Monthly Archives: August 2011

One Punch Reviews #51: Aikonia

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When I first started this site, one of the most exciting new artists to appear on the webcomics scene was Awkward Zombie‘s Katie Tiedrich. Even if you didn’t like video game comics, you had to admire her fun character designs, her sense of comic timing, and her unique character personalities. Marth and Roy, for example, were less the characters from Fire Emblem and more Teidrich’s own creations who just happened to look like somewhat familiar video game characters.

It made several of us wonder: how would Katie Teidrich be able to handle original characters? We sort of get a taste of that with Aikonia, a fantasy webcomic illustrated by Ms. Teidrich but is written and developed by a team from MADSOFT Games, LLC (who are working up to a game release based on the world established in the comic).

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The Trenches Begins

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Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I’ve been pretty busy up here in real life. A friend of mine was in the hospital, we’ve been helping take care of her kids and her mom, things at work have hit the wall, I’ve been training a little for a 200-mile cycling run … and, let’s face it, it’s Season Finale time at USA Network. Will Peter ever trust Neal again after the latest twist to the plot about the stolen U-Boat treasure? The mind boggles.

Which means I haven’t had that much time to read up on webcomics or check up on the latest going-ons. Good thing though that the readers have been keeping me honest! Algeya gave a bit of a low-down in the comments section, and perhaps the most interesting (to me, anyway) was that The Trenches finally debuted. This is, what I imagine, a gamer-centric comic created by long time webcomic creators Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, and Scott Kurtz. All these guys have been running their successful webcomics (Penny Arcade and PvP) since 1998. While the devotion to their comics should be applauded, I also that theses guys appreciate the fresh start that The Trenches represents.

Thus far, The Trenches seems to be following a more mature take on the genre. (Description in the New Readers tab: “The Trenches documents the tribulations of software testing with the precision tools of ‘the office comedy.’”) Sure, it’s only two strips in. Odds are, though, that we’re not going to see some dude displaying his latent psychic ability. Inserting a random troll at some point in the comic is still up for grabs, though.

The Webcomic Overlook #176: Botched Spot

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As you may have guessed from my online handle, my image of myself if a silver mask, and the banner with an image of Eddie Guerrero with an iPhone for a head, I’m something of a fan of pro-wrestling. I blame my sister, who was all over that stuff in the mid 1990′s. This was in the middle of the Monday Night War, and both WWE and WCW were throwing up crazy storylines and outlandish gimmicks to try to grab the viewers. As someone who’d been a casual viewer in the 1980′s, I preferred WCW since it featured several of the wrestlers I knew, like “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, “The Macho Man” Randy Savage, and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan.

Also, we only had basic cable, which, at our house, meant that we had TBS (where WCW aired) and not USA (where RAW IS WAR aired). That’s right: my intro to wrestling was the much-maligned WCW Thunder. Which, frankly, wasn’t a terrible show. While the big name stars got the spotlight on Monday Night Nitro, Thunder focused on the mid-carders, who were, by far, the better wrestlers. There was Chris Jericho, Booker T, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, and my first introduction to the luchadors: Rey Mysterio, La Parka, Silver King, and El Dandy. Seriously, who are you to doubt that guy? There was a refreshing can-do spirit to those guys, all trying to become huge stars through a combination of showmanship, athleticism, and incredibly corny gimmicks… like that time Hugh Morrus rebranded himself as the military-themed Hugh G. Rection. (Seriously.)

I haven’t really been watching wrestling that much recently, but I do know enough that Raw is now the John Cena show, Triple H is taking the Vince MacMahon role of WWE president, former wrestler Brock Lesnar caused a tidal wave of pride from wrestling smarks by winning one of the top belts in mixed martial arts, and The Miz, CM Punk, Sheamus, and Jack Swagger are all former champions. Oh, and apparently Hulk Hogan is still kicking around in TNA Impact Wrestling.

When you have a niche but rabid fanbase, inevitably someone’s going to try to make a webcomic out of it. While James Hornsby’s Botched Spot isn’t the first wrestling-themed humor webcomic I’ve come across, it probably does the best job at capturing the zeitgeist of wrestling fandom.

(Incidentally, while the title sounds like a particularly lewd and filthy sexual position, Botched Spot is named for when a wrestler badly screws up a move.)

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Boston.com reports on the new webcomic entrepreneurs

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In a recent piece, Boston.com did an interview with several webcomic creators, including Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), Jeffrey Rowland (Overcompensating), Richard Stevens (Diesel Sweeties), and Michael Terracciano (Dominic Deegan). Here’s an excerpt:

Questionable Content is not just a hobby for Jacques, 31. It’s his job.

Webcomics were once seen as a new path to syndication. Comic artists would post their work online, hoping to attract a large enough fan base that syndicates would take notice, offer them contracts, sell their comics to newspapers, and give them a cut of the profits. But for Jacques and many other webcomic artists, syndication is out of the picture.

“There’s no real money in that,’’ he says.

Jacques, who says he earns six figures from his webcomic, is among a small but growing number of professional webcomic artists. There are, by some estimates, 36,000 webcomics in the world, but Wikipedia counts only 47 professional webcomic artists, meaning only a minuscule percentage are making money at it. Mostly they earn money from merchandise sales, supplemented by advertising and donations.

They arrived at this profession by various paths, but none originally set out to live this way.

Jeffrey Rowland, 37, of Northampton began drawing comics and submitting them to syndicates in 1999. All he received in return were stacks of impersonal rejection letters. Craving constructive criticism, he began to upload his drawings to a website.

He eventually hit his stride with a webcomic called Wigu, about a little boy named Wigu Tinkle and his adventures with intergalactic beings such as Topato, a flying potato. Successful Wigu T-shirt sales made him realize that he didn’t need to be syndicated to make a living drawing comics.

“If a syndicate came to me and offered me a hundred newspapers, I would probably say no,’’ Rowland says. “I’d have to answer to an editor, which I wouldn’t be happy with. I’d probably make less money, with more work.’’

This is precisely the situation Richard Stevens, 34, also from Easthampton, found himself in four years ago, when his webcomic, Diesel Sweeties, was syndicated by United Media, which distributes Dilbert, Rose Is Rose, Get Fuzzy, and other strips. Diesel Sweeties portrays brightly colored, pixelated robots and humans, and their romantic entanglements. The site receives a few million page views every month.

Stevens now says syndication was a terrible decision.

“It’s nice to have a syndicate handle things if you have 1,000 newspapers and your whole job is drawing seven days a week. But if you are committed contractually to draw seven days a week and you don’t have clients, you’re really working for free,” says Stevens, who was syndicated in about 20 newspapers. “Even when I was syndicated, I was making 80 percent of my money from my website.”

Incidentally, Boston.com has a paywall thing going, so clicking on the article more than once brings up the accursed registration warning. It’s likely stuff that you’ve heard before, but it’s still rather nice to read how these guys accidentally becoming creators in a previously unproven comic medium.

(h/t Fleen)