My friend Lys Fulda made a succinct observation a little while back regarding the difference between Marvel and DC.

There's been decades of discussion among comics fans comparing and contrasting the two companies and their characters and their stories, and the idea that DC's characters are more like gods while Marvel's tend to have more feet of clay is hardly new. But I quite like the particular phrasing Lys came up with here. It's pithy and has a symmetry that I think works serves the distinctions really well.

Obviously, there are exceptions on both sides. Marvel's Thor is a literal god and how often does Green Arrow chastise himself for thinking he can run around with the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman? But I think it gets to the heart of the general differences pretty quickly.

But one thing that almost immediately popped into my head when I read this was a set of visuals: Superman changing to Clark Kent and Bruce Banner changing into the Hulk. A god putting on the suit of a man, and a man being empowered to the level of a god. I'd seen both of those images plenty of times in the comics and I thought it perfectly encapsulates the point visually, so I wanted to make that to be able to use/share online. I had a little trouble finding the precise image of Superman that I wanted for this, so thanks to dance along the edge 💬 for that.

In any event, here's the image I put together. I flipped the sentences because the visuals work better in this order, but I think sharing it will make for a nice light bulb moment for some people. Feel free to pass it around if you want to look clever in your comics circles.

I think most creators who try to make a go at comics understand that they're not going to become mega-successful overnight. Even those with unrealistic expectations seem to have an understanding that their wildly brilliant and totally original idea will take some time to disseminate enough that they start raking in the big money. So in the meantime, they take a job to pay the bills. Maybe full-time, maybe part-time. Maybe it's a retail gig, maybe it's food service, maybe it's data processing in a cube farm. Whatever the case, the creator is decidedly thinking of it in terms of a job, not a career. They split their time between doing something to pay the bills, and doing something they have a passion for, hoping that they'll eventually be able to do the former via the latter.

And that makes sense. By doing a job and not pursuing a career, the creator is able to devote more time and brain capacity towards making and promoting their comic. It allows them to focus on what's working and what isn't in their comic, and to improve their craft. But I'm struck by two considerations that a creator should keep in mind...

1) If the comic doesn't take off (and let's be honest -- most of them don't) then that job used to pay the bills becomes a career. And because the creator wasn't focusing on it as such, and because many of those jobs aren't very lucrative in the first place, that means their unintentionally adopted career has already plateaued. If they're doing at least a decent job, they'll probably get performance and/or cost of living raises from time to time, but their chances of significant advancement are limited. If you're not focused on trying to get a management job, they'll be more than happy to keep you slinging hamburgers or re-folding sweaters or whatever indefinitely.

Now some people can use this as an encouragement to put more effort into bettering their comic. "I don't want to be doing this shit job for the rest of my life, so I had better figure out how to kick ass as a comic creator." That works for some people but, of course, not everyone. If you want to take this approach, I suggest knowing in advance whether you're the type of person who's motivated that way or not.

2) The other consideration is that, if you're doing a job instead of pursuing a career, you're going to be viewed that way from the people who've hired you. We're increasingly living in a culture where employees of all sorts are just considered interchangeable cogs, but the farther down the pay scale you are, the more you're thought of in that way. Corporations and the people running them don't two shits about you, and will be more than happy to let you go if it means their year-end bonus is a little fatter. Which means that the income you'd be relying on while trying to get your comic career going is probably more tenuous than it should be.

This all then ties back to a point I tried to make a few years back. That if you're pursuing a career in comics, you need to have several irons in the fire financially. Even if your focus is entirely on your webcomic, you can't rely exclusively on advertising or Patreon or whatever. You almost need to constantly juggle several different revenue streams to help create a safety net. There's obviously going to be greater emphasis on some avenues over others, but it goes back to the old adage of not keeping all your eggs in one basket. You want to make sure you've got options open if/when something comes crashing down unexpectedly. Because your day job got cut, or your biggest sponsor closes up shop, or whatever.

It's admittedly difficult to just suddenly start juggling all these different venues at once, of course. So my suggestion is to investigate your options and play with what works when everything else is relatively stable. You're not likely to lose a retail job during the holiday season, for example, just because they need lots of workers.

The ongoing challenge is that you essentially never get much of a chance to rest. Because our economy is such that it's almost working against anyone not making six figures, it's going to be a near-constant uphill battle. I don't mean to come across as fatalistic or anything, I think assuming that your current status -- whatever it might be -- will be disrupted in the near future is what is going to be necessary to keep from not just staying in place but sliding backwards. If I'm overly cynical, that cynicism is directed at the society as a whole and not comics in particular.

Freelancing has always been a hard gig. It does allow a great deal of freedom that being a corporate drone does not. But it also comes with some additional challenges of keeping a constant vigil of your horizons, and ensuring that you're paying attention to where things are headed so that you can leap off sinking ships but still have some semblance of an escape plan laid out.

