About a year and a half ago, I was contacted by Ronja Jokilampi, who was working on their Masters thesis and had some questions relative to my Webcomics book. I tried to answer them as best as I could -- although I have to admit I didn't have great answers then, and I still don't! But they've been working on their thesis since then and I learned last week that they indeed finished and have received their Master’s in Literary Studies! So first off, congrats to Ronja!

More to the point of my blog, though, the title of the thesis is Paratext in Paradox: Paratextual Elements and Functions in the Webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons. The academic study of webcomics is woefully lacking, generally speaking. One of the reviews of my own book noted, as one of his biggest complaints, that there weren't enough academic references in it... but then went on to add that there simply isn't much to reference in the first place! So it's worth noting when we get a thesis paper on webcomics in any capacity. More interesting, though, is that Ronja focuses in particular on the paratexts of Kill Six Billino Demons. The paratexts are basically all the stuff that's part of a webcomic, but not the comic itself! Everything from the ALT text on the images to the web site's FAQ to even the extra material over on an ancillary site like Patreon. I barely touched on paratexts in my book, doing barely more than citing that webcomics can have more options available that traditional comics. As far as I'm aware, Ronja's thesis is the first study looking expressly at webcomics' paratexts and how they're intergrated (or not) with the main comic.

Here's the paper's abstract...

The thesis analyses how Kill Six Billion Demons uses its paratext to expand the webcomic’s narrative toolkit beyond just the comic. The webcomic paratext is used for directing the comic’s interpretation, presenting both supplemental and primary narratives, creating aesthetic and comedic experiences, and breaking the borders between textual and paratextual spaces to create potent narrative effects. Building on the theoretical bases of Genette’s ‘Paratexts’ and Kleefeld’s ‘Webcomics’, Waites’ idea of paratextual narratives, and the categories of paratextual function introduced by Birke and Christ as well as Gross and Latham, the thesis is the first to create an extensive typology of a webcomic’s paratext. It is also the first piece of academic writing to focus on Kill Six Billion Demons, inviting further research on both the webcomic specifically and digital paratexts in general.

The paratext of Kill Six Billion Demons is shown to be unusually robust and influential to its text. While earlier research has claimed that paratexts function primarily to illustrate the author’s intent over the text’s interpretation to the reader, to assist in navigating the work, and to boost its sales, this analysis reveals further functions that challenge our understanding of the paratext as a solely pragmatic tool. The thesis gives examples of creative paratextual functions that demonstrate how the webcomic author can use the varied paratextual spaces that the webpage’s infinite canvas provides in ways that would be unfeasible in print comics. Paratextual space is used for textual functions and vice versa, creating a formal paradox that has the potential to both challenge and expand our contemporary understanding of the paratextual threshold.

The full thesis is available for download from the Helsinki University Library website under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. If you've got any interest in webcomics, it's well worth the read and gets into a LOT of material that I didn't have the space to touch in my book. (Full disclosure, though: my book is cited several times and Ronja gave me a special thanks at the very end.) I've been saying for literally decades now that we need more journalistic and academic discussions about webcomics, and I think we should all support anyone doing exactly that! Go check out Paratext in Paradox and, if you happen to be working on your own thesis, be sure to make some references to it, so we can continue to spread the good word!

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 re-runs for a week, maybe two, if they've things to take care of (convention travel, planned family events like weddings, etc.) 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™ 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. A lot of the OG webcomikers like Scott Kurtz and Kate Beaton have flatly said that you couldn't replicate their success today because they just happened to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and got seen by the right people. 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.

When I was writing Webcomics, I made a point to include some space to discuss Tatsuya Ishida and his Sinfest comic. I made a point to include it because he had radically shifted the tone of the strip from a pretty sexist male-gaze-pandering to a radical feminist message, and I wanted to note how his audience reacted. In most cases where a creator wants to shift their messaging substantively, they'll stop one strip and introduce a new one. With clear jumping off and jumping on points for readers. But Ishida offerred the rare opportunity to see how a tonal shift can affect readers and readership over an extended period.

Shortly after Webcomics was published, I was challenged for not including mention of Ishida's hard tonal shift to an expressly trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) message. The reason I didn't include it was simple -- my final draft of the book was turned into the publisher before this newer shift was fully realized. Ishida had indeed begun dropping TERF messafing into the strip, but there was, at the time, ongoing discussion on his own message boards what his overall intent was. Was he actually demeaning the trans community or was he poking fun at the fact that there's even a debate about them? Longer-term fans gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, and Ishida himself wasn't saying anything outside of the strip itself. So the is he/isn't he question wasn't really resolved until after my manuscript was out the door.

