So... kind of a big news week, right? I was talking just Monday how I've been focused on speed running our 2025 projects to avoid any of the batshit insane curveballs that will inevitably be addied to accomplishing them after January 20, and despite that focus, I still heard more than a little of the news. We've got s heath insurance CEO getting killed in broad daylight with people literally celebrating that. We've had the collapse of the French government after Michel Barnier's tenure as Prime Minister that lasted barely longer than Liz Truss's in the UK. We've had South Korea fall under martial law for only a few hours, but it was long enough for An Gwi-ryeong to pull off one of the most bad-ass moves I've ever seen from a politician while looking like she stepped off the set of one of the Matrix movies. We've had so much going on this week alone that a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in California followed by a tsunami warning barely registered as national news.

But between the spotlights on South Korea and the health insurance industry, it's reminded me of a story that Ryan Estrada did a few years ago that involves both. I wrote about it at the time, but I thought it might be poignant to re-run that today...

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I've talked about Ryan Estrada here before. It seems like he's always doing something interesting, even if that occasionally means it puts his life in peril. He's recently noted, though, that his closest brush with death came from sitting on a couch in Florida. Estrada has just posted on his site a 10-page story about how he had to undergo surgery for testicular torsion. Go over there and read about it. (Don't worry -- it's a family-friendly comics and no naughty bits are shown at any point!) Of the ten pages, the first page is basically the set-up, then there's seven pages of the story itself with a resolution on page nine. But then he has something of an epilogue on the last page, and that aspect of the story is what I want to focus on.

Estrada had been living in South Korea at the time, and he was only in Florida on visit. I mention that to explain A) why he didn't have health insurance, and B) why he "hid" in Korea after the events of the story; he simply returned home. The story was originally done for CORPUS: A Comic Anthology of Bodily Ailments, which came out last year. The anthology, and certainly Estrada's story in it, tie in to the growing trend of graphic medicine stories -- comics that are expressly related to medicine or illness. But while the crux of Estrada's story is indeed focused on the torsion incident itself, that last page -- the pseudo-epilogue I mentioned -- is about getting flooded with bills afterwards.

Estrada works as a freelance cartoonist. He doesn't make tons of money -- enough to live comfortably in South Korea, but he's not what you'd call wealthy. Estrada has been very open about his finances over the years. I don't know exactly when this story took place, but I think he was making about $20,000 annually around that time. Technically above the poverty line here in the US, but not by much. He noted to me that the bill for a one day stay in the hospital -- not counting any of the doctor visits, examination fees, etc. Just the hospital stay itself -- was more than that. He says he could have bought a house with the money that got racked up in bills.

And I don't think anyone familiar with the US medical system would question any of that. "Yup, sounds about right!"

The leading cause for bankruptcy in the United States is medical expenses. Roughly 2/3 of all bankruptcies in the US are because of medical bills that people can't afford. And nearly 80% of those people HAD health insurance!!

Go back and read Estrada's comic again. Out of a ten page story, discussion of medical costs/bills occur on literally half the pages. As he's lying there in a fetal position, experiencing the worst pain in his life, he's actively talking about skipping parts of health care because of the cost. His very first line of dialogue is: "Does anyone know how much it costs to go to an emergency room if you don't have insurance?" My point is that the health care system here in the US is so fucked up that there are literally no walls between discussions of actual health care and how life-shatteringly expensive it is. Estrada was asked to write a story about "bodily ailments" and half of his story is about the financial impact of it. The two are so intertwined as to be inseparable.

Estrada is certainly not unique in being in this position. But his story highlights for me two conclusions:

1. Graphic medicine as a genre of comics will continue to expand, but will also increasingly incorporate a great deal of financial issues/concerns as well. This will require two sets of storytelling skills from artists -- the ability to relay medical information and the ability to relay financial information -- and those who are talented at both will be the stand-out artists that are celebrated. This could have the potential effect of talented graphic medicine artists (unfortunately) not getting enough credit and/or accolades because they're not as adept at relaying the fiscal side of the story.
2. As a society, we're going to see more and more people emigrate to other countries specifically to escape medical bills. Estrada, as I said, already had made a home in South Korea, so he wasn't trying to escape the bills specifically, but he did discover something of a loophole that worked to his advantage. It will only be a matter of time before this becomes more widely practiced as an intentional means of fleeing impossible medical debts.

Both of these, for different reason, give me cause for concern. Estrada has more than once proven he's generally ahead of the curve compared to everybody else (he literally invented "normcore") and while I generally like to celebrate that about him, this is one time I hope he doesn't become a trend-setter.

I've talked about Ryan Estrada here before. It seems like he's always doing something interesting, even if that occasionally means it puts his life in peril. He's recently noted, though, that his closest brush with death came from sitting on a couch in Florida. Estrada has just posted on his site a 10-page story about how he had to undergo surgery for testicular torsion. Go over there and read about it. (Don't worry -- it's a family-friendly comics and no naughty bits are shown at any point!) Of the ten pages, the first page is basically the set-up, then there's seven pages of the story itself with a resolution on page nine. But then he has something of an epilogue on the last page, and that aspect of the story is what I want to focus on.

Estrada had been living in South Korea at the time, and he was only in Florida on visit. I mention that to explain A) why he didn't have health insurance, and B) why he "hid" in Korea after the events of the story; he simply returned home. The story was originally done for CORPUS: A Comic Anthology of Bodily Ailments, which came out last year. The anthology, and certainly Estrada's story in it, tie in to the growing trend of graphic medicine stories -- comics that are expressly related to medicine or illness. But while the crux of Estrada's story is indeed focused on the torsion incident itself, that last page -- the pseudo-epilogue I mentioned -- is about getting flooded with bills afterwards.

Estrada works as a freelance cartoonist. He doesn't make tons of money -- enough to live comfortably in South Korea, but he's not what you'd call wealthy. Estrada has been very open about his finances over the years. I don't know exactly when this story took place, but I think he was making about $20,000 annually around that time. Technically above the poverty line here in the US, but not by much. He noted to me that the bill for a one day stay in the hospital -- not counting any of the doctor visits, examination fees, etc. Just the hospital stay itself -- was more than that. He says he could have bought a house with the money that got racked up in bills.

