Month: May 2017

Courtesy of a friend who works at one of our FLCBS’s (that’s “Friendly Local Comic Book Store” if you’re unaware) Dawn brought home a few English-translated trade paperbacks of the classic French sci-fi comic Valérian et Laureline. I wish we could claim to be more worldly and knowledgeable and say we knew of it “before it was cool”, but the truth is that we came at it out of curiosity over the upcoming Luc Besson film premiering in the U.S. this Summer.

But all that is an article for another day. What I wanted to address today is letters (see what I did there?). Or more specifically, lettering. You see, in the U.S. comic book industry there are all these rules that professional letterers are supposed to adhere to, rules I eventually started trying to emulate even though it didn’t (and doesn’t) always work out in practice. The unspoken judgment on your work otherwise would be that you were a hopeless amateur, right?

Well, imagine my confusion to start reading Valérian et Laureline and notice it seemingly breaking all sorts of these rules, despite the international comics community holding it in high esteem. Was it a function of the translation into English? Did the balloons get all screwed up by an uncaring adapter? With the power of the Internet, I researched and soon had my answer: nope!

Holy crap. The unrepentant white space. The rectangular (or nearly so) word balloons. The wavy balloon tails in panel 2 (which in America would tend to denote the speaker being sick). The complete lack of a word balloon for the dialogue being spoken in panel 3.

These are the kind of lettering sins which could get a webcomic snubbed as hopelessly amateur by mainstream American standards. I mean sure, it’s still readable, but what the heck? Do they have different rules or something across the pond?

Oh. I guess yes, maybe they do. Or at least different traditions. And open-minded as I like to think I am, sometimes it’s useful to have a reminder that all these conventions and rules we’ve come up with here might, in the total sum of things, be absolutely arbitrary when it comes to actually conveying a comics story, regardless of the genre.

Something that’s common practice (or at least used to be) in the webcomics world was the idea of “mirroring” your comic, i.e. voluntarily hosting your content on several different sites for the purposes of maximum exposure, as if you were casting several fishing lines with the same bait into a lake.

That might not be a perfect analogy, so let’s get more literal. Let’s say I have a comic named Gorblunk which I host on my website at Gorblunk.com, but in order to try to get as many eyeballs as possible I also decide to host it at Comixcapacitor.com, which I register a free creator account at and in return receive a subdomain of “gorblunk.comixcapacitor.com” to work with. I set things up so that I automatically or manually repost new pages of Gorblunk on the Comixcapacitor site as well as my home site in hopes that Comixcapacitor’s own promotional efforts and potentially far larger userbase will help Gorblunk become a known thing. Meanwhile those who choose to read Gorblunk on Comixcapacitor are helping Comixcapacitor also be a thing.

Of course as an independent creator I am very concerned about my intellectual property, so before registering I make sure to check that the Terms of Service I’m agreeing to do not grant any rights to Comixcapacitor beyond that necessary to duplicate the content I’m posting. The copyright, etc., remain my own, and nothing is notated as exclusive. I can continue to post Gorblunk at my home site. In fact I could also register at Comixcavalcade.com and host my content in all three places. Mirrors, mirrors, everywhere, with no strings attached. Everyone wins.

So if you were paying attention to the little subculture of webcomics creators this past week, you might begin to understand the blow-up that resulted in several creators deleting their comics and accounts from the hosting site Tapas. The bone of contention was, to my knowledge, first publicized via Michael Kinyon’s Twitter and spread rapidly from there, concerning an unannounced addition by Tapas to their Terms of Service:

If user desires to sell, license, exercise or otherwise dispose of, indirectly or directly, any rights or any interest in any content posted on the Platform (the “Offered Right”), then the user shall give written notice to Tapas Media of such desire. Commencing upon Tapas Media’s receipt of such notice there shall be a 30 day period in which user will negotiate in good faith with Tapas Media for Tapas Media’s acquisition of such offered rights. If by the end of 30 days no agreement has been reached or if at anytime Tapas Media declines interests in the offered rights, then the user shall be free to negotiate elsewhere with respect to such offered Right.

This sort of contractual clause is better known as a “Right of First Refusal,” and in practical layman’s terms it would mean that if I was approached by Nickolodeon to do a Gorblunk cartoon, I would not be able to say yes to that deal unless I first contacted Tapas to ask if they were interested in making a Gorblunk cartoon. Then they have thirty days to negotiate their own offer with me. If I did not do this and arranged the adaptation rights with Nickolodeon regardless, Tapas could then sue for damages.

