T Campbell's Blog
Writer of Penny and Aggie, Fans (also called Faans), Rip & Teri, Search Engine Funnies and A History of Webcomics. Experienced webcomics editor, currently seeking full-time work and working on strange and interesting new things...Sunday, January 29, 2006
How Can I Help?
Here's what I want to do with my life:
Help make better comics.
And help make comics better.
I'm doing all right with the first of these, I'm pretty confident. My writing's shed a lot of the too-clever-by-half feel of my early work; the plots are feeling more organic and less contrived; the dialogue's more down-to-earth, the use of artists and the dance of collaboration are more skillful, the stories are more worth telling.
Goal #2 is a wee bit more ambitious.
It's why I'm with OhNoRobot, why I wrote the History and why I edit Graphic Smash, and it's on the back of my mind in the Meanwhile podcasts. And it's why I'm with Clickwheel.
How can I make comics better?
How can we make comics better?
My official title at Clickwheel is "Commissioning Editor." I've been given a budget and a goal. The goal, translated out of business-speak, boils down to: commission things to make Clickwheel AWESOME. I see two major ways to use that power. One: there are specific comics I want to make happen, comics that I think will be good for the art form in general... comics I'm sometimes not qualified to write myself, much less draw. Two: create the kinds of tools that make cartooning itself easier... which draws in the cartoonists who care.
The iPod is only the beginning for this company. I see that more clearly now. Ultimately it's about the intersection between comics and technology, the kind of peanut-butter-chocolate combo that leads to better art. More efficient art.
More. I want us to be doing more. I want better advances in the genres we web-folk explore regularly (gaming comics, techie fantasy) and the genres we don't (I'm looking at you, instructional comics). I want there to be a good place to find quality children's comics (I'm years past trusting the newspaper for that). I want people to be able to import comics scripts directly into word balloons. I want an excellent webcomic-- at least one-- that accurately portrays the Muslim experience in America (Applegeeks throws me a bone but only every once in a blue moon). I want cartoonists to understand better how to use digital tools to enhance their art. I want cartoonists to have more power. More. Better. More.
How do I make this happen? The money helps, but as Randy points out, money isn't always power. Not too many people get into cartooning for the money, which gives them the ability to refuse it as necessary. Besides which, I am acquainted with the notion that Clickwheel is a business and expects to make a profit on most of its investments.
Leadership helps, but I don't flatter myself that people are going to do things specifically because I think they're a good idea.
Appealing to self-interest helps, but that's not always enough, and some of the things that need to happen won't happen out of short-term self-interest.
Discussion. I think discussion helps.
There's no shortage of talk on the Web, but with this post and others I'll make over the rest of '06 at least, I'll be trying to focus and channel the discussion to positive ends. I'm asking the people I know to lend their brains to these questions as they come up.
So let's start with this one. I have some money, I have some limited influence, I have the desire, and I have some time. And I see a lot of things that I think need doing.
How can I help?
Help make better comics.
And help make comics better.
I'm doing all right with the first of these, I'm pretty confident. My writing's shed a lot of the too-clever-by-half feel of my early work; the plots are feeling more organic and less contrived; the dialogue's more down-to-earth, the use of artists and the dance of collaboration are more skillful, the stories are more worth telling.
Goal #2 is a wee bit more ambitious.
It's why I'm with OhNoRobot, why I wrote the History and why I edit Graphic Smash, and it's on the back of my mind in the Meanwhile podcasts. And it's why I'm with Clickwheel.
How can I make comics better?
How can we make comics better?
My official title at Clickwheel is "Commissioning Editor." I've been given a budget and a goal. The goal, translated out of business-speak, boils down to: commission things to make Clickwheel AWESOME. I see two major ways to use that power. One: there are specific comics I want to make happen, comics that I think will be good for the art form in general... comics I'm sometimes not qualified to write myself, much less draw. Two: create the kinds of tools that make cartooning itself easier... which draws in the cartoonists who care.
The iPod is only the beginning for this company. I see that more clearly now. Ultimately it's about the intersection between comics and technology, the kind of peanut-butter-chocolate combo that leads to better art. More efficient art.
More. I want us to be doing more. I want better advances in the genres we web-folk explore regularly (gaming comics, techie fantasy) and the genres we don't (I'm looking at you, instructional comics). I want there to be a good place to find quality children's comics (I'm years past trusting the newspaper for that). I want people to be able to import comics scripts directly into word balloons. I want an excellent webcomic-- at least one-- that accurately portrays the Muslim experience in America (Applegeeks throws me a bone but only every once in a blue moon). I want cartoonists to understand better how to use digital tools to enhance their art. I want cartoonists to have more power. More. Better. More.
How do I make this happen? The money helps, but as Randy points out, money isn't always power. Not too many people get into cartooning for the money, which gives them the ability to refuse it as necessary. Besides which, I am acquainted with the notion that Clickwheel is a business and expects to make a profit on most of its investments.
Leadership helps, but I don't flatter myself that people are going to do things specifically because I think they're a good idea.
Appealing to self-interest helps, but that's not always enough, and some of the things that need to happen won't happen out of short-term self-interest.
Discussion. I think discussion helps.
There's no shortage of talk on the Web, but with this post and others I'll make over the rest of '06 at least, I'll be trying to focus and channel the discussion to positive ends. I'm asking the people I know to lend their brains to these questions as they come up.
So let's start with this one. I have some money, I have some limited influence, I have the desire, and I have some time. And I see a lot of things that I think need doing.
How can I help?
Comments:
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Man, I can't figure out how you keep up with all the things you're already doing, and you want to go and do more? Geez!
