Author and Thinker
The post I was going to do “today”? Now coming Monday. The post I was going to do Monday? Now coming Tuesday.
“Yesterday’s” distractions ultimately kept me up late past the time it was sane, so I had to make that time up “today”. That, plus catching up on certain other things I’d fallen behind on, took up almost all of the time I’d reserved for working on the post.
A post Friday.
A post Monday.
Random Internet Discovery Wednesday.
Time-filling posts Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Next week, I’ll barely be posting about anything at all. A post that shouldn’t have taken me very long is taking rather long indeed. I think I can finish it tonight, and the next post is even shorter, but considering the post I’m working on now I originally planned to put up Monday…
(To be fair, I started working on it today, and the main reason it’s taking so long is that I was distracted by OOTS for most of the day, but still. A backlog is developing in my RSS feeds.)
Give yourself a crash course in massage, New Age-style!
I may just go to biweekly webcomic posts for the near future, rather than just skipping one week.
(From The Wotch. Click for full-sized cash-in.)
First, for the thumbnail I’m following what I call the Dresden Codak rule. When I reviewed DC the front-page image was a notification that the strip was on hiatus. This strip’s similar hiatus notification has a stronger case to be made the thumbnail, in that it will probably remain in the same spot in the archives rather than a netherregion.
Second, I hate to say this after a month without reviews (only “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” and the state-of posts), but I’m not doing a webcomic review this week. Or next. When next a webcomic review appears – I don’t normally announce my webcomic reviews in advance, but – it will be on Sluggy Freelance, since I have plenty to say about Sluggy the site and Sluggy the comic and it should just flow onto the page (to the extent I may do it next week and leave the week after that empty). After that I’ll do the March OOTS post. (No, yesterday’s post doesn’t count.) I’m skipping next week because I have a paper I need to get cracking on for a class and working on Da Blog has really cut down on my time (and as I’ve said, I’m finding myself with less time than you’d think). I still have more posts I’d like to get through the pike than I really know what to do with.
The reason I’m skipping this week is a bit more interesting.
I never really wanted to review The Wotch – it’s no Penny Arcade in terms of popularity, and the stereotype is that strips where people flip genders a lot appeal mostly to people with a fetish for that sort of thing – but I felt that, since I used it as a thumbnail for a non-specific webcomic post, it was too much of a bait-and-switch that it wasn’t an actual review, and so I owed it to The Wotch to do an actual review some day. But even at the time, I said that “I might decide to write that review at some later date” (emphasis added).
As it turned out, the strip I used for that thumbnail was part of the denouement of that particular chapter. So as I followed along with the strip in preparation for reviewing it, I sat through maybe two strips of actual plot (bracketing fillers), several state-of strips, and a quick, three-page, probably-unrepresentative gag before the strip went on hiatus. Which, incidentially, was in late February. Which left me somewhat surprised the strip has been able to bang out three chapters a year at a once-a-week pace, considering I was around for what should have been half a chapter.
So I don’t have nearly enough information to write an informed review, and I don’t feel strongly enough about it to go trawling into the archive as a stopgap. I’m not going to wait around for several months more following a comic I wasn’t particularly interested in reviewing in the first place, so I’m cutting my losses and removing The Wotch from the “tryout space” of my RSS reader. So this week, when I had been planning on maybe reviewing The Wotch, since I didn’t feel I was quite ready to review either of the other two comics in the tryout space, I’m just leaving blank instead. (I don’t feel I have quite enough material to write a review of Sluggy right now; as soon as next week I think I would. Which sounds ridiculous now, considering I arguably had less material to work with from The Wotch.)
David Morgan-Mar wrote a reply to my recent Darths and Droids post, as I’m sure you figured would happen. It’s actually rather illuminating, so if you haven’t already, check out the comments to the original post.
Yes, I’ve read today’s Order of the Stick. Post coming, probably early in the morning. Like Vaarsuvius, I’m tormented by distractions everywhere.
