More good comics in any medium bodes well for the art form. Squabbling about the medium is useless.

If only that were the case! Almost every professional web cartoonist I know of has a free website and makes their money off of ads, merchandise and/or freelance garnered from the larger (tho still smaller than newspaper) audience that an open site allows them to grow.

Selling “bonus” subscriptions to fan clubs, email lists and the like are a very small fraction of things in my experience.

If anything, the debate might be better defined as “niche comics” vs. “comics with mass appeal”.

I always got the impression that syndicates were interested in making money as a primary goal. If all syndicates would follow this model an artist could once again look to syndication either on the web OR in print format as a great way to focus on their art and not spend all their time running the business of their own subscription service.

It certainly seems there’s a bitter war between print vs. web. While I think I come across as one of those on the ‘death to newspaper comics’ side, I’m really not. It’s not about webcomics directly REPLACING print comics, it’s simply about the future. And to be frank, newspapers as we know them simply will not last. They’re actively being eroded away by the emergence of online offerings. I predicted that the Internet itself was getting too big too fast and was going to leave a lot of people hurting, and what happened? The dot com bust.

I’m saying the same thing now about newspapers; except in reverse. I’ve noticed for a number of years that newspapers have continually gone downhill (heck, they’ve been doing so since before I was born.) It’s a simple matter of progress. Papers will get distilled to their bare essentials, to the point you’ll be paying $2+ for a smaller paper. And I don’t think I’m out of line when I say that they’ll probably drop comics before they get rid of say, the sports section.

I doubt it will happen anytime soon. But when it comes to making a comic you want to last 20, 30 or 50+ years, I think it’s a good idea to take a good hard look NOW at the reality that there may not be a viable print venue THEN if you don’t think about what it is you wish to ultimately accomplish.

I personally haven’t entirely given up on developing my comic for syndication, but honestly, even without the prestige of being a ‘legitimate cartoonist’, there’s a certain allure to doing a comic on my terms, ultimately making it my job to listen to the readers not a jaded editor (and I mean no offense to jaded editors, but the simple fact is if you do something like this so long you begin to get higher and higher humor expectations to the point the nothing is funny anymore. I’m not even an editor and I catch myself critiquing comics more than reading/enjoying them.)

Oh, I forgot – I also really like the portability of my paper , it is a lot easier to read on the train than dealing with the laptop and I can actually write on my crossword puzzle. (yes I ‘m one of those people who does those too – go ahead – just call me a dinosaur and be done with it!)

Lots and lots of legwork. You don’t need to sell a lot of merchandise to live middle-class using a web audience. I’ve done it for five years, PA and PVP have for much longer.

The difference between them and me is that I see syndication as a bonus, not a curse.

“I don’t know why you’d want to rush to get to that cemetery,” says Krahulik. “I guess everybody wants their dad to like them, right? They feel like they need that approval. I think we represent the exact opposite of that.”

I didn’t intepret it as a “nuke”, but it’s definitely a dig at newspaper cartoonists used to glorify the image of web cartoonists.

To say that web cartoonists don’t want their creativity hindered and sanitized by newspaper and syndicate editors is fair, but to imply that anyone still going after the traditional route of print syndication must have a misplaced need for approval is not.

In a completely unrelated observation, the online version of the article didn’t bother to link or provide the URL to any of the web comics it mentioned. That’s sort of lame.