My personal interest in comics is as a medium. The notion of sequential images that tell a narrative. That includes comic books, graphic novels, manga, newspaper strips, mini-comics… I even have a small collection of those passenger safety cards from airplanes because I see those as comics as well. I’m happy talking about all aspects of the medium and, while some of the production specifics vary, all those categories follow the same basic rules that make them comics.

So why single out webcomics? What makes them worthy of an extended discussion?

At the beginning of the 20th century, almost any discussion about comics focused on newspaper strips. That was the predominant form of comics, and the kind that most people recognized. Then comic books and graphic novels came around, and those started becoming part of the discussion as well. The eventually came to dominate the discussion in the mid-1950s, thanks to some fear-mongering. More recently, newspaper circulation has dropped radically and the associated strips have become much less part of the discussion in recent years. Suffice it to say that various forms of comics wax and wane in their popularity and influence.

Webcomics, today, have a great deal of influence. I think much more than people realize.

Comics, in general, are all about coalescing ideas down into something more approachable that a block of text. And webcomics, or rather the internet more broadly, is about getting people’s ideas to people all over the world in the blink of an eye, and without the oversight of an editor. Editorial cartoons have long served this basic function but, as I have noted before, their historic platform in the newspaper has fallen on hard times. Not to mention both the syndicates and newspaper editors acting as gatekeepers.

Webcomics are important because they’re stepping in to these large voids left by both newspaper strips and, to a lesser degree, comic books. People are reading webcomics in volumes unimaginable in other venues, despite an impossible-to-quantify proliferation of webcomic titles well beyond what any issue of Previews might publicize. What, frankly, amazes me is that, over two decades in, they are still only talked about as a curious aside compared to Batman and Spider-Man. When I wrote Webcomics, it was only the seventh book to cover the topic at all. Four of the previous ones were "how to" guides and only two of the previous six remained in print beyond 2008. And even today, four years later, there's only been one more book published, which was yet another "how to" guide. I mean, I'd love to think I wrote such a definitive book on the subject that nothing more needs to be said, but that's laughably absurd. (There is also one book on webtoon fandom that was published in the wake of Webcomics, but it's focus is very specific to the fan aspect primarily and even then, more narrowly on the fans of the webtoon sub-format of webcomics.)

The percentage of webcomic readers that might read any given webcomic might be smaller than the percentage of comic book readers who might read any given issue of Action Comics, but the incredible reach of webcomics via the internet is so far beyond that of any print medium that the impact is much more significant. Why more people don’t recognize that is stunning, and that’s why I try to return here week after week to alert people to that.

Back in the 1970s, when the comic direct market system was just getting started, Triumph Comics entered the picture in much the same way that Atlas and Pacific and Skywald and other pubishers did. And, like them, they saw some success. Not to the levels of DC or Marvel, certainly, but they did respectable numbers and gained a number of fans. Not all of their titles were winners, of course, but there were a couple that stood out, notably The Legendary Lynx. It would later be considered influential to those in the know, and there's a pretty direct line to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns about a decade later. Writer Harvey Stern died before the first issue actually hit the stands and artist Doug Detmer comitted suicide shortly after finishing issue #11. The series petered out soon after. While most of the issues have never seen print since their initial debut, the first four issues are collected here for the first time.

Or at least that's the story we're told about The Legendary Lynx, via an introduction by J.M. DeMatteis and some back matter material by Brian Cronin.

This isn't the first time readers have been offerred some comic lore that had been previously forgotten in the form of 'reprint' material. Curio & Co. produced several of these types of books -- all of which are meticulously executed -- and Marvel's original promotion material around The Sentry character had some real world mythos built up around it. In all of these cases, they were all brand new creations with an invented backstory to, aside from arousing additional interest, provide some context for how the material should be viewed. We should be viewing The Sentry's backstory as akin to other characters from the late '50s and early '60s, and try to look at it through the lens of what several decades of continuity does without the emotional baggage of nostalgia coloring readers' perceptions.

The Legendary Lynx follows a similar pattern. What did comics that were just outside the mainstream look and feel like? What is the experience of reading that type of material -- again without the baggage of nostalgia -- feel like today in 2024? Creators Alex Segura and Sandy Jarrell attempt that here, although with enough of a nod and a wink that there's no real question what you're getting. (And to be clear, the nod and wink are in the promo copy, not the story itself.)