I was planning on doing several state-ofs on webcomics I’m reading today. You can blame my inability to find anyplace quiet enough on campus for me, perhaps partially attributable to my growing inability to handle any disturbance to the quiet – or noise, as the case may be – for the fact that I mostly goofed off today instead. (It doesn’t help that it seems most people seem to have forgotten what used to be inextricably linked to libraries – a “quiet” rule – even at the school library where it used to hold relatively well; less than a year ago I was called out for breaking it.) I’m keenly aware of the risk of it happening again though, so I’m going to try to at least get a start on one tonight, so I have a reason to already be in the mood tomorrow.
Because I don’t want that to be my only reason to post today, two graphics packages I want to look at now. I don’t know what it is with the holder of the NFL primetime package and the need to change up the graphics for the Super Bowl. CBS didn’t make a single change to its package for Super Bowl XLI, and the closest thing to a change Fox made compared to the playoffs was to swap out the “NFL on FOX” logo for an “XLII FOX” logo whenever the banner didn’t show. I could understand it for ABC at Super Bowl XL (even they didn’t used to do this) because they were rolling out their new adaptation of the banner for all sports. (It was the only time they could do so for the NFL, and in less than a year it was made obsolete when ABC Sports was folded into the ESPN brand, but whatever.) NBC… what is the point of spiffying up your graphics?
It’s definitely not a long-term change, because it was back to normal at the Pro Bowl. I’m not necessarily criticizing the banner itself, because it’s basically the old one with slicker graphics and animations, but it’s kind of pointless.
ESPN, meanwhile, rolled out a new banner for its tennis broadcasts. You may recall that ESPN’s first attempt at adapting the banner for tennis, back at Wimbledon, didn’t go well. I suggested that ESPN take a cue from the presentation of tennis scores in other countries and simply list the number of sets won and the number of games won in the current set, rather than the awkward-looking take they went with. ESPN didn’t do that, but there’s little to complain about in the new strip. The score of the current game takes up the bulk of the strip, with the set-by-set score relegated to a side space. It’s almost the reverse of what most tennis boxes have looked like in this country, where the game score has been subordinated to the match score. In fact, the match score gives way to present updates of games on other courts, as well as break, set, and match points, deuce numbers, and for the duration of any tiebreak. Stats are presented by causing the game score to give way to the stat numbers, and the match score to give way to an indication of the stat displayed, but when indications like upcoming schedules and the time in both Melbourne and someplace in the States appear above the banner, I wonder why the same couldn’t be done for stats.
However, I have a couple of quibbles. First, the order of the players for display of the game score switches places for each game, depending on who’s serving, in order to maintain the “Server-Returner” order (a knock on the Wimbledon strip). This might be useful to differentiate each game as a separate game, but that might be kinda pointless. But more to the point, it doesn’t look much like any other strip ESPN has. In a sense, it evokes the new Monday Night Football banner, which also has more of an emphasis on squareness than ESPN’s other, parallelogram-based strips, but it doesn’t look a heck of a lot like that either, and it doesn’t have the MNF banner’s distinctive feature of containing all extraneous graphics within itself. It’s about as good as ESPN could have hoped for, though there’s still room for improvement, and certainly an improvement over the Wimbledon banner that was so awful I can’t really find a video of it anywhere.
I was going to comment on one other (national) strip at one point, but damned if I can remember what it was now. Instead, please enjoy how not to design a score graphic, from the Portland Trail Blazers.
I personally think the centralized approach, which ESPN tried for MNF the first two years, has potential, but this isn’t it. The main sin is this: each team’s score naturally invites comparison to the other team’s score. The easier you make it to tell which team has the lead, the better. That’s the thinking behind the weird “bar” TNT has introduced on its new NBA box. You do not put each team’s score on opposite ends of your box or strip!!! Especially when they are separated from the time by the team logos, which makes them look lonely as the only changing element compared with its immediate neighbors. (And it only gets worse when individual stats are displayed.) I know what the Blazers were going for – emphasizing the “opposition” – but something compact like ESPN’s “orb” would have worked for that purpose just as well. Or Versus’ graphics. Or The Score’s efforts. This strip would be greatly improved just by switching the place of the score and team abbreviation with that of the logo, but the time and especially the shot clock still take up way more space than they need. I’m not a fan of spelling out “QUARTER” either. The Blazers should have just let the professionals at Comcast SportsNet design their graphics.
