I wrote this press release to the tune of the Terminator theme song.

The comic series, “Silly Daddy,” posts its 500th online cartoon November 9th, 2009. Started as a print comic book in 1991 with the birth of his first child, Chicago area cartoonist Joe Chiappetta has received much award recognition for the series, including Harvey and Ignatz nominations. When his story arc combined science fiction with real life family drama and humor, he won the Xeric Award.

Since 2004, Silly Daddy has also been a webcomic with an emphasis on one panel cartoons. Here are five reasons why you should take note of Silly Daddy’s 500 webcomics milestone:

1) Silly Daddy is one of the oldest autobiographical comics still releasing new material. It’s definitely the longest running autobiographical comic about family by a father.

2) While the all-ages webcomics are drawn on a variety of media, Chiappetta is one of the only cartoonists to regularly complete comics on a Pocket PC (handheld mobile computing devices with 4″ diagonal screen or less, running Windows Mobile operating system).

3) Many of theses webcomics (74) were created entirely on a mobile phone. Chiappetta is the first cartoonist to pioneer in this field of phone-made webcomics, calling it “telephomics.”

4) The Silly Daddy website is one of the few cartoonist sites wherein all the comics are fully accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Every webcomic posted has a described narrative that assistive technology software (such as JAWS or ZoomText) can read to the viewer.

5) Roughly half of the 500 comics are works on paper and the other half were drawn entirely on some type of computer device. It took 5 years to make these webcomics and cost $2000 in materials to produce.

About: Silly Daddy, the all-ages family webcomic by cartoonist Joe Chiappetta, updates at least once a week and can be read online and also on the Internets at www.sillydaddy.net.

All this week, Graphic Novel Review’s Derik A. Badman will be cooking food from the culinary manga series Oishinbo, as a sort of alternate means of reviewing the book. Today: an overview of the entire meal. Tomorrow: Miso soup!

There’s a job opening at E-Line, the parent company of ComicSpace. You have to live in the New York City area, even though it’s a part-time, telecommuting gig. Here’s the info:

E-Line is a publisher of digital entertainment that engages and empowers. We are in development on a slate of original games and comics that are fun, relevant and genuinely impactful in the areas of learning, health and youth empowerment. The E-Line team features seasoned executives who’ve helped build some of the world’s leading game and digital comic franchises as well as social entrepreneurs who are committed to harnessing popular media for impact.

http://www.elinemedia.com/

We are seeking an experienced online advertising sales contractor to sell banner ads and other types of online media across our network of websites, currently serving 50 million pageviews to 1.2 million unique users per month. Knowledge of comics, videogames, and social networking trends is desirable but not required.

Very generous commission.

Please send cover letter and resume to: jobs01@elinemedia.com

There’s this quote that floats around about “breaking in” to the corporate comics industry. “The comics industry is like a high-security government installation. Nobody gets in the same way twice, because after they find out you got in, they seal up that entrance.” Or something like that. I wish I could remember who it is attributed to. Gail Simone, maybe?

There’s another answer. The only infinitely-replicable way to “break into” the comics industry.

Make great comics. Publish them (online, in minicomic form, whatever). Make them popular.

People want the corporate comics industry to lift them up, to take them from where they are to where they want to be. Unfortunately, the industry wants creators who are already, you know, there. The corporate comics industry doesn’t exist to fulfill the dreams of its freelancers, or even of its readers. It exists to risk money in order to make more money. Just like any business. If you approach these people from a position of strength — established readers, a brand name, a strong aesthetic and personal style — if, in other words, you don’t need them, then, yeah, you’ll get anything and everything you want from them.

This is good news. Because thanks to the web, and to the comics community’s long tradition of print self-publishing (comics is one of the few forms of media where self-publishing isn’t considered a nasty sadness), you have the power within yourself to make all of this stuff happen for you. That’s the most powerful position you will find, as a newcomer, in any creative field.

Which isn’t to say that working in corporate comics is a bad thing. It’s just that they don’t want you until you don’t need them. And, again, that, too, is a very powerful position for you to be in. I want to make sure that this doesn’t come across as negative. I want you to understand that everything is up to you.

