Bill Watterson, creator of "Calvin and Hobbes," was no fan of the comic strip industry.\n"Comics can be vehicles for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression," Watterson said in a speech at Ohio State University in October 1989. \nBut contemporary comics were neither art nor improvements on earlier work, Watterson complained.\n"The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward," he said. "Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it."\nWatterson's conclusion: "Comics are simpler and dumber than ever."\nFourteen years later, it's hard to say things have improved. Some changes are obviously for the worse: Watterson and Gary Larson (artist of "The Far Side") are now retired. More strips have seen their creators die only to be replaced by cartoonists-for-hire. Newspapers appear even less willing to support innovation than when Watterson spoke.\nHere and there, though, are signs of hope. Newspapers are realizing that they're losing their hold on young readers and are letting some cartoonists, new and established alike, do edgier, funnier, better material. \nBut these changes may be too late. A whole generation of underground cartoonists is attracting huge audiences online, and they don't want to leave the Internet.
'Dennis the Menace was a malicious little kid'\nGene Weingarten, a columnist for the Washington Post, hosts a weekly online chat for the Post's Website. In the chat, Weingarten often discusses comics and cartoonists. They take the discussions and the strips very seriously.\nIf that sounds ridiculous — taking the funny pages seriously?-consider this: Just about everywhere you go, you will see comic strips pinned to cubicle walls or taped to office doors.\nDifferent groups put up different strips: Graduate students might choose a Ted Rall or Tom Tomorrow strip, professors clip from the New Yorker, and people working in the corporate world turn to "Dilbert" or "Cathy." But they all use comic strips to express themselves.\nWeingarten has a theory that we care about comics because they remind us of our childhood.\n"I think basically our senses of humor are basically fully formed by the time we're eleven years old," he said. "Ultimately every joke can be deconstructed in an adolescent way-the way people care about their past and the way things were."\nComics are important. Not as much as, say, AIDS or world hunger, but important nonetheless.\nAnd Weingarten is disappointed with many of today's comics.\n"Various strips run out of ideas. Sometimes it happens quite early; sometimes it happens late," he said. "Watterson is God for having made the decision to stop; Charles Schultz ("Peanuts") never did that ... Most of these strips never did."\nWhen strips go on after their creators run out of ideas (or die) they stop developing. Sometimes they regress, and lose the edge that originally made them great.\nTake "Dennis the Menace."\nThe strip, drawn by Hank Ketcham, began in 1950, the same year "Peanuts" made its first appearance. \n"At one time 'Dennis' was great," Weingarten said. "Dennis was a real bastard, a malicious little kid. That's how it started out: Hank Ketcham just couldn't believe what a bastard his own kid was.\n"As the strip became more popular, Dennis became a kind of sweet little boy, just a little bit mischievous."\n"Dennis" illustrates one of Watterson's complaints about the comic strip industry. Part of the problem with comic strips, Watterson argued, was that newspapers and the syndicates who distribute strips treated cartoonists as replaceable, and so many strips continued after their creator's death.\n"We've got too many comic strip corpses being propped up and passed for living by new cartoonists who ought to be doing something of their own," Watterson said.\nHank Ketcham died in 2001, but new strips are still being produced. That didn't affect the strip. Ketcham had a hands-off policy long before he died. The official Web site for the strip says that, after 1994, Ketcham "supervised" the strip's creation.\nWhy, I asked Weingarten, do comics suck?\nHis reply was typically measured. "Comics suck because American newspaper editors are pantywaists and they are simply unwilling to risk losing any readers-let alone 40 or 50 senior citizens who they know will cancel their subscription if 'Hagar the Horrible' is gotten rid of," he said.\nThe result? "The comics pages are jammed with work product of people who haven't had a fresh idea in 30 years, but are chained to what has become a money machine," Weingarten said.
