Now, before I get into any of my thoughts, let me start with some context for those of you who weren't paying attention to webcomics at all back then. Prior to, say, 2006-2007, webcomics were simply dismissed out of hand by pretty much everyone. Not on the basis of the creativity or talent or anything like that, just that so few people were making a living doing webcomics that the medium was considered little more than a distraction. A hobby at most. There were a handful of people earning a living making webcomics, but it really was just a handful... literally only four or five individuals. They had proved it was possible, though, and that gave a lot of webcomikers hope and a business model template they could actually work from.
The "problem" was that some of these more successful webcomikers were trying to make a space for themselves in more traditional cartooning circles. Many established print cartoonists dismissed webcomikers as talentless amateurs, and they would slag them off by saying they're just cheap t-shirt salesmen and don't actually make any money from making comics.
The back and forth lasted about five years until basically even Kurtz gave up trying to convince the old guard that webcomics were a valid profession. I'm pretty sure nobody won over anybody with their arguements, and all it did was make Kurtz and a few others look immature, and the newspaper cartoonists look like old farts yelling about "these kids today" to nobody in particular.
I covered this in much more depth in my Webcomics book if you're interested.
Anyway, back to Gardner. He revisited the topic, now a decade and a half since everybody gave up arguing, and reached out to Kurtz and Rall, as I said. There's a few things of interest I'd like to highlight in their response.
First, Kurtz comes across as much more mature than he was. He admits he was "immature asshole" back then and that his arguements didn't sway anybody. He also acknowledges that the business model he used when he started PvP isn't really viable any longer, and he largely works on graphic novels now because he's unwilling to, with his age, commit to the daily grind of webcomics or newspaper comics. He hints at, but doesn't specify, the exact timing of his getting out of daily webcomics happens to coincide with a massive shift in how the original webcomics business model began failing thanks in part to the rise of ad blockers and automated t-shirt 'shops' that liberally stole creators' designs.
As for Rall, he definitely seems calmer now than he did then, but he still comes across as having an angry "these kids today" mindset. He still seems to think that all but a handful of webcomikers are outright lying about their finances, and that webcomics are functionally impossible to earn a living from. He continues to cite $100,000/year as some kind of baseline for what he seems to consider "making a living" even though the median American income has never cracked $50,000/year. His overall position seems to remain unchanged, and it's only his tone that has tempered a bit.
When I revisited this whole debate while I was researching my Webcomics book, I thought that both Kurtz and Rall were being pretty obstinate and needlessly antagonistic. But, if you were able to read past the attitudes, Kurtz did bring up many valid points, which Rall continually dismissed out-of-hand. And while they both wound up being the faces of the two sides of the 'debate' by being the most vocal and most antagonistic, anyone who chimed in from the sidelines and didn't have an axe to grind seemed to align with Kurtz. Mostly other webcomikers, to be sure, but even several of the newspaper cartoonists. Piccolo and Cravens, as I noted earlier, but Jim Davis and Julie Larson and Bill Amend. They might not have been able to figure out how precisely they could work in a regular webcomics format successfully themselves, but they acknowledged in various way how that was a viable direction for the 21st century.
I recall thinking the "debate" was stupid at the time. Some people were drawing cartoons, posting them online, and earning a living from it. By 2007, when this all first erupted, webcomics was proven to be a viable career option. Not an easy one, certainly, but viable. We had a number of clear examples by that point, Kurtz only being one of many. That anyone would refute that, or deny that those people were professional cartoonists did nothing but highlight the claimant's own fragile ego. It just highlighted people who were scared about where their careers were headed, and that they didn't seem to know -- or even want to know -- what to do about it.
Webcomics are thing. Some people make money at it, some people don't. Some people make enough money at it to earn a living, some people don't. Same with print comics. That it was ever a debate at all stuck me then, as now, as silly.
0 comments:
Post a Comment