And I don't think anyone familiar with the US medical system would question any of that. "Yup, sounds about right!"

The leading cause for bankruptcy in the United States is medical expenses. Roughly 2/3 of all bankruptcies in the US are because of medical bills that people can't afford. And nearly 80% of those people HAD health insurance!!

Go back and read Estrada's comic again. Out of a ten page story, discussion of medical costs/bills occur on literally half the pages. As he's lying there in a fetal position, experiencing the worst pain in his life, he's actively talking about skipping parts of health care because of the cost. His very first line of dialogue is: "Does anyone know how much it costs to go to an emergency room if you don't have insurance?" My point is that the health care system here in the US is so fucked up that there are literally no walls between discussions of actual health care and how life-shatteringly expensive it is. Estrada was asked to write a story about "bodily ailments" and half of his story is about the financial impact of it. The two are so intertwined as to be inseparable.

Estrada is certainly not unique in being in this position. But his story highlights for me two conclusions:

1. Graphic medicine as a genre of comics will continue to expand, but will also increasingly incorporate a great deal of financial issues/concerns as well. This will require two sets of storytelling skills from artists -- the ability to relay medical information and the ability to relay financial information -- and those who are talented at both will be the stand-out artists that are celebrated. This could have the potential effect of talented graphic medicine artists (unfortunately) not getting enough credit and/or accolades because they're not as adept at relaying the fiscal side of the story.
2. As a society, we're going to see more and more people emigrate to other countries specifically to escape medical bills. Estrada, as I said, already had made a home in South Korea, so he wasn't trying to escape the bills specifically, but he did discover something of a loophole that worked to his advantage. It will only be a matter of time before this becomes more widely practiced as an intentional means of fleeing impossible medical debts.

Both of these, for different reason, give me cause for concern. Estrada has more than once proven he's generally ahead of the curve compared to everybody else (he literally invented "normcore") and while I generally like to celebrate that about him, this is one time I hope he doesn't become a trend-setter.

Despite people seeming to really get into Kickstarter enough to have multiple successes and pass along their learnings to others, it's still a venue that is new enough that we're still trying to figure it out. I've had two projects fly into my radar recently and it's interesting to me to compare the two. Both are by creators who've had successful Kickstarters in the past and, having contributed to both of them, I can attest to them both following through on delivery in a timely manner. We're talking about professionals here, who know what they're getting into.

First we have Frank Beddor, who's launched a project to complete his fifth and final Hatter M graphic novel, a spin-off from his successful Looking Glass Wars prose trilogy. Beddor's books have been primarily self-funded, I believe, and his previous Kickstarter for the fourth Hatter M graphic novel was his first attempt at crowd-funding things. Many of his rewards are enticing, including not only original art and a promise of getting written into future stories but also unusual items like a custom milliner's hat like the one used in the story and a Princess Alyss maquette prototype. Beddor also established the series several years before Kickstarter and is coming to the table with a decent fan-base, both of his material as well as the original Alice in Wonderland stories it's derived from.

Probably the biggest challenge he faces is that his reward tiers tend to heavily favor higher backers. This project includes four new books in total (one graphic novel, one prose novel, an art book and a "Millinery Academy Handbook") but the only way to get both the graphic novel and, say, the Handbook is to pledge $110 so you also get the art book and the prose novel. And while you can get a paperback version of the graphic novel at $21, the prose book is only available in hardcover starting at the $35 level. I don't know Beddor's costs on any of this, obviously, but it seems that he's setting the project up geared towards existing, fairly devoted fans. It doesn't strike me as conducive to folks with anything resembling a casual interest, or first-time backers.

Our second example is Ryan Estrada, whose project is based around a story he's been trying to get together for several years now. It's a series of stories he's written in which the villain of one story becomes the hero of the next. It sounds like an interesting take on the "everybody is the hero of their own story" idea, but spelled out through 18 different people. And while Estrada has written the whole thing himself, he's enlisted a cadre of talented artists to illustrate the different stories. Folks like Amy T. Falcone, Brittney Sabo and Carolyn Nowak to name a few. Estrada's also made something of a name for himself, although more for his own personal style and mission than with a single character or intellectual property, so he's got a fan-base to work from as well.

My guess is Estrada's biggest challenge lies in the opposite end of the spectrum. You can give him one dollar, and receive all 18 stories in a digital DRM-free format. So while Estrada's project has over twice as many backers as Beddor's, he's raised about $7000 less (as of this writing). His lower threshold for entry is apparently making it more difficult to raise enough to reach his $25000 goal, even as he attracts more attention and interest. The other aspect working against Estrada, it seems to me, is the focus on digital rewards; he's providing a lot of stories at lower tier levels but they're primarily available electronically with little in the way of tangible print items. In particular absence is the main Broken Telephone story itself; it's not available in print format at any level. So while people might be willing to drop a dollar or twenty for a digital set of comics, the project really has little to appeal to folks who have no interest in digital delivery comics.

That Beddor and Estrada are coming at their respective projects from two different angles, and are facing pretty much diametrically opposed challenges, strikes me as a fascinating study in how Kickstarters work. Beddor is looking at a smaller audience but one from a vigorously devoted fan-base, while Estrada seems to be banking on his own personality and word of mouth to win over enough casual readers. He's not going for fans as much as he's just setting the barriers so low that it's easy to reach the masses at large. But they're both about half-way through their campaigns and have each raised over half of what they're aiming for.

I suspect both will achieve their goals, although not with some of those spectacular 1000% results. But I think we should keep an eye on them to see just how well they do in these campaigns. Maybe we should check back in a few weeks to do some follow-up when they're both done.  

You know what I like about Ryan Estrada? The man has no fear. Or, if he has, he's repeatedly been able to push past it and live life as a grand adventure in the best way possible. Those of us who take a regular job for the security of a paycheck and/or health insurance, and dip our toes into the water by writing a blog or doing a webcomic in our spare time generally don't charge ahead because of the what ifs. "What if I fail? What if I'm not as good as I think I am? What if people think I'm a fool for trying this?" Yeah, it takes some courage to put yourself out there as a webcomic artist or a blogger or whatever, but that is nothing compared to Estrada. He just charges ahead with his ideas. They might fail, they might not, but either way he walks away with an experience.

