Splinter of the Mind’s Eye – Part 27
New to Blue Milk Special? Start reading from the beginning!
After yesterday’s sexy drama, we’re hitting you with yet another BMS strip. Yes, I know it’s only been about 9 hours since the last strip, but we are altering the schedule. Pray we don’t alter it further. ;= Why? We want to power through what remains of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. There’s still two weeks worth left even if we go daily and we want to leave you guys with a real goody this Friday. So, today we show you the fight between the Coway champion and Luke Skywalker, as only an apathetic time-saving fan webcomic could do. That’s right, we couldn’t be arsed illustrating the Coway so we decided they would be invisible natives! Consider it a statement about the native inhabitants of Mimban themselves. Like Halla said in yesterday’s strip, the readers really aren’t missing out on anything!
Here’s what Ryan Sohmer, co-creator of the webcomic Least I Could Do has to say about our craft. Given some of the things I often deal with, like criticism, net community politics, work load, etc, I found the following excerpt particularly interesting. Thanks to Scott Wilkins of the Citrus webcomic for making me aware of this post.
I’ve been involved in Webcomics for a good 8 years now, with it being my main source of income and a full time job for about 5. I’ve had my share of successes, and plenty of failures I try to hide under the proverbial rug.
Since the beginning, and still to this day, one of the biggest things that continually irk me is the sense of entitlement that people in Webcomics have, on both sides of the spectrum here, including readers and creators.
For the sake of the point I’m attempting to make, we’ll focus on the creators.
We’ve seen over the past few years an increase in the Print vs. Web debates, that only seems to be intensifying as the newspaper continues its decline.
I’m not going to delve deep into that debate, because I have nothing to prove to either side. I’ve discovered a webcomic model that works for us, I have 2 webcomics in the Top 10 on the web and we’ve managed to put together a company that employs twenty full time employees, all based around webcomics.
From these many, many debates (sometimes civil, often not), I have seen Webcomic creators absolutely go into meltdown when print cartoonists refer to themselves as professional, with the webcomic crowd playing the part of the amateurs.
It’s to those people, those webcomic creators, that I’d like to address with a simple statement:
If you want to be treated professionally, act professionally.
Get your strip up when you say you will. Bill Waterson never missed an update because he was drunk, tired or sick. Neither should you. Stick to your update schedule, not only to the day, but to the hour.
Remove the “Donate” button from your site. Professionals cartoonists aren’t beggars, we don’t need handouts. Earn your money, don’t pan handle for it.
Rather than spend 4 hours of your day ranting on online forums about why another is so wrong, and you’re so very right, ignore it. Every time a flame war breaks out, it accomplishes nothing but make all parties look like children. Keep your head down, focus on your work, let that and your success be what speaks for you.
Don’t let your readers dictate what your work will be. Trust yourself, your direction. You may end up with a few less than stellar arcs or strips, but you need to follow through on your vision.
Accept your limitations. If you’re not a business person, don’t try to be one. There are many business-minded individuals who love to partner with a creative force such as yourself, you just need to find him/her.
Don’t respond to hate e-mail. You get nothing out of it except wasted time, time you could use to be working on your strip.
Forget everything else, forget the drama, the arguments, it’s the work that matters.
You’re only an amateur if you let yourself be one. Act professional in what you do, and you will be treated as such.
That’s Ryan’s take. Some of what he says isn’t really relevant to a fan webcomic as we’re not dealing with original characters (even if most of our characterizations ARE original takes). This means that his advice should be filtered in the context of what Blue Milk Special is. What do you guys think?
New Blue Milk Cartons: Smoking Jawa and Boba Fett. These could be T. Gatto’s very best milk carton designs yet! He has done a great job with the add on attachments: Smoking Jawa’s arm and cigarette as well as Boba Fett’s antenna. You can find more Star Wars themed Milk Cartons in our downloads section linked in the menu above the strip (along with helpful instructions).
Download and make your own Blue Milk Special milk carton!
After the beatings Leia has taken so far, I think the look on her face at the end is perfectly justified 🙂
Now, be professional, dammit.
