in your rss feed and receive it automatically every time you post. Before feeds, if a user wanted to find the latest work by a cartoonist, they had to check their website regularly and dig around for any new material. With feeds, the subscriber recieves the information directly in his newsreader when it is updated without having to visit your website at all.
If you are unfamiliar with newsreaders, I HIGHLY recommend you acquaint yourself with one. I’ve used a few different ones, and there are a ton of them out there. I currently use Google Reader, which works extremely well. I’m currently subscribing to over 250 different rss feeds with it, and I can view the contents of all of those feeds in one place. If I checked all of the websites whose feeds I subscribe to every day, it would probably take all day. Instead I read them all in one place and can browse them quickly. Additionally, Google Reader makes it easy to organize and share feeds you are subscribing to. You can also access your Google Reader account from any computer with and internet connection… this is not the case with a newsreader that you run off of your desktop.
If you use the web regularly, using a newsreader will save you a tremendous amount of time, and beyond that it changes the usefulness of the web utterly. It makes it so all the content you are interested in comes to you, rather than you having to hunt it down. Some other popular newsreaders include MyYahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines… there are probably hundreds of them out there. I recommend Google Reader. Once you get set up with one, start subscribing to some sites to try it out… here are links to all my current feeds, which I’m sure you’ll want to subscribe to!
Stwallskull Feed
Stwallskull’s Interesting Links
Soapy the Chicken Feed
Conspire! The Cartoonist Conspiracy Group Blog Feed
Conspire! Conspiracy News Feed
Conspire! Conspirators Feed
Conspire! Cartooning Lessons Feed
Conspire! Comic News Feed
THE COMIC BLOG
One other potentially free option you may want to consider would be posting your comics as a blog. I publish my comic, Soapy the Chicken, as a blog, and it works pretty well for the most part. There are a number of free blogging options out there… Blogger (which is owned by Google and integrates somewhat with Google Reader) and WordPress are probably the best known. I’m currently using blogger for the Soapy site (and the Cartoonist Conspiracy group blog), and it works very well. Recently I started using WordPress for this blog on my stwallskull site, and it works even better than Blogger, it is much more flexible and powerful. However, if you are a beginner, Blogger may be a better option, as it is extremely simple to figure out. This brings us to another of my handy lists of advantages and disadvantages…
ADVANTAGES OF POSTING YOUR COMICS ON A BLOG
1) It will have an easy to use rss feed, so you can easily have people subscribe.
2) The templates tend to be very flexible, and with a little bit of work you can alter them fairly easily to have the features and look that you want for your site.
3) Blogs are pretty intuitive to use, and easy to update.
DISADVANTAGES OF POSTING YOUR COMICS ON A BLOG
1) If you are not hosting it yourself, you may want to find a separate place to host your images. Most blog accounts provide some image hosting space, but it may not be enough for your purposes. There are a number of free image hosting places out there on the web… far too many to list. Here are a few… again there are a lot of them out there…
imageshack.com
photobucketshop.com
flickr.com (note that while flickr works slick has a lot of advantages, they inanely require you to post more photos than printed stuff or they may freeze your account)
Asking for some good suggestions on the Cartoonist Conspiracy or Comics Journal message boards should get you a number of opinions about the best ones to use.
2) You’ll have to build an archive separately if you want a way for people to go through your comics from the first one to the last, and keep it updated… same deal with a gallery or other additional pages you may want. I’m currently managing the Soapy the Chicken archive with a flash movie that I built. My friend Sean Tenhoff archives his strip, The Bean Men, with a huge page of thumbnails of previous strips. Unfortunately, I don’t have a particularly easy solution to suggest for doing this… the automated archive is one of the big advantages of using the free comic hosting services.
3) There is probably a bit more of a learning curve than the comics hosting solutions… nothing worth getting intimidated about though.
YOU AND YOUR FEED
Once you have your feed set up, I also recommend registering it at feedburner.com, which is a useful website for optimizing and adding to your rss feed. Using it, you can make it easier to subscribe and add subscriptions via email, and it generally gives you more control over how your content gets syndicated, along with many other useful things.