And I mean that in the very literal sense. This guy makes Indiana Jones look like a wimp. When he says, "I thought I might die" he means it in a very literal sense. Ask him about his 2004 trip to Japan.

His latest venture, perhaps a bit more mundane than that, is The Whole Story. Fortunately for us, he loves online comics, which means even his mundane adventures lead to more material for us readers! What he's done is get together work from a number of indie comics folks, from Box Brown to Spike Trotman to Dorothy Gambrell to too many other people for me to remember offhand, and got them to make new comics. Not ongoing serials, but a bunch of done-in-one stories. However long the creators need/want to go on to tell the story they need.

And he's selling them online in a name-your-own-price, DRM-free format.

You want to pay a dollar for hundreds of pages of work? Ok. You think it's worth $10? Sure. $100? Great. And what you get is a file (or files, depending on how many different stories you want) that you can save to your iPad or laptop or desktop or whatever. Throw them on a micro-SD card to read on your phone if you like.

And, yes, theoretically, that means you could pirate them very easily. But Estrada is betting that you think it'll be worth more than that, and all the contributors will get paid fairly.

I haven't read ALL of the material he's making available, but there's quite a variety even in the ones I read. While I think his own The Kind is the most touching and fun, I like the concept behind the two Fusion books: with Korean artist Nam Dong Yoon's consent, he's taken some of his stories -- written in Korean -- and had other comic creators write scripts over top of them having no concept what the original story was or what other collaborators were doing. They make for a very interesting and diverse mix of material that still manages to hang together cohesively, in part thanks to Estrada's editing and in part to Nam's consistency in art. And just to prove Nam's a talented storyteller in his own right, one of the other options available is the more straightforward translation of You Can Do It, Dong Gu which has two original tales by the creator.

Given the creators involved here, there shouldn't be any real question about the talent or quality of stories here. The only question might be which ones' personal styles fit with your own preferences, and what you feel their individual contributions are worth.

It's a fairly bold online initiative, and I hope Estrada will see it succeed. The pay-what-you-want option will only be available through July 23, so you don't want to dally too long on this, but Estrada promises that he'll do a financial report-out afterwards, so it'll definitely be interesting to see how well it works and whether it might be financially viable as an option.

You don't see many folks charging forward with ideas like this. It might work fantastically. It might wind up gaining Estrada absolutely nothing. But it's that kind of bold thinking that I'm thrilled to see in comics. He's taking a chance that not many people are willing to take and, with the promise of relative openness in his financials, I think there's A LOT to be gained from keeping an eye on him. Not just in this initiative, but everything that he's doing. Because it's the risk-takers that push the boundaries and show others where the paths forward are.

But that's just my summary. Go check out The Whole Story for yourself!

OK, you know that Jim Steranko has taken the Twitterverse by storm recently, and relaying stories from his own past that are just as amazing as the ones he wrote and drew into his comics. Counterfeiting, fighting with whole motorcycle gangs, bitch-slapping Bob Kane... There are more than a few people questioning, "Why aren't THESE being made into comic book stories?" The man has unquestionably led an amazing life, living on his own terms.

Now here's the interesting comparison: Ryan Estrada. He's only in his early 30s so he doesn't have quite the long history Steranko has, and clearly has a different set of life experiences. He hasn't, so far as I know, fought a motorcycle gang or had the opportunity to bitch-slap Bob Kane. But he has spent many years living life on his own terms, and has an impressive list of personal experiences than can be (and in many cases have been) written as comics.

There's a generational difference between Estrada and Steranko, of course, and there's something of a genre difference as well. Steranko's life reads more life an urban pulp novel, while Estrada has more of the jungle adventure thing going on. They both have different outlooks, so it seems a little strange to compare them so directly, but there are so few people who really live life on their own terms that they wind up in something of an elite group.

At my day job, we had a new employee start recently. We had a team lunch, and went around the room telling a little about our personal lives. My turn came up, and I noted that I had just moved to 300 miles away to Chicago, was training for my second marathon, and really liked comics and had a couple columns over on MTV's website. As I passed on to the next person, some of my co-workers then chimed in about how I'd written/published a couple books and appeared in The Avengers movie and got struck by lighting. The next person then added that she's never going after me again because my life looked much more exciting than hers.

But, from my vantage point, I still pale in comparison to Steranko and Estrada as far as living my own life on my own terms. As great as Steranko's and Estrada's comics are, and whatever stories they can relay of their own lives, I think the real inspiration people should take from them is to do what you need to do for yourself. Live a life that lets you tell you great stories about what you've done, whether that's escaping from a sealed crate at the bottom of a river or chasing ghosts in a local village.

Ryan Estrada has submitted a few books through the comiXology Submit program. Ostensibly, it's a good way for comic creators without a "name" publisher to get their works into folks' hands digitally. I talked about how comiXology is THE place for digital comics distribution a couple weeks back.

Estrada recognized this and submitted several of his books. These are books that were not only done, but ones that he had already distributed digitally. Books that, in 2013, grossed him $72,000. That's not net, mind you, but it's still a chunk of change. And all the books with free of any DRM restricitions.

Theoretically, more people would see his books through comiXology. That was the point I was making in that earlier post, right? So shouldn't Estrada be making a boatload of money now? Not to put to fine a point on it, but he hasn't. He's made less than ten bucks.

Estrada provides the fulls details here, but the upshot is it took months and months to get any response at all from comiXology and most of his books were rejected for pretty vaguely defined reasons that weren't much more detailed than "bad art."

It's of course comiXology's right to accept/reject any stories they like based on whatever conditions they like. They could say, "We're not accepting any books from creators without an 'M' in their name." And they don't have to tell creators why their work is rejected either. They could have just one guy making the decisions, and just sending out Yea and Nay form letters. Do Marvel and DC even send out submission rejection letters any more? (Serious question; I don't honestly know.) ComiXology is a private company and free to digitally distribute anything they like.

I'm not sitting here judging comiXology and/or their submission policies and practices. But Estrada's piece highlights that they are not necessarily the end-all and be-all of digital comics distribution. Estrada made almost nine times the money just doing his own thing than he did going through "official" channels. It's a perfect example of how a creator might not really get any more exposure through comiXology than what s/he was doing before.

That's not to say that it shouldn't be tried; any additional income in the inherently unstable world of independent comic creators is a good thing. But it's not really the panacea that some people make it out to be.

