Allegedly, Toys R Us makes the vast majority of their income in December every year, as everyone swoops in to buy holiday gifts for their kids. I know a lot of other companies see their sales go up in December as well for pretty much the same reason. Companies know this, of course, and kick up their advertising and staffing and all that accordingly.

But it's got me thinking...

A lot of webcomics people don't do their strips full-time. They hold other jobs that frequently do require extra hours. Plus they have families, too, and try to spend additional time with them, which often involves travel. Combined, this means a lot of webcomikers put their strips on hiatus for some period towards the end of the year. Totally understandable, and I completely get it.

But, if they're not putting out their comic, and not doing as much promoting of it, are they missing out financially? Are people out there looking for gifts to buy friends and family, and don't think of a printed webcomics collection or a clever t-shirt based on a webcomic or whatever, because the creator is taking a break and they're not top-of-mind for the whole month?

I don't have any data on this, but anecdotally, I've heard that sales tied to a webcomic generally track pretty closely with actual strip updates. People only hit the site when there's a content update, and then they might click over to buy something because the strip is already in front of them. I suspect it's rare that readers think, "What should I get Uncle Phil? I know! I'll be he'll like this t-shirt based on a comic I don't know if he reads!"

So while I appreciate the break in creators' schedules so I can catch up with their work, I wonder if that works against them from a business perspective? I'd be curious to hear any webcomikers' thoughts/experiences on the subject.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Popular or Passionate?
http://ift.tt/1OuHpbh

FreakSugar: Fanthropology: Afraid of What?
http://ift.tt/1OoNPT1

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: Assembly Line Origins?
http://ift.tt/1VnHJbn

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/1NQNED4

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: 2015 in Review
http://ift.tt/1RRjNhB

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: Death for Everybody!
http://ift.tt/1mTlbDQ

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Little Sammy Sneeze Tissue Box
http://ift.tt/22CfuKV

OK, I swiped this idea from Sunday Press Books' The Complete Color Little Sammy Sneeze promotion: a tissue box cover depicting Winsor McCay's nasally challenged protagonist, Sammy Sneeze. Whereas the Sunday Press version is of the longer box design, I made for myself a version to fit over square tissue boxes. It features two abbreviated cartoons on opposite sides, and spotlight images of Sammy on the other two sides.

I made this a couple years ago and never intended to do anything with it beyond having one in my library, but since I'm travelling and needed an "On Strips" post, I thought I might share it. If you'd like your own, you can order a poster board size sheet with two complete tissue box layouts on it here. It's printed on a high gloss paper, so you'll have to glue it to a sheet of poster board or something a little sturdier. But then you can just cut it out, glue the flaps in place, and you should be good to drop it over a standard tissue box! Plus you've got a second one you can gift to a friend!

You ever notice how the living embodiment of Death seems to be a more recurring theme both around Halloween and towards the end of the year? Here's some recent comics featuring Death...

Mother Goose & Grimm


Sinfest


Strange Brew


Mary Death


I suppose it makes sense in a way with the year ending. That Sinfest piece in particular is a recurring motif with the strip, where Death hunts down the old year in kind of a Logan's Run style.

But here's the interesting thing: while the Old Year is almost always depicted as an old bearded white guy, Death is just a skeleton in a robe. No skin color, no gender, no sexual orientation. (Obviously, I'm talking contemporary Western depictions primarily.)

The notion of using a skeleton to represent Death makes sense beyond just our culture. After a body dies, the flesh decays away, leaving only a skeleton. There's nothing left recognizable from the original person. And given that everybody's skeleton looks pretty much the same, it's not at all a far leap to start using that as a symbol of Death itself.

But that's the bit I don't think many people think about either. Everybody's skeleton looks pretty much the same. You strip away the skin color, the visibly obvious gender markers, the outward characteristics of sexual orientation, everyone is the same. We're all built the same way.

I mean, you know this, of course. But there's a disconnect a lot of people seem to have when you add that superficial stuff on top. Not everyone recognizes it as the same as using the same blueprints and materials to build two houses, and then just painting them different colors.

And yet, we see Death being depicted as that framework all the time. I wonder if, the next time you come across a comic like these featuring Death, you make an "offhand" comment to whoever happens to be nearby -- something like, "Hey, you ever realize that because Death is shown as a skeleton, he represents everybody? He doesn't have skin or muscle, so he could be you or me or that Black guy up the road or that Asian woman over there or..? Funny how we're all exactly the same underneath a bit of skin, but people still think you're more inclined to violence if your skin is just a little darker."

I have no idea if that would work, or even get people to think a bit more, but it's worth a shot, isn't it?

• Jennifer Sheehan looks at Phillipsburg High School teacher Faith Roncoroni and how she uses comics in her classes.
• Samantha Melamed talks with Terry and Patty LaBan about ending their syndicated newspaper strip Edge City. Several other cartoonists also weigh in on the slow decline of the comics page in newspapers.
• Jim Shelley digs up and shares Woolworth's Christmas Story Book comic from 1953.
  

