Q&A 11: "The business of webcomics"

John Lee writes:

"This is a question more concerning the business end of things, so not sure if it's completely relevant, but I'm curious - what are some of the biggest differences in producing webcomics in current day vs when you first started in terms of advertising, networking, community, etc? And do you have any tips for people interested in going into such endeavors in present day? I'm sure that things must have changed quite a lot given how much the internet has evolved since the early days."

Since I read this question a week ago, I've been trying to think of a way to answer it that wasn't a massive downer, a rose-tinted portrait of a more innocent, easy time vs a modern, corporatised dystopia. And I'm not sure I can. I talked to friends about it, friends from the olden days of webcomics - most of whom return to the field only sporadically, or maintain their presence out of habit/nostalgia/the joy of doing it. 

But I will try to give a positive spin to this, otherwise it's not really worth writing.

So when I started doing webcomics, there were only a couple of dozen doing them, but there a disproportionate ratio of people looking for free, regularly updated online content. there wasn't so much of that in the early 2000s, suitable for low-bandwidth connections. This was an environment where you could grow slowly and learn your trade while producing work in a volume that could be managed, with care, against a day job.

The monetisation of webcomics at that time - through product merchandising rather than the comics themselves, was something I didn't enjoy but that could produce a good supplementary income and for a few people, combined with web advertising, would support them entirely. The "indie merch" method was a completely separate culture that existed symbiotically with the comics. 

I don't count printed collections in this. Anyone who has sat at a convention with a table full of (for example) prints featuring a joke from one of your comics hastily rendered, and that same comic, often for a lower price, will speak to the pain of selling the prints and carrying most of the books home.

Webcomics were also served by the old "webring" behaviours - artists linked prominently to all their favourite comics. These people were often your friends. The big ones lent a certain patronage to smaller ones, creating word of mouth. And various comic hosting services networked comics to similar effect.

The virtue of doing business off a personal website, making merch yourself (or through a friendly, often cost-advantageous distro), and self-publishing, meant that your margins were as good as they could possibly be. You didn't need so many people to support you to be able to survive. It was a young person's game, running that kind of operation (often alone or with limited help), but workable.

If you came up in that era and were able to sustain yourself then, you can probably sustain yourself now, with a grandfathered-in audience, two decades of goodwill, and significant experience in self-publishing and art. Whether you have the energy to, and whether the income from self-publishing webcomics into a third decade will support what may now be your family, as opposed to a young adult, is a different question. But it's possible.

However, entering the field now represents the exact opposite experience. Few people visit personal websites. Social media, which initially seemed to be a good way to expand your comic's audience, is now locked down, algorithmically driven, and very difficult to monetise. Your little comic isn't going to be a lot of people's goof-off of choice. The internet is very rich in distractions in 2022. 

It's easier than it ever was to publish a webcomic now. But it enters a very crowded field. Webtoon and Tapas have huge user bases which are clogged with professionally-created, team-drawn manga strips, often updating with huge chunks  every week. They take everybody's work, but most people will never see it. And even successful comics on these services will seldom see decent money. Indie cartoonists with tens of thousands of subscribers end every update asking you to sign up for their Patreon. 

If you're not one of the giants, you will not get what you should be worth - what an audience roughly equivalent to that of a mid-table Marvel comic really ought to be worth - on Webtoon or Tapas. That audience isn't particularly portable because breaking readers out of one of these locked-down corporate ecosystems is hard. Good luck extracting your Instagram comic readers onto your personal website when you get sick of their algorithm or the eternal pivot to video!

As stated, my intention was not to be negative. I have had a pretty charmed life in comics, but it is a charmed life founded on endless writing and drawing practice, careful networking, market research, fiscal prudence, and the sure knowledge that every cycle ends and you have to be ready for that. 

The field of comics probably has more participants now than it has ever had. It must do. The volume of work produced, professional and amateur, is vast. But the lack of gatekeepers/active curators, and the ease of publication, leaves precious little oxygen for fish in a teeming stream of new creators.

I imagine that people making a living from webcomics, by which I mean, leveraging their webcomic work into commissions, merch sales, ad revenue, Patreon income, is a factor many times higher now than it was when I started. It must be. All of those people will be  intellectually agile, with a sense of what needs to be done to survive. 

If I came out with 'Bobbins' now, of course it could not have built an audience. It was a barely-thought out, amateurish strip I made to kill boredom when unemployed after finishing university, with half a mind to trying to sell it to a newspaper syndicate. But it was good enough to satisfy what people (and we may have been talking 100 people back in early 1999) wanted at the time. i like to think that if I was starting now, I'd work out exactly what was good enough to get people interested, and start there. 

If you look at a modern webcomic success story like Heartstopper, that's exactly what it does. It didn't have to be drawn to within an inch of its life by a team of mangaka to become something with a life outside Webtoon. It's not aimed at me, but how can I not respect what Alice Oseman has achieved with a black and white webcomic? It's immense.

Now, as then, the only way to find out if you can succeed is to have a go, keep your eyes open to what is going on around you, and make things up as you go along.