Also, don't forget to enter my Valentine's/Blogiversary Contest! The deadline is this Friday!

I've said before that I'm here for comics that Ryan Estrada is attached to and No Rules Tonight is no exception. It isn't really a sequel to Banned Book Club, but given that it has the same authors -- Kim Hyun Sook and Estrada -- and another biographic story of Kim's that takes place in 1984, not long after the events of Banned Book Club, it's hard not to separate the two. But while Banned Book Club focused on the politics and trying to navigate/subvert them, No Rules Tonight focuses more on the emotional aspects of living in that type of environment and what you might do when you take advantage of the moments of freedom you are afforded.

Once again, we mainly follow Kim during her college days, particularly her time with a "Masked Folk Dance Team" when, at the end of the term, they went on an overnight hiking trip in the mountains. The organizer, however, is arrested the day before and the group is left scrambling to pull together plans at the last minute. Things are less than ideal, as they didn't really coordinate on bringing food or water, some students wore flip-flops for the hike, others negelected to bring a sleeping bag or anything. No one is seriously hurt or injured, but it's not a physically pleasant trip for most of them.

But it is a trip in which they all learn about what freedom means to each of them. "Here we are, on Christmas Eve. No parents, no teachers, hours from the nearest police station. So I ask again: what would you do with one night of freedom?" They all answer that differently ultimately, but the answers all revolve around being honest with yourself about who you are.

The emotional hooks in the story are solid, but I found some of the political messaging -- which, as I noted earlier, is not the focus here -- more interesting. The notion that their original curfew was imposed by the United States military and when the Korean military took over, they just kept it in place. "Keeping folks apart at night kept them from commiserating over their problems and discussing anti-fascist ideas... like hopes, dreams, or independence." Or that they banned the works of Marxist philosopher Bill Martin... or rather, they intended to but got him confused with children's book author Bill Martin, Jr. who wrote Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? illustrated by Eric Carle. And, funny twist... the Texas State Board of Education made the exact same mistake. In 2010.

As I said, that's not the focus of No Rules Tonight. It's definitely an interesting and engaging emotional story about Kim and her companions, all twelve of whom have their own story arcs. It certainly makes me thankful we don't live in a society like that here in the US, even though I have pretty much all the privledges I can get and likely wouldn't be cracked down on to nearly the extent that anyone in the book is. I've very much always been a proponent of being my authentic self, and being forced to act as something not that would be an awful burden.

No Rules Tonight is by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada and was released last week. It's published by Penguin Random House and retials for $17.99 US (paperback) or $24.99 US (hardcover).

"No matter what you pledge, I'm gonna give you these comics. No matter how much you pay, even if you don't choose a reward tier, I will find you and I will give you comics. That's just a fact!"

That's what Ryan Estrada is telling potential Kickstarter backers as he's standing on a (I presume) Korean rooftop in the rain. And even though he's standing in one place for the duration of the video, his excitement and energy seems boundless.

I talked a bit about his Whole Story project from last summer. He basically said the same thing, "Pay what you want, and I'll give you these comics." I've caught in other interviews where he noted that some people paid him, got the comics and, after reading them, gave him more money because they liked them so much. Using Kickstarter to do the same thing is, at first blush, kind of an odd choice. Their normal rewards system is very much set up on a tiered payment structure; the more you contribute, the more you get. What Estrada has done with it, then, is basically make all his new comics available at the $1 level (the lowest a Kickstarer project will allow) but then provides stickers and print copies and original art as you increase your pledge. But his stated goal of giving you his comics is universal.

In fact, he's gotten so many pledges already and has been so thankful to those people that he's given them some of his comics already, more than two weeks before the Kickstarter campaign is complete! The comics I've read from him are good -- both the ones from last year and the review copies of Plagued and The Dog's Sins he sent me this past week. They're not all by Estrada personally -- as he notes in the video, he's basically going around asking people who's work he likes to do cool comics.

I could do a proper review of the books here, but I'm not going to. You want to see what you think of his comics? Go over to his Google+ page where he's posted a bunch of them; you can read a lot of them for free to see for yourself. What I think is more noteworthy here is that any sort of pledge will get you the collection of books. A bare minimum of 300 pages of comics, even if you only pledge one dollar. It's kind of an anthology thing, but the only theme really is people who make good comics. There's almost certainly something you'll like in there, since Estrada's interests are pretty diverse and he's just on the hunt for good work.

You know, after my divorce a few years back, I started making some changes in my outlook towards life. There was a lot of "playing it safe" and "doing what you're supposed to do" and all that. And, divorce aside, I had been doing okay for myself. But just okay. I've made no secret that it was Bob the Squirrel comic that kicked me off my ass, and got me back into the world of the living and I think I've mentioned once or twice that it was "what are you waiting for" post from Seth Godin that finally got me working on my first book. The last few years when I've been getting more into the idea of living my life in a deliberate way and taking more of a 'just do it' attitude have been very fruitful in many ways.

And what's interesting is seeing how that manifests in other people as well, Estrada being a prime example. He's been living a fantastic life and has really been making a name for himself in just doing some great comics work. From the standpoint of the stories he creates, of course, but also his experimentation with different publishing models. And it works! His Kickstarter, still ongoing, raised over double the funds he was asking for in less than 24 hours! He's at something like eight times over as of this writing, and he's not even half-way through the campaign.

I've seen a number of friends and acquaintences in the past couple years start letting go of old ideas and dogma, and living more on their own terms, and I'm seeing them achieve more success and (more importantly) more happiness than before. Now maybe that's partially due to my personal focus moving away from Negative Nellies or so-called "toxic relationships" and concentrating on creative people who are just out there trying to do good work, but it's uplifting and inspiring and energizing to see that going on more and more.

Some of the Kickstarters I've backed have been pretty-down-to-the-wire on whether or not they'd get funded. Estrada's set, like I said; whether you opt to back him or not, his project's funded already. But what I'd like to suggest is just supporting those comic creators who are doing great work and enjoying what they're doing. There are many talented folks out there who turn in fantastic comics, but can be miserable, bitchy SOBs. I'm not saying they don't deserve any support, especially if they can still turn out good comics, but let's put our energies in 2013 to helping make successes out of people who deserve it AND will be happy and excited to do more of the same!

