^ May take a little work to get their crawler to track your comic, especially if your current code doesn’t support–oh heck they’ve stopped tracking mine, now I gotta figure this out.
^ Takes a little work but you can just make your own page for your comic.
http://topwebcomics.com/
^ Has kind of been taken over by a gang of authors all voting for each others’ comics that they don’t actually read but oh well what are ya gonna do
Not sure how useful these last two are but still you can list your comic on them so hey
YEah I dunno, those sponsored artists are the way less than 1% that are actually making some measurable money from it; they’re the successful ones, by that rather crucial metric. They wouldn’t be making that money if it wasn’t for the site publishers. Whether or not the terms are actually “fair,” I dunno.
Young workers are always going to be exploited.
Unless you’re working entirely for yourself, which is tough. (In that case you just exploit yourself.)
We’re talking about this without actual terms. If they’re really bad on specific sites then yeah people should protest and get them changed. Or just quit.
Come to think of it, I think one of those webtoons-style sites–must have been a newish and rather desperate one, don’t remember who though–did offer me actual terms once, and what I vaguely remember is that I’d have needed thousands and thousands of page views for it to even start to matter in terms of $, and that if I could actually generate that many readers then I’d probably be able to make way more money if I was on my own and had complete freedom over what I was doing. Basically they didn’t know what they were doing because they should have been able to tell that my work wasn’t going to get them that kind of readership, heck my format wasn’t even any kind of fit for their site; I think they had just included me in a sort of mass mail out to authors they found on other sites; they had pretty clearly not bothered to look at my comic, even after I’d exchanged a few emails with them in which I asked for more information.
Fortunately nobody had a gun to my head so I just said thanks but I’m not interested.
PEOW Studios is closing, too much effort to publish a handful of titles without making enough money to do it full-time. the last title is Linnea Sterte’s A Frog in the Fall
packaged in a slip case as a book block, landscape. the art is monochrome ink linework + screentones.
I got a copy, I liked it. I think Linnea was taking inspiration from some manga work (no idea which) and that’s why it’s set in Edo-period Japan, though I think it would have been fine set in Sweden. thought the plot follows a kishōtenketsu structure? was worried it would fall too far to either side of the twee—orientalism spectrum but I felt like it didn’t indulge.
here’s the (rough) plot: a recently-hatched frog is assisting a great frog prepare for fall when two toad vagrants pass by, traveling south to the tropics to escape winter
the little frog decides to follow them. they have the normal huck finn-type aventures, stealing a melon from a garden guarded by a sleeping dog, who starts tracking them
I used to ask the same question and then I learned there’s no longer much of a price difference between slick paper and pulpy shit. Like, all the junk mail I get is slick as fuck, I think the only stuff that actually uses newsprint is actual newspapers and that’s also of much higher quality than it used to be.
I find it annoying when I have to hold a comic at a certain angle just to read it because it’s glossy and reflects the light too much. This happens a lot, and I wish the fancy paper were a little less glossy.
Sorry to quote a thing 30 posts back but this opinion has always confused me, like ive only been reading comics from those alt publishers since like 2014ish but i have never once read a comic that was actually like that?
Yeah that style of book has been out of vogue for like, 25+ years at this point. I used to gripe non-stop about how much I loathed those strips and, as a result, those publishers, but if you look at Fanta/D+Q’s actual catalogs there like…aren’t that many sad dude autobio books, and even some of those books were by legit good cartoonists.
I just loved to baselessly hate things by people who were more successful than me!! Then I learned what success in small press comics means!! (Landing a partner who supports you while you bring in like $8k a year.)
Now if either of them had published Blankets they’d be damned forever in my eyes, fuck that is the worst goddamned book.
I kind of feel like hiveworks dominance is responsible for me REALLY not caring as much about webcomics anymore, that and I am NOT creating an account on a fucking platform for reading and tracking a comic, and reading more than a couple comics on a given platform gives me fatigue because the default setup for the app makes it feel like i’m reading the platform instead of reading the actual comics I’d care about and I give up because I don’t have any love for tapas or webtoon as people at all.
edit: it also didn’t help that following twitter feeds for updates replaced the RSS as the way to get webcomic updates and twitter became a huge source of fatigue to look at on its own since it insists on being the everything space where you go for news and conversation and professional networking and jokes all at once
after i finished re-reading it’s a good life if you don’t weaken, i did some wikipedia reading, and it turns out that chet, his only friend in the comic, who lends him money and feeds his cats while he’s away is actually a real guy who makes comics about masturbating and patronising sex workers.
on the subject of webcomics, i think an easy thing to point to about how things are different to how they used to be is that dc comics have an officially licensed batman slice of life webcomic on webtoon
Half right. Seth from “its a good life” is/was friends with 2 formerly popular 1990s indie cartoonists, chester “chet” brown (who made an entire comic about being a john) and joe matt (who’s series of comics was mostly about his masturbation addiciton and old cum rag he refused to get rid of). A different era…