You’ll want to make sure that your link to your feed is prominently displayed all over your site. With web design, redundancy of important information is a GOOD THING. You want people to find your subscribe link! Don’t just hide it at the bottom of the page! Make sure people know you are offering a subscription and have some prominent links that lead to your feed.
All links to your feed should lead to the same place… having multiple feed locations linked to can cause you headaches down the road. Again, if you set up your feed with feedburner, this provides a very friendly link that should work in any newsreader.
HOSTING YOUR OWN COMICS
If you want the maximum amount of control over the presentation of your work and how it is displayed, you’ll probably want to host a site yourself.
There are a ton of web hosting options out there, so you may want to research it more yourself… I think it would be pretty hard to find a better deal out there than Dreamhost, though. Dreamhost offers a vastly better deal than any other hosting provider I’ve ever seen, has a very intuitive backend to manage your website or websites with. Here is an overview of some of the things that make Dreamhost a great deal:
- You can host as many domains as you want there for no additional cost (other than the cost of domain registration).
- They offer the ability to easily add a WordPress blog, PHPBB message board, or a number of other complex applications to your website with basically the click of a button. Message boards can be huge community building tools for cartoonists, so that is a big perk.
- They give you more hosting space all the time, without raising your rates.
- You can set up email accounts at your domain. You get a free domain registration with membership.
- The cheapest hosting account is $7.95 a month, and has everything most people would ever need.
Note: One of the nuttier things Dreamhost does is offer an affiliate program where you get generously paid for each person you refer to their service that signs up. I’m not writing this hype for them for the referral, but because I genuinely believe they are offering an great service… however, I’d love to get your referral if you’re inclined to give me one. If so, please use the button below to sign up for their services, which has a link on it to let them know I sent you.
BUILDING YOUR WEBSITE
A lot of cartoonists are intimidated by the prospect of making their own websites. Discussing how to make webpages is out of the scope of this article, but I will note that it is no more difficult to make a webpage than it is to use a word processor (in fact, most modern word processors will export html pages if you want… which I do not recommend doing, as they usually do a very poor job of it).
The easiest way to make a html page is to use a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get). I use Dreamweaver, which is excellent, but it isn’t free. There is a free one from the Mozilla (makers of the excellent Firefox web browser), and you can find a list of other ones here. Again, I can’t really recommend a free one since I have no experience with them. I encourage people to suggest some good ones in the comments to this post.
You can find some good articles on web development at webmonkey.com.
As far as designing your site goes, I do have some advice.
1) While it can be fun to go crazy with the navigation for the site and have it integrated into a drawing of a character with each of his limbs pointing to different sections of your site or something, don’t let this sort of thing be the only way to navigate your website. Be artistic with your site, but keep it intuitive. If you want to go crazy with the navigation, that’s fine… just make sure you provide a more obvious redundant navigation system as well. An unintuitive website will lose you viewers who may love your work if they could only find it. Again, to repeat: REDUNDANCY IS GOOD. Am I being redundant?
2) If you are using a blog on your site, they make excellent home pages. A blog can highlight all your most current content, and updated content is what people keep coming back for.
3) As I mentioned, you will definitely want to offer rss subscriptions. And you will want to make sure people know that you offer rss subscriptions in many places all over your site.
4) Keep the names of your navigation simple. HOME, GALLERY, LINKS, and CONTACT may not be the most exciting words, but they make a hell of a lot more sense to your users than MY PAD, THE HALL OF MYSTIC AMUSEMENTS, THE SPIDER LAIR and BUZZ ME.
REGISTERING A DOMAIN
If you’re pretty serious about your presence on the web, you’ll definitely want your own domain for people to find you at (like yourcomic.com or yourname.com). Registering a domain is easy… as I said, you get one for free with an account at Dreamhost and most other web hosting providers.
I keep my domain registrations separate from my hosting provider to make it easier if I ever decide to change hosting providers… A good place for finding what domains are available and register them is dotster.com.