Graveyard Greg is looking to revive THE GUARDIANS on Graphic Smash.

You might be the one who can help him!

Send samples of your best work to Graveyard Greg, and if chosen, you will be the next penciller for one of the highest ranked comics on Graphic Smash!

Glorious Bounty recounts the non-adventures of four pathetic, third-rate bounty hunters who travel deep space with no moral compass. Each full-length storyline focuses on what goes down after the hit. Where do they go? What do they talk about? Why do they want to hurt each other? Hey, why is that robot spraying acid everywhere? Oh god, sweet Jesus, it burns! Get it off me!

Meet manic-depressive Furious Bruce, with his mysterious past, borrowed face and nunchuks that shoot lasers. The reprehensible squid-like Deevis, professional conman, liar and smuggler of dead prostitutes. Funf the gigantic, raging, idiot, lizard. And PK, the robot that has been programmed to hate everything.

Written/coloured by fringe-dwelling Perth playwright Luke Milton and lovingly illustrated by Australian comics aficionado Edward J. Grug III. The story continues every Tuesday and Thursday.

gloriousbounty.com

Brigid Alverson over at ComicBookResources.com has a great interview with our own D.C. McQueen about the pending re-launch of Girlamatic! Here’s one of my favorite tidbits:

Girlamatic is not a hosting site, it is not an artists’ community, it is a magazine,” says McQueen, who is the creator of the webcomic Spades as well as the editor-in-chief. “We are professional artists. The artists are hand picked and produce content on a regular schedule and they get paid for it.” In the past, she said, artists were paid a share of subscription fees; now they will get part of the ad revenues. Contracts are still being negotiated, she added.

I’m working on those contracts right now! Ha! Meanwhile, since you’re not, you’re free to go check out the rest of the interview.

Maybe it’s because I was flying from New York rather than Louisville this year, or maybe Comic-Con really is a much bigger deal this year than in the past, but almost everybody in the boarding area — and in the boarding area across from us, and the one beside us — seemed to be heading to Comic-Con. It felt like the Con started early for me. I ran into Jeff Newelt, who invited me to a party Saturday night (I think?) where Paul Pope will make his debut as a DJ or something. Also: Jerry Robinson, Golden Age Batman artist and creator of The Joker and Robin (though Bob Kane disputed his claim), waited just across the aisle from us, and flew two seats up. The man is 87 years old, and he’s flying across the country, with his wife, to go to Comic-Con! That’s something.

We just settled into our hotel room. I’m seeing lots of Tweets about pro registration being a madhouse today. I figure it’ll be a madhouse tomorrow, too, but at least I’ll have slept a full night’s sleep — so I’m waiting until tomorrow to get registered. I may regret this.

ComicSpace isn’t exhibiting at this show. I’m mostly here to make connections, strengthen old ones, and learn stuff. Our first big show with a booth will be next year’s New York Comic-Con. I’m not 100% happy with the way our presence at MoCCA turned out (our very first time exhibiting as a company) — we looked more penny-ante than we should have. And that was MoCCA, where penny-ante is charming. Wouldn’t fly here at all. Besides, Josh and I aren’t used to having a budget to play with. We’re used to being scrappy sole proprietors flying by the seat of our pants. Having actual money — and actual investors attached to that money — can make you a little, well, I don’t know, more careful. Maybe that’s good; maybe that’s bad. Either way, we’re still trying to figure out this marketing/promotions stuff (see my previous three booths), and I’m pretty sure we need to learn to walk before we can run. Also: four year waiting list! Crazy! I guess if I’d kept buying Modern Tales tables year after year, from back in the day, I would be able to just step right into a booth. But I didn’t, and I can’t. And, like I said, that’s probably a good thing anyway. The Modern Tales table was a disaster! Don’t ask! Ha!

My plan this year is to attend a lot of panel sessions, and spend less time walking the con floor. I’ve got the iPhone app downloaded and installed (it pretty much contains the program for the show — a map of the floor, the panel schedule, etc) and am about to go outside, find a place where I can sit and smoke my pipe, and plan out my panel-viewing day tomorrow.