Back in the day, I did actually read many of the comics that Segura and Jarrell are trying to emulate here. While I was admittedly more interested in Marvel at the time, my dad found many of these comics while I was rifling through back issue bins and I was able to read the ones he picked up after I had re-read the latest issue of Fantastic Four half a dozen times. And what Segura and Jarrell do here with Legendary Lynx is indeed pretty impressive in that regard. It feels very much like a book that could've been published by Atlas or Pacific or Skywald. Some of the elements -- like thought balloons -- are an obvious enough differentiator from contemporary comics, while some are noticeable but not glaringly so -- like the bare-minimum basic origin recap in every issue -- and others are stylistic flourishes that are hard to pinpoint but you can't help but be vaguely reminded of some comic you read forty years ago.

Interestingly, there are still some subtle "tells" that this is new material. The lettering was all done digitally (most visible on the sound effects) and the color holds that are used are too complex to have been used before computers. I mean, I suppose they technically could have been done back in the '70s, but there's no way anyone would've put that much time/effort into that many of them for a 25¢ comic book in 1975. They're not trying to make a perfect replica of a 1970s comic here; they just want to give enough of a feel of one that you can buy into it.

And from that standpoint, they do an excellent job. It absolutely reads like a comic I might've read at the foot of our basement stairs just around the corner from where Dad kept his comics back when I was 12. Is it enough to give you a sense of nostalgia? I suppose that depends a bit on what you were reading back then. While I say that it reads like one of those books I read back in the day, I didn't find myself absorbed in it in the same way. To be fair, a lot of what I read back then was engaging because I was coming across new-to-me concepts in almost every issue I picked up because I was still so new to the hobby, and there is almost no way to replicate that now that I'm in my 50s. I can't tell if the experiment here is on trying to get the reader to actually feel like a kid reading one of those books back in the '70s or if Segurra was simply testing himself to see if he could write in that particular style. Regardless, it's a decently enjoyable read on its own merits and is worth picking up if you want to see what coming across Ms. Mystic or The Scorpion back then would've felt like.

The Legendary Lynx came out from Mad Cave Studios about a week ago and retails for $17.99 US. It should be available from your local comic shop and all major book sellers.

The 1966 Batman television show did not get released on any home video until 2014. Despite airing in syndication for years, a byzantine morass of legal paperwork kept anyone from actually putting it out on VHS tapes or LaserDiscs or any of the other formats that have come and gone since the 1960s. The rights were equally co-owned by 20th Century Fox and Greenway Productions until 1991, when Greenway’s owner died and left his share of the rights split among his kids and his lawyers. Nothing could be produced until and unless all five owners agreed on everything.

(As a curious aside, Fox was not involved in the Batman movie and thus there were fewer legal issues to deal with; it has been available in a variety of home video formats since 1985.)

I could point you to a piece detailing all the legal wrangling that happened to get the long-awaited release, but the short version is that, after countless hours scouring through decades-old paperwork, a fan named John Stacks was able to get some of that in front an eagle-eyed producer who found a legal loophole. It took a few years, but it was that loophole that eventually led to coalesce the ownership and thus make it possible to get the DVD/Blu-ray sets produced.

Stacks’ reward in all of this amounts to the satisfaction of seeing the series released. He received no compensation for his efforts — in fact, he had to spend a fair chunk of his own money to do all the research — and he’s not creditted on the discs anywhere. As far as I know, he was not even given a complimentary copy of the final set.

Of course, legally, no one owed Stacks anything here. But Fox (the current and sole owner) stood to earn a huge amount of money off the 2014 release, largely thanks to Stacks’ detective work — work that they had long since given up on, believing it would not be profitable to pursue. And it may well have been unprofitable if they had to pay a team of lawyers who-knows-how-long to sort through that paperwork to discover that loophole. But because that work was done for free, they were able to cash in.

That’s hardly uncommon. There are fans of all sorts uncovering esoteric tidbits for their own purposes, and corportations capitalizing on that. Sometimes they’ll offer a small token, but that seems to come most often from a specific individual at the company who appreciates the fan’s efforts, and is not a matter of company policy.

Is that fair for a corporation to take advantage of a fan’s love like that? Is that ethical? I suspect most people would say no. But that’s how corporations work; they exploit every financial advantage they can to increase their own profits. In some respects, it’s no different than a restaurant charging two dollars for 3¢ worth of sugar water.

