The following is the text for a Comics Journal column by Jeremy Pinkham from 1998 that never ran; I believe it was to be the first in a series of columns cover web comics. It was based on a brief interview with me; I suppose since it was largely about my now-defunct MEGATONMAN.com website, it was canceled, since the Journal (also now defunct) was in denial about the impact of the internet on printed comics). It is presented here for historical purposes only.
28.8 Panels Per Second: A Field Guide to Electronic Comics Culture by Jeremy Pinkham
Column of November 2, 1998: “Dandy” Don’s Internet Fiasco Shows Promise
As a young teen, I was introduced to the world of small-press, independent comic books by a Fantagraphics Books publication called Amazing Heroes. To be precise, Amazing Heroes, the comic-book sized, now-deceased superhero-friendly cousin of this magazine, put out large quarterly “Preview Specials” which served as resource guides to the upcoming output of the entire comic book industry, and one of these ended up somewhat inexplicably for sale in a small U.S. Marine magazine shop on the subtropical Japanese territory of Okinawa, where I promptly bought it. After taking that black-and-white magazine home (along with the usual four-color copies of Spider-Man, the X-Men, etc.) my hyperactive young brain was pretty much immediately blown into the back of my skull.
This sudden turn-on to the post-underground, pre-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle glory days of alternative comics was exhilarating, inspiring reveries of greedy delight at the dozens of comic book series out there, featuring styles of art and writing I had never seen while scouring the spinner racks at my local store. But along with that sense of wonder and fun came a small bit of youthful ignorance; I thought that surely the publications listed inside must be doing good business, or at least enough to support the cartoonists doing them. For how else could they be regularly published, I thought, if they weren’t turning a self-sustaining profit for their creators?
One of the cartoonists I found through that now-yellowed magazine was a man named Don Simpson, who was then creating a series called Megaton Man for Kitchen Sink Press. Today, after completing hundreds of pages of comic book art featuring a posse of different characters of his own creation (most recently self-published under the Fiasco Comics imprint) as well as several others owned by the major comic book publishers, Simpson is back doing Megaton Man once again, but no longer as a comic book; Megaton Man is now a [defunct] World Wide Web site (www.megatonman.com).
And since Simpson is a pioneer in bringing comics to this electronic medium, having published his comics exclusively on the Internet for the last two years, he is more than often greeted by fans and fellow cartoonists with the rather forward question: “how do you make a living doing this?” The irony, it turns out, is that those who ask him that today are guilty of the same wishful thinking in which I indulged as a teen.
As Don explained to me by e-mail,
in all my years in print, even when I was spending gobs of money attending shows, spending money for booth space, air fare, hotel, meals etc., and trying to pay for it all by selling $2.95 comics, no one ever asked, ‘How in the hell can you make a living at this racket,’ when it wouldn’t have been hard to count on your fingers that I wasn’t.
It’s a fact of life that small-press and self-published comics are an increasingly difficult business. The more a cartoonist sticks to his or her muse, it seems, the harder it is to make a buck. And so, today, many cartoonists are looking to the Internet and wondering if it offers a way out of the direct market, a way to reach new audiences and support themselves by doing what they love. Little specific information is available, however, on the financial and artistic possibilities of comics on the World Wide Web, a situation which makes venturing into that relative unknown a daunting risk to those more familiar with the business and aesthetic of print comics. Don Simpson, then, as a cartoonist with a solid print comics reputation who has largely left that world behind in favor of publishing on the Web, offers an informative example for those wondering if such a medium-to-medium transition is possible.
Don’s entry into the Web publishing arena wasn’t a coolly critical decision. The repurposing of his Fiasco Comics imprint to Internet delivery was an act of survival initiated by an industry-wide crisis which challenged him to defend the career he had pursued since childhood. “When Capital folded in the summer of ’96, my cash flow was locked in suspended animation for months and that was that.” (Simpson reports he had to wait a year and a half for the second-largest comic book distributor in the US to pay him for the last self-published issue of Bizarre Heroes.)
I had seen this coming, having had several distributors fold on me in the previous year or two, so I knew the warning signs (everybody but [the] Kitchen Sink going exclusive with Diamond being a pretty clear one), and had already decided that continuing to print comics for the Direct Sales market was just not in the cards. […] The computer (with Internet connection) offered the only solution to keep my creativity alive […].
Fortunately, when the need for change arrived, Don wasn’t intimidated by the non-traditional comics tools of computers and the Internet. He had begun coloring his own comic book covers with Adobe Photoshop two years earlier, and regularly laid out his letters column in Quark XPress. In addition, he had established a small, preliminary version of his current Web site, though admittedly “my [original] conception of it was that it would sell a few back issues and spark interest in upcoming print publications. I really didn’t consider its potential as a way of publishing original work or to build a completely new audience.”