When choosing your domain, I’d recommend generally staying away from anything that isn’t .com, .net or .org, as it will most likely cut down on your traffic… people will assume you are at .com. Registration for any of these domain extensions runs $14.95 a year on dotster… they often have sales on them too.
Dotster also offers hosting, but I’ve never used it… but like I said, it can be nice to have your domain registration separate from your web hosting, if you ever change hosting providers.
Next: Getting your Images Ready For the Web
Previously:
HOW TO GET YOUR COMICS ONLINE PART ONE: Advantages and Disadvantages of Putting Your Comics Online
Song of the Hobo
If I hadn’t gone and made the mistake of doing something with my life, I would have been a hobo.
A while back I participated in the 700 Hobos Project. This project succeeded in having cartoonists from around the globe draw pictures of the hobos mentioned in John Hodgman’s wonderful book of all knowledge, The Areas of My Expertise (you can download the audio version of this absolutely hilarious book here for free). You can hear Mr. Hodgman recitation of his list of Hobo names here. You can see all of the drawings from the project here… currently there are 1430 drawings of the 700 hobos.
Fortunately for weekend hobos and hobo wannabes, the internet has provided the world with a repository of hobo knowledge… not that any true hobo would ever set finger on a conblasted contrapulated computer… hobo poseurs, however, have no such scruples.
For example this site and this one will illuminate you with information on hobo signs and symbols. This will enable those of us in the Johnson Family with a watchful eye and ragged dress to find free pie and coffee, or a hay loft in which to lay a weary head.
Alas, the hobo codes are under-utilized these days… I wish some of the tag-happy spray-painters of the modern world would get over peeing arcane versions of their names on walls and start providing us with useful hoboese instead.
The amazingly wonderful music site juneberry78s.com has a bunch of great public domain music, some of which is about the noble hobo. I have purloined the relevant tracks for your edification here:
Asa Martin – The Contented Hobo
Asa Martin – The Wandering Hobo
Andrews Brothers – Hobo’s Life Is Lonely
While you are listening to these old tunes of the lonesome, lice-infested road, here are some images I made for the 700 Hobos project to peruse and ponder simultaneously.
Hobo 002: Cholly the Yegg
Cholly the Yegg was once a wealthy man, but he left his fortune behind for life on the rails. Many claim it was bad investments that led him to this fate, a claim which Cholly denies wholeheartedly. Cholly insists that he just needed the simplicity of sleeping under the stars with a knapsack full of dreams and open roads leading in all directions. Of course, the liquor may have had something to do with it too, not to mention the embezzlement accusations, but we prefer Cholly’s interpretation of events. For he is Cholly the Yegg for a reason… not for his portly stature… not for his fondness for eating 3 pickled eggs for lunch every single day of the week… but because, when you see him walk away into the sunset, you can’t help but think to yourself, “there goes a good yegg.
hobo # 301: Captain Slicktalk
No one has seen Captain Slicktalk around lately… could it be that he finally sold the Golden Gate Bridge? More likely he borrowed a bottom dollar from the wrong bum and didn’t pay it back. The Captain will never learn.
hobo # 477: Unshakably Morose Flo
Unshakably Morose Flo rides the Greyhound endlessly, always choosing whatever destination is farthest away. She would spill her guts to you if she could, but she can no longer see anyone… she is not physically blind, only terminally stunned. It is no matter, for she has become virtually invisible to the world, although they can smell her long after she leaves a room. Furthermore, madness and mania sank in long ago, and her conversational abilities have atrophied, she speaks to no one but herself. She wears her tragedy like a noose and wonders why the breath has not yet been sucked from her lungs… what god could be so cruel to let her live through this?
hobo # 575: Ammonia Cocktail Jones
Ammonia Cocktail Jones is a poor drinking buddy. Infested backwash is the least of your worries, believe me, should you have the misfortune of sharing a drink with this man. Whether it is his bottle or yours is irrelevant… when he is around, dehydration is your friend.