For some, they might be okay with that satisfaction of knowing they helped their favorite book/show/movie gain a wider audience. And if that’s sufficient for them, fandom does indeed benefit. And while it’s disappointing that companies don’t generally reward fan efforts that earn them additional revenue, it’s hardly unexpected, so it might be worth considering by every fan who does work on/for/about an intellectual property owned by someone else.

Alvin Toffler wrote a book in 1970 called Future Shock. In it, he described how some people, particularly older folks, seem to suddenly wake up one morning and not recognize the society in which they live. As if they woke up in another country where everyone spoke a different language and had different customs. But the problem, he noted, was not one of culture shock, but what he termed future shock, though the effects are quite similar.

Toffler went on to lay out how and why this is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gist of his arguement is that, if it feels like society and technology are speeding up, it’s because they are. Quantifiably. Moore’s Law states that computer processing power will double about every 18-24 months, and that exponential growth has a direct and ongoing impact on society. Essentially, Toffler argued, that culture had to adapt and change at about the same rate that computers did in order to continue to function effectively.

Where future shock came into play was when someone did not or could not keep up with the technology, and are suddenly forced to confront the changes in a very dramatic fashion. The little old lady, for example, who’s been quite happy playing her VCR tapes suddenly finds that she can no longer get the machine repaired or replaced, and even the replacement technology (DVDs) is nearly obsolete.

This is relevant to webcomics in two ways. First, newcomers to the form can’t necessarily rely on advice from the old guard cartoonists. I’ve heard Scott Kurtz say repeatedly that, when someone mentions that they’d like to do what he did to break into the field, he tells them that they first would have to go back in time to when he first started because the landscape has changed so dramatically since he began PvP back in 1998. The culture is different, the technology is different, the audience is different. No one can replicate what Kurtz did now, not because he was that special and unique but because the environment he got started in no longer exists.

That’s not to say verteran webcomic creators have nothing of value to pass along to a new generation, just that their experiences might be wildly different based on when they’re starting.

The second thing to keep in mind is that webcomics, by their very nature of relying on technology for their distribution if not creation, are subject to the same issues as every other technology. Namely, that every 18-24 months, computing power will have doubled, allowing for new and faster ways of processing data. In the early days of webcomics, each strip had to be uploaded manually, typically through an FTP process, and hard-coded onto a web page written in very simplistic HTML. It worked at the time, but it was tedious. Trying to follow with that process now would put a creator a severe disadvantage, because they’d be spending much, much more time devoted to laborious technical aspects of their job rather than either actual content creation or promotion and marketing.

This means that a webcomic creator needs to be at least nominally aware of technological updates and shifts in the digital landscape if they want to remain relevant. Letting those types of changes slip by unnoticed can impact not only the effeciency of creating a comic, but can lead to a work that seems stagnant and out of date, both creatively and from a business model perspective. And if you don’t believe me, take a look in your local newspaper and see how the comics there compare to some of your favorites online!

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Frank Johnson Review
https://ift.tt/SV7lFR0

Kleefeld on Comics: Feed Your Readers
https://ift.tt/ZRG2yEO

Kleefeld on Comics: Remembering Tom Spurgeon
https://ift.tt/QADcSN2

Kleefeld on Comics: Scooby-Doo Personalized Comics Review
https://ift.tt/oOHfzaJ

Kleefeld on Comics: Pen vs Stylus
https://ift.tt/Q3eH1zh

Often when you hear about a print versus digital debate regarding webcomics, it’s putting the “final” formats against one another. Typically, newspaper cartoonists railing against these young upstarts and their webcomics, and how they couldn’t possibly be earning a living without a syndicate deal and they must all be lying about their income.

But there is in fact, another print versus digital debate regarding webcomics that doesn’t seem to get discussed nearly as much. Namely, whether the artist is better off drawing digitally or with traditional tools like pen and paper.

When comics first started being drawn digitally, it was cool (because it was new) but it was also blatantly obvious that it was being drawn with a computer. The resolution simply wasn’t there to hide all of the pixelization. After that improved, then the issue became one of having the right tools. Drawing tablets weren’t commercially available, and drawing software was largely limited to what you could accomplish with your mouse, so digital artists worked in programs like Illustrator and Freehand, using Bézier curves to create extremely precise drawings. The precision was also cool (again, because it was new) but it was also obvious because the lines were too meticulously accurate to be organically drawn.

