There are a number of webcomickers these days who are able to make a living doing (or at least primarily doing) webcomics. That is fantastic! But a lot of them aren't making much (if any!) money from their webcomics yet. Maybe they're just new to the game, or maybe it hasn't been their focus, or whatever, but their primary income derives from some kind of day job. I've seen several that work as graphic designers; I don't doubt some work in retail environments; there are probably as many different occupations as there are webcomickers out there.

But if someone is getting paid to do a job that is not webcomics, that frequently means that webcomics by necessity become a secondary project. After all, you don't see CEOs and hedge fund managers making webcomics where they've got plenty of vacation time to take off if they need to. The people who are making webcomics typically have day jobs that are farther down the pay scale, often as hourly employees. With their the lower incomes comes less financial security. With less financial security comes a greater need to make sure you don't lose whatever income you're getting.

All of which means that webcomics that aren't make much money are going to take a back seat to a paying gig.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Perfectly reasonable approach in our capitalistic society.

But it does make for a big challenge in getting a webcomic up and running. After all, if the time a creator normally allots for working on their webcomic disappears or diminishes for any reason (change in job hours, relocation that requires a longer commute, etc.) the webcomic goes on hiatus. While on hiatus, a webcomic will almost inevitably lose some percentage of readership it has and the creator will have to work extra hard later to coerce them back.

A webcomic can run guest strips or maybe re-runs for a week, maybe two, if they've things to take care of (convention travel, planned family events like weddings, etc. -- I mean, there's not much of that going on now, but it has happened and will again... eventually) but generally a hiatus comes unexpectedly and for more extended periods, often months. Sometimes, even a month-long buffer can be eaten away almost before you realize it!

And as I sit here thinking about the webcomic hiatus, it occurs to me that it mimics some of the social strata we see in American culture in general. The people who are living paycheck to paycheck have the most to lose, and have to fight the hardest to even keep up, much less make any headway in their lives. They are less likely to become financially secure because their daily fight is one of just surviving. Whereas someone higher up the career ladder has more flexibility; they have some measure of savings they can use as a security net should they lose their position, and their resumes look more impressive to give them a greater advantage in locating a new job.

Now compare that to webcomics. The people not making a living off their webcomic yet have the most to lose. Their small handful of followers diminishes noticeably even if only one or two people leave. By contrast, Randall Munroe doesn't give a rat's ass if I read his strip or not because he has so many readers that one more or less is insignificant. Similarly, if that first webcomicker drops their strip to start something new, it will be an incredibly hard uphill battle, but Munroe has a huge following that will undoubtedly jump over to (and fund!) whatever his next project might be. Munroe's comic might be, qualitatively, total crap next to this new person's but he will continue to be successful because he already is.

It just strikes me as interesting that the webcomic industry has become essentially a metaphoric microcosm of American capitalism. Where claims of meritocracy still abound and the American Dream^TM of becoming anything you want if you just work hard at it is still widely believed. Even though neither is a terribly accurate method of describing what actually goes on. Webcomics likewise don't rise in popularity just because the writing or artwork is especially noteworthy. They rise in popularity when they're given attention by someone with connections.

Doing a great webcomic is not enough. But doing an okay webcomic that you're able to get your friend with an already existing audience to promote on your behalf might be.

This book is almost 200 pages long and pretty much all in one place. And as a reader, you don't notice because there's so much going on.

In the opening pages, we see Lord Wong and his people en route to the Old Land via the Dragon Path. But the convoy is stopped by an intentional rock slide from the Dragon Tribe that inhabits the area. (Despite the name, they bear a closer resemblance to the Lizard Men from Flash Gordon than what you might traditionally think of as a dragon.) A fight naturally breaks out, and Lord Wong's son Prince Sing gets lost. He stumbles into a nearby ruined section of the Old Land where he meets Ming the Mystic. The story then revolves around Sing learning the true nature of his heritage as well as the history of the Land itself, but it's pieced out over an extended period as each portion of the story sheds a new and different light on what had been revealed previously. Lord Wong and Komodo Khan (Commander General of the Dragon Tribe) learn a great deal as well, and eventually part on peaceful terms.

Laid out in those terms, it sounds dreadfully dull but trust me, it isn't. What's fascinating to me as a reader is how Ethan Young lays out several different levels of backstory here. It's suggested in the first couple pages, for example, that Lord Wong's advisor is not to be trusted and, indeed, he bears many traditional hallmarks of a duplicitous character. Ming, by contrast, is immediately presented an honorable and trustworthy character, loyal to the good of the land over any individual. But as pieces of the history that lead everyone to this time and place are revealed, we learn that all of the characters fall into more grey areas with individual motivations driving them to do and say things that aren't 100% good or evil. Virtually every character lies (either telling outright falsehoods or deliberately omitting key facts) but for a wide variety of reasons, so it takes much of the story to piece together how/why everyone is acting the way they are.