It’s not uncommon as a contract clause and is less binding than it might seem (all the creator basically has to do is run out the clock saying “no”), but it’s unusual to include in a Terms of Service for the free section of a hosting site, particularly one that otherwise assures creators that their copyright is retained (though remember my warnings on that). More than that, this was a clause inserted post-launch, after many, many creators had already signed up, and it doesn’t seem like the change was publicized with an opt-out offered. Just about every company reserves the right to change their TOS at will, but this globally modified a relationship between creators and third parties that was not part of the original agreement. What was weirder was that when Tapas got called on it, their official response was as follows:

The purpose of the Right of First Refusal is not to take any rights away or steal your content. The purpose is to help you. We’ve witnessed multiple creators on Tapas accept unfair, uncompetitive deals and sign away their rights for far less than their work is worth. Creators who should have been paid 10x what they were offered agreeing to terrible deals because they either did not know their market value or did not have any competing offers.

We have connections in traditional publishing, merchandising, tv, and film.  Our intention is to work with creators to bring additional offers to the table, and to create competition in the market so individuals get the best deal possible.

Now that sounds great, but if the purpose was education and protection, why was it so surreptitious? It seems like the kind of clause a creator who had signed up with Tapas mirroring three years ago would only find out about when Tapas sued them for signing that (indeed possibly terrible) Nickolodeon deal, which they didn’t even know they needed to check in about. This is baked in to the idea of Right of First Refusal: the aggrieved party has no legal power to undo a deal after the fact, only receive damages.

Even if you accepted Tapas’ rationale, the backdoor change could certainly give pause as you’d wonder what other sort of silent changes (for your own good) Tapas might make in the future. But a TOS isn’t really the same thing as a signed contract, so there was one easy way out for anyone made uneasy: cancel your registration and delete your comic from their site, and many (including Brad Guigar) ended up doing just that. Tapas later removed the offending clause, but the damage was done.

There was a share of snark from certain quarters that creators were overreacting or that in most cases the IP in question was worthless anyhow so why bother being so protective of it? Well, I imagine you can imagine my response to some self-righteous butthole telling me Zombie Ranch is worthless. Do I make a living off of it at this time? No. Might that change in the future, at which point I would sorely regret not being more protective? It might, and not just webcomics but the entirety of the creative arts are littered with horror stories empirically backing up that scenario. Even something as seemingly innocuous as letting your buddy film a movie based on your IP in his backyard could severely impact chain of title and tank potential deals years or even decades down the road.

It’s easy to go overboard in the other direction, of course, like the people so afraid for their million dollar idea they want you to sign on to their comics project without telling you what it is, but the idea of due dilligence where it matters — and where terms limiting the potential future interactions of one or more parties are involved, it always matters — should never be scoffed at.

Perhaps the Tapas controversy is a sign that the happy-go-lucky age of free mirror hosting is ending. We never really indulged in it ourselves, mostly since it never seemed worth the effort in our case. But whatever else, it’s a reminder to closely review your TOS agreements with hosting sites — and now, unfortunately, to check in on those agreements from time to time and make sure that your mirror hasn’t gotten darker while you weren’t looking.

Occasionally some of you first hear about a thing because I mention the thing. This is fine. I like to teach as well as entertain, blah blah etc.

On the other hand, good lord above please never depend on me for your breaking news, because somehow, some way, I either had forgotten or completely managed to miss that Robert Khoo of Penny Arcade fame resigned his position with the company almost a year ago after nearly 15 years as “President of Operations and Business Development.” Here, then, is my belated take.

Now if you don’t know the significance of what I just typed, Robert Khoo is something of a legend, especially amongst webcomickers aspiring to make their hobby into a living. Khoo did more than that for Penny Arcade. He made it into a business empire. PA is certainly not the only webcomic whose creator(s) have developed into something that pays the bills, but for all their success people like Brad Guigar are still those who exhibit and speak at conventions, while Penny Arcade runs conventions. Several conventions. Nationally and Internationally. And perhaps most importantly — since I have often belabored the point that anyone can *try* to put together a convention, often to disastrous result — successfully so.

Now this is not to discount the efforts of the original creators of the comic, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. They were doing the strip for four years, building their audience, before Khoo came on board. But I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say Khoo was and remains a goddamn unicorn. He was a fan of the strip who also happened to be a business genius, and in late 2002 came to them with a business plan and an offer to work for them free of charge for a two month trial period as he built their brand to the next level. Let me repeat that, for those of you fellow creators out there who are regularly inundated by those bots posting to your contact forms who pretend to be real people but just use your naked URL and a bunch of vague generic platitudes and promises to “get leads” (which is not exactly webcomics talk). Robert Khoo, an actual long-time fan of Penny Arcade, offered to take over all the headaches of business management from Mike and Jerry with no money required up front, promising… well, I’m not sure precisely what was promised, but he seems to have delivered. In a world full of horror stories of artists being taken advantage of by business partnerships, Robert Khoo elevated everyone and his resignation was universally reported as a friendly affair where he just decided that after enough miracles worked it was time for some time off.