“What do you guys think?”
Totally along for the ride and enjoying every hill and bump along the way. This is the only web comic i’ve ever gotten into and continued to follow.
I’m with the Lord Of Idiots – this is the one I look forward to. “It’s Blue Milk Wednesday!!”
Mr. Ryan Sohmer makes his point well.
My 5 year old has a “Dumpy the Dumptruck” book that teaches “It’s not what you do, but how you do it!”.
I think that says the same thing in fewer words.
One of the things that makes this comic is the Creative team forum, where we the fan-base is never made to feel unappreciated.
Rod you do a great job of making us know we are an important part of what you do.
Thanks.
And thanks for complimenting my small contributions as well.
Heh. Love the Gravatar!
(“Whip it good!”)
This rant may be entirely off topic from what you were looking for, but here goes:
I read a lot of webcomics and I think it’s one of the really amazing aspects of the internet that smart, creative people can turn a hobby or quirky sense of humour into a career. Though I have to admit there are times I’m sort of surprised a comic is making a living for its author(s). Sohmer figured it out, and the Penny Arcade team obviously, but a lot of others aren’t entirely there yet. BMS probably misses less updates than some “professional” comics. How you treat the comic and your audience is what makes you a professional webcomicker, I think, not whether it pays you or not. You definitely act professionally in regard to BMS and I feel like you take it seriously even though it’s just a hobby project largely started to amuse yourselves. Speaking of which, I whole heartedly support Sohmer’s advice to follow your bliss. What right do we have as an audience to complain that free entertainment isn’t entirely to our liking? The web’s a big place, there’s something out there for everyone.
What she said.
Thanks for the thoughts, Fan Girl. I don’t know how Sohmer managed it. Apparently he has a whole team of employees? Maybe he has syndicated distribution in different papers? I actually know very little about the comic! In any case, obviously BMS will never have any of these things being a fan work. It kind of sucks really, as I recently started talking seriously to Leanne about us doing a Harry Potter parody in webcomic form, same style as BMS, and I also have several Doctor Who strips already done. As much as I want to just make a few tweaks and make these comics our original characters rather than a fan work, that misses a lot of the point. It’s hard to get the same humor out of a gag in which the Supreme Dalek has a daughter with pink spots called Little Bumps. Designing a whole race of Dalek rip offs just wouldn’t have the same effect. I think I just have a knack for parodying things as a fan. I hope that it’s not my only lot in life, but at least it’s received well enough by readers.
If you haven’t taken a look at his comics, I highly suggest them. I follow Looking for Group regularly, and occasionally catch Least I Could Do.
http://www.lfgcomic.com
Doctor Who? Harry Potter?
Dude, you’re killing me with laughter! You’ll make my Bookmark list all the longer should you expand to those venues. I tell ya, I’ll follow y’all wherever you take your creative juices.
I think Ryan’s statements, or at least his general principles, regarding professional attitude and work ethic are totally applicable to any webcomic, no matter the format or subject matter. In fact, in a far more general way, they are applicable to any profession. But work ethic is not always a popular subject in western culture these days …
😉
That said, I think you guys do just fine. You seem to hold to an update schedule (except when you exceed it, like today, which is just fine 😉 ), and your treatment of the trolls has been exemplary and very professional, as far as I can see.
And if there’s a Donation Button here, I can’t find it right now …
😉
Ack! All this winking, I think I have something in my eye …
😉
We tried a donation button at the very beginning. We didn’t get any donations, but also we wondered what was more important? The longevity of the comic, or potentially pissing off LucasFilm. I think, basically, we just decided in the end, “hey, we can’t make money and that’s not why we’re doing this.” That’s why I get a little frustrated when I see other fan webcomics out there publishing collected works and selling them for profit.