If you look on Amazon, you'll find that there are exactly four books about webcomics available. The most recent of them was published in April 2008. Brad Guigar has a new one that is JUST coming out now, but I don't believe it's available in print quite yet. Of the four available, one is a history and the other three are more How To guides. And of those three, two of them are beginners' guides that seem to be aimed at someone who just saw xkcd for the first time and thought it might be fun to do a webcomic. How to Make Webcomics by Scott Kurtz, Kris Straub, Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar by contrast is for cartoonists. And, while it does provide insights from four professional webcomickers, it's still largely presented as a single perspective. That is, from humorists who've been doing webcomics for a decade or longer.

Don't get me wrong. It is an excellent, excellent book. But they flatly admit in the book that they don't have much experience in dramatic, long-form serial storytelling or strictly biographic works or editorials and so on, and I know I've heard at least Kurtz and Guigar note elsewhere that it would be impossible to mimic their breaking in stories simply by virtue of the fact that the web has changed several times over since they first started in the late 1990s.

Ryan Estrada is, as I've noted before, a powerful force in comics in part because he gets shit done. "Hey, I've got an idea!" Boom, put it out there and see if it works. "Hey, I've got another idea!" Boom, put it out there. "And another!" Boom. They might work, they might not, but he's working from a pragmatic perspective that he's going to keep trying things, keep what winds up working and discarding what doesn't. He threw out a tutorial recently on "How to make and sell ebooks of your comics in like 12 1/2 seconds." It was simple and straight-forward, and struck me as pretty blindingly obvious for anyone who's ever even considered making a digital version of their book. Yet it garnered a bit of attention because no one else seems to have actually sat down to write this stuff out.

Here's the thing, though: these perspectives, as well as my own, are digitally biased. The people championing webcomics and digital comics the loudest are largely the people who have been championing webcomics and digital comics the longest. (Mark Waid seems to be the biggest exception here.) I don't think it's preaching to the choir exactly, but the people most qualified to write/talk about this material have so far out-paced everyone else that we start running the risk of taking everyone's knowledge for granted. The Kurtz/Straub/Kellett/Guigar book came across to me as well-written with solid information, but maybe that's because I'm too aware of/involved in this. Maybe it's far, far above the heads of people just trying to get in.

What Estrada was writing about seems almost self-evident to me, but that it received the attention it did clearly proves otherwise. It was a piece that folks removed from webcomics and digital comics could see as wholely original. It provides an easy framework to get started without getting into a lot of esoterica nuances and complexities that almost certainly scare off a lot of people.

Now, I wouldn't expect my Aunt Barbara to know anything about webcomics. My guess is that she hasn't read a comic of any sort in decades. Similarly, I wouldn't expect her to do much investigation into anything about webcomics. Not really her thing. But what about the guy who's been eager for a chance to draw the X-Men since he was twelve, and only after he started getting into his twenties that it occurred to him to do something on his own? That type of guy is going to be completely familiar with the process of creating comics, but perhaps not the specifics of creating one for digital distribution. That's the discussion Estrada -- and as far as I can tell, no one else -- is having.

I don't expect I'll start trying to horn in on that; I'm talking about the stuff that I personally find interesting. I don't care to rehash stuff I've known for years. Unless there's a new twist or angle on it, it's just old hat for me. How exactly Guigar covers all this in his new book, I don't know. But even if he takes the exact same approach Estrada does, we're still only looking at only two people talking about webcomics development at some intermediary level. Seems to me that there ought to be more.

Not necessarily in print -- print books about anything web-related tend to get dated really quickly -- but in whatever venue(s) are accessible by those not already ensconsced in webcomics. Is that a podcast, or a YouTube series, or a series of blog posts, or...? I don't know. But the more I watch Estrada do his thing, the more impressed I am with him overall, and I think he's an excellent role model that just-starting-to-get-into-web-stuff creators should look to emulate. And maybe some veteran webcomickers can pick up a few things, too!

Ryan Estrada (who's been known to shake up people's ideas on comics before) had a Tweet last week that I immediately liked...

I just realized that the entirety of DC and Marvel's output is a decades-long guest comic week.

— Ryan Estrada (@ryanestrada) February 22, 2013

The guest strip, if you're not very familiar with it, is something of a tradition in webcomics in which a creator takes a bit of time away from his/her comic (sometimes for vacation, often because they're forced to for health and/or financial reason) so they ask a few friends to contribute a strip or two. The idea is that, if you can get five or six friends to each contribute one strip, you can continue the strip's momentum when you're not able to make any updates personally.

Frequently, the guest creators are given free reign to do whatever they like. Many try to match the style and tenor of the original, just using their own artistic style, but some go off to do bizarre interpretations just for the sake of providing a new take.

Now think about that in the context of Marvel circa 1970. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee had been working on the Fantastic Four just shy of ten years and Thor almost as long. Regardless of where you stand on the "who did what" debate, there's no question that those books reflected their unique vision. Then Kirby left Marvel. Art chores were given to a few different guys, mostly John Buscema. About a year later, Lee took some time off to work with director Alain Resnais, so the books were written by Archie Goodwin and Gerry Conway, under the editorship of Roy Thomas. Thomas later picked up some of the writing duties himself. There's nothing inherently wrong about those issues, but they're definitely NOT the same stories that Lee and Kirby were doing.

Even though John Romita tried aping Kirby's style as much as he could in those immediate FF issues, and even though inker Joe Sinnott carried through to provide some consistency, it was still a different book. It had different emphasis, different pacing. It wasn't what Kirby would've done. It was as if Kirby had called Romita and asked him to do a few guest issues. As Lee was also in charge of handing out story assignments, that is in fact literally what happened with Goodwin and Conway. Lee said he needed some time off to write a movie, and he asked those two writers to fill in for him. And that's pretty much been what's been happening since then.

"Hey, George Pérez, you want to do a stint on the FF?"

"Hey, John Byrne, you want to take a crack at the FF?"

"Hey, Jim Lee, how about a few FF issues?"

