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This article appeared in the Ottawa Citizen Feb. 20, 2001

See ya in the cyber Funnies!

Self-publishing online comic strips is an easy way for cartoonists to break into a tough business. But readers beware: You may have to click through hundreds of bad Web-based comics until you find a good one; and many of them are for adults only

by Zachary Houle

A few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible for Ottawa cartoonists like Gisele Lagace and Josh Phillips to have their comic strips read by thousands of readers around the globe.

Before the World Wide Web came along, there was only one way a cartoonist could be seen by a large audience: submit work to a newspaper cartoon syndicate and hope for the best. Most cartoonists quickly learned that the numbers were working against them, and packed up their pencils.

According to United Feature Syndicate, the distributor of strips such Peanuts and Dilbert, more than 4,000 submissions flood in each year to their offices alone. Out of this number, the syndicate picks up only two or three new comics a year for publication. There are only eight cartoon syndicates that deal with major newspapers across North America, says Bob Staake, a freelance artist in St. Louis who runs PlanetCartoonist.com. Each of them have similarly huge piles of submissions, making it impossible for anything less than the next Charles Schultz to land a gig.

But today, cartoonists can find large cult followings without having to even turn to a newspaper, thanks to the Web. Here's the really surprising part: some online comic strip creators have become so successful that they no longer need a day job.

"The advent of the Internet has really leveled the playing field," says Staake, 43. "You can self-publish your own work now and be successful at it. (Web-based cartoonists) get some pretty significant hits on their sites, and they have some pretty solid fan bases."

Of course, online comics have their problems. They're almost never professionally edited, so their quality can be dubious at times. That's especially a problem when there are thousands of comics to choose from -- making it easy to stumble across one horrible comic after another. They're also free of editorial censorship -- a liberating thought for freedom of speech proponents, but a headache-inducing one for parents who now have one more thing to worry about when their kids are online.

There is, however, potential for online comic strips to challenge conventions that small newspaper space places on the medium. Lagace and Phillips are also receiving a great deal of recognition for their passion that they'd probably never otherwise get.

Lagace draws Cool Cat Studio (www.coolcatstudio.com), which spotlights an eclectic group of graphic designers. It's a group of people the 30-year-old creator can personally relate to, since she happens to be one at Ottawa's Multimedia Design Group. Phillips' Avalon (www.avalonhigh.com) centres on a group of high school students in a fictitious Eastern Ontario town along Hwy. 7 bearing the comic's name. A 22-year-old engineering student at Carleton University, Phillips isn't too far removed from his own secondary school career himself.

Besides the fact that they're both semi-autobiographic comic strips, both Avalon and Cool Cat Studio share another thing in common. They seem to be slowly striking a chord with comic strip lovers worldwide. "The readers are from everywhere," says Philips. "There's a strong Australian contingent. There have been a few notable people I remember (e-mailing) from Asia; there's quite a few people from Great Britain. It's sort of become a daily routine to hear from these people, and chat just a bit."

Phillips says he brings in up to 6,500 readers every weekday with his black-and-white strip. His work originally went up on the Web more than a year ago, and he just celebrated his 300th strip. One day at the end of January 2001, Avalon was ranked No. 4 on PlanetCartoonist.com's list of top 100 comics strips based on popularity, and seems to pop up in the Top 10 fairly often. Lagace estimates her six-panel colour comic, updated three times a week, is read by up to 8,000 people a day.

"That (popularity) really kind of opens up the eyes of a lot of us traditional cartoonists who are forward thinking," says Staake, who has illustrated for clients as diverse as Hallmark Cards and MAD magazine, and drew cartoons for Jay Leno's book of Tonight Show Headlines. "That's a pretty intriguing and powerful proposition for a creative person who doesn't have a syndicate behind them."

What's just as mind-blowing is the fact that some readers even have a say about what direction a certain comic strip should go in. Besides having the odd critique land in their e-mail box or posts of encouragement to message forums on their Web sites, Phillips has had other online cartoonists draw the occasional strip when he's overloaded with school work. Lagace has even seen some of her characters make guest appearances in other Web comics. One of her regular readers in Virginia has even just taken over primary writing duties on Cool Cat Studio. (While Lagace is fluently bilingual in the spoken word, French is her mother tongue and she concedes that her writing in English isn't spectacular.)

"Sometimes you look at a creator, let's say Jim Davis (Garfield), and it seems like he's untouchable or something," says Lagace, pointing to the wide gulf separating a successful cartoonist like him from his fans.

