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AMA — "Will 'Evil Inc' reboot again?"

Added 2022-09-25 18:00:04 +0000 UTC

Q.: Did you anticipate having to reboot Evil Inc before you had to? Do you think you'll have to do another reboot to Evil Inc?

The reboot of Evil Inc was predicated more on format than it was on story. In 2012, I took a buyout from the Philadelphia Daily News and become a full-time cartoonist. Later that same year, ad-blocker software became very popular. By 2013, the ad revenue that I had based my entire business plan on was shrinking away to nothing. That same year, webcartoonists were starting to discover this new thing called Patreon.

It was becoming pretty clear that our business was moving away from an ad-supported model to a crowdfunding model. That meant I would need to change how I delivered the comic. In an ad-supported model, daily updates were almost mandatory. Daily updates meant daily visitors, and that meant daily ad views. Ad-blockers killed that. And crowdfunding focused on community and content. So I had to re-envision Evil Inc as something that delivered bigger story swings. That would give my comic a better opportunity to get readers engaged in the story and become active in the community I was trying to build. So the Evil Inc daily comic strip had to end, and the Evil Inc graphic novel was going to take its place.

I stuck with the strip format for a few more years as I prepared to pivot to a graphic-novel format. Once I made that decision, I realized that I also had an opportunity to correct some of the writing mistakes I had made over several years of strips. For example, launching the strip with Captain Heroic and Miss Match happily married was a big mistake — from a storytelling standpoint. That had to be changed. Also, I had three characters that were virtually interchangeable — Dr. Haynus, Dr. Muskiday and Dr. Vincent. Two of them had to be removed. Also, placing the emphasis on Evil Inc as a corporation was unwieldy and difficult to communicate. So the new Evil Inc focused on a branch office. This allowed me to communicate the story much more effectively.

And that’s how Evil Inc rebooted. A change in format begat a change in storytelling. And if the Internet changed tomorrow — reverting back to an ad-supported model — I would probably be forced to go back to the daily comic-strip format. And that might tempt me to do a third reboot.

However, at this point, I would probably be much more tempted to either launch a spin-off (i.e.: a new branch of Evil Inc) or launch an entirely new project. A space opera featuring Captain Scarr always intrigued me, for example. A story that takes place on a college campus would also be fun. And a “Halloweentown” concept would be absolutely marvelous to try to conjure.

Or maybe I’d just do all of them. They’d each be standalone stories that would unfold over a year. When one ends, the next one begins. Honestly, I have no idea what will happen next. It pretty much comes down to the market forces of independent comics and, well… you folks.