—————————
Note that Ammonia Coctail Jones, along with another comic of mine, will be appearing in the newly published anthology about drinking from Spout Press, Lush: A Poetry Anthology and Cocktail Guide . You can order the book from Spout press directly here. Tonight there is a cocktail release party for the book in Minneapolis at the Nomad World Pub.
HOW TO GET YOUR COMICS ONLINE PART ONE: Advantages and Disadvantages of Putting Your Comics Online
A lot of cartoonists are really intimidated by the prospect of what it takes to get their comics online. I thought it would be worthwhile to write up some tutorials on the subject, in an attempt to show what an easy thing getting your work on the internet can be.
I’ve been putting my comics online since 2000, and, frankly, in a lot of ways I’m probably not a great example of how to do things… I’m not particularly successful or well-known, and most of my comics on my main site were put on here years ago, many of them poorly scanned (I’ll get around to fixing this eventually).
Nevertheless, I do have some knowledge about this stuff, and I thought I’d share it. My main comics website can be found at stwallskull.com, and I do a regularly updated webcomic (currently on hiatus as I work on a children’s book) at soapythechicken.com. Additionally, I’m the webmaster for The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, a cartooning group with cells all over North America (and soon… the world!) that includes both amateur and professional cartoonists, which all cartoonists are encouraged to join… more information on that can be found here. I actually make a living doing web development and flash animation, so I’m not totally unqualified to write this thing. And just because I may not take my own advice on this stuff doesn’t necessarily make it lousy advice.
There are advantages and disadvantages to putting your work online…
DISADVANTAGES OF PUTTING YOUR WORK ONLINE
1) People can access your work online for free.
2) At this time, it is very difficult to make money with online comics, although some people do.
3) Any image you put online can easily be used and altered by individuals without your consent. Depending on how they do this, and how you present it, this may or may not be legal… however, it is certainly easy enough for someone to do if they want to.
4) What works for comics on the printed page can be very different from what works for comics on the screen. You may not like some of these differences. You may want to take these differences into consideration when designing comics for online viewing. For example, horizontal comics pages will probably fit better on most screens than traditional vertical pages. Although you have an “infinite canvas,” as Scott McCloud has pointed out, many people will only have the patience for what they see immediately… the internet is the land of the short attention span… this is likely the reason that most webcomics are presented in the traditional strip to strip format.
ADVANTAGES OF PUTTING YOUR WORK ONLINE
1) People can access your work online for free.
2) By putting your work online you have increased your potential audience exponentially.
3) Putting your work online is free, if you want it to be. If you can afford to put some money into it, you have more options.
4) Your artistic options are not affected by printing cost limitations… your work can be full color, or even animated, if you’re inclined.
5) The desire to please an audience actively interested in your work can be a good motivator to produce more work on a regular schedule.
6) It is an inexpensive way to display your portfolio, which can save you a lot of money when trying to find cartooning, illustration or animation gigs.
7) There are a lot of opportunities for innovation of the comics form in online comics.
8) It is relatively easy to offer online RSS subscriptions which make it so people who subscribe will see whenever you post something new… unfortunately I don’t think a lot of the free comics services offer this, and this part is really key to building an audience.
Personally, I think the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. The internet gives you access to a potentially enormous audience for your work that you can not find anywhere else.
If you’re concerned about putting stuff online because you are giving it away for free, there are a number of things to consider.
First of all, you don’t have to put ALL of your work online. If you are working on a graphic novel, for example, it may be worth considering putting a “first chapter” online for free to generate interest in the larger work. Even a sketchbook could go a long way towards generating interest in the rest of your work… check out Sam Hiti’s great sketchblog for a good example of this.
Most webcomics don’t make any money. There are notable exceptions, like PVP and Penny Arcade. Of the comics that are making money, most are doing so through advertising and merchandising. There are people offering paid subscriptions and exclusive content of their work as well, with greatly varying degrees of success. I suspect that it is pretty hard to establish a large audience for your work using paid subscriptions unless you have a large following going into it. Once you have built a fan base, it may be something to consider, but I doubt it is a beneficial option for the majority of cartoonists.