It’s ILLEGAL…
To argue that because you changed the name of the webcomic and altered the characters that you think you can now lawfully make money off it only demonstrates naivety. Altered characters are still likenesses and even under the dubious protections of parody and fair use which BMS uses as our own cardboard shield they are still making a profit off the back of someone else’s characters and trademarks. Why do Marvel Comics always have that little disclaimer about no likenesses living or dead? Okay, so that’s an extreme example. How do you avoid using past presidents and historical figures? But the point remains.
I’m still annoyed about this particular instance. It’s not envy, it’s just frustration that someone else is doing this under the radar of the company and getting away with it without penalty. Yes, pop culture should be open to parody even for profit, but for me it comes down the nature of the parody. If the parody is centered exclusively on one property, for example, Star Wars, then it’s effectively riding their coat tails, like a parasite, making money off the work that George Lucas put in to become a success in the first place. For me, this feels ethically wrong. If BMS covered a broad swathe of properties, in a more generalized look at pop culture I would feel differently, but comics looking to profit solely from someone elses property are treading a fine line.
Except, you know, you can’t be successful and remain under the radar.
Not only is it illegal, but it’s also a portrayal of their lack of originality. They appear to take other people’s work and claim it as their own, expecting people to pay for more of it.
This is why I don’t write about characters from Narnia. If I intend to make a living out of this, I better just work with original characters right from the get-go.
I read Least I Could Do and Looking for Group so I’m familiar with Ryan’s work. I have also created and run two webcomics of my own (both of which failed) so I also understand what he’s talking about in the entire article and I have to agree.
At the same time I have to say, “What’s wrong with being an Amateur?”
I fully admit my 3D art skills are junk, my writing has improved immensly over the years and both webcomic ideas were good writing exercises for me. To that I’m thankful of the experience but never did I have delusuions of grandure to think I was a “Professional.” I’m a professional Spacecraft tracker and part time First Responder, a full time father and husband, to me that’s good enough. 🙂
“Remove the Donate button off your site” is bullshit. Professionals in comics, by definition, are those who are earning their daily bread doing comics. Now, web comics are FREE. The options to extract income are (1) sell merch, including printed books, (2) place ads and (3) take donations.
I’d be sort of a hypocrite if I said I don’t like merch. I love merch. This summer, I was kicked out of my apartment. The stuff I took barely fit into a car, and there’s still a roomful left. Boardgames, books, action figures, videogames, music CDs. I miss my stuff, but it’s a leg iron. For entertainment, I just need a PC, an ebook reader, and storage. I don’t need more merch. I don’t have a place to put moar boardgames.
Yes, I know you can slap a logo on everyday stuff like pens and notebooks and get a percentage of thusly stimulated sales. I bought a NaNoWriMo tote bag – and that’s it with buying tote bags for the year. I have a drawer full of geek t-shirts which I don’t wear, what with working for a government agency and all that.
It feels nice owning that stuff – no big surprise here, because merch *is* luxury. In a world where entertainment is essentially free (plus the price of an Internet connection), merch, being limited in supply, is the basis necessary to sustain the age-old habit of “keeping up with the Joneses”. Life satisfaction reaches the top at $10000/month or so, when you run out of time. If you don’t want to “see the real world”, being satisfied with billions of virtual worlds offering experiences just as/more entertaining, the saturation happens even earlier. Merch is a status symbol, and the demand for it, like the demand for gold and diamonds, is based on hype. I’ve got a phianite ring that BLAZES LIKE A BILLION SUNS. Everyone knows it’s not a diamond, because I don’t look like a person who can afford that pretty a diamond. But who cares? Its functions are to be pretty, to BLAZE LIKE A BILLION SUNS and to stay on my finger and it performs them marvelously.
There are people who like the feel (look, smell) of a printed book. There will continue to be people who like the feel (look, smell) of a printed book, until there are no more people. I prefer my Opus for reading fiction. However, it’s hard for me to study without a printed book, and at all impossible without handwritten notes. But over on the life-improvement blog, readers are asking while commenting on the best note-taking program, “who the hell uses paper these days?” Yes, only a small portion of the comic readers donates, but the portion of merch-buying readers is also not large, And it will continue to decrease.
