Online syndication of comics
I like comics; newspaper comics, comic books, manga, graphic novels, all of it. I especially like comics with a single creator - there’s something pure about seeing words and pictures that come from the same mind, both trying to convey the same concept.
By the time I started reading them, newspaper comics already mostly sucked. Pogo an Li’l Abner had both ceased publication, and a good chunk of the strips in the local paper came out of Mort Walker’s studio, which is a polite way of saying they were crap. I didn’t realize they were crap at the time, having no benchmark for comparison, and the only person who told me they had become crap over time was my grandfather. Since he thought the period from 1920 to 1980 was marked by a general trend of everything turning to crap, I didn’t take his pronouncements on comics too seriously. But he was right about them, and maybe about the rest, too.
When I first encountered Bloom County around 1982, I realized that the rest of the comics on the page really weren’t very good. In the years following there have been a few standouts - Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, The Fusco Brothers and Dilbert are obvious examples. But for every Bloom County there are dozens of Boner’s Arks - the average level of quality for newspaper strips is poor. As Berke Breathed has pointed out, comic strips tend to age poorly, and many syndicated strips are kept in publication far too long. There are people collecting social security who hadn’t yet been born the last time Blondie was actually funny.
King Features Syndicate is the giant in American newspaper comics, and has been since the very beginning. Along with newspaper editors, a lot of people blame King for the abysmal state of American newspaper comics. It’s true that King is guilty of many offenses. Take a look at its comics inventory - it’s a huge mound of dreck. The average age of currently-published King Features Syndicate strip creators is “dead so long the earth over their grave has formed a depression.” King is still publishing Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, for chrissakes. Of course, it’s not the original creators who write and draw these comics - it’s usually some hack who isn’t permitted to do anything to change the underlying fundamentals of the strip, but who slaves on in the hope he’ll eventually be permitted to launch his own creation with the syndicate. Change threatens revenue, which means creativity threatens revenue. That’s why Cookie and Alexander Bumstead aged more or less normally until they were approximately 17 years of age and not a day since, and also why no one reads Blondie.
The continuation of stale or even comatose features of course prevents new ones from pushing through the ranks. There are a finite number of newspapers and a finite amount of space on the comics page. Newspaper editors typically receive a barrage of mail from septuagenarians whenever they kill off some ancient piece of shit like Beetle Bailey, and since the counterweight potential increase in revenue from launching a new strip is effectively zero, the blue hairs win every time. There’s nothing but downside on incremental changes to the comics page, and so decade after decade the comics page barely changes at all. I don’t have any survey data on this, but I’d be surprised if the daily comics readership is more than 15% of what it was in 1965. (Mostly the same individuals, too.)
Ten years ago, everyone thought the internet would kill the syndicates like King and usher in a new age of vibrant, smart and funny daily comics. That hasn’t happened - as near as I can tell there are just a small handful of strips that have started online and then migrated to newspapers or to comic books. I’m not aware of any online comics with a following that rivals even moderately successful blogs. And King Features Syndicate still exists, limping along with a fading line of barely read anachronisms - it might have been the reason newspaper comics were lousy in 1990, but it is no longer the biggest problem. The online creators themselves have failed to make their revolution.
Why have they failed? I can sum it up in two sentences:
- The creators of online newspaper-style comics are oblivious to the fact that serial comics are intended to be diversionary.
- Lacking editors, they have adopted no uniform production standards.
A serial comic strip that is published on a site by itself or with other similar strips will never become very popular - PVP is the most successful example of such a comic, and the vast majority of people have never heard of it, even though it’s now published as a comic book, as well. Another is Melonpool - a “daily comic strip…about two aliens, a telepathic dog and a five-foot 220-lb hamster.” I bet you never heard of that one, either, even though it’s among the most successful comics online.
To become successful a strip needs regular readers, which means it must be embedded with other content. Possibly the best example of such embedding in practice is Kevin Smith’s MoviePoopShoot.com, which offers a number of exceptional comics. All but one of them (Action Datsun - phew!) far exceed even the best comics found in newspapers today. Naraghi and Mann’s Lifelike stands out even among the others at the site - if I owned a newspaper I would sign it in a second.
Yet even MoviePoopShoot doesn’t really embed the comics with other content in an interstitial sense - they’re available by linking from the left side menu bar. The creators of all the site’s comics are greedy for space and have no uniform production standards - too many chiefs, not enough indians. So as good as it is, it’s still not good enough.
So what do I recommend? I have a whole plan of action. Everything up until now has been mere exposition.