A benefit of me being late to this party is that I can observe that in the months since, things have not collapsed and everyone still seems quite amicable. What Robert Khoo did for Penny Arcade is what I’m pretty sure most webcomic creators have dreamed about at least once, although I also think most of us would be happy just being able to live comfortably without dreams of anything beyond that. Did Mike and Jerry dream of empires?  Next year mark’s Penny Arcade‘s 20th Anniversary, and so why don’t we take a moment to look at their very first strip, which was published in November of 1998 on loonygames.com:

There it is, comic sans font, typos and all. In fact I almost wonder if even this was touched up at some point, since a later strip from mid-1999 doesn’t even have word balloons.  A quick scan of their wikia page for 1999 also seems to show that, although certainly prolific, there was a time they did not hold hard and fast to their current M-W-F schedule, such as this comic (suggesting a vacation?) that immediately precedes a 16-day gap. They also had sketch days while attending conventions!

So at that point did they dream of empire? Maybe, maybe not. But from those humble beginnings they stuck with things, migrated to their own site, and by the time the Age of Khoo dawned (no, seriously, in this 2004 article they already refer to the early years as “B.K.” or “Before Khoo”) were already a known commodity, working as full-time comic creators and making a living off ads and reader donations. They made their own names, but Khoo is unquestionably the one who took them to the heights they’re at now.

One of my recurring topics over the years has been observations of creators burning out on their stories, an all-too-common occurrence especially in the field of webcomics. There have been more than a few abrupt endings that I personally witnessed, and many more noted in passing, to the point where Zombie Ranch seems to be something of a rarity as we find ourselves in the midst of its seventh straight year in production. Now of course that’s not as impressive as it might sound given that we’re a once-a-week gig that even then has taken its share of pauses for life instances or holidays, but never without some sort of notice, and I believe our longest hiatus was the month we took off after we finished Chapter 7 (at least part of which was spent in early planning and production for the trade paperback and its Kickstarter).

We’re still chugging along, and that counts for something, but I’ll admit that it’s tempting at times to want to just take one of those indefinite hiatuses that many of our peers have ended up doing. What stops me is that an indefinite hiatus more often than not just ends up a way that a comic dies without the creator officially pronouncing it dead. Because who wants to do that? But if it’s gotten bad enough that you want to just walk away and aren’t sure when you’ll look back, would it be better to make that final pronouncement rather than leaving everyone hanging?

Thankfully this is not a stage we’re at, which I credit to our slow pace and the accompanying patience of our readers. Nothing accelerates burnout like fans posting semi- or outright abusive demands to a creator if they feel unsatisfied with the pacing/quality/whatever of their free entertainment, ironically making sure to kill the thing they loved as something that doesn’t generally pay well (or really at all) turns from a joy into a nightmare for the artist(s) involved. That’s usually when the ultimate version of burnout occurs — the unannounced hiatus where without warning the comic just stops updating, because even the effort of communicating something to their fans has become too much and they’d rather figuratively slip out the back than face what seems to be already a largely hostile crowd. It’s an understandable behavior, but a result the Internet is full of once vibrant comics whose last update page is dated from a few years ago, with the occasional commenter asking, “Is this ever coming back?”

This, more than anything, is the outcome I seek to avoid. But what would happen if, say, Dawn were offered a full-time job doing storyboard work for an animation studio? Could we keep the comic going? If not, would we be willing to pronounce it dead? Should we? After all, not every comic that has gone on an extended hiatus has died. It would give an (unsatisfying) closure to shutter the doors early, but should we truly extinguish all hope?

In any case this all remains hypothetical and I suppose the best answer is to just deal with it if and when it comes to that, but I do like to take into account that our readers are a patient bunch and many of them are already used to just doing the occasional binge catch-up rather than reading week-to-week. That says to me that even should the worst(best?) circumstances happen and we felt like we couldn’t continue Zombie Ranch for the foreseeable future because of them, it wouldn’t rule out a possible resurrection (heh) down the road.

After talking about dire circumstances I should hesitate to compare the current comics situation to our marriage, but there’s a certain parallel in that Dawn and I have been together for over a decade now. The whirlwind zest of our early years has long since settled down into a more routine, low-heat situation, but it’s a comfortable kind of heat. The kind of heat that should hopefully never burn out.

First off, hey, no writer’s strike after all! The agreement isn’t completely finalized yet but that’s just a matter of formalities at this point. For better or worse, the T.V. landscape shall continue as normal.

Anyhow, when you think “art scam”, what comes to mind? Unscrupulous souls passing off the work of old masters as the real deal? While that sort of thing can and does happen to this day, art scams come in far more shapes and sizes than defrauding the wealthy through an auction house. Just today one hit far closer to home in the form of a contact Dawn received through her gallery website:

Greetings!