As I've noted before, I started reading webcomics regularly in 2004. And, like most people trying to read webcomics at that time, it largely involved bookmarking the comics' home pages and trying to remember to return on whatever update schedule the creator established. Which sounds easy enough... until you get to reading dozen or more comics, all of which have different schedules. Some update daily, some weekly, some on weekdays only, some on Monday/Wednesday/Friday, some without any regular schedule at all... So a few years later, I found myself exploring options for getting a more centralized hub so I wouldn't accidentally miss any of the comics I wanted to follow.

Fortunately, web portals were becoming a thing and the bigger ones had built-in widgets to pull in a variety of comics. If a comic had an RSS feed, you could just pull that in and many of the comics that didn't have one had dedicated widgets. The major syndicates had widgets, too, where you could just check off the comics you wanted to follow and it would just display them all for you. I spent some time in the 2007/2008 timeframe playing with different portals and how they handled displaying comics and eventually created a "comics" tab in my iGoogle where I could go to read all my favorites. I think I had somewhere around 150 comics going through there. Now, there were a few comics that didn't have handy options that I could pull in easily, and what I ended up doing was creating some stand-alone javascript functions to pull in the latest comic when they had regular naming conventions or a targeted iframe if not. But ultimately I had a stable, relatively flexible platform for reading all my favorite comics.

Of course, iGoogle closed down in 2013. While MyYhoo and MSN are technically still around, neither ever handled comics very well to begin with and have had their functionality further limited since then to boot. I had been using The Old Reader, which isn't a portal, but just an RSS reader, meaning that you're limited to comics that have an RSS feed in the first place and those are only useful if they embed the comic itself into their feed in the second. (More than a few just include a link back to their website, without displaying the actual comic.) Sites like Piperka are still around, but those don't collect the actual comics together on the same page.

With so many comics that went dark at the start COVID -- many of which have ever come back -- I largely reverted to a handful of bookmarks and hoping I'd catch a creators' updates on social media. I cancelled my accounts with Facebook and Twitter (before it was rebranded as X) so I find myself in pretty much the same place I was back in 2005 when it comes to reading webcomics. No good solution for getting all the comics I want to read in one place. So I find myself using 2005-era technology to create my own comics page. I've built a stand-alone web page that brings in all the latest comics I want to read. It's very crude, using tables for a rudimentary page layout and inelegant javascript to call image URLs that have variable dates embedded in them. Plus I'm doing a lot of down-and-dirty cut and pasting to just build it quickly, so it's not even decent code from an early 2000s perspective. But it's only for me, and it's only running locally, so it doesn't need to be particularly effecient; it just needs to work.

Two columns of comics on a single page, updated whenever the comics are. I spent little time organizing them since I don't need to. I did put Flash Gordon first, as you can see by the screen shot, because that's just an iframe and I couldn't find an easy way to get rid of the date -- I figured I might as well have the date up top then. The only other consideration is that I tried to keep the columns of about equal lengths, but that'll change day to day as the comics change sizes. Nothing especially complicated or elegant. Like I said, it just needs to work for me.

I don't know if you've any interest in smart home technology but there's been a few news items this year whereby some companies that make smart home products have retroactively removed functionality or interoperability, effectively making their smart devices less smart. They usually throw out some lip service about doing that in the name of "security" but I haven't run across a single person who believes that. Many of the more knowledgeable smart home enthusiasts have responded by promoting local hosting of as much as possible. If your smart light can be controlled entirely without connecting to the internet, then the manufacturer can't decided to randomly jack up your whole setup on a whim. Fortunately, I saw this coming about two years ago and started migrating my devices to local control, so the changes that happened this year effectively didn't have any appreciable impact for me directly.

I bring this up because I wonder if comics needs more of that approach as well. Obviously with daily comics, they need to be regularly served up to audiences and you won't be able to get away from a cloud connection entirely, but if you're not dependent on MyYahoo or Piperka or The Old Reader or any other platform, and you're having the comics delivered directly to you without going through a third party, there's one less potential roadblock to your reading all your favorite comics in one place.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Cobb on Israel
https://ift.tt/OpRx9Bh

Kleefeld on Comics: Comic Book Cake
https://ift.tt/PRpFiTS

Kleefeld on Comics: Comixology Non-News
https://ift.tt/ef6iI5s

Kleefeld on Comics: There Was One Time When I Was Almost a Superhero
https://ift.tt/bvgsWHA

Kleefeld on Comics: Warp Hustler Review
https://ift.tt/W1gnf6E

You know those moments when you do or say something, and realize it's exactly the same thing one of your parents would've done or said in the same situation? You realize you've turned into them and you curse yourself for that sneaking up on you? Yesterday, I got an email from a publisher notifying that some books I ordered were just shipped, and I also received a copy of Warp Hustler #1 in the mail. Now, neither of those things are particularly unusual, and neither are things my parents would be likely to order. My "oh, shit, I've turned into my father" moment was that I barely remembered making the order from the publisher in the first -- and I still don't recall what exactly I ordered -- and while publisher "Laguna Studios" sounded familiar, I didn't remember anything about Warp Hustler at all, and I had to look up that I did indeed support a Kickstarter for it back in July. That "ordering too many things for your hobby and not remembering half of them" thing is my dad.

