News From the World of Webcomics
Posted November 1st, 2007 by Howard TaylerThis has been a big week for Webcomics news:
1) Melonpool is back! Blank Label Cartoonist Steve Troop was one of the very first webcartoonists, and Melonpool is one of the longest-running properties online. He’s been burning the candle at both ends professionally puppetteering for the last several months, but he’s back on his inkin’ game now.
2) Comicspace and Webcomicsnation announced a merger. I had some conversations with Joey Manley about this during the summer and again a few weeks ago, but had to keep my mouth shut. Interestingly, I STILL have to keep my mouth shut. Their stuff is really that cool.
3) Zudacomics.com, DC’s big foray into the world of online comics (and buying intellectual properties for peanuts and page-views) launched on the 30th. Their launch was HUGE, with over 23,000 pages viewed in just one day. (Ummm… yeah. To put that in perspective, you people view over a quarter-million pages at schlockmercenary.com each day. DC may get more traffic from this blog post than from their launch.)
4) Blank Label Cartoonists Brad Guigar, David Kellett, and Kristofer Straub, along with BLC Unofficial Advisor Scott Kurtz bid a fond farewell to Blank Label. They’re doing their own things, some of which will be done jointly under the Halfpixel banner. This fission leaves Blank Label Comics with Melonpool, Real Life, Ugly Hill, Wapsi Square, Shortpacked, and of course Schlock Mercenary.
5) That Wikinews article about webcomics and notability (the one I blogged) got slashdotted. As did I, I suppose. Traffic here blipped up by about 8%. Webcomics have come a long way since the days when Slashdot could actually hurt our hosting. More importantly, however, the discussion under that article has lots of very meaningful, articulate posts, and only a few all-caps trolls.
Of all of this stuff, I’m sure the folks at DC would like to think their news is the most worthy. Personally, I think the WCN/CS merger (Item #2) is the biggest news. If comics were geopolitics, that merger is like if England and France teamed up to colonize the Americas in 1530. Zuda is like if Columbus arrived in America in 1906 and tried to announce that he was discovering it. And then unloaded a sack of beads and asked if Manhattan was still for sale.
Explore posts in the same categories: Business, Comics, Industry News, Site News, Wikiwatch
November 1st, 2007 at 10:12 am
> Traffic here blipped up by about 8%. Webcomics have come a long way since the days when Slashdot could actually hurt our hosting.
Or Slashdot just isn’t what it used to be.
November 1st, 2007 at 10:35 am
The Zuda beads are meant to be flashy but break easily. Site unusable thanks to their flash viewer crashing on me consistently.
I would have left a feedback to that effect, but marking full name and email as required fields did not strike me as they were interested in feedback really. But maybe that’s just old school ‘net paranoia speaking.
November 1st, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Out of curiosity, I wandered over to Zuda. Got to view absolutely
nothing. Lots of ‘loading in progress’ icons followed by blank white
spaces. Sigh. Another site crippled by flash.
November 1st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Considering that a lot of the comics printed by DC and Marvel have less than 20k issues published, launching with 20k page views is pretty big.
November 1st, 2007 at 3:07 pm
I *seriously* dislike Flash comics. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve yet to see one where the format added anything to the comic or story, and it’s always distracting.
.
Be interesting to see of Zuda makes it, or goes the way of CoolBeansWorld.
.
Doc.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:29 pm
The only Flash interface I’ve ever liked was the one that Gabo Mendoza invented for Crossgen. You pulled up a two-page spread of the comic book on your screen, and then the tab key expanded each dialog bubble in turn. They were barely readable before expanding, but when tabbed to they were clear as day.
Also, the tab key told you the order of the dialog and the panels. It was, dare I say, BETTER than reading the same comic on paper. I enjoyed it a lot more.
Regardless… Zuda is not using that interface, and you’re right, it adds nothing.
November 1st, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Other webcomic news – it may mean nothing to your other readers, Howard, but I like to think I know quality when I see it – after all, I start my daily webcomic crawl with Schlock every night –
Anyway, Arron Ruiz has just made the leap of faith and quit his day job to produce Dresden Codak (www.dresdencodak.com/index.htm) as an ongoing weekly comic as opposed to a once a month (if then) thing of beauty. He’s got a loooong ways to go to match our esteemed Howard’s daily output of story and schlockiness, but the man does create some wonderful work. Even if you decide that this comic isn’t for you, you owe it to yourself to check out “Dungeons and Discourse” in his archives.