'Readers of all ages'\nWhat happens when cartoonists have a fresh idea?\nTake a look at what happened to one of the country's best-established strips. \nA few weeks ago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Doonesbury's" Sunday strip joked about a study linking masturbation to reduced chances of prostate cancer.\nHere was a fresh idea and a funny joke. \nNewspapers squashed it.\n"Doonesbury" artist Garry Trudeau later told the Long Island paper Newsday that over 400 papers pulled the strip. Nearly all said they were "family newspapers" and that children shouldn't see jokes about masturbation.\nTrudeau defended the strip in an August 29 press release: ""It's (a) 'South Park' world now, and younger readers are unlikely to be shocked or confused by anything they find in 'Doonesbury.' Besides, our general experience is that most children don't understand 'Doonesbury' in any event, and thus sensibly avoid it." \nDespite arguments like Trudeau's, family friendliness pervades the comic strip industry, where it blocks the efforts of cartoonists to try anything daring. Descriptions of the strips Universal Press Syndicate offers to newspapers stress how inoffensive these features are.\n"Readers of all ages will enjoy the antics of 'Garfield'," one page says. \nOn the same page: "Appealing family comic strips, like 'Stone Soup' and 'Heart of the City' will attract young and old alike to your comic pages."\nThere's nothing wrong with family-friendly comics. But there's a lot wrong with having only family-friendly comics. Like the fact that nobody who doesn't have a family will read that page.\nOn the opposite end of the controversy continuum is Jonny Hart's "B.C.", a strip originally about cavemen in the Stone Age. Since Hart became a born-again Christian, though, he's begun using more overtly religious themes in his strips.\nThese strips aren't funny. They're preachy-literally. But they do have an audience, a large one. And still newspapers refuse to run them.\nAnother controversial strip, Aaron McGruder's "The Boondocks," harshly criticizes the Bush administration, B.E.T, and American culture in general. Like "Doonesbury" and "B.C.," newspapers frequently refuse to run "The Boondocks" because it isn't family-friendly.\nThere's no room in the newspaper for jokes about sex or politics. There isn't any room for Christianity. There's no room in some newspapers, really, for anything interesting, because what is interesting will offend somebody.\nAnd that's why many of today's best artists are skipping newspapers for the Internet.
'My strip would not have had a chance five years ago'\nNot all of the best new strips are online, of course.\nStephan Pastis writes and draws "Pearls Before Swine," a new comic strip syndicated in about 125 newspapers. \nDespite his success, Pastis had a hard time breaking into comics. His story exemplifies the problems with the "old media" path to comics stardom. And even his story shows the power of the Web to make or break the new generation of cartoonists.\nPastis began writing comics in 1996 because, he told me in a telephone interview, "I'd been a lawyer for three years and I hated it."\nSeveral of his early ideas for strips were rejected. It was discouraging. "I even stopped drawing, just because I didn't want to get rejected again," Pastis said.\nHe kept working as an associate at his law firm. Then, in mid-1999, he decided to put together a new proposal, using some of the 200 "Pearls" strips he'd drawn in 1997 and 1998.\n"I took the 200 strips into work. I had my fellow associates go through them and vote on the best 40-at least when the partners weren't looking," Pastis said.\nHe submitted them to the big syndicates, who handle the marketing and distribution of comic strips to newspapers and Web sites. \nWithin weeks, he had offers from syndicates. Pastis accepted Universal's offer because, he said, Charles Schulz ("Peanuts") and Scott Adams ("Dilbert") were both with Universal.\nThe odds were still long. \n"When you sign with a syndicate, what they do with you is they put you in what's called a development period," Pastis said. "For anywhere between 1 and 6 months, you send strips in and they tell you if they're funny or not. \n"The odds of you getting signed even into a development period is 6,000 to 1; of those, half will drop out," he said.\nUniversal's enthusiasm for the strip faded. There was no demographic to support "Pearls'" jaded, cynical, sometimes morbid humor, Pastis was told.\n"It looked like the whole thing was just dead in the water," he said.\nThe syndicate offered to put "Pearls" on its Website to gauge reader response. This was Pastis's only option, because the other syndicates had lost interest in "Pearls" by now.\nWhen "Pearls" first appeared online in November 2000, it had 2,000 hits a day. Not bad, but not good either-except that one of those daily hits was Scott Adams.\nAdams linked to "Pearls" on Dilbert.com. It was the equivalent of a free TV ad during the Super Bowl. Suddenly "Pearls" had 75,000 hits a day.\nAfter the strip showed it could hold that audience, "Pearls" launched in newspapers January 2002. Pastis left his law firm for good soon after.\n"If it wasn't for the Internet, I never would have gotten into papers," Pastis said.\nPastis also credits the increasing willingness of newspapers to take risks for "Pearls'" success. \n"I've seen a change in the last year. It is reflected in the fact that 'Boondocks,' 'Get Fuzzy,' and I have succeeded," Pastis said. "[Papers] are changing and the recent statistics about the low readership among young people are worse than ever."\n"Pearls" often contains jokes about death and life that editors would have refused to run. But papers are now ready to accept edgier material to attract younger readers.\n"Newspapers are aware now more than ever that they have lost this younger generation. They have been listening to the letters of 65 year old grandmothers perhaps too much, and in catering to the older reader they have left this younger generation sort of hanging," Pastis said. "My strip would not have had a chance five years ago."