I'm starting my review with that to basically say that, while Warp Hustler must have sounded interesting or intriguing to me when I heard about it, I did not recall anything about it. In reading back through the Kickstarter description, I supsect it was either the “Doctor Who for the Depraved” and/or “The Time Bandits do Repo Man's drugs and steal Dr. Who's Time Machine and soon Everything Everywhere All at Once is Undone” descriptors that sold me. After reading the first issue, I'd say the latter description is a little more accurate.

As you can probably guess, time travel and alternate realities are involved in the actual story, which makes a straight-forward retelling of what happens in the first issue difficult at best. But the main character Janice is a math prodigy -- like off-the-chart genius level math prodigy -- who's got colleges courting her when she's ten years old. In 1999, she meets an unusual guy named Bob and she soon finds herself flipping through time or realities or something. Things eventually settle down with her working in her father's how-is-it-even-still-open video store in 2021, where the guy from the head shop a couple doors down goes pyscho on her shift before Bob finally shows up again.

Trust me when I say that I'm really doing a disservice to what happens in the book.

The trick with time travel and alternate reality stories -- from a narrative point of view -- is that when you have a character flipping in/out within a short span of the audience's time, it's really easy to lose your audience. By throwing too much at them too quickly for the sake of showing the chaos the character is feeling, the audience just winds up confused. But if you stop and explain too much, it can come across like tedious exposition. Part of the problem is that, since we don't have personal experiences with that kind of thing, the creators need to establish the "rules" of how things operate in their story, and it can be difficult to show that succinctly. Even with a pretty straight-forward time travel story like Back to the Future, they have to take time out in each movie to have Doc run through an explanation for Marty (as the viewer's stand-in).

In Warp Hustler, there is surprisingly little exposition about what's going on. Much of it is indeed written in a third-person narrative format, using the voice of an older Janice. But there's a not-insignificant portion that is effectively wordless, and I didn't really have any problems following along. In fact, there's not only enough there despite some minimalist exposition to make the basic plot points understandable, but it offers some hints at what's coming up as well. There's still PLENTY that needs to be explained, of course, but there's enough for me to be pretty intrigued.

I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. There's a lot of narratively challenging stuff going on in this book, and it comes across better than I've seen in most time-slipping stories. I'm definitely here for the next book, whenever it comes out. While they're still fulfilling orders from the Kickstarter, I think you can put in an order through their Backerkit page for it. Definitely worth a look!

Over the years, I've made various attempts to monetize my comics related work. They've all failed miserably, I think, primarily because I have no audience to speak of. I was accidentally reminded of one of my efforts to create a series of shirts that played off various superhero origin stories in a comedic manner. They all placed the wearer in the role of Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, Donald Blake, or Bruce Banner experiencing the same origin that they did... but with decidedly less dramatic results. I thought they were clever and fun, but I don't think I sold a single one so I eventually dropped the store.

Or so I thought.

Apparently, I just deleted the links to it, but never actually closed the shop. The CafePress store I created for them is still open and running, well over a decade later! I still have sold literally none of them but I am kind of amused that they're still out there if anyone happens to be interested. 😆

So the "news" in comics yesterday was that Amazon announced that the standalone Comixology app will be going away and the only way to read comics through their platform will be on the Kindle app. Heidi MacDonald has a more complete write-up here if you're interested, but I wouldn't bother. Not that there's anything wrong with the piece, but Heidi is incredibly optimisitic (she even says, "I realize that I’m stressing the positive in this piece") and the best silver-lining spin she can put on the whole thing is: "And there’s some good news: Comixology as a brand is not ending."

I figure that if someone who knows what they're doing, and is incredibly familiar with not only comics generally but many of the specific people involved, and they're openly trying to put as positive a spin on the news as they can, and they best they can come up with is that they're still keeping the logo... just shut the whole thing down. Comixology has been a shell of its former self since Amazon bought them in 2014. I'm sure there are people who still use it, but definitely not at the level there used to be.

Pick a social media platform, search for "Comixology" and read the comments. Nobody's even mad. Everyone is either confused because they thought Comixology closed down entirely years ago, or they're just shrugging their shoulders and lamenting what could've been. Do you know the level of effort you have to put in to get people to not care like that? They've actively made the app harder to use, literally impossible to purchase though, and less functional. Plus they've had any number of "glitches" where parts of people's collections just... disappear. There are complaints about that even now, although people don't seem espeically upset by them because they never used the app any more anyway.

I don't believe it was ever disclosed how much Amazon paid for Comixology, but I don't see how it can be worth even half of that now. Probably closer to a quarter of that price when you factor in inflation. So if the news is that the Comixology app is going away and no one cares, is it worth even holding on to that brand?