As I think on it, I'm reminded a little of Rashōmon, where several people tell their version of the same story and their unique perspectives and motivations have a noticeable impact on how they perceive things. While Young isn't really doing that in such a formal manner here, by having different portions of the backstory revealed by different characters the slow build of details has a similar impact. We keep seeing that events aren't always as obvious as they seem, even after they've been explained! Some of that is from deception, and some of it is just accidental misunderstandings. But it's all built up over time and brings us to where Sing essentially has to re-learn his land's and his family's history. It's almost an exercise in making the world-building an intriguing and engaging proposition in and of itself!

Young's art and storytelling continue to improve. When I reviewed his Nanjing several years ago, I commented on how he'd worked on both his fine linework as well as his brush inking. Here, you can see Young has honed his craft, as both his linework and his brushwork are enhanced yet again. I still see similar inking techniques that I found in Nanjing but they seem much more confident and practiced, and they're often strongly complemented by the coloring.

Also, the story has a 30-foot kitty name Midnight.

All in all, Young turns in another strong work here. His stories have always proven to be enjoyable reads, and The Dragon Path continues very much that tradition. The book came out last week from Scholastic's Graphix imprint and retails for $12.99 US.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Goes Review
https://ift.tt/3fn3yt0

Kleefeld on Comics: Thomas Inge, RIP
https://ift.tt/3tVhU9e

Kleefeld on Comics: Miss Cairo Jones
https://ift.tt/2SRXild

Kleefeld on Comics: The Creator's Bill of Rights
https://ift.tt/3fw52kx

Kleefeld on Comics: The Origin of the Comic Book Assembly Line
https://ift.tt/2S8OxTz

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.)

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 it's definitely not common in North American comics. At least not since the death of the newspaper adventure strip. I've heard Bryan O'Malley, Jamie McKelvie and Marc Silvestri have used background artists on occassion, but that's far from the norm, I think. 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.

You don't hear much about the Creator's Bill of Rights any more. Not that the comics industry heard much about it back when it was drafted in 1988. But today, I thought I'd put a small spotlight on it.

As I'm sure you're aware, creator's rights have been an issue in comics pretty much since Day One. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster signing over the rights to Superman in 1938 is sometimes referred to as the industry's original sin. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, the issue became a topic of regular discussion. Neal Adams tried forming a comic creators union in 1978, Jack Kirby fought a fairly public battle just to get his original artwork back in the early 1980s, and publishers that specialized in creator-owned content began popping up.

After a dispute with Diamond Distributors, Dave Sim tried pulling together other comic creators to try establish some rules designed "to protect their rights as creators and publishers and oppose exploitation by corporate work for hire practices and the power of distributors to dictate the means of distribution." (Quote from Wikipedia.) The group, which included the likes of Steve Bissette, Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Larry Marder, and Richard Pini among others, drafted the following Creator's Bill of Rights...

For the survival and health of comics, we recognize that no single system of commerce and no single type of agreement between creator and publisher can or should be instituted. However, the rights and dignity of creators everywhere are equally vital. Our rights, as we perceive them to be and intend to preserve them, are:

1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.
   
2. The right to full control over the creative execution of that which we fully own.
   
3. The right of approval over the reproduction and format of our creative property.
   
4. The right of approval over the methods by which our creative property is distributed.
   
5. The right to free movement of ourselves and our creative property to and from publishers.
   
6. The right to employ legal counsel in any and all business transactions.
   
7. The right to offer a proposal to more than one publisher at a time.
   
8. The right to prompt payment of a fair and equitable share of profits derived from all of our creative work.
   
9. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.
   
10. The right to prompt and complete return of our artwork in its original condition.
    
11. The right to full control over the licensing of our creative property.
    
12. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of ourselves and our creative property.

Scott McCloud is generally cited as the primary author.

Although news of this did run in The Comics Journal, very few people paid it much mind. Perhaps because there were more independent publishers out there, and there were still several distributors in existence? Coupled with the demise of the Comics Creators Guild and Kirby's "success" in getting art back from Marvel, perhaps the Creator's Bill of Rights was no longer seen as necessary by some people. Very few people, including many of its original proponents, claim it had much impact, if any. Image co-founder Erik Larsen denies it had any impact on that group's decision to create their own company, while Denis Kitchen dismissed the document as "generally naive and unrealistic."

While it may be that the Creator's Bill of Rights was drafted at precisely the wrong time, and was seen by some as "pie-in-the-sky", I wonder if it's worth discussing again, but now with the backdrop and context of webcomics and digital publishing. What would that initial discussion have been like if it happened today, over three decades later?

I'm almost entirely familiar with Bob Oksner's work through Lois Lane and Supergirl. Despite that, however, his work was hugely influential on me in that a good chunk of the types of clothing I like to see on women was informed by the Oksner's 1970s comic artwork. Beautifully drawn women in some wonderfully designed clothes.

