Tracking the Trackbacks: Tocci and Quigley
by Joey Manley
Last week I linked to Jason Wray’s essay on “Why Webcomics Are Destined to Stay Where They Are” as an example of a useful splash of cold water on my business plan thinking. Today, Jason Tocci responds to one of Wray’s central premises — that webcomics are, and always will be, a geek-driven phenomenon — by pointing out that that’s only true if you limit your definition of “webcomics” to a very small number of strips that everybody seems to talk about all the time. Tocci’s sole counter-example is Buttercup Festival, an excellent, but long fallow, series — which weakens his post a little. It strikes me that there are plenty of more prominent examples that could have bolstered his point more firmly — like, say The Widow Reminisces over a Plate of Vegetables, our own Eric Millikin’s Fetus-X, or maybe Teaching Baby Paranoia. Those are just three off the top of my head. Content-wise the webcomics field is far more variegated than a look at the top five or six strips everybody talks about all the time would lead you to believe. Even in terms of popularity, there are a few wildly successful strips, like, say, Achewood, Stuff Sucks, or Questionable Content, that seem, to me at least, to be less aimed at the geeks, more aimed at the average cool-kat college kid. I’d put Diesel Sweeties in that category, too, come to think of it. Especially now that it’s in the papers. Maybe I’m wrong.
Here’s the full post. (Link via Journalista!)
Over at his ToonBrew blog, Neal Quigley posts a long commentary on my “Why Some Things Are Hits …” post from a few days back. His unequivocal premise: “Webcomic Popularity is Not a Matter of Chance” Unlike Neal, I still believe that the popularity of individual webcomics has a large random element to it (call it “luck”). Despite my general disagreement with his premise, though, I found a lot of room to agree with Quigley on the particulars — he makes some interesting and truthful points along the way.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
I hate to throw water, especially on strips I like, but calling Fetus-X or Teaching Baby Paranoia examples on not niche strips is a pretty tough sell to me. Fetus-X fits nicely withi alt. press political cartoons, a niche, and Teaching Baby Paranoia is, at its heart, a comix, another niche. Webcomics, heck most webspecific content, is niche driven. There are professional webcartoonist no one (no one who hangs out at forums like this anyway) talks about, but they serve lawyers, Red Sox fans, airline pilots, and librarians. The counter arguement to Wray is that there are so many webcomics serving so many different niches. The likes services that help people create content and content that narrowly targets its audience. Webcomics are comics, but they are also web content and will have some qualities of that. And yes, I realize I am partially contridicting my post on “Why webcomics are destined to stay where they are, but hey, I’m waffly.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
I didn’t say “not niche,” I said, “not geek niche.” “Not niche” is a whole nother conversation. The variegation I described in my post above is a result of thousands of niches being cultivated independently — not a result of mainstreaming. Ugh. Mainstreaming. Who wants that? (grin).
April 20th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Then we agree. Comics, at least strips, do have somewhere to go because there are so many different niches out there. Long form comics are a tougher sell on the web I think because they are really an entirely different animal. Alot of their success depends on the success of that medium in general, web or not.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
In terms of longform, I’d hope that most creators interested in that way of telling stories are hitching their wagons to the success of Graphic Novels in mainstream culture, rather than the Periodical Comic Book. Time Magazine naming Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical memoir “Fun Home” its “Book of the Year” (not comic of the year, not graphic novel of the year — book of the year) is a sign of that mainstreaming trend. And also a sign that something we’d normally think of as “niche” (a lesbian coming-out story) can step outside any boundary, if it’s good enough.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
“Fetus-X fits nicely withi alt. press political cartoons”
I think I appreciate the sentiment behind this (I’d appreciate it even more if you passed it on regularly to your local alternaweekly’s editors!) but frankly I think that’s a bit off.
While all of these are totally awesome, one of these things is not like the others! See if you can count the ways!
The day Fetus-X fits in nicely with anything is the day I retire!
April 21st, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Good point about moving into other niches, even if some of those niches have a degree of geekery of their own (such as librarians and graduate students).
Also, thanks for suggesting other examples, Joey. I have to admit that I used Buttercup Festival because I stopped reading most comics online shortly after its demise, so I don’t know current ones worth noting. Also, I thought it was a better example of what I’m talking about than Diesel Sweeties, which does have mainstream appeal but also very much plays to the geek crowd with pixelated graphics, borrowing a character from another online comic, semi-obscure internet references, and decidedly geeky music references. Then again, there’s something notable about the fact that even a “geeky” strip can get syndicated; the geekiness of existing webcomics may not hold them back if they can be adapted for broader audiences.
And as for long-form comics, while I personally only buy comics in paperback/hardcover format, I don’t really make a distinction between collections, original graphic novels, and stories published online a page or a strip at a time. I think it’s important to have multiple viable business models available to creators.
April 21st, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Fetus-X reads well with the others, even if it looks nothing like them and has a much broader subject focus. So I stand by my claim thank you. I will write to Citybeat http://www.citybeat.com/ about carrying Fetus-X though. They owe me after they got rid of Savage Love (yeah its a column not a comic but it is very funny.)