First off, comics creators must embrace online syndication, which means XML feed standards like RSS and Atom. (I’m not going to explain the technology here, but Blogger.com offers a concise blurb.) Most people, of course, aren’t aware of XML syndication, and many of those who are aware know it only as a way to read blogs quickly, by accessing the syndication feeds from multiple blogs in a single newsreader, or via an aggregation site like Bloglines. But aggregation users are not the primary reason why comics should be published in XML (though an unauthorized daily reproduction of Dilbert seems to be one of the five or ten most popular syndication feeds in the world). Instead, online comics creators should publish in XML so that other web sites can grab their comics and syndicate them freely.
There are some issues around syndication that we have to deal with. The most important is format. You may have noticed that on the comics page, almost all the strips are exactly the same size. Online, newspaper strips are most often represented as being about 600 pixels wide, and between 185 and 210 pixels tall. I expect that’s the size at which they are made available to newspapers, and it’s a great format for newspapers. But 600 pixels wide is a lousy format for websites. The column you’re reading here is less than 600 pixels wide, for instance. And online comics are all over the map - without editors to set down the ground rules, they have reveled in their freedom, and become debauched.
So let me make it clear: to be syndicated, online comics need to be of uniform size, and they can’t be very wide because many sites are chopped up into vertical columns. Comics feed aggregator Comic Alert! understands this, but its vertical execution renders the comics unreadable unless they click through to them. Like MoviePoopShoot, that’s good, but not good enough.
Horizontal space is very “expensive” on web pages, because there’s not much of it. Vertical space is cheap. It is not uncommon for a given web document to be several times longer than wide; length is effectively unlimited, as Scott McCloud likes to demonstrate. I’m not suggesting anyone produce six-foot long comics like McCloud - that would be unreasonable for a serial strip. There’s something much better already available, and widely adopted.
“Wide skyscraper” is an online advertising term - it refers to ads that are 160 pixels wide, and 600 pixels tall. And it is very nearly the perfect format for online comics syndication. Most prefab templates used by bloggers and other personal publishers have columns that are intended to contain wide skyscraper ads provided by Google’s Adsense, and most bloggers are desperate for quality content to fill these columns. Even widely-read “pro blogs” like Gawker are not able to fill their sidebar columns. It’s a best case scenario - two problems that cancel each other out: bloggers need sidebar content to fill empty spaces and comics creators need empty spaces to syndicate their content.
The wide skyscraper format I’m suggesting would allow for four square panels of about 150 by 150 pixels each, and a 10 pixel “credits” column down the right side. Westerners are accustomed to reading primarily left to right, and secondarily top to bottom - the vertical format isn’t quite as easy to read as the horizontal, but it’s close.
Another upside - comics creators can simply rearrange the four boxes horizontally to make a 600 pixel wide strip. So on the strip’s home page, in its archives and with luck even on a newspaper page it could be presented horizontally.
I recommend that comics creators switch to this format as soon as possible, and create two XML syndication feeds for each comic. The first feed would be for the 160 x 600 wide skyscraper, and would contain just the most recent comic - bloggers and other online publishers could simply grab the whole feed and present it on their sites. The second feed would present the most recent 15 comics in horizontal mode. Other sites could grab this feed for a secondary, linked page, either presenting stacked multiple comics like newspapers do, or show the most recent strips from a single comic as an archive, with a link back to the creator’s site. Readers using web aggregators would find the second feed most convenient. Both XML feeds should have the comics images coded as “hot” - clicking on them will bring up the creator’s site.
There’s a lot more I could write about this topic, and I will, but the post is too long as it is. I haven’t published much at RobSterling.com previously, but I’m hoping this “think piece” and another I plan to do regarding online financial services metadata will attract some traffic and some comments. Because of my past sales training I have already come up with answers to anticipated objections, and I will write them here soon. Also, many comics creators lack the technical knowledge to do what I suggest - I’ll explain ways to implement syndication and I might even write a PHP script that will output the appropriate XML.
Oh, one more thing. These are the various ad formats supported by Google Adsense. Comics presented in any of these formats would have a good chance of finding syndication space. Additionally, Adsense gives away surplus ad space to various left-wing organizations as “public service advertisements”, but site owners are able to “opt out” by providing Google an alternative to the PSA. Supplying a PSA alternative to site owners would be another way to promote an online comic, and possibly even to syndicate one.
Update: My friend Mike wrote and mentioned Gaping Void, a site which embeds comics into text very effectively.
Filed under: Media, Technology