(In general, when teams have their graphics designed by people not good enough to get jobs working for national outfits or nationwide regional sports networks, they tend to get painfully experimental, when they don’t blatantly and clumsily rip off other networks’ graphics as is the norm in the NFL preseason. The Yankees’ YES Network has one of the better team-designed graphics, and it’s very conventional – and the Yankees and YES are big enough to afford national-quality designers. (Also worthy of praise: the Orioles and Nationals’ network, MASN; the Red Sox and Bruins on NESN; and if the Padres designed Channel 4’s graphics they did a good job, but still couldn’t help but experiment a little.) When the Cleveland Indians got their own network in SportsTime Ohio, their first season was spent with a fairly conventional strip – then they decided to get experimental, and stuck a box in the lower-right that disappeared when the ball was in play (setting baseball graphics back to 1995) and displayed the logo of the team at bat when no one was on base.)
My eye is pretty much back to normal. Sometimes I think about stopping or restricting the RID because what comes up rarely interests me, and then come days I’m thankful it’s one fewer day of posting I need to worry about.
I don’t know what to make of this. You may notice I say that a lot about the RID…
So I think I accidentially poked myself in the eye last night and it’s still red and sore and anything I had planned for today may have to wait for tomorrow. Which includes some important things…
(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized abrasion of large hadrons.)It’s become apparent that my “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series is very much a representation of a moment in time, of the state of webcomics in February 2009. (Really January, considering the impeti for me to write it.) So here, I hope to keep a record of the more interesting thoughts on the matter floating on the Internet. There are plenty of other places to get a comprehensive record; this is a log of my ongoing thoughts as I hope to write a book on the changing face of the Internet in general. (It’s not getting its own label for the time being though, and I still have a full-fledged “State of IWC” post coming.)
Hey, David Morgan-Mar linked to me off his LiveJournal again! DMM is responsible for what has been one of only one or two major traffic bumps in Da Blog’s history when he linked to my full-fledged review of Darths and Droids. For someone who launched into webcomics in 2002, rather late compared to some of the giants of the field, he has always been something of an outsider (his first strip is basically him discovering the idea of webcomics) who’s been overwhelmed by the support he’s received from the webcomics community. As he stipulates in his post, he’s actually been surprised, almost oblivious, to Irregular Webcomic!‘s notoriety in the webcomic community.
This part gets to the heart of the post and is worth quoting in full:
And then I find myself thinking: Hang on. If there are a few dozen webcomic authors making enough money to live on, and I’m pushing for a spot in the top 50, why am I making no money whatsoever out of my comics? (In fact, why do I pay a webhost $40 a month for the privilege of putting my comics on the Net?)
To avoid any suspense, the simple answer is that I have never treated webcomics as a way of making money. I’ve never had any expectation that maybe one day I’ll be able to run ads and sell merchandise and make some money. That “business model” has never been something I’m aiming towards.
All I’ve ever wanted out of webcomics is to do something creative, share it with people, hopefully entertain a few people, and have it as a fun hobby. Over time I’ve added a couple of other desires: To educate people with the annotations I occasionally write to accompany comics, and to raise some money for charity.
But there’s this whole community of people out there, webcomic authors, critics, bloggers, and so on, who seem obsessed with the idea that webcomics can be (or already are) a way to make a living, and lamenting the difficulty of breaking into the field and building up the recognition to that magical point where you can quit your day job and live off merchandising. They analyse the developments in webcomics, pore over statistics, speculate about the future of the “industry” and what webcomics will be like in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, and wonder how many people will be making a living off them and how easy/hard it will be for new talent to get recognised.