I don’t normally shill (and unpaid at that) for another person’s work, but I’m a firm believer in spreading the word when I see something that is truly worthwhile.
Howard, if this dies in your spamtrap, I bear you no ill will. I’m still loving you for “Brains! She loves me for my brains!”
November 1st, 2007 at 8:14 pm
“DC may get more traffic from this blog post than from their
launch.”
Glad I read that before clicking, because now I won’t. :)
I refuse to reward them for sucking.
November 1st, 2007 at 9:18 pm
So Tagon is going to get paid five tiiiiiimes?
November 1st, 2007 at 10:51 pm
As far as #4 I could of sworn that Starslip Crisis, Evil Inc. and Sheldon were listed under Howard’s favorites but are not there now. Sorry if I’m wrong But if I was right, Whats up Howard?
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:21 am
Nnnng. I was almost happy to see Zuda exist… and then flash site? Gah.
Way to go on the wikipedia front. Some of the arguments on the talk page amuse me, in particular the idea that secondary sources can be used to prove notability, after which primary sources can be used for information. If my comics blog actually gets cited for being a secondary source to keep webcomics around I would be vastly amused (and scared, considering how dinky my comics blog is).
November 2nd, 2007 at 12:41 am
“Regardless… Zuda is not using that interface, and you’re right, it adds nothing.”
I suspect it’s in part used as a copyright control. You can’t save copies of the comic ‘pages’ as easily- if at all- in Flash as you can with a conventional GIF, JPEG or PNG.
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Doc.
November 2nd, 2007 at 3:30 am
So… Zuda got about as many pageviews from its launch as Schlock Mercenary got from Slashdot. That seems… respectable, for a newly-launched site. If it wasn’t FlashRidden™, I’d expect it to grow into a major player (although I can’t at the moment think of a good geopolitical metaphor).
And I second cptnspldng’s recommendation of Dungeons & Discourse. I love the idea of Zeno’s paradox as a spell!
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:39 am
… I’ve dissed sites for using Flash, e.g. Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which used to be entirely Flash. Back when I first commented on them it was completely unusable without Flash It’s still mostly Flash, with practically no way to navigate the site without the plugin, but now it has some few non-Flash links and info. I just wish people would restrict using Flash to present media, which it does OK, instead of designing silly interfaces.
Especially when the interface isn’t actually helpful.
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 pm
hmoulding: You need to include the “http://”. Without it, the browser interprets the URL as being relative to the page.
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Egad! My DSL line isn’t fast enough to comfortably view the Ripley’s site.
Like I care. I mean, it’s not like Ripley’s actually do the research to make sure their stories are true.
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Addendum: I know, I know, just because the founder didn’t do his research doesn’t mean they don’t now. But it doesn’t even suggest that they do.
November 3rd, 2007 at 7:19 am
BTW, congrats on a sweet Schlocktoberfest Howard! You had me hooked every day.
December 12th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Hi, folks. I’m just your random Wikipedia admin who is trying to help out in stuff, and I don’t know where to post my comment, so I’ll just post it here, in the last thread with the “Wikiwatch” tag.
One thing that has been repeated ad nauseam is that mods have a tendency to be delete-happy. Ironically enough, reading some of the threads in several pages, many users who are mentioned are not Wikipedia administrators. While this seems like a petty complaint, I’d rather not get a bad rap I don’t deserve… ;) But in all seriousness, if you want to find out who is an admin or not, just plug in their username in Special:Listusers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers).
However, whining about whether someone is an admin or not is not the point of my comment. Watching the Webcomics mess from the perspective of someone who has the delete bit, one thing that I can say is that if there were a way to demonstrably say that a comic is notable, then there would be much less of a mess in this situation. However, as far as I can look, there is no external guidance that allows us to determine why a particular Webcomic is popular or not. So, the only thing we can do is fall into our default guideline, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28web%29. Now, we all agree that the guideline is definitely not ideal, but consider things from our perspective. We have to deal with mountains of crap every day, so how do we discern that which is crap from the non-crap? While we can all agree that a crappy garage band from some random kid somewhere is not notable, what constitutes notability in Webcomics?