You regularly hear, when a new creator comes on to a long-running book like these, something along the lines of, "I'd like to take the character back to his roots." And the reason why that's said SO OFTEN is because everybody's interpretation of what the original creators were doing is a little different. And the key here isn't that the new guys are doing something they think harkens back to the original, but that they're not the original creators in the first place. They just stepped in to help out for a bit, while the original creator is taking a break to write a movie. Or because he needed to do some work that paid a little better. Or -- at this late a date -- because he died.

I think everyone reading this is pretty conscious of the fact that the folks currently working on Thor and the FF don't actually own the characters, but I think putting it in the context of "a decades-long guest comic week" really hammers the point home by putting a slightly different 9and perhaps more relatable) spin on the legal arguments that often get bandied about.

I've said before that it's a good idea to keep an eye on Ryan Estrada because he's often involved in something interesting. He's helped prove that true once again with the just-released Banned Book Club.

Ryan has led an interesting life. He's set himself on fire, slept in a typhoon, kayaked across the ocean, and thrown away a million dollars. Many of these he's created comics about. But it turns out that his wife, Kim Hyun Sook, has done some amazing things on her own... and somehow forgot to mention them to him until they'd known each other for fifteen years! And that's where Banned Book Club comes in.

The story covers Hyun Sook's first weeks of college in the early 1980s. After meeting some fellow students, she was invited to a book club but was surprised to discover the books they discussed were all ones that were banned by the Korean government. Although she was initially trying to be a model student, she kept finding more and more ways that the government was corrupt and became more and more active in protest movements. Things got more and more dangerous for her and her friends with a growing number of confrontations with military police.

The main story is history. It took place decades ago. But as the Yeogno and the Yangban story the masked folk dance team performs early in the book illustrates, people often need to use history as a way to hide their political messages. "Why do you think Shakespare wrote about long-dead kings? Because he could get away with making points about the people he wasn't allowed to condemn directly. And many people still use Shakespeare that way today... You can learn a lot about history by figuring out what people wanted to hide."

I don't think they're trying to hide any political messages against the current South Korean government in Banned Book Club. But I do think that, with the international trend of swinging wildly towards authoritarianism from the past few years, there are a lot of useful messages here that can and should be paid close attention to. "They want us scared and innocent, right? Give them what they want, and we're invisible." This might prove to be damned useful advice in the near future.

Ryan, to his credit, opted not to illustrate this story, instead choosing Korean artist Ko Hyung-Ju. It's very much a story of and about Koreans, particularly Hyun Sook, so Ryan seems to stay out of the way as much as possible here. As far as I can tell, he was mostly just facilitating the functional/practical aspects of crafting the narrative in a comic format. But with Hyung-Ju serving up art duties, the story is about as Korean as it can be while still being published in the US. While I'm not familiar with how much comic-making experience Hyung-Ju had prior to this, the narrative flows very smoothly and his characters all manage to remain visually distinctive despite many of them being cursorily pretty similar.

This is a really powerful book. Certainly on its own merits given how little Korean history we typically get here in the US, but also in relation to the increasingly dictatorial approach the federal government has been taking since 2017. What should Americans be on the lookout for and why? Where might that lead? Why aren't we taught much about Korea in school in the first place? Why does Trump seem to hold up North Korea's Kim Jong-un as a model of leadership? Why is it that wearing a scientifically-proven-to-help mask discouraged by right-leaning politicians during a pandemic?

"In times like this, no act is apolitical." Go read Banned Book Club.

I've used Ryan Estrada as an example of people who are doing some creative stuff in the business of comics before. (And his comics work ain't too shabby either!) Here's another neat idea that I'm going to unceremoniously swipe from his Google+ page and share with you here...

The drawing wall at my comic-con booth was a big success!

The idea was this- Jerzy Drozd talked about how looking busy at your table helps lower the pressure for people who want to stop at your table without feeling forced to buy something. However, I didn’t want to lose interaction!

So I made a plexiglass wall and bought a set of board markers. I drew on the back, and invited visitors to draw on the front! Together, we drew a monster party! (I live-colored their monsters as they drew them)

It got people to stop, and I could introduce my comics to their friends while they drew.

And while people rarely bought a comic right after drawing, they remembered the interaction and at the end of the day I had a whole bunch of people return to my table to pick up my book!

Next month, I’ll make some tweaks... add more wall, and get a white sheet behind it so it’s easier to see. A fun way to interact with potential readers!

I think Estrada's hit upon a fantastic idea, and one that ANY artist can set up at their convention booth!

I just read this piece about Pearls Before Swine author Stephan Pastis. In it, he's quoted as saying...

Now, to make it, you have to go that web route. Many of those guys, from Penny Arcade to Cyanide and Happiness to The Perry Bible Fellowship — which are all excellent — claim to make a living, but how do you know? I can tell you that even if someone does a strip and it’s fairly popular online, the money is not online. I question a lot of claims about the money being made, and the question remains that if things continue to go that route for newspapers, and you have to make money online, how do you do it?

Pastis has never struck me as a stupid man. Granted, I've never met him in person, but from the interviews I've read, he seems reasonably well-spoken and thoughtful, and he seemed to make a pretty good living as a lawyer before taking up cartooning. So why is it so hard for a newspaper cartoonist like himself to wrap his head around the idea that webcomickers can earn a living?

I mean, he's got to know it's a different business model, right? Even if he doesn't know what that model is or how to exploit it, he has to know that, because they don't have a syndicate paying them, they have to get their money from somewhere else. Why is it so hard to believe that doing something BESIDES syndication might work?

Look at television. (Conceptually. I wouldn't recommend actually watching it.) There are, and have been for several decades now, three basic business models at work. 1) Give the programming away for free and have advertisers pay to include their commercials amid the free programming. This is what the main networks do. 2) Give the programming away for free and periodically ask viewers for donations. This is what PBS does. (Despite what some politicians might tell you, government funding only accounts for 12% of PBS' annual budget.) 3) Charge for programming. This is the model cable and satellite services use.

Three very different approaches to making money, even though the basic audience experience -- sitting on the couch and turning the TV on -- remains the same.

Newspaper strip cartoonists get paid by their syndicate. Everyone is very secretive about precisely how much, but it's basically on a per paper basis. For every newspaper that picks up your comic strip, you get an additional amount of money. It's often a little more for larger newspapers and a little less for smaller newspapers. But it boils down to the syndicate paying the cartoonist based on how many people have access to your strip. (Not how many people read it! There's no way to judge how many people who pick up the paper actually read any given strip, nor is there any way to tell how many people pick up and read the strips without buying a paper.)