Webcomics\nEven with those changes, many cartoonists choose to avoid newspapers completely. \nMike Krahulik (known to fans as "Gabriel") draws the online strip "Penny Arcade" (http://www.penny-arcade.com), which is written by Jerry Holkins ("Tycho"). \nIn a telephone interview, Krahulik said "I don't know that I would want [syndication] because of editors. I'm perfectly happy with 'PA' the way it is. Because of the Internet we're able to target exactly the people we want to reach. It's a very niche comic, but we're able to reach everybody in that niche."\nThat "niche" is huge-tens of thousands of people read the site daily. It's the best-known of the Internet's many "gaming comics," comic strips devoted to video games and gamer culture.\nScott McCloud, author of "Understanding Comics" and "Reinventing Comics," points to gaming comics as an example of the Web's power to create new genres besides the old forms of comedy, romance, and adventure that long dominated newspaper comic pages.\n"The web is a great place for talent to show their wares at a time when they don't have a slot waiting for them," McCloud said in an interview. "There is no gaming comics genre in comic book stores. That's a thing that had to find its level in another market entirely, that's just a natural process of evolution."\n"Penny Arcade" and other gaming comics could never get syndicated. Expecting newspaper readers to get jokes about, say, Max Payne would be asking too much. And "PA's" humor isn't family friendly. \nMatt Boyd, who writes "Mac Hall" (http://www.machall.com), is also happy to be online.\n"Editors are definitely one thing we wouldn't work with very well," Boyd said in an interview. "We feel lucky to be in a position where we could hypothetically publish our own book and not have to go through editors or things like that."\n"Mac Hall," drawn by Ian McConville, isn't exactly a gaming comic, but it too wouldn't exist without the Internet. The strip's humor, based on the lives of college students (McConville and Boyd met while both were students at University of Maryland-College Park), is too edgy for any daily newspaper. The strip itself is too large to run on any newspaper's comic page.\nBoyd still reads newspaper strips in addition to webcomics. "You shouldn't write off syndicated strips as devoid of creativity," he said. "There's certainly a lot of room for excellent work there."\n"Penny Arcade" and "Mac Hall" are just two of thousands of online strips. The community has grown exponentially since 1998, Krahulik remembered. "When we started there were 3 other webcomics. When PA came out almost five years ago, it had a pretty good readership just because there was nothing else to read," he said. "Now you make a comic, there could be a 1000 other comics like it."\nWhile many of these comics are essentially just digital versions of traditional comic strips, some of them use techniques only possible because of the Internet, McCloud said.\nOnline artists can make use of what McCloud calls the "infinite canvas," which frees cartoonists from the limitations of paper. "When I am King" by Demian5 (http://www.demian5.com), for example, extends the traditional panel layout of most comic strips far beyond what would be possible online. \nOther strips use animation, audio, and other innovative techniques to create an art form McCloud says is organic to the Web.\nAnd all webcomics have something that no newspaper can provide: Archives of every strip, from the earliest to the most recent.\nWebcomics have variety, artistic freedom, and, occasionally, content that equals the best of print media. Everything is in place for webcomics to supplant newspaper strips.\nExcept one thing.