"With a Web comic, people will go posting in your forum and tell you how they feel, or they'll write you an e-mail right away. They feel that they know you, like you're their friend. In a way they are, because I've met a lot of people online who've read my comics. They're great people because they think a bit like you."

Lagace's appreciation for comics, like most people's, began in her childhood. She read European comics -- namely Asterix and Tintin -- while growing up in Bathurst, N.B. (That influence, along with the wide-eyed look of Japanese anime, is evident in her online comic strip.)

These day, most of her work is somewhat influenced by events in her personal life or from her past. The cool cat of the title is actually Lagace's real-life tabby, Camus.

All the people in the strip are composites of people she knows in one form or another.

The idea of drawing a comic came to Lagace back in the early '90s, when she was a bassist in a Montreal all-girl heavy metal band called Barbarella. (This explains why one of the strip's characters, Tony Cross, sports big '80-style hair and tight jeans.) It was during this Lee Aaron "Metal Queen" period of her life that she began to re-immerse herself in comic books, just to pass the time on the road with the band.

"It was something to do while waiting for the next gig," she says. "When I decided to stop music, which really wasn't for me ... I enrolled at the University of New Brunswick for a year, and learned to draw on my own and through them."

Through a long series of circumstances, she moved to Ottawa a few years ago and wound up befriending Janet L. Hetherington -- a local illustrator.

That got Lagace thinking about putting pencil to paper, but she was dismayed at the amount of trouble Hetherington was going through to produce her book, Eternal Romance, in the middle of a worldwide comics retail slump. So Lagace began to think about using the Web as a means to publish a comic strip instead, since it was more cost-efficient and seemed to be a fairly hassle-free way to publish her work. It didn't take too long before Cool Cat Studios was born.

Lagace was able to sign up with Keenspot.com, an online comic strip syndicate which hosts her Web site. She also quickly found support through now-established online artists who liked her work, like Scott Kurtz of PvP Online.

"They really pushed me, they really marketed me ... they really seemed to like what I was doing," she says. "So they were always mentioning me on their (Web sites), and they had links to my site. It grew and grew to the point where every day I'd get a few more (visitors)."

Online comic communities are being helped by the fact Web sites are modeling themselves after traditional newspaper syndicates, ironically enough. These sites include Keenspot.com and Toonscape.com. (Both Lagace and Phillips have signed on with the former, which has its head office based just outside of Pasadena, California.) The goal was to link enough independent online comics to attract banner ad revenue, says 47-year-old Teri Crosby, Keenspot's chief financial officer. Keenspot and its cartoonists split this ad revenue 50/50 each month. It wasn't enough for creators to survive on their own -- but it gave cartoonists a little extra spending money.

Towards the end of last year, Phillips was receiving about $200 a month for his strip. His income, however, along with other Keenspot cartoonists, is now decreasing as advertisers are questioning the effectiveness of banners.

Though Keenspot may be seeing less money from advertisers, it hasn't gone unnoticed on the Web. The site attracts anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 unique visitors a month who have free access to 40 comic strips. And even as the banner ad market shows signs of crashing, some cartoonists are blazing new trails when it comes to making a living from comic strips on the Net.

Scott Kurtz, creator of PvP Online (www.pvponline.com), started earning enough money from banner ads to quit his job three years ago as a Web master at a radio station in Dallas. The 29-year-old was earning $23,000 U.S. a year at that job.

But when PvP began getting millions of page views a month, he started making about $25,000 to $30,000 U.S. annually from the ads alone. Naturally, he quit his job to focus on the comic. (PvP is an acronym for Player vs. Player, and centres on the staff at a role-playing and computer- gaming magazine. Many online comic creators speak in reverential tones about PvP, and it seems to be universally viewed as the best Web comic at the moment.)

Though delighted by the money he was making, Kurtz had the foresight to envision a bust in the dot-com market. Thus, he quietly developed back-up plans over the years to keep PvP going in the event of a crash. These plans are now starting to take off.

His first idea was to set up e-commerce on his Web site and sell merchandise directly related to the comic. The second plan was to get PvP into traditional print formats for greater exposure. The comic is now being published in PC Gamer magazine every month and, in March, the first issue of his PvP comic book will roll off the presses. If that's not enough, Kurtz will be shilling these wares at the first annual PvP Convention to be held in Minneapolis March 31 and April 1, 2001.

But ask him if he feels he's doing too much marketing for an independent comic strip, Kurtz shakes his head. "I have money coming in from many different sources, which is how a traditional cartoonist typically makes money. There's just limitless numbers of ways to use a cartoon: greeting cards, mascots, and in all (other) forms of advertising. There's a lot of tools for a cartoonist to earn a living off of his work. The Internet is one of those tools. It's a very cheap way -- at least at first -- to get your work instantly to an audience. Instead of an editor determining whether it's worthy or not of attention, the audience is determining that immediately. Not only did I get to use the Internet as a tool to expose my work to an audience, ... but I got to earn money off of it."