I re-visited the strip again in late 2023. I tried following it for about six months but found myself pretty lost. I initially thought it was because I was trying to jump into the middle of some larger storyline but it seems he'd taken another turn from TERF messaging to anti-semitism. What was hard for me to parse at the time was that his visual metaphors were so strained that they didn't make sense, using symbols to represent things 180 degrees opposite of what they actually mean.

A few weeks ago, I was told Ishida had gotten worse. I was a little dumb-struck honestly because... how? I mean, Ishida had already taken a pretty firm stance against every group imaginable -- he's anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-Jew, anti-women, anti-capitalism, anti-communism, anti-every-spectrum-of-politics... what more could he possibly come out against? Well, it turns out, he's not aligning against anything new or different now; he's taken a stance on something he's actually supportive of!

Hitler.

I shit you not; he is now praising Adolf Hitler.

(This is why there're no images with this post; literally every strip I might use as an example for anything I'm talking about today has something blatantly offensive in it.)

His current storyline, which started back in December, is all about re-framing Hitler as a hero. Which he justifies by saying that if Hollywood can re-frame villains like Cruella, Maleficient, and Elphaba as good guys, why not Hitler? He then proceeds to relay how all of World War II was in fact a plot by the Rothchilds, who had Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as their pawns, and Hitler trying to save the world from transgenderism, child sex workers, and physical emasculation. It's so absurd in its positioning, it almost seems like he's satirizing the villain-as-protagonist concept, but there are enough 'tells' to confirm that he's indeed pretty genuine in his beliefs here.

It's certainly not unheard of to present a well-known story from alternate perspectives. Back in the late 1990s, Mark Waid wrote an issue of Captain America almost entirely told from the Red Skull's perspective. Red Skull himself was the narrator and spoke about how oppressed he was by non-Ayran races. How he was the victim, and he his acts of violence against them at the behest of Hitler were only a form of justice. But what was key was that Waid also included a scene at the end told not from Red Skull's perspective, but Kang's and he clarified that what we had seen was specifically Red Skull's version of things and he was contemptably evil. So readers were afforded an immediate perspective that even the most vile villains see themselves as heroes in their own stories, regardless of what the rest of the world sees. But it only worked because of that point of contrast in the last two pages.

(As a point of clarification, the issue that was ultimately published was changed by editorial pretty substantially to the point that Waid asked for his name to be removed from the book. But his original script was later put online, and shows what his original story was. I've got more background and tried to recreate Waid's version of the story here. And to further make clear, the officially published version of the comic with the editorially-revised script takes the same basic approach, but is just considerably less nuanced.)

Here we are, nearly half of a year into Sinfest's current storyline -- still running in daily installments! -- and there's been no indication that everything isn't 100% sincere. He's not presenting any counterpoints in any fashion.

A second key indicator that he's sincere is that his re-imagining of World War II not only places Hitler as a hero, but THE hero against literally everyone else. Ishida has had no issue caricaturing various world leaders but he's notably left Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini out of the story entirely. In fact, Ishida has shown Japan as a whole under Jewish influence with only their previous culture to protect them. So he's not coming from the idea of "the Allied powers were in the wrong" but rather "Hitler was the only person working to save the entire world."

Further, the current story make explictly clear that World War II was not only the fault of Jewish people broadly, but the Rothchild family in particular. It's not just anti-semintism -- which Ishida has been displaying for several years already -- but conspiratorial anti-semitism. Ishida portrays Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin as golems under the direct control of Baron Henri de Rothschild in particular. (To be fair, I only think it's supposed to Henri. He's not been given a first name I can find, but it does look more like him than any other Rothschild as far as I can tell.) And they're relying on the "Kalergi Plan" -- a "Great Replacement" style conspiracy theory based on a deliberate mis-reading of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi's Praktischer Idealismus. This all goes well beyond "Hitler was just misunderstood" and requires not only an understanding of Jewish and WWII conspiracy theories but an appreciation and affection for them.

For the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that Ishida doesn't hold any Nazi sympathies and he's trying to use this storyline only to satirize various attempts of Hollywood to turn well-known villains into heroes. (We'll also ignore that Wicked was originally a 1995 novel that was turned into a 2003 Broadway musical before it finally got to Hollywood in 2024. I'm sure many people who only saw the film version don't know it's origins.) For these types of stories to work, they need to keep the source material intact. To keep the audience following along, they need the source material as common touchpoints, so the audience understands and appreciates how it can be interpretted in multiple ways. Ishida is not doing that here. He's inventing wholecloth new elements that provably never existed. Ishida is not illustrating Hitler responding to external events he may have viewed differently or in a different context than the rest of the world; Ishida is having Hitler respond to external events that never happened. Provably. You can't have readers sympathize in a "well, if you put it that way..." point of view if your "that way" is completely inevented from nothing. No one even heard of the so-called "Kalergi Plan" until it was coined in 2001 by Gerd Honsik -- a neo-Nazi and author of the book Hitler Innocent? in which he tries to justify Hitler's war crimes -- long after Coudenhove-Kalergi himself had passed away.