Webcomickers generally don't get money based on access or readership. In fact, how much they earn (Note: earn. As in, they do all their own work, not get paid for doing something for somebody else!) is largely dependent on what they do ABOVE AND BEYOND their comic strip! The strips themselves are a loss leader to get people to buy books and t-shirts and mousepads and refrigerator magnets and whatever else. They also get money through advertising. Sometimes freelance commissions. Sometimes donations.

None of this is news. This has been known and touted by many webcartoonists FOR THE PAST DECADE! This is not some arcane secret! This is not something so utterly bleeding edge that no one knows what they're doing! This is how things work! Not only is not hard to grasp the concept; there are plenty of cartoonists out there who expressly and openly talked about HOW they make money! What's more -- many of them EVEN PUT THEIR FINANCIAL INFORMATION ONLINE!

Side anecdote: Ryan Estrada just had his fiance uncomfortably ask him about his finances. He told her to Google it, and the first thing that came up was my column on MTV's website where I posted everything. (With his permission.) THAT is precisely how easy it is to find this information!

Seriously, why is it THAT difficult to understand? Why are newspaper strip cartoonists being that willfully ignorant/obstinate about this? Shouldn't they be investigating it MORE, knowing that newspapers are dying off and, hey, maybe their income stream might dry up in the next decade? Maybe not entirely, but enough that they'll need to look at other sources of income. All we're talking about is a simple Google search! Can't you guys even do that?

• Ryan Estrada tells us a bit of his personal history, and how he went from living The Dream^TM to chasing HIS OWN dream. At the end, he decides: "I’m gonna go make some stuff. I hope you like it."
• Nikki Burch and Jim Meyer put together this comic detailing the history of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The way the captioning works kind of hinders its effectiveness as a comic, but I'm pointing to it in large part because it's an important issue that could have a devastating impact on the environment. I mean, it sounded to me like a phenomenally bad idea even before I knew all the issues behind it!
• This is several years old now, but I just came across Rivkah's excellent notes about comic panels and pacing. It speaks most directly to manga, but the ideas are useful for all types of comics.
• Finally, Rodrigo Baeza presents us with some original art used in the 1974 San Diego Comic Con program book. Yes, that's a Jack Kirby Etrigan fighting a Russ Myers Broom-Hilda over a Charles Schulz Linus and Snoopy. Clearly, one of the best jam pages ever!

Alright, it's time for an update on what I'm doing, and where you can find more of my work!

• Last weekend, I was interviewed on the Webcomic Beacon podcast. It was originally broadcast live, but they've got it available for download here if you missed it or want to save a copy for posterity. I had a great time chatting with hosts Fes and Mark, and we wound up going a bit over the usual hour for the show.
• Back in January, Comic Book Bin published a piece of mine on the state of digital comics. I also wrote a state of webcomics, as well, but that's not up quite yet. Theoretically, you'd be able to find that through here if/when it does go live.
• Coming in March is the debut of a new comics magazine called The Drawn Word. I've got a column on European creators; my first one looks at Enki Bilal and his famous Nikopol Trilogy. (Fantastic stuff if you haven't read it!) It will be available via Graphicly; my publisher there has hinted at other venues as well, but I don't know if those have been finalized yet.
• Later in March (I think) should be the next issue of The Jack Kirby Collector with my latest "Incidental Iconography" column. (Note to self: write your latest "Incidental Iconography" column.)
  
• Kleefeld on Webcomics is still going strong over at MTV Geek. It's still just me writing, but it seems to be kind of popular. (At least, relative to my other work!) Recently, I've looked at Krishna Sadasivam's mentoring program, the fragmentation of webcomics, and Ryan Estrada's finances.
• I've still got plans for my book on Harry Blackstone comics, but I've been kind of busy lately and it's gotten relegated to the back burner repeatedly. (Definite paying gigs win out over I might break even on this projects.) I'm still working on it, but it's going to be a while before it's complete. Since there's not exactly a vocal clamoring for it, I'm pretty sure this won't be a problem for anyone!
• Oh, and of course, I still continue to blog here at Kleefeld on Comics every day!

• The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium has posted a listing of all their events through the end of the year. Normally, these would only be availble in person, but this year, they're all being held online.
• I don't know that I've mentioned it previously but Rhymes With Orange's Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo have been playing with making interactive cartoons in Mental Canvas. The comics are created in a virtual 3-D space that viewers can navigate around to encounter different jokes and gags. Piccolo will actually be doing a live demo/webinar on September 15 at 1:00pm ET. You can register for the free event here.
• Ken Eppstein has posted the results of another survey he did on creators who table at shows. "The primary goal of this survey was to get some context on how artists participate with these transient marketplaces, what are the goals they have related to that participation, and what barriers they face in participation." He doesn't get into a whole lot of analysis here, but the results suggest a lot of flux was happening even before the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into public gatherings.
• Over at BoingBoing, Thomas Dunn has a nice piece on David F. Walker's and Sanford Greene's Bitter Root.
• 10 years of comics in Russian libraries. Pros and cons. Featuring Scott McCloud, Paul Gravette, Alexander Kunin, Stepan Shmytinsky, Dmitry Yakovlev, and Mikhail Wiesel. September 5th, 9:15-10:00pm Moscow time. How many more details do you need?
• Channel eNews has a brief report on how Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Hyung-Ju Ko -- the creative team behind Banned Book Club -- met with Changwon's Mayor Heo Seong-moo.

I stumbled across this post of mine from 2007 in which I complain about the state of comic news. Namely, that I was making a few active attempt to follow as much as I could and I still missed even the basic announcements about some book releases. I've been noodling the idea again recently because I saw that Ryan Estrada posted a short video last week in which he and his wife are unboxing their latest book... which I hadn't even heard about yet.

He followed that up the other day with an entire song that he and a friend had written for the book!