But we’re at a technological stage now where artists can simply hold a stylus as they would a pen or brush, and draw onto an electronic tablet instead of a piece of paper. The lines—complete with textures, pressure marks, and other hallmarks of traditional tools—are captured by the computer without an actual mark ever being made. When looking at a finished comic online, it’s nearly impossible for most people looking at the final result to tell if it was drawn with a stylus or an actual pen.

So what’s the benefit of one over another?

Personal preferences aside, the biggest factors seem to be time and money. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the electronic version is going to be more expensive to set up. I know some webcomickers who use simple Sharpies instead of “proper” brushes or pens for their inking, and those are certainly all cheaper (even in the long run) than a few hundred dollars for a tablet.

A different issue, still related to money, though, is one of sales. Artists who work traditionally have a piece of original art that they can turn around and sell once their comic is published. Digital artists can make prints, of course, but they simply don’t have originals to sell. While there’s definitely some validity to this, what artists need to keep in mind is that the prices they can charge for originals varies based on their popularity. Meaning that an artist just starting out isn’t likely to earn much from original art sales, compared to a more well-known, tenured artist, so the sales benefit here tends to be more longer-term.

Which brings us to time. Most accounts I’ve read/heard put digital as the clear winner in the time department. It’s easier/faster for most artists to work digitally, and therefore gives them more time to work on other aspects of their business and/or life in general. This speed comes from a number of factors, including switching between digital tools at the click of a button, and making corrections more smoothly. (While there is a learning curve to working on tablets, it’s worth noting that there is one for pens and brushes as well, but those are often overlooked as artists are frequently already familiar with them when starting a comic.) How much time might be saved depends a lot on the skill of the individual artist, and a good many might not see any speed benefit by switching.

While many artists make a decision to work digitally or in print based on personal preferences and stylistic biases, there are concrete, real world implications to consider in terms of the creator’s resources. Does it make sense to work digitally? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but whether it’s a good artistic decision is not necessarily the same answer as whether it’s a good business decision.

A week and change ago, I pointed out that you could get a Scooby-Doo "graphic novel" with you inserted in as a unique character. Although the quality of comic book storytelling seemed weak, I did break down and get a copy for myself, largely to see just how good or bad it was. The book arrived the other night.

The story is literally just that original Scooby-Doo episode "What a Night for a Knight" if you want to know how good the plot and dialogue are. (I haven't compared literally every line, but the graphic novel basically lifts the original script in its entirety.) And going through it more carefully, yes, the quality of the comic storytelling is not great. It's not terrible in that the story is told adequately and, with one exception, there's no real place where you might confuse the reader. While they didn't use screen shots, the art does look like it might have been scanned from the original cels and backgrounds. It probably isn't -- I can't imagine Hanna-Barbera has that much of the original material still available -- but it does very much look like it, and not like somebody redrew everything.

Which does make the insertion of a new character more impressive. It's certainly not completely seamless throughout the entire book, but it is very well done. The panels by and large remain visually balanced and the inserted character feels like it's interacting with the others and not just pasted on top. And despite the almost-doubtlessly-different approach to the actual figure drawings (the original figures all seem to be one traditionally while the new one is almost certainly made with vector graphics) there really isn't any stylistic discrepency to make the new character unnaturally stand out.

Also, despite the comic storytelling being uninspiring, there does seem to be some graphic attentiveness to the overall piece. The page and panel layouts vary. Dialogue balloons and sound effects never feel forced into place or interfere with important visual details. And several of the border graphics actually seem to tie into the narrative itself. So the end presentation, while not anywhere near the same league as a Will Eisner or Jack Kirby, still works from a visual perspective in general.

Is this going to win any comic book awards? Almost definitely not. But it is a nicely put together package and is a lot of fun. Probably even moreso if you like Scooby-Doo or Hanna-Barbera or maybe even animation just in general. The "base" cost of these is around $90 (after shipping, etc.) which does strike me as a bit on the pricey side. They were having a sale when I purchased mine, and they were only asking around $50. Plus I found a coupon code which brought my grand total down to $41.24 US, which seems much more reasonable to me. That's all just how I personally would value this, though -- you might place more or less value on the personalization aspect. But I mention the variability here to suggest to not dismiss this entirely if any of the initial pricing you see is outside your budegt; you might be able to wait for a sale or find some coupon codes to bring it down a fair amount.