In other words, I’d like to ask the Webcomic community for something. If there were a way for you to police your own content, the decision-making of administrators might be much less of a non-issue. However, I’m not asking about doing that in Wikipedia, as doing that would just result in Yet Another Wikipedia Notability System (WP:YAWNS). :P Instead, I consider a much more constructive step for both Wikipedia and Webcomics to be for the comic community to create a site showcasing good webcomics, documenting awards, etc. Not only that would give Wikipedia a litmus test and a secondary source (which is the crux of the whole issue), it would also have its own value within the Webcomics community by creating an information depot of sorts.
I personally believe that is the best way to satisfy everyone’s concerns. However, the impetus for such a move has to come from the Webcomics community; it cannot come from Wikipedia. Since I really have no idea how it would be better to distribute that proposal to your community, or even if doing this here would be even seen, I’ll leave the details to you, Howard, to figure that out. In either case, I’d really like for all of you to consider this seriously, not only for the benefit to Wikipedia, but more importantly, for the benefit to all of you.
Hopefully the unnecessary dispute between both of our communities can be solved via dialog and innovative solutions. It has dragged on far too long.
Sincerely,
Titoxd
English Wikipedia administrator
December 13th, 2007 at 1:37 am
Titoxd: If only Websnark was notable…
December 13th, 2007 at 5:24 am
Titoxd: Sadly, this has already been done to no avail. Comixtalk.com and Fleen.com, two of the top Webcomics journalism and criticism sites, are up, running, and non-notable. Fleen doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, and Comixtalk’s has been deleted on more than one occasion.
The Webcomics Creators Choice Awards, WCCA, is also seen as non-notable, and has had its article deleted as well.
In short, thank you for trying to push responsibility back on us, but we’ve done all we can. There’s still a mote or two (or a few) in our eyes, but there may be a beam in your own. If Comixtalk, Fleen, and WCCA can be stabilized at Wikipedia, you’ll have all the source information you need to keep track of Webcomic notability.
Not that I believe that to be the problem. I believe deletionism is the problem. The default mode of operation should not be “delete first.” It should be “all content can live here,” and then you just go after the obvious spam. If it’s not OBVIOUS spam then you can let it alone.
What’s that you say? That’s not the purpose of Wikipedia? Oh. You want to be an online Encyclopedia Brittanica or World Book? Hmmm… I think we already have one each of those. Why do we need another? We want something bigger and better, and apparently Wikipedia does not want to be that.
So… we’ll continue to whine and not send WMF our money, and hurt editors and admins will continue to go OMGWTFBBQ over our obviously unfounded, non-notable position on the matter.
(I think I’ve pretty much summed it all up.)
December 13th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Hmm… I’m not really sure I understand. I see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComixTalk, which has only had one deletion debate, which was overwhelmingly for keeping it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Comixtalk. Fleen doesn’t have any page, but one thing that may help you out when you create the article is to make sure it is fleshed out first, or at least gives a reason why the page is not just another web page. A mention in the press will shut up a large part of the pro-delete camp, as well.
The problem about having obvious spam as the criteria for deletion is simple: What constitutes “obvious spam”? Your definition may vary from my definition, and both of our definitions may be different from the definition of somebody who works as a chemist. Any usage of the spam criterion is controversial due to that problem.
We do have MANY users who are delete-happy. I won’t even argue about that, and if I thought the situation was ideal without fault on our part, I wouldn’t bother posting here. That said, playing blame games doesn’t really help solve this problem. You did point out the key point of Wikipedia: it is trying to become a general-reference encyclopedia, not an information database of everything possible. For that, there’s Wikia, or Everything2. Deletionism and inclusionism are the result of the dynamic tension between having the core goals of having a comprehensive encyclopedia and having a usable encyclopedia.
You may ask why do we want another Encarta. Well, because the existing encyclopedias are not free content. Wikipedia, on the other hand, can be redistributed without restrictions solely by following the GNU Free Documentation License. It’s a matter of freedom, not price, though (http://freedomdefined.org/Definition), so that’s why getting a free CD on the mail doesn’t count.
As for sending money, I don’t particularly care (the Foundation doesn’t pay me :P), but alienating an entire community is a situation that at least I would prefer to change.