In building the site up to its current form, Simpson wasn’t completely left to his own devices; critical assistance came from the ranks of Simpson’s readers: “Dave White, a fan who attended one of my cartooning workshops here in Pittsburgh and is a Carnegie Mellon University computer whiz kid, became Fiasco’s college intern for ten weeks and really set up twenty or so pages that have since grown into the present site.” Don then “learned HTML out of my compulsive do-it-yourself-ness, and [has] since transmogrified the site several times over […].”
I still handle everything, but wouldn’t mind passing off a lot of that responsibility. I’ve really hit the wall with all this dynamic HTML and other newfangled technologies. The web is becoming too complex to really maintain a website without full-time immersion in all this Java stuff, which is not my interest and not my expertise. The web for me is a great distribution system and personal computers are fascinating up to a point; frankly I’d rather be cartooning and would love to have a situation where others updated the damn site!
Simpson’s site is now built on the attraction of a weekly adventure-comedy serial starring Megaton Man and the rest of the Bizarre Heroes ensemble (as previously seen in the self-published comic book of that name). “I’m sure [readers] would like it daily,” he admits, “but my sense is not to commit to something I might have to go back on. That would be the worst thing. […] It’s a matter of trying to get readers into the habit of checking you out weekly, knowing that if you go off that, they’re not likely to come back.”
In this, Don echoes a tenet of Web publishing today; regular updates are believed to be crucial to keeping Web visitors interested and visiting regularly. Sites which neglect scheduled updates risk losing their audiences through becoming known as “ghost sites,” an entertaining presentation of which being available at www.disobey.com/ghostsites/index.htm. True to form, Don has posted a new installment of Megaton Man each Sunday for two years now, keeping reader interest steadily piqued (as his claim that “the strip now reaches more people on the web in two months’ time than the bi-monthly comic book ever did, by a factor of 5 to 1,” indicates). The physically scaled-down format (each strip being half the size of his previous, printed comic book pages) has affected more than just the frequency with which he tells his stories; Simpson says it has taught him “a lot about storytelling.”
On the web, everything has to be worth the time it takes to download, so it’s forced me to become a hell of a lot tighter with my material. I’ve cut massive amounts of stuff that I would have deemed perfectly okay for a print comic. You’ve got to give the reader the feeling that things are moving, and that things are going to happen next week. I’m not sure I’ve mastered this, but I’m improving. Still, a lot of fans tend to come by the site every six weeks or so to read a larger chunk of comics. A selection of previous strips are archived for just such sporadic readers, giving context to the latest installment about nine strips back into the storyline.
This improves the momentum of the main strip, for, as Simpson notes, “your recap can be a hyperlink, whereas in the newspaper, you ritually have to waste your first panel recapping the last strip, which is why to this day I can’t wade through most adventure strip collections. Thus web strips can be designed for maximum effectiveness as serials and as a collected story.”
In addition to the ten current strips available, new readers can get oriented via a “Daily Rerun” strip (which provides a look back at previous storylines through reprinting an older installment each day), a simple synopsis of the current storyline in text form, and various “Cast of Characters” pages. All of these take the usual newspaper-strip pressure of continually re-establishing character histories off of the serialized comic itself, helping Simpson pack in more forward narrative thrust and ever-more-wacked-out gags.
Aside from these aesthetic considerations, how does the site keep afloat? Nowhere in it are visitors required to pay for the privilege of following Don’s online work, and most, if not all, of the banner advertisements on the site are of Simpson’s own making and thus not supported by paying advertisers. The conventional wisdom on Web publishing today is furthermore expressed succinctly and depressingly by Bill Bass of Forrester Research, Inc. (a Massachusetts technology research firm) in a March 1998 New York Times feature: “[T]he stuff that’s worked well online has a financial purpose or is a game or pornography. […] nobody on the content side is running profitably right now.”
By “the content side,”
Bass refers to anyone who isn’t publishing financial news, video games, or smut, a wide category which includes Don Simpson, given that he’s never attempted the first two, and has given up on the third:
I did have Wendy [Whitebread, a sexually explicit character Simpson created for Eros Comix under the pen name Anton Drek] as a part of my website for awhile, then [as] a separate XXX website. I scuttled it early this year because when people signed up for my email list, they apparently couldn’t type with one hand! So I figured it wasn’t worth it. There’s enough adult material on the web as it is without any contribution from me.
Simpson’s rejection of porn comics is moreover based on his belief that the profitability of such works is further proof of the general state of collapse in the comic book direct market, and comes at the expense of the market as a whole:
The Anton comix are the only ones to remain in print of their own volition, and it’s a pretty sad statement about where the market’s at. This isn’t any kind of religious conversion or newfound shame I have in the Drek material. It’s just over for me. When I did it there was Cherry, Omaha and Black Kiss. Now [it] seems to be the only thriving genre in comics. Unfortunately it kills off any hopes the comic art form has of recapturing a general audience.