So yeah, the title of this post is a mouthful (or an eyeful, assuming you’re not moving your lips as you read this). I’ll start with the title, then. Taking it piece by piece, buzzword by buzzword:

ROI means “Return on Investment.” It’s one of those concepts that is fairly simple on its face, but can sometimes dissolve into blurry meaninglessness the harder you stare at it. As it relates to advertising, ROI means: how much money did you get back in the form of sales, versus the amount you spent promoting the product? Like I said, it seems simple. In a direct sales mindset, it is simple. If your product nets you $1 in profit, and you spent $1000 on an ad, and sold 2000 products as a direct result of the ad, then you had a 2x ROI. But it’s only in the world of direct sales advertising that ROI is simple. Most advertising on television, for example, or in magazines and newspapers, is not measurable by direct sales. You can’t click a Wii commercial to buy one. Those kinds of ads are called “branding” campaigns, and they have very different goals. The idea isn’t that you’ll buy a product as a specific result of viewing a specific ad, but that over time you’ll grow more and more familiar with the product, and be more likely to buy it, versus its competitors, thanks to the warm fuzzy branding messages you’ve received. Large advertising agencies spend millions of dollars “proving” ROI for branding campaigns — using focus groups, decades-long sales trends, demographic data, polls, etc. We won’t be doing that kind of analysis here, in part because I’m not qualified to do it, in part because we don’t have that kind of budget, and in part because ROI for a branding campaign is only measurable at the highest levels of saturation (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, etc), and a product designed to appeal to hundreds of people, like, say, a t-shirt by a webcomic creator, is just too small to make any kind of noticeable branding impact in a poll or a focus group. Our experiment is strictly being conducted to determine a direct sales ROI: how much did we spend, how much did we make, and how do those two compare to one another.

Oh, did I mention this is about t-shirts? This is about t-shirts. Specifically, it’s about one particular t-shirt, the God Is Cute t-shirt by James Kochalka. I have chosen that shirt for this experiment because a). it hasn’t sold as well as James’ other shirts in the ComicSpace store, but b). it outsold all of our shirts when we exhibited at MoCCA, and c). it has a potential audience that exists outside of the standard “James Kochalka fan” audience — specifically, people who believe in God, and think He’s, you know, cute. As opposed to the people who think he’s all about fire and brimstone or whatever. Reaching out to this audience is key to ComicSpace’s online sales strategy, because, let’s face it, anybody can sell a t-shirt to the fans of the webcomic it came from. You, yourself, as a comics creator, can sell stuff to your own fans, all by yourself. You don’t need help. Unlike some of the other online stores that serve the webcomics space, ComicSpace is committed to finding audiences outside the already-existing fan audience for any individual creator’s merchandise. Part of that is identifying designs and concepts that might be able to “hook” other audiences, and then reaching out to them.

Here is the experiment: I have taken out ads for this shirt on three popular advertising platforms: Project Wonderful, Facebook, and Google AdSense. These ads will stay up for one month (through July 22, since I launched the campaigns yesterday). Every day between now and then, I’ll let you know how each ad platform is doing, in terms of generating clicks, and (more importantly) in terms of generating sales. If any. That’s the “liveblogging” part of this, the constant updates, for those who might be interested. If I tweak a campaign, change keywords, or target it to different websites, I’ll mention that, too, and share the results. I’ll also let you know how much we’ve spent, so far, on each platform. At the end of the month, I’ll wrap this all up with my conclusions. If any.

So, to get started, here are the parameters as the exist today:

Google AdSense

I set a budget of $10/day, bidding on the keywords “webcomic,” “comic” “kochalka” and the keyphrase “God is”.

So far, there have been no clicks (no impressions, either, which is weird — maybe I’ve done something wrong here) and the cost is zero. ROI is neutral.

Project Wonderful

I set this up to run across the entire PW network, with conservative bidding strategy and a cap of $500/month.

So far, there have been a few clicks. PW itself tracks 72 clicks. Our internal stats track 91. We have spent $19.46. There have been no sales. ROI is currently negative to infinity (because you can’t divide by zero).