But while I'm mostly familiar with him through his superhero material at DC, it turns out that he also had a few turns as a newspaper strip artist. He co-created a short-lived (only lasting a few months) strip called Soozi in 1967 and was the writer on Dondi from 1967 (I've also seen 1965 and 1966 cited) until his retirement in 1986. But the one that strikes me as interesting as Miss Cairo Jones, which ran from July 1945 until April 1947.

Oksner and co-creator Jerry Albert had the idea for a comic strip featuring Cairo Jones, an action hero type not wholly unlike Captain Easy or Buz Sawyer. Bell Syndicate president John Wheeler liked what he saw, but seemed to have felt that there wasn't room for another action hero, so he suggested switching the character's gender. The original male character of Cairo Jones was renamed Steve Racy, and his girlfriend was thrust into the newly feminized title role of Miss Cairo Jones.

The strip was pretty much just straight-up action with razor-thin plots and minimal, if any, characterization. But since Oksner drew attractive women even back then, and Miss Jones would ocassionally be the victim of wardrobe malfunctions, no one seemed to mind. In fact, Albert -- who had been writing strip -- dropped entirely after about year, right around the time it went from Sundays-only to a full daily, and Oksner continued on as the sole creator.

Some of the early strips were collected in comic book form in (presumably) late 1945. Croydon Publishing put out a single issue of Miss Cairo Jones Comics. It relayed the closest thing to an origin story she had, as she tracked down her husband who was a suspected Nazi war criminal. Though she had hoped to prove his innocence, she discovered he had indeed been helping to fund the Nazi party. When she finally found and confronted him, however, he chose to hang himself rather than be taken in.

The daily strips evidently weren't terribly popular. Perhaps because there was less space to see the primary draw of the strip: Oksner's art. Bell Syndicate seems to have taken the commercial failure of the daily strip as an indication of the strip as a whole, and canned the whole thing in mid-1947. Although some conflicting dates suggest that the daily may have been canceled several months earlier. So maybe Oksner's art alone wasn't enough to keep even the Sundays going. In any event, while it was still a relatively short-lived strip, it's some of Oksner's earliest comic work and probably helped him get in the door with Sheldon Mayer and DC.

You may have caught yesterday news about the death of M. Thomas Inge. I won't recap his basic backstory; you can read that elsewhere.

I didn't really know Tom personally. I met him a couple times but only really talked with him briefly once. But, as I am sure you can hear from any number of comics scholars, he served as a shining light forward. My earliest influences when it comes to comics research were Peter Sanderson, Will Murray, and Greg Theakston. They wrote pieces that took comics and their stories seriously, and applied thoughtful consideration to them in a way the most of the fan press simply wasn't doing. When I started my Fantastic Four fan site back way back in 1996, the writing I did for that was inspired by them.

I wouldn't discover Thomas Inge's work for about another decade. He took his work just as seriously as the others, but he didn't limit himself to superheroes. He was interested in comics as a medium, writ large. He looked at not only a broader array of material -- different venues, different genres, etc. -- but also put it in the perspective of their times and broader culture. He wouldn't write just about the illustrative style of Winsor McCay or the surreal landscapes of George Herriman or the storytelling ability of Lou Fine, but he put that in the context of everything that was going on around them. The first extended work of his I read was Comics as Culture that quickly became a seminal piece of writing in terms of how it got me to think about comics.

Shortly after I discovered him back in 2007, I wrote...

From the little I've read of his work thus far -- I have a few scattered essays on top of the book I cited earlier -- he not only treats comics with an inordinate amount of respect, but he understands them in a way few people seem to. He's able to keep things in a historical context, and show their social relevance at the time. I can't think of anyone offhand who really has this sort of perspective across the entire medium and speak to it in a freshingly simple, yet intelligent manner.

More importantly, though, he actively encouraged and even assisted getting new comics scholars up through the ranks to get even more scholarship about our favorite medium out there. He not only paved the way for them, pushing through many books and papers to get published that, before him, there was simply not an audience for -- or at least, not an audience recognized by publishers -- but he also reached back behind him to help pull others along with him. Most of the comic scholars I know owe much of their career very directly to Tom, who personally encouraged them onward.

When I last heard Tom speak in 2018, he expressed a great deal of satisfaction with the state of comics scholarship compared to when he started. He was humble enough to see it as the work of everyone currently involved, and took little credit for spearheading pretty much all of it. I'm glad, though, he was able to see how far things had come since his earliest efforts and the truly impressive collective body of work people have put forward. Whether Tom had ever read -- of, for that matter, even seen -- any of my work, I don't know, but I've always been thrilled to add whatever minor contributions I can and Tom was a big part of getting me started on that.

My consolences to his family, friends, and colleagues who have lost a towering figure of comics scholarship.