My name is john glenn from SC. I actually observed my wife has been viewing your website on my laptop and i guess she likes your piece of work, I’m also impressed and amazed to have seen your various works too, : ) You are doing a great job. I would like to receive further information about your piece of work and what inspires you. I am very much interested in the purchase of the piece (in subject field above) to surprise my wife. Kindly confirm the availability for immediate sales.

Thanks and best regards, john.

An email like this wouldn’t necessarily raise red flags since we’ve gotten legitimate contacts in the same manner that also offered compliments and sales inquiries, but the immediate suspicion here is how this wording is as flattering as it is vague. If this was an email about the Duckiecorn pins Dawn just listed on Etsy, why wouldn’t it mention that? Oh, apparently the piece in question was in the subject line, so I asked Dawn what the subject line was.

It was simply, “Other.” And no, Dawn has no piece of that name.

Welp, I find when there’s any question of legitimacy, one of the best things to do is just copy a few lines of the email verbatim and paste them into a search engine and see what comes up. See, one thing scammers and spammers have in common is the laziness of whatever program or bot they use, which tends to send the exact same message, poor grammar and all, to hundreds of different recipients, with only the name and email varying. If I found the same message from “john glenn” reported by another artist, or perhaps even more damning, the same message but supposedly sent by “Henry Cameron” instead, then we can safely discard the message as illegitimate. Lo and behold, one of the top hits on the search engine led to this article: How to Recognize an Art Scam.

And the most recent comment at the time, as of yesterday? A report of “My name is Henry Cameron from Ohio. I actually observed my wife has been viewing your website on my laptop and i guess she likes your piece of work, I’m also impressed…”

Scrolling down the comments I saw the pattern repeated several more times as well. It’s all pretty blatant once you know what to look for. Needless to say, “john glenn” is not getting a response.

If you’re an independent artist, it’s important to be able to spot these scams up front, because just like with the classic Nigerian 419, the first mistake is starting a conversation at all. Even if you use a fake email address of your own and intending to troll them back, you’re still wasting time I’d argue is better spent elsewhere. If you don’t use a fake email, or even worse have other contact information in your email, that’s trouble. The original contact will usually be done by a spambot of some sort, but after that you’re going to get the attention of a real live asshole who may never stop bothering you even after you start to smell a rat.

What do they get out of this? Well, this particular version we got didn’t get too cheeky up front, but I have no doubt that they would soon be asking for our detailed contact information so they can “send a check” ASAP. Contact lists are valuable stuff in this day and age and for many independent artists their home and business addresses are one and the same. Now even if you renege on the rest of it, they have something to sell for their trouble.

But that’s not the ultimate goal. The ultimate end is that after they waste your time getting you to send them images of your art (which… weren’t they on your site?), they’ll mail you a cashier’s check (often international but sometimes appearing otherwise) for some amount more than agreed upon, often $1000 extra. If you attempt to cash this it may seem to go through, but here’s the rub: cashier’s checks are something that your bank credits you for on the spot, but it’s a phantom credit. Especially for a check that originated internationally, it can take a few weeks to confirm legitimacy, and if it happens to bounce at the end of that, the bank will just reverse the deposit.

That means you, the depositor, end up on the hook for any of that phantom money. If you spent any of it you may even be in the red now. But again, that’s a few weeks down the road, and those weeks are the magic time for the scammer. Somewhere between then and now, you will be contacted with an apologetic note that the check was accidentally written for a larger amount than intended, and your “buyer” will ask either that you refund the difference to them or forward the difference on to a shipping company the buyer contracted for the shipping and handling fees. The shipping company is, of course, a fake front. Ideally they want you to now do this by wire transfer since those are non-reversible, non-refundable transactions, and by the time your bank lets you know the first check was a fake, your real money is in their hands.

To sum up: You and your “buyer” agree to, say, a price of $1000 for artwork. They send you a cashier’s check for $2000. You inform them (or they inform you) of the mistake, and they say to please return or forward the extra $1000. Then, too late, you find out that $2000 check is worthless, but your $1000 “refund” was all too legitimate. You’re out all that time, that effort, your personal contact information, that money, and possibly even some artwork if you shipped it off. But at that point count yourself lucky if they just disappear, rather than continuing to harrass you or passing your information off to someone else who will. You already proved an easy mark once, right?

And that started just because you responded to what seemed like a very friendly and innocent business opportunity.

This is, of course, all highly illegal, but it’s very rare for law enforcement to be able or willing to do anything other than make sympathetic noises and suggest you be more vigilant in the future.

Well, for most independent artists, that’s not something we can afford. So be vigilant now, because just a few minutes of research can save a lot of heartache in the future.