FaceBook

I set this up to display only when the Facebook member has specified an interest in “comics,” “webcomics” or the phrase “God is Love”. According to Facebook, that’s 145,000 people.

So far, there have been a few clicks. Facebook itself tracks 25 clicks, while our internal stats track 31. We have spent $13.95. There have been no sales. ROI is currently negative to infinity (see above).

It’s likely that the difference between our tracking and PW’s and Facebook’s relates to their attempts to cancel out “click fraud.” We don’t have any such filters on our own click-tracking. Since I can’t imagine that anybody has any reason to commit click fraud, I actually trust our numbers more than theirs at the moment. I’ll keep watching this and see how it plays out, though.

Note from Joey: Some of you may not know this, but E-Line Ventures is the parent company of ComicSpace. I moved here to NYC specifically to work more closely with these guys on stuff like what you’ll read about below. Not that I can take any credit for this particular thing. I’m just a supportive team-mate. But yeah. Here’s our first big announcement. I’ve got a lot to say about this — and about some comic-ky things that will be spinning out of this — but for now I’ll let the press release speak for itself, and follow up with another post, perhaps tomorrow, about E-Line Venture’s new initiatives, and how they affect ComicSpace (and me, and maybe you).

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Following a global competition funded by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, E-Line Ventures was awarded a $166,000 Innovation in Participatory Learning Grant to develop Talkers and Doers, a new computer game franchise about entrepreneurship for at-risk teens and young adults that will feature fun and relevant gameplay and integrate real-world mentors, opportunities and resources.

“Every 26 seconds, an American high school student drops out of school,” said Alan Gershenfeld, Co-Founder and President of E-Line Ventures, “It is extremely difficult for these kids to find meaningful employment. Many become disenfranchised and disengaged. As a result, many young people talk about launching a business, but very few actually do. Talkers and Doers seeks to help close the gap between the desire to launch a business and the ability to do so. We want to convert talkers to doers.”

The franchise will feature a series of social networking games where players overcome the common challenges of becoming an entrepreneur with help from their friends. Each game will unlock tools and missions where players can make real money and connect with real-world mentors and community-based resources.

Talkers and Doers was selected as one of 19 winners in the 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition, which is funded by a MacArthur grant to the University of California, Irvine, and to Duke University and is administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), a virtual network of learning institutions. The Competition is part of MacArthur’s $50 million digital media and learning initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.

“This open competition makes an important contribution to the emerging field of digital media and learning by seeking out and embracing the freshest of ideas and the most innovative thinking,” said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton, addressing Competition winners at an event showcasing projects produced through last year’s competition. “The Competition demonstrates that pioneering work often takes place at the edges and sometimes between the most unlikely of collaborators. These projects are true exemplars of how digital media are transforming the way we think and learn, and perhaps even how we participate in our democracy.”

The team behind Talkers and Doers includes a unique group of successful social entrepreneurs who have engaged and empowered millions of kids. Key team members include Alan Gershenfeld, former Senior Vice President of Activision Studios and current Chairman of Games For Change; media industry veteran Bill Stephney, who has run the music firms Def Jam Recordings and Stepsun Music and has also served on the boards of the National Urban League and the Apollo Theater Foundation; David Lowenstein, formerly Managing Director of the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council and Manager of the National Urban League’s Technology Programs and Policy Department and currently a fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop; as well as leading music, game and technology executives.

About the MacArthur Foundation

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. More information is available at www.macfound.org.

About HASTAC

A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers from universities and other civic institutions across the U.S. and internationally, the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) is committed to new forms of collaboration for thinking, teaching, and research across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology. The infrastructure for HASTAC has been largely provided by the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. More information is at www.hastac.org.

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About E-Line Ventures

Based in New York City, E-Line Ventures develops and publishes digital entertainment that engages and empowers with a focus on computer/video games and webcomics/graphic novels. The management team features a unique combination of senior game, media and technology executives, as well as social entrepreneurs. E-Line is deeply committed to expanding the sector of computer and video games that make real-world impact. More information is at http://www.elineventures.com.