The bottom line, though, is that there is no more effective way to generate interest in your work, build an audience, and inexpensively distribute your work than the internet.
Next: Publishing Options, and the Necessity of RSS Subscriptions
Collecting (or Just Admiring) Comic Art Online
I rarely have the money to collect comic art, unfortunately, but I often enjoy browsing artwork that is for sale online. Often you can find unpublished and obscure work by artists, and frequently you can see elements in the artwork that you don’t see in the final published versions. Here are some of the better places I’ve found online for viewing original comic art.
The Comic Art Collective (comicartcollective.com)
Fantagraphics Books site featuring art by cartoonists they publish, primarily… Jamie Hernandez (where’s Gilbert?), Peter Bagge, Tony Millionaire (who also has a ton of original art on his maakies site), Doug Allen, Colleen Coover, Dave Cooper and many more. Since they publish a good number of the world’s greatest cartoonists, this is well worth a look. Besides Gilbert Hernandez, also notably absent are Jim Woodring and Robert Crumb, who sell their stuff at the links on their names (Woodring can also be found here, and Crumb can also be found here). Also notably absent is Chris Ware, who has no regular place that he is selling work that I know of (although he has some work at the Adam Baumgold Gallery, below). The Comic Art Collective also has a recent additions page where you can see recent work added by all of the artists they represent in one place.
The Beguiling (beguiling.com)
An excellent comic shop from Toronto that sells work from a number of great cartoonists, including many of the artists published by wonderful publisher Drawn and Quarterly, and many Canadian cartoonists… great stuff by Paul Pope, Dave Cooper, Chester Brown, Kevin Huizenga (who also sells stuff here), Joe Matt, Seth, Julie Doucet, Dave Sim (who also sells and commissions work here) and many more. I’m still kicking myself for not scoring a Marc Bell orignal from them when I could have, alas… he’s no longer there. As with the Comic Art Collective, they keep everything they sold online for you to see as well (and cry about what you missed for sale, as a lot of the stuff is cheap!).
Denis Kitchen Art Agency (deniskitchenartagency.com)
Denis Kitchen, former Kitchen Sink Press publisher and underground cartoonist, represents some of the best cartoonists in comics history and their estates, including Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Eisner.
The Adam Baumgold Gallery (adambaumgoldgallery.com)
Has work by Chris Ware, Marc Bell, Julie Doucet, Jules Feiffer and some other cartoonists (as well as lots of “fine art,” if you like that sort of thing).
Albert Moy Comic Art (albertmoy.com)
A comic art dealer who has been around for a long time… I remember his Gahan Wilson illustrated ads from the Comic Book Price Guides in the 70’s. He has work from a ton of great cartoonists including Dan O’Neill, Bob Burden, Jack Kirby, Antonio Prohias, Jack Davis, and many, many more.
Heritage Online Auctions (comics.ha.com)
A big auction site that has some of the biggest, best scans of amazing original comics art you’re likely to find anywhere… they usually have a George Herriman original or two, among other beautiful things… they have a great selection of stuff by many long dead comics artists.
Best of all, they have a permanent auction archive, where you can view all kinds of glorious stuff… I think you need to be a member to access it.
A comic art site with a great site search. In addition to selling stuff, they provide access for people to post images of their collections for online display.
Comicartfans.com also highlights auctions on the inevitable…
Ebay (collectibles.ebay.com/Comics)
Obvious, I know, but for sheer volume of stuff, nothing else compares.
Besides all of that… did you know you can commission a David Boswell original for as little as $49? I gotta get around to doing that the next time I have the cash…
Lots of comics artists maintain their own artwork and sell their own work online… a google search for your favorite artist to find their personal website is always the best place to look for art by that artist… then the artist gets all the money you’re paying for it without a middleman getting a cut, which is a nice thing. If they aren’t offering artwork on the site, you can always consider emailing them directly about it, too, if they have contact info.
Know of more great places to browse comics art? Please let me hear about them in the comments.