In 2024, when I last talked about how Ishida shifted Sinfest's focus, I mentioned that it was demonstrably alienating his readers. The forum on his own site had become a virtual ghost town from 2018 when readers at least still logged in to chat with each other, even if they didn't really discuss the strip itself very much. From what I can tell, the last thread took place between May and July 2024 and consisted of exactly three messages: one poster saying he was back after being gone for a year, another responding 30 days later saying "Get ready to watch Tat completely go off the deep end," and the original poster coming back two weeks after that to say he enjoyed the schadenfreude. It looks like Ishida removed the forums altogether a couple months after that; I strongly suspect no one noticed.

I'm still at a loss on how he's surviving; it sure as hell ain't on money he's making from Sinfest. The site has zero advertising on it any more (which largely dried up for all webcomics back in 2016 anyway). He does have some merch available, but he also has a note on his home page from January indicating that both Redbubble and Spreadshirt rejected his designs entirely. Of the nine designs he posted up on Fourthwall, it looks like four of those have been rejected. (There are spots indicating a design with a name for each was there, but they don't actually display anything.) With his radical politics, I have trouble believing he would be hired in any position above minimum wage, and I'd be surprised if he would tolerate dealing with a just-above-minimum-wage manager for long. I have to believe he's got someone (parents? wife? a generous trust fund?) effectively subsidizing his entire life.

I don't know where he gets any information; this stuff is more bonkers than anything I've seen from Fox or OAN. He only uses social media to post his latest strips; he certainly doesn't respond to readers' comments and I don't think he even sees them. Some of the references in his strip suggest he's still interested in media generally -- I've seen him draw elements from The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, Saw, A Clockwork Orange, Nosferatu, and That Mitchell and Webb Look in just the past few months. Although he seems to have completely missed the point of each and every one of those, but he has clearly seen them. And just prior to his current Hitler storyline, he was making overt references to various current events. Although here again, he seemed to have a very distorted view of some of the basic facts.

I am by no means a psychologist but at this point, I think Ishida is legitimatly disturbed. Not just because he's had an increasingly overt message of anti-semitism for several years or because he's started praising Adolf-fucking-Hitler. I don't see evidence of any human contact any more. He seems increasinly out of touch with reality. The conspiracies he's subscribing to are increasingly unhinged, fueled by whatever worst common denominator rabbit holes the algorithms have thrown him down. I don't think anyone would be surprised at this point if he shows up at some public Jewish festival with a loaded automatic weapon. Or he blows up a temple. Let me be clear that I have no knowledge or intel that he's actually planning something like that, but reading through and thinking about his most recent work has me legitimately concerned.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Sinfest is an outlet for all his worst instincts, and doing the strip allows him to vent enough that he can still go around like a regular guy. Or maybe he views everything around/about the strip as a giant piece of performance art where he does a big reveal on the strip's 30th anniversary that he's actually a very nice guy and he donates billions of dollars he earned from selling his life story to Steve Spielberg to help Jewish refugees. Occam's razor, though, suggests he's really just a mentally unwell piece of shit and wants to eradicate literally everyone who isn't a cis hetero white Christian, and he might be far gone enough to acting on it one day.

Webtoon announced earlier this week some leadership changes in order "to Accelerate Global Growth Strategy." Let's start with the high level stuff...

1. President Yongsoo Kim is assuming oversight and will consolidate global operations, while the previous Chief Operating Officer role will be eliminated.
2. Leah Goeun Yeon has been hired as Webtoon’s first Chief Business Officer. In the newly created role, Yeon will oversee Webtoon’s webcomic platform business (excluding Japan) "leading growth, marketing, content, and creator management."
3. Teo Taeyeong Jang has been promoted to Head of AI. He is to be build on existing AI capabilities, including content protection and anti-piracy innovations, content discovery, and their new translation program.
4. Sean Shinhyung Kim has been promoted to Head of IP Business, "strategically expanding its IP value chain in areas that can accelerate global growth." (Basically, he'll be in charge of obtaining and expanding licenses from other IP holders.)