On the topic of money -- while it's true that most web cartoonists don't earn their living from comics, for those of us who do want to practice our art full time, greater financial freedom would translate to more, better comics. Ideally, this means more successful business practices, but even in the most profitable of arts, making a living in the capitalistic way is often prohibitively difficult.
What I would like to see happen to make up for this is the beginnings of a patronage system—which is to say, grants. Both for the sake of giving creators greater freedom to focus on their art, as well as (and perhaps even more importantly) to give talented writers the means to hire artists to illustrate their more ambitious works. (It can be incredibly difficult to find an artist to commit to a five-page story, never mind a hundred-page novel, without the promise of payment. As I’m sure you know.) I’m not sure you have the money to put this in place yourself (or even how much money it would take), but a group of more solvent arts patrons might be able to do this together.
On the topic of influence -- I’d really like to see more practice of and support for short and non-serialized stories. Not just because I like them, but because I believe that sort of work encourages creators to play with ideas and styles that wouldn’t fit into an endlessly ongoing serial, leading to more skillful work, even within those ongoing serials. I’ve put some of my own efforts into this with Full Story, but one index isn’t enough. We need actual markets, and more attention to be paid to those markets when we have them. I hope to see MT Longplay return. And why isn’t the Flight anthology at least partly online? It’s an anthology of web cartoonists, for goodness’ sake!
This isn’t to suggest that you should go and found a new online anthology. But since you do have some promotional influence, it would be a great help if you pushed more readers in the directions of these sorts of projects as they arise.
On the topic of money -- while it's true that most web cartoonists don't earn their living from comics, for those of us who do want to practice our art full time, greater financial freedom would translate to more, better comics. Ideally, this means more successful business practices, but even in the most profitable of arts, making a living in the capitalistic way is often prohibitively difficult.
What I would like to see happen to make up for this is the beginnings of a patronage system—which is to say, grants. Both for the sake of giving creators greater freedom to focus on their art, as well as (and perhaps even more importantly) to give talented writers the means to hire artists to illustrate their more ambitious works. (It can be incredibly difficult to find an artist to commit to a five-page story, never mind a hundred-page novel, without the promise of payment. As I’m sure you know.) I’m not sure you have the money to put this in place yourself (or even how much money it would take), but a group of more solvent arts patrons might be able to do this together.
On the topic of influence -- I’d really like to see more practice of and support for short and non-serialized stories. Not just because I like them, but because I believe that sort of work encourages creators to play with ideas and styles that wouldn’t fit into an endlessly ongoing serial, leading to more skillful work, even within those ongoing serials. I’ve put some of my own efforts into this with Full Story, but one index isn’t enough. We need actual markets, and more attention to be paid to those markets when we have them. I hope to see MT Longplay return. And why isn’t the Flight anthology at least partly online? It’s an anthology of web cartoonists, for goodness’ sake!
This isn’t to suggest that you should go and found a new online anthology. But since you do have some promotional influence, it would be a great help if you pushed more readers in the directions of these sorts of projects as they arise.
Speaking from the perspective of a beginning cartoonist, I just can't find enough information on assembly/craftsmenship side of things. There are guides on how to code HTML, even templates for the truely lost, but precious little on actually making comics. I speak not of theory but of the physical production. I realize that everyone does things their own way, but the trial-and-error method to economizing my time isn't very useful for me. I'm working on a double major so I don't have a lot of time to figuring out my "error" in how to configure templates in Photoshop and the like. Also, I found in most tutorials terms that the author assumed I would know. It took me a week to find a website that explained how to make a gradient fill (how I made it to college, I do not know). It's one of the reasons I've been keeping a journal since I decided to start my own comic, so when I've launched I can figure out what I didn't know and make guides for others down the road.
Making comics better is a good ambition, but I think it would help to have more work done on promoting existing comics too, particularly in getting word of them out beyond the present webcomic fan-circles. I may well be completely wrong, but I can't help thinking there are some brilliant strips that would be playing to huge crowds if only news of them could get out into the wider world.
What needs to be done now?
What needs to be done to make webcomics a viable industry?
In my opinion, we need to bridge the gap between print and webcomics. There needs to be less seperation between the two if American comics as a whole are going to survive the upcoming decades.
What needs to be done to make webcomics a viable industry?
In my opinion, we need to bridge the gap between print and webcomics. There needs to be less seperation between the two if American comics as a whole are going to survive the upcoming decades.
Automatically flowing text into word balloons should be possible, perhaps as a Photoshop or GIMP plugin. It wouldn't be easy to do though. You might be able to put up a bounty to get some open source guys to tackle it.
Would the balloons resize and reshape to take the text?
It'd be fun if it was possible to automatically put links into balloon and other text in a comic. 'Course, it would require automatically creating image-maps around the relevant bits of text, so it would probably be complicated.
It'd be fun if it was possible to automatically put links into balloon and other text in a comic. 'Course, it would require automatically creating image-maps around the relevant bits of text, so it would probably be complicated.
Actually, imagemaps aren't that complicated, and plugins already exist to make them even easier to do.
In that case, I vote for the auto-balloon links. They'd be great for factual comics. (I've seen one or two cases of links in balloons, but they're not common.)
I want an excellent webcomic-- at least one-- that accurately portrays the Muslim experience in America
It doesn't deal with life in America, but an excellent comic on growing up in Iran a while back is Persepolis by Marjane Satrpi. It has already been published in book form, but is definitely worth a look if you're interested in Persian and/or muslim culture.
It doesn't deal with life in America, but an excellent comic on growing up in Iran a while back is Persepolis by Marjane Satrpi. It has already been published in book form, but is definitely worth a look if you're interested in Persian and/or muslim culture.
I've read Persepolis and Persepolis 2! Great reads, despite the art. You're right, they're definitely worth mentioning.
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