Well… sometimes it just bemuses me. I sort of know this community is out there all the time, but I don’t dwell on it, and I don’t really participate much in it. I just make my comics and put them on the net, and hope someone has a nice word to say about them. Sure, it would be really nice if someone offered me a full-time salary to quit my job and make webcomics, and I’d probably think seriously about doing so. But it’s not an end I’m seeking. I’m not taking the steps to try to get there.
So although apparently I’m part of the webcomics scene, I still feel like the meek outsider who doesn’t belong. I don’t seem to share the same aspirations as many of the vocal webcomics personalities. And I have to say that for the most part, I’m glad I don’t. I don’t want to obsess over the “state of webcomics” or whether webcomics are considered an artform or not, or whether webcomic authors can make money or not. I just want to spend a few hours a week enjoying my hobby.
Fleen also links to Morgan-Mar’s post (so I may be getting another, bigger bump) and I’m mostly going to cover the same ground as Gary Tyrell, but I also have a far more profound thing to say about Morgan-Mar’s topic:
David? A lot of the people in this community would really love to know your secret. (Also, don’t get too excited about being #55 in Comixtalk’s comedy list. First of all, I still hope that list isn’t ordered; second of all, if it is the only reason you’re likely to make the final list, let alone anywhere near that high, is the paucity of drama nominees.)
Irregular Webcomic! is nowhere near as easy to create as Sandsday. It’s not as simple as taking a bunch of random circles and squares and copying-and-pasting them onto panel after panel, and making funny jokes using them. You have to have the impressive LEGO collection, you have to set them up in the way you want to, you have to have the mad Photoshop skillz… Eric Burns(-White) goes into more detail just how much effort must go into each IWC here. And that’s just IWC; Morgan-Mar may get help on the other projects, but between all the plot points that need to be shaken out on Darths and Droids and organizing all the screen caps, and all the coding work that’s gone into IWC and mezzacotta, and basically everything David Morgan-Mar has his hands in the cookie jar of, and he notes in his post that he’s paying $40 on hosting costs alone…
If David Morgan-Mar wanted to open up even one revenue stream – a single Project Wonderful or even Google ad, selling just one or two tchotchkes, even allowing donations to himself rather than directing them all to the Jane Goodall Institute – he could probably make more money than most webcomic artists could ever dream of. But Morgan-Mar doesn’t make a single penny off his comics. (Okay, so there’s a tiny little ad at the top of mezzacotta, but still.)
It’d be nice if every webcomicker could simply make comics as a hobby effort and not only not worry about making any money, but consciously avoid even rather simple steps they could take to make money. (I don’t understand why people like Morgan-Mar and Rich Burlew are so insistent about not putting up ads; there are plenty of ways to make them non-intrusive, guys!) But webcomics (and blogs) take time to make, and they don’t pay the bills. You still have to go to a job, and that means time taken out of your schedule to make comics – and do other things. And Irregular Webcomic! isn’t done cheap.
So how is it that David Morgan-Mar can put together one comic by his lonesome, and contribute to several others, and pay for the hosting of all of them? And keep track of e-mails, forum posts, etc.? And not make a single dime off any of it, which means he’s doing it all while maintaining a day job?
Whatever it is, hats off to David Morgan-Mar: a webcomics success story in his very lack of success.
I have four posts I want to get to over the course of the next week: the state of Ctrl+Alt+Del and Darths and Droids, and two sports-related posts. All but one requires me to be connected to the Internet to do most of the work. But those and the RID are all you’re getting over the next week and I may backslide on one or two of those.
After that, I’m going to try and refocus on webcomics reviews as my main focus of posting, in order to get work done on other things. I have a paper to do for a class I’ve been falling behind on the reading in, I have to try and find a real job, I have to work on a lengthy series for Sandsday, I have to work on a series of posts I have planned for the summer. I have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.
I put too much stuff on my plate this quarter; my schedule is only supposed to be this full in the fall when I’m doing football-related stuff. I need to get back to basics in a sense. But between my RSS feeds, the above projects, my webcomic reviews, and another fairly major project that will partly spin out of the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series… is anything really changing? Am I really reducing my workload?