Borrowing from my old article on the subject (it used music as a primary example, having been written for the benefit of my professional singer friend), the “merch” that would live the longest is live performances (conventions for comics). But even those will fade, as webinars, live cams, and online games merge. Donations, effected by good will, or a guilt trip, or plain forced by law, is *the* economic model of the future.
Ads. Ohgodtheads. It’s one thing to be paid to endorse something that you actually like – this doesn’t make my ethics sense tingle. But we all know this is rarely the case. People are fighting for a commercial-free education, try to kick ads out of schools, try to ban teachers from “politely insisting” that children ask parents to buy specific drinks “for the benefit of the school”. Why not free culture? Art museums are often state-sponsored: that means we, as a people, decide to keep the “enlarge your weenie” banner away from the statue of David. Why I, being competent enough to block advertising, cannot contribute some money so that other, less competent people would see a crap-free webpage?
Sure, it’d be good if culturally significant ongoing works of living artists were sponsored by an ideal international council for culture – but let me tell you, the actual results will be ugly. They smelled suspiciously in the 20th century, what happens now in my country (I’m not American btw) is plain revolting. And really, why should we allow a council of dunces collect taxes from people in all the world to pay for Sonic the Hedgehog porn (extreme example)? Let the individual people pay for what they like, as much as they like! …Wow, what a brilliant idea, I’m sure no one else has thought of it.
Bottom line: success in business does not mean you’re universally right. Shut up Sohmer, and stick your plushies… (ahem) where the sun doesn’t shine.
P.S. I don’t have a good idea of “kid-friendliness”, feel free to replace the words you consider naughty.
First, let me say straight off that for most webcomics I think that a donate button is not only absolutely fine, it’s also absolutely necessary.
That said, here are my thoughts on whether it’s ‘professional’.
No, it isn’t.
Nobody who is professionally selling a product solicits charitable donations from the consumer. A TV station either gets an up-front subscription, or gets paid by advertising. Bands (with very few exceptions) selling their music charge a fee up front, either to buy recordings or to attend performances. Composers writing music for Hollywood are commissioned to do so at an agreed fee. Painters, by and large, set a price on their work.
The point is that their work has a value, negotiated with or imposed on the buyer, and that value, once set, must be paid.
I simply do not feel that a metaphorical cap on the ground can be called professional; or at least, not in the sense of the word as used by Ryan Sohmer :).
Bear in mind, though, my first comment about donations being necessary for most webcomics. Most simply don’t have an audience large enough to support them through advertising, and very, very few could dream of making an income through charging people to access them. This is especially true of the more creative (and therefore niche) webcomics. Many artists have needed patrons to support them, because they cannot sell their work profitably. That doesn’t make them lesser artists.
I also limit my comments to whether a donation button is professional. I agree that lots of webcomics may be produced in a highly professional manner, but may still need a donate button.
Word.
Honestly, what he’s talking about is people who want the project to be their sole source of income, who spend their time going to cons and pointing to the donate button, but who don’t keep their update schedules.
Honestly, I think this is an awesomely done webcomic, and one of about 4 I check on with stoic regularity, whatever the update schedule. One of the others, in spite of not being a Star Wars fanboy, is Darths and Droids, and I think its because its nice to see people take something that had so much potential and play with it.
I think the worst case of something like Sohmer is referring to was a strip called ‘Gone with the Blastwave’. Good artwork and a poor update schedule, but when he got a publishing deal he declared he wouldn’t be updating anymore, but made sure to point to his donate button, in case people still wanted to donate.
I’m all for supporting a struggling artist if I can, but that just always struck me as the height of douchiness given how many webcomics out there which, like this one, have good art, pacing, and update as regularly as they can.
Whew, I almost missed this one, not realizing this was an update day.
Wow, I never realized Mr. Sohmer’s statement would pose so much debate. And with so many different opinions about the subject; wow, I don’t know if I’m glad this was directed here and not at me, though probably I’d welcome reaping what I would sow, posting such an apparently controversial subject. Thanks again for the mention; I feel like royalty called my out of a crowd. 😀