How, then, we should ask again, does the Megaton Man online serial work, financially speaking, given that sex is one of the few proven moneymakers on the Web, and Simpson has lost his desire to exploit it? According to Don, the incidentals of the site are what bring in the revenue:
The website has sold original art and back issues and has garnered me freelance work. It has also cut costs such as film output for color separations, printing, shipping and storage, not to mention newsletter printing and postage. In fact, my Internet Service Provider was comping me the space for plugging his services and having his name in the URL until I switched to [the now-defunct] MEGATONMAN.com about a month ago. […] Having the website online is better than any portfolio I’ve ever had. It’s the ever-present back-up and all-purpose conversation piece, and I even use it to post freelance jobs I’m working on so clients can check out the progress—much better than faxing, especially since they can see things in full color.
The color in Simpson’s online strips is more than just a pragmatic plus for his freelance career; it brings a pep to his comics art printed comics couldn’t offer. As a press release on his site describes the evolution of his graphic technique: “over time Simpson evolved a simpler, more judicious style, harkening back to his childhood favorites John Romita Sr., Jack Kirby and Gil Kane.” Those cartoonists are known for their work in a four-color medium, and like them, Simpson’s work benefits from color printing. The color graphics of the Megaton Man online serial are more viscerally appealing than the black-and-white pages of his previous effort, Bizarre Heroes, and in creating art for print comics, Simpson had little choice—the financial constraints of self-publishing in the direct market would not permit a full-color approach. There are certain technical limitations and considerations in color use on the Internet (Microsoft OS and Macintosh OS computers display colors differently, for instance, and graphics cards in older computers often can’t handle full color), but so far fans seem to be pleased with what they see.
Those online fans are, however, not as far removed from the taste-making influence of the direct
market as those hoping to reach new audiences via the Internet might wish. As Simpson tells it:
I’ve found that I’m more dependent on print comics culture than I would have cared to admit. I’m getting back a number of old fans who drifted away from comics and from Megaton Man since the eighties (the price of comics and ‘real life’ being the main reasons people note) and rediscovering it through the web. […] Nonetheless, reaching folks through the web has many, many favorable comparisons over trying to reach them through Diamond Previews and the musty comic shop in the basement space over in the funky part of town.
So, although as Simpson says, “folks really have to have picked up the comics reading habit from somewhere, and generally that's from print comics, with all its attendant lunacies,” he would still “like to think that I'm picking up a bit of a more general audience of folks who would never tolerate the nonsense required to navigate the print comic book market.”
This is America, and one should be able to acquire whatever silly piece of merchandise one wants one demand, and not have to pre-order two months before hand from some hole-in-the-wall comic shop on the other side of the railroad tracks (assuming it hasn’t been boarded up). I realize Internet access is not a universally democratic institution by any means yet, but the trend is towards a greater and greater chunk of the public going online, so I’m optimistic in the long run. […] The proof as to whether any of this is working will come in 1999 when I actually release a couple print comics.
Will sales stay the same, will they be worse, will they be better? Will there be synergy between print and the website? Stay tuned. Those comics, to be released as Megaton Man: Hardcopy #1 and #2, will be published by Image and collect the first 89 episodes of the online serial. The cover of the first issue, says Simpson, “has a coffee ring on it and fingerprints, and MM is saying, ‘Gee I’m glad to be back on eternal paper!’ This may really backfire, but it’s my mocking statement about comics collectors’ fetish for mint condition paper collectibles.”
Mocking of diehard, obsessive print comics fans or not, Don’s still keeps a foot in that world via a backup strip in Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon, and renewed convention appearances. “The recent SPX was my first show in about a year and a half,” he admits. “It was very encouraging—it proved to me that my fan base was being kept alive and possibly was even growing because of the site.”
According to Simpson, comic book readers shouldn’t find reading comics on the Internet a radical departure, and those who refuse to adapt to this new technology are in for a rude shock:
Everything between the drawing board and the reader’s eyeballs is media. Print has been fetishized beyond recognition in the comics industry, and we are locked into ‘collectibles’ that no one reads anymore. As such, comics has been the ‘canary in the wire cage’ of media, being hit first and hardest among printed matter by a revolution that is transforming all media. Is print dead? No, but Quebecor and World Color (remember them?) are well on their way, being replaced by Hewlett-Packard and Canon. Mass, centralized printing replaced by personal, on-demand printing. (Anybody nostalgic for print can help me move a hundred boxes of overprinted comics when I move my storage locker next month!)
Lest this man come off as a dour pessimist who gets his rocks off forecasting Nostradamus-like doom for his peers, readers should keep in mind that to Don Simpson, the computer-aided production and Internet delivery which have become necessary arrows in his quiver are not his chief preoccupation: “What interests me is putting this powerful, clumsy guy in a beat-up VW van with a goose, a gorilla and a jungle girl and having them ride around Detroit. This captures my imagination and tickles my funnybone.” Producing Megaton Man is what is in the end important. The technology simply makes that possible in a world where print comic books mostly fail to support the artists who create them.
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