You're probably aware that many of the more commercial comics are done by a series of people, right? A writer will draft the story, a penciller will do the initial illustrations while an inker cleans the linework up, a letterer is actually the one putting in the dialogue, and a colorist applies... well, color. Pretty standard breakdown of work, right? It mostly makes sense, as those individual tasks require slightly different skill sets. That approach is generally credited to Will Eisner, who by the late 1930s began getting too much work to handle by himself and found he had to hire a staff of creators to help meet the demand. The list of Eisner & Iger Studio alumni is a veritable who's who of early comicdom: Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, Lou Fine, George Tuska, Mort Meskin, Bob Powell... In hiring all these new people, he established this assembly line process to help speed up production.

(The art accompanying this post is the original rough layout for the page in which Eisner explains his approach in The Dreamer. All of his page layouts for that book can be seen here.)

What I'm wondering, though, is how/where did Eisner hit upon the idea originally? I've seen/heard it referenced almost every time the Eisner-Iger shop is mentioned, but there's very little in the way of details. In fact, The Dreamer is about the most elaborate version I've found, and he literally spends only one panel on it. From Eisner's own accounts, he didn't seem too business savvy at the time, so it strikes me as odd that he might lift the idea wholesale from Henry Ford. Also, I doubt he would've woken up one day and suddenly hired fifteen people to help out; he would've picked up one guy here, another there over the course of weeks and months, so even if he did have a flash of inspiration, he wouldn't have had the resources to implement a full assembly line at the outset anyway.

So some kind of gradual approach seems to make the most sense. Maybe start with "I'll write the story and do some rough layouts, you finish it and make sure everything looks polished"? Then perhaps "I'll write the story and do some roughs, you write in the dialogue and draw the figures, and you fill out the backgrounds"? Then "I'll write the story, you do some roughs, you write draw the main figures, you drop in the dialogue, and you finish it"? Something kind of like that makes sense, right?

But how much experimenting did he do with that? How long before he settled on a single methodology? What were some of the options he might have tried that didn't work out well?

And one thing I've always been struck by is that Eisner has mentioned on more than a few occasions that different artists worked on the main figures than the backgrounds. I understand that's not an uncommon practice in manga, but I can't recall when I may have last heard of that approach being used in US comics. Maybe from the waning days of the newspaper adventure strip? Was Milton Caniff the last major comic artist to employ this approach? (It should go without saying that the foreground/background division of duties is still standard in animation.) When/where did that comics assembly line process shift into the penciller/inker model we're more familiar with? Is it indeed more efficient than a foreground/background approach?

I find it a little curious that, for as much as has been written by and about Eisner, and for as significant as that division of labor was/has been to comics, that there seem to be scant details about how it actually came about. At least, as far as I can find.

Before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics, it was a low-end publisher of knock-off material. Martin Goodman's business plan was basically to see what was selling well, and then make as many knock-off versions of the same thing before readers moved on to something else. Although he had been doing that for decades before, that's basically where the Fantastic Four came from. "Hey, this Justice League thing is selling really well! We should get on that right away! Stan, gimme a superhero team!"

That's not at all an uncommon practice still today. Marvel started doing superhero movies really well, and we've got a glut of superhero and comic book movies now. They started spinning them all together in one great big "Marvel Cinematic Universe" and people are trying to copy that model. Variant covers, line-wide event-driven stories, universe reboots... anything that does well, inside of comics and out, gets noticed and copied. Usually ad naseum.

Some players do it better than others, but there are two general approaches to this. One: do it as fast and as cheap as possible. Two: do it as big and as loud as possible.

Now, I bring this up because most creators simply do not have the resources to do big and loud. At least not at the level they'd need to. The Walking Dead started in 2003, and soon picked up steam. The zombie genre started seeing more prominence in comics, movies, TV shows and you can't swing an undead cat without hitting a zombie cosplayer at a convention any more. But the only ones that really register are the larger scale ones, like Ash vs Evil Dead. Even though half the creators in any given Artists' Alley are doing zombie related material, you don't know what those are. Those creators just don't have the volume.

So the trick, at that scale, is to do them fast and cheap. Get on board as soon as possible, and jump off as soon as you start being overtaken by the guys doing it louder and bigger.

The problem, though, with that approach is that you're always chasing the quick buck, and you never know what's coming next. Maybe Westerns will become popular again. Maybe dystopian thrillers. Maybe retellings of ancient Chinese legends. Whatever it might be, you have to know enough about them to get something out in the market quickly before the people who are more expert in that subject/genre do something. It's do-able, as far as go-to-market plan is concerned, but it requires a constant and ongoing survey of the entire market. Which sounds ridiculously exhausting to me.

A better approach might be to focus on what you're really passionate about. If that coincides with something popular, that's fantastic, but if not... well, you're still probably going to get exhausted (this time by trying to promote your work to an audience that's less primed for it) but at least you'll love what you're working on.