Certainly, if Kurtz had tried to get his strip into a major newspaper, the odds would have been overwhelmingly against him based on content alone. For one, comics about computer geeks don't offer too much in the way of mainstream appeal. Secondly, Kurtz usually throws in the odd risque joke.

In newspapers, it's been proven that there are consequences to straying away from time-honoured, G-rated formulas. Lynn Johnston, the North Bay-area cartoonist who draws For Better or For Worse, could tell you first-hand. In 1993, one of the comic's teenaged characters revealed to his cartoon friends and millions of newspaper readers that he was gay. While Johnston was lauded in some quarters for tackling complex issues, newspapers received a flood of complaints from conservative readers. All in all, 13 newspapers decided to cancel the strip. At least another 25 asked for alternate comic strips to run during the controversial plot-line.

Four years later, when Johnston decided to briefly revisit the storyline again, her syndicate at the time -- Universal Press Syndicate -- chose to notify 1,700 newspapers a month in advance. About 20 newspapers printed re-runs in the place of the homosexuality storyline.

But Matthew Blackett, who draws the sardonically witty online comic m@b (www.mattbcomic.com), doesn't have to worry about offending people by having a lesbian supporting character in his work. Nor does he ever catch fire for sneaking in the occasional four-letter word.

M@b is on the Web for everyone to potentially see, but entire families won't stumble upon it day in and out either. To find something on the Web, you have to go looking for it. That's why Blackett thinks online comic strips are a gift to artists, like himself, who seek complete autonomy in their work. "There's nobody out there to censor you," says the 26-year-old Toronto-based cartoonist. "That's the most empowering thing about the Internet, especially when it comes to my comic. I don't have anyone over me saying, 'You know, you shouldn't put (the f-word) in there.'"

But the power of unrestricted freedom in Web comics land also raises another issue: quality control. Since anyone has the power to post their work to the Web for anyone to see, the trappings of instant recognition seems to be blindsiding some illustrators. Kurtz admits that a reader might have to wade through a lot of poorly realized strips to find the one or two they might really like. And, according to one reader, the vast majority of cartoonists online seem to be overlooking a key ingredient in their comics.

"I find the artwork to generally be better than I thought it would be, but the writing is really bad," says Nancy Shaver, 34, an Ottawa freelance graphic designer who seeks out online comics once a week or so. She also notes that some online comic creators have biographies on their Web sites which tout questionable achievements. "A lot of it seems to be done out of vanity."

But, despite their failings, some illustrators hold onto hope that online comics could potentially change the very medium of cartooning.

Aspiring online cartoonist Bob Roland sums it up best in an essay posted to Toonscape.com: "I'm not stuck to (drawing) a certain number of panels, or a particular style. If I wanted to do a year-long running story-driven comic, I could. If I felt like doing a single-panel joke, I could. ... Out of this mess of me learning how to make a comic strip, perhaps something new will be added to the medium."

Online comic strip links:

www.scottmccloud.com

Scott McCloud is an online comic book creator and the author of the book Reinventing Comics. While he doesn't really dwell in the world of online comic strips -- but, rather, the longer narrative form of comic books -- this is a neat site for those wanting to know where online comics are pointing. He also frequently posts personal essays (written in the form of a comic strip, no less) on the state of online cartooning, which make for interesting reading.

www.planetcartoonist.com

One of the best places to head if you're an illustrator wanting to learn more about getting your work up on the Web, and a great site for readers as well. You'll find PlanetCartoonist's top list of the 100 most popular Web comics on any given day at www.topsitelists.com/

bestsites/comicstrip/topsites.html.

www.keenspot.com

and www.toonscape.com

Two online comic syndicates. Great places to find a whole whack of online comics that are usually better than average comics, bound together in one spot.

www.webcomics.com

A list of dozens of daily and weekly Web comics available for instant access. (No guarantees on the quality of content, however, or whether strips not appropriate for children are available through this link.)

Notable Ottawa comic strips:

Avalon: www.avalonhigh.com

Cool Cat Studio: www.coolcatstudio.com

If you feel like you've walked in during the middle of a story upon visiting the above sites for the first time -- you probably have. Both strips tend to have fairly complex story lines and characters. You can, however catch up on the plot by reading older comics stored in each strip's archives. Note: Cool Cat Studio sometimes contains mature themes, and is thus not recommended for small children.