I double checked many of the "usual suspects" when it comes to comics news and found nothing about the book at all. (As a curious aside, many of the specific references in my 2007 piece feel incredibly dated. Wizard Magazine ended in 2011, Newsarama is technically still around but has been a shell of its of former self for at least a decade, Jen Contino stopped writing for Sequential Tart five years ago after two decades -- I don't know what she's doing now. Amazon had back then recently started their "You Might Also Like" feature which was nacent enough to be lousy, but it got better only to have since gotten much worse. Google Alerts is supposedly still a thing, but I haven't seen/heard of anyone who's found it functionally useful for a decade.) I had a come to the conclusion some years back that my best option was to follow creators I was interested in directly on social media as there was by no means any guarantee that any 'normal' comics news outlets would have any coverage of what I'm personally interested in. That's proved challenging, however, since I dropped Facebook and Twitter (before it was rebranded as X), both of which started serving up more garbage than useful/interesting creator updates anyway.

I'm opting to pass on BlueSky since everything I've heard paints it as having all the same problems Twitter had before I left. I can't stand the TikTok and Instagram formats. I follow a few comics people on LinkedIn, but that's hardly a mecca of creator content. I'm on Mastodon, which also isn't used very heavily by the comics community. As you can see, I've gotten some updates from creators on YouTube, although based on the trends I've seen in what they've been serving up over the past six months or so, I expect I'll be presented with more garbage than anything useful within the next year. I'm seeing more creators get back to email newsletters and re-adding RSS feeds to their own sites; I'm hoping those trends continue before we get to the point where social media becomes useless to me.

Logically, I get why all this is happening, and the basic challenge of being a creator and trying to get the word out about your next/current project in an absolute avalanche of information and announcements. It's all indicative of larger problems with news and communication more broadly and, as I've already suggested, a problem that I know I've certainly been wrestling with for several years now. And because I've been wrestling with it for so long already and haven't resolved it since the landscape has been constantly shifting, I don't expect to resolve it any time soon either.

I suppose my point here -- besides just taking some time to vent -- is to suggest that you keep an active eye/ear out for comics news beyond a handful of websites, and that you continue to search for news, that you don't assume it'll be served up to you through your favorite outlet. It is indeed more work on your part, but you get -- for my money -- better, more satisfying results. Because I can guarantee you right now that reading about a single night without a curfew in Korea is going to be more interesting to me than whatever it is the Justice League are doing.

Ken Eppstein of Nix Comics recently ran a survey of comic artists to look at their identity as artists and their relationship with nonprofit organizations (like CBLDF and Hero Initiative). He posted the results almost two weeks ago but I haven't heard much chatter about it, so I thought I'd try to bring up some points here. Particularly in light of Eppstein's survey of non-artists, which I'll also get to in a bit.

First off, Eppstein does note that his results are somewhat skewed by virtue of how he got respondents in the first place. Namely, the vast majority of them came from his personal contacts. He had one question that asked if they identified as member of a frequently/historically marginalized group and, with over 57% answering "no", that implies that most of his respondents were able-bodied, cis hetero, white men. (Eppstein also acknowledges this is a failure of outreach on his part.) And while this demographic may be more reflective of "mainstream" comics (i.e. Marvel and DC) it certainly does not encompass comics writ large.

That caveat out of the way, there are some numbers that I find particularly interesting. Of the 240 respondents, over half included "full time job" as one of their sources of income and another fifth included "part time job." "Freelance art" was called out as a separate category response, suggesting that those first two categories do not include making comics for most people. However, half of respondents did also say their day job was "comics related" but this could obviously include working in comic shops, in the marketing department of a publisher, on the line at a printing company, etc. But it seems like we're looking at roughly three-quarters of these artists that seem to be unable to make a living solely through making comics. The average was a little shy of three separate sources of income per respondent.

This is supported by a question on the number of hours worked on comics per week. While the pandemic has skewed the numbers a bit, as much of this survey was conducted while Diamond was shut down entirely, both the average and the median number of hours devoted to making comics per week topped out around 20. Basically the equivalent of a part-time job. Which either means that artists can't afford the time to put a "typical" 40-hour work week towards comics, or they can't afford the financial hit from the opportunity cost of not working another part- or full-time job. Either way, they're basically making the decision to limit the amount of time they work on comics because they simply can't afford to devote more time to them.

Honestly, I have trouble reading much of substance out of the responses on the questions bout nonprofit organizations. Eppstein calls out, "one respondent commented that all of the services, functions and values were framed as positives and wondered why they wouldn’t select all in every category" and I have to agree. It looks like over half liked seven or more of the ten values presented. There were no questions about assigning priorities, which I think may have helped to parse the data better.

I mentioned the non-artist survey earlier, too. These questions were more of a "Family Feud" type where non-artists were asked to guess how they thought artists would respond. Overall, non-artists guessed a little got a little more than third accurately. The very best score, however, came in at still under two-thirds accurate. Considering that, here again, Eppstein's respondents largely came from his social circle, it would suggest that these people did have more than a typical knowledge and/or familiarity with the comics industry. This is backed up by only five respondents identifying themselves as "not a fan" of comics.

It strikes me that there is a pretty massive gap between what comic artists actually do and how comics fit into their lives versus how they're perceived by others. I mean, I like to think I know a fair amount about comics. I'm friends with Eisner winners, I've chatted with Marvel Editors-in-Chief, I've had lunch with nationally syndicated cartoonists... And I scored less than fifty percent. Eppstein does claim a respondent trying to answer these accurately is "actually a fairly difficult task" but it does point to how people might rely on stereotypes and broad assumptions in lieu of any real (even anecdotal) data. He also promises a longer essay on how these stereotypes can cause problems in making positive social changes in the industry. Particularly in light of the recent spate of sexual misconduct issues that have been in the news the past few weeks, I am definitely looking forward to that! (Read Asher Elbein's excellent Daily Beast article for how the economic exploitation inherent in the comics industry encourages this sexual misconduct!)

One of the issues we have in the United States more generally is simply an unwillingness to openly discuss our finances. Even the friends I have who are most open about their finances still tend to shy away from specific numbers when it comes to their income. The two creators I've heard really talk about it at all have been Dorothy Gambrell and Ryan Estrada, and I don't think I've seen anything concrete (with regard to finances) from either of them in several years. It's an almost completely taboo subject. Does simply opening up that conversation a first step towards changing the whole financial model of comics? I don't know. But it seems to me that even these unprecedented times, it's unlikely that we'll start really opening up about how much comic creators get paid.