Webcomic$\nAs McCloud wrote in an essay on his Web site (http://www.scottmccloud.com): "What's the difference between a comic book writer and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four."\nPastis was blunter. "I haven't seen the Web make any money yet," he said. "As of now, [newspapers] are the only way to make money."\nProbably fewer than a dozen webcomic artists support themselves fully through their art. Krahulik and Holkins of "Penny Arcade" are among them.\nIt took a while for "PA" to build a fan base, Krahulik said. "We kept our jobs for about two years, we were doing the comics in the middle of the night."\nThen the pair signed up with eFront, one of the many dotcom companies of the Internet boom that sprang up to use free content to sell advertising. They left their day jobs just before eFront was revealed to be fraudulent. \n"We quit our jobs and then the money stopped coming. [eFront's founder] left the country; and we were like 'this is bad,'" Krahulik said.\nKrahulik and Holkins were ready to fold the strip. Then they appealed to readers to voluntarily contribute to the site's maintenance through a scheme they called "Club PA." Money flowed in. The strip continued.\n"We didn't have to go back to our crappy jobs. We were able to pay our rent and buy food and video games," Krahulik said.\nIn September, Krahulik and Holkins stopped "Club PA." The strip had enough revenue schemes that it wasn't necessary. \n"We can live off of advertising and merchandise," Krahulik said.\nAdvertising and merchandise are the two traditional ways for Internet companies to make money. But they're imperfect: The advertising market goes through boom-and-bust cycles, and profit margins on merchandise can be small.\nAnd subscriptions like "Club PA" can be difficult to manage, and some artists feel uncomfortable with them. "I feel bad taking money from (readers) because we don't really need it," Krahulik said.\nThose are the two traditional ways for Internet companies to make money. But they're imperfect: The advertising market goes through boom-and-bust cycles, and merchandise profit margins can be small.\nBut an alternative is needed if webcomics can become profitable.\nIU computer science professor and publishing industry consultant Gregory Rawlins believes that while publishing in some form will always be around, the publishing industry is doomed.\n"The forces of history are against (publishers). They're fighting, but they're going to die," Rawlins said in an interview. \nThe death of traditional publishing doesn't guarantee wealth for creators, though. \n"You can use the online world to gain fame, to hone your skills, to use tools, to meet friends," he said. "But until it becomes artifactual, we have no way to actually pay you for it." \nIn the long run, Rawlins believes, very few people will make a living from producing content.\n"No one has found a surefire way to monetize online content. Content is still basically free, and it will remain free as long as it stays online," Rawlins said\nMcCloud champions another scheme: micropayments.\nMicropayments would be small online transactions, like buying access to a webcomic and its archives for a dollar or less-far cheaper than the print cost of comic strip collections.\nEven though the price would be cheap, McCloud believes the scheme could work in principle.\n"The natural fair price for most digital content should be pretty low," McCloud said. "Comic books that cost 2 or three dollars on the newsstand only earned 20 or 30 cents for its writers and artists.\n"When that same work moves online, the creators of that work can expect to get 80 to 90 percent of those profits and it's only fair that they share some of that savings with their audiences," he continued. "This is true for prose, for music, for video; creators that charge a fair price will almost always be falling below a dollar."\nMicropayments wouldn't replace advertising or merchandising, McCloud said. But they could offer artists a new way to earn a living.\nMicropayments are "a contentious point," Boyd said. "There's a few superstars. They're already making a living off of their comics, so really they wouldn't be wiling to take a risk on a sure thing.\n"Really it's up to the lesser-known [creators] if that's going to become an accepted cultural thing," Boyd continued. But, Boyd said, lesser-known strips might not be able to build an audience if their content isn't free.\nPrevious micropayment schemes have sunk because they weren't easy enough to use. To work, McCloud thinks, micropayments need to be digital cash-as simple as using dollar bills and coins.\n"We're still not really at that point," Boyd said. In the meantime, he said, "Mac Hall"-which is profitable-relies on advertisements and merchandise for revenue.\nMcCloud believes, and hopes, micropayment technology will be ready soon. "We don't have all the tools we need for online artist to reach their level in terms of self-sufficiency," McCloud said. "Micropayments is a piece of the puzzle."\nWhen webcomics become widely profitable, or even reach a break-even point, then it will fulfill part of Watterson's vision. \nWatterson thought that a new type of magazine featuring comic strips on high quality paper with artistic freedom was the way to improve comic strips. He was wrong; it was the World Wide Web, created only a few months earlier, that would shake up the industry and bring better comics to the public's eye.\nBut he was right on the larger issue: "We should keep in mind that newspapers and syndicates are by no means essential to the production of comics," Watterson said in 1989.\nThe thousands of webcomic artists, and their hundreds of thousands of readers, would agree.
