Latest NewsPlease join me for a little streamed AFTER PARTY tonight, March 4, at 8pm EST on Twitch. I’m going to be tabling at MoCCA in Manhattan and TCAF in Toronto in the near future. Thank you for reading. Latest Letter ColumnHi Evan, I wrote back in the fall and mentioned that I liked the space that you’re creating around the comic. You asked for a little elaboration on that, and now that the first passage is wrapping up, I am finally getting around to it. I speak from the perspective of a person who randomly stumbled upon the world of webcomics around 2007. I’m not an artist and my interest in comics as a whole is somewhat limited. But at that time, I would have been finishing up my undergrad degree in English, so I am sure that Kate Beaton was my gateway. Every webcomic artist linked to a bunch of other webcomics on their sites, basically creating a webring. And that was how I found most comics. Back in those times, it seemed pretty arbitrary how these comics were put up. It seemed like most people were drawing them and posting them one page at a time because that was the speed at which they could work. I think it burnt a lot of people out because there was just no support for their work; they did it all for free and for an audience that sometimes unfortunately felt that the artist owed them something for free. One webcomic very close to my heart, unfinished and now long gone from the internet, went dark because the creator had a baby and an apartment fire. I’ve seen many more comics go on permanent hiatus than get finished due to lack of financial support. So much of the way that webcomics looked in the early days was due to happenstance. What resources were available to artists posting stuff for free? The one-page-at-a-time format was well supported by blogging platforms and simple hand-coded websites. Sometimes there would be a comment section, sometimes not, depending on what the artist could afford or was technically capable of. A sense of community was haphazard and wasn’t something artists would necessarily intentionally work to create. Overall, my experience of reading webcomics has been lonesome, but that’s not everyone’s experience, I know. I started reading your work when you were creating comics one page at a time like everyone else, and you put them up on your website with like 5 lines of HTML per page (that’s a joke—I have never looked at your source code) and somehow you just succeeded in this landscape that was brutal to so many others. Most of the webcomic artists who have been able to make their art into a career seem to have gone into games or animation, and webcomics became a side passion project. You, on the other hand, just kept putting stuff out week after week, year after year, into the webcomics space. It seems a little strange to me now, but I really did read Vattu from start to finish every MWF for 12 years without having a single other person to talk to about it. My partners knew that I was reading it and I repeatedly recommended it to them. I also recommended it to a lot of friends and even strangers. But I never knew someone who was reading it at the same time I was. I knew there were social media conversations happening about it out there, but I didn’t spend much time on those platforms. I would have liked to have been able to talk to someone about it, but after a while just kind of accepted that I was on a journey with this comic alone. Anyway, what I mean about the space around 3rd Voice: I was really refreshed to come back to after Vattu to see how you’re doing things differently with this one. I also finally joined your Patreon, which I should have done years earlier, so that’s made a difference for me, too. I see now that you have emphasized the elements of webcomics that you like and pulled back from the ones that are purely arbitrary. I like reading one scene a week MUCH more than reading a page three days a week; it allows for better emotional engagement. (And to be clear: I am not a fantasy/world-building person at all. I am 100% here for the Feelings.) The difference between 3rd Voice and your other comics is that now it feels like you have chosen this format, rather than just doing it because that’s what was available to you. I like the letter column, I like the Patreon community, and I did join the Discord although I have to say it immediately made me feel 1 million years old. I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with the people who read your work and your constant encouragement of younger artists. I now see that the closeness to your audience is one of the things about the webcomic format that’s probably kept you going. Thanks for cultivating that and I hope it keeps sustaining you. (I also hope it makes you more money, too.) Emily * March 1, 2024 (apologies, again, for mangling the line-breaks in this republication of your letter) Hey! I really appreciate a big historical picture like this, thank you so much for writing it. The shift you’re identifying from an independent, organically-interconnected webcomics/independent art world is one that I’m thinking about a lot lately. Trying to articulate this to the class I’m teaching (full of people Significantly Younger than me [us])— trying to not be totally bleak about it. The circumstances change but I still intermittently have faith that there’s a historically unique space for idiosyncratic & overcommitted works in comics out here, and that there are people who will be interested in whatever particular thing gets made, if it’s Idiosyncratic and Overcommitted Enough. Starting 3V was all wrapped up in these big-picture career-trajectory ideas you delineate, to me. I have done books with publishers and will do more probably! But it is increasingly clear to me that working in serialized-webcomic context opens up way more space for me creatively; it is kind of scary and tenuous but I am like… clinging to this really hard as the way I feel I can make the best stuff I can make. What does that amount to, though!!! Hopefully a stable sustainable sort of career at least!!!! That loneliness feeling, I think I know what you mean. Going to comic conventions in the first few years of doing that really helped me see that there were People engaging with this sort of stuff, and other artists doing it in the same sort of way I was doing it, and I loved that. Now though I feel a little socially and aesthetically out of touch, but it is still nice to see in physical space what people are making. But outside of conventions it is kind of lonely! It’s a marginal space in a marginal art form! People don’t talk about comics much on the public internet, it seems like. And all of the smaller-scale pop culture journalism has vanished pretty abruptly. And it’s weird going to a world-historically huge and vibrant space like SPX, or TCAF, and seeing practically no record that it ever even happened on the internet afterwards. I dunno! Not a soluble problem, just thinking out loud. SO anyway I have been trying to double down on the things I can have control of, in the midst of all these CIRCUMSTANCES. I am really grateful and excited to have an audience that’s engaged with this stuff, and to have little spaces for them like the discord or this column or whatever. I liked doing the little livestream after-party thing when the first book ended. who knows!!! I am just trying to hold onto what I can hold onto!!!! I appreciate your reading and thoughts!! I appreciate that you’re more a Feelings Reader than a Worldbuilding Reader; my dream is to get both of those tracks moving in the same direction as much as possible lol |
MoCCA Fest, in Manhattan, NYC, March 16-17, 2024. TCAF, in Toronto, ON, May 11-12, 2024. SPX, in Bethesda, MD, September 14-15, 2024. |