What's notable here is what is NOT mentioned. Readers. Not even using the more cynical phrasing of "users" or "customers." There's no mention on doing anything for the people who use their service. They're not even an afterthought when it comes to leadership goals. The closest they come to referencing their readership at all is when they note that Yeon will be "leading growth." Presumably this means either more customers or getting existing customers to pay more, but even that much isn't 100% clear.

Aside from the AI angle, there's also no reference to anyone in IT. Meaning either they are putting minimal-to-no effort towards improving their apps' functionality, or they are turning any/all of that work over to AI. For a tech company in particular, both of those options sound like a phenomenally bad idea. Further, it runs very counter to the messaging they were telling everybody as recently as December. They knew back then that AI wasn't popular, which is obviously why they weren't touting it in their public statements, but they've gone ahead anyway by not only embracing it, but creating an entirely new role just to try to plug it into everything in their business.

Even from a cynical consumer perspective, there's no focus here on their customers and there's no focus here on their product. They're talking about growth and increasing value. That's an exceptionally short-sighted, investor-focused approach, and one that will almost certainly lead to problems for both creators and readers as services and support get cut, ongoing maintenance falls to the wayside, and they put more effort into extracting more money from existing customers than bringing in new ones. I've long had the sense that many people looked hopefully at Webtoons as the solution for a single, functional webcomics discovery platform. But they're very much telegraphing that isn't their intention at all; they just want to suck up as much money as they can, sell the company for as much as they can, and walk away with as much cash as possible.

I mentioned back in January how Amazon completely axed my decades-long customer account with them. I lost my history of everything I'd ever ordered from them, all the comics I had accumulated on Comixology, my Prime account (which was set to expire only a month later anyway), all of my Alexa functionality, my affiliate links (which, because they kept changing the rules on payouts, earned me exactly zero dollars over two decades)... Also, I still haven't checked to be sure, but I don't think I can add any new content to my old Kindle. (I did do some work at one point to try to jailbreak it, but it's a gen2 version, and it's only gen3 versions and later where you can seemingly do that. Or at least that anyone's bothered to figure out how.)

I originally set up my Amazon account decades ago when they literally only sold books. The slow creep of their services meant that I'd add one service here or there as they became available until I eventually realized how embedded I was with their system. With the realization, I began trying to ween myself off starting about a year and a half ago. It was good timing, in retrospect, because once they did cancel my account entirely, I found it annoying only in their complete lack of any reasonable explanation. I responded to the actual loss of services mostly with a shrug.

But that's me as a consumer. Whether or not I'm connected with any of Amazon services doesn't impact my income stream at all. (OK, technically, I expect some of my books get sold via Amazon and I would lose out on some profits from that, but annual sales of all of my books under all platforms combined is a couple dozen at most. That's barely enough for a nice dinner out once a year.) What happens if your income IS dependent on Amazon specifically?

Tom Ray recently noted that Amazon completely shut down his account as well. More notably, though, he had been selling copies of his HomeMade Cartoons and "Bobert"comics through them exclusively since 2018. Every book that he had made was specifically formatted for Amazon's platform so he could get paid on 'per page' basis instead of 'per title.' But now that income stream is just gone. He has a very similar story to mine. He was just going along, doing his thing, and then BAM! Email out of nowhere that his account had been terminated with some unconvincing and generic explanation about "violating terms." Although his comic features nothing you could label as pornographic or excessively violent or obscene in any way -- I can't even find any mild cursing in it.

The suddenness with which his and my accounts were canceled, coupled with the complete lack of any sort of appeals process, leads me to believe this is the result of Amazon turning over their account review process to AI. Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright. I'm not sure what the thinking was on their part. In theory, with something like this, you would have tested the process by simply running a report before doing anything to actually impact any accounts. But if they did that, they would've gotten tons of obviously false positives like Ray and could've seen their agent was too aggressive with flagging. Which suggests one of three possibilities to me:

1. They didn't actually test the process at all. They just assumed it would work fine and pushed things into production. This is not only not a "best practice" but it would generally be considered a "worst practice."
2. They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but felt that whatever loss of revenue they'd incur from false positives would be less than whatever they'd stop 'losing' from shrinkage. "Shrinkage" is what retail stores call theft, but in an online environment, there is no real shrinkage. If someone is able to somehow "steal" a digital file, it's not like Amazon has lost anything -- they could sell the file an infinite number of times before and they could sell the file an infinite number of times after. At worst, they miss out on the opportunity to sell one more copy, but studies have repeatedly shown that people who pirate files digitally were never going to actually shell out money for the file in the first place. But in the interest of pursuing a "not losing any potential opportunity" they rolled things out anyway.
3. They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but said, "We're the 800 pound gorilla in the room here. F--- them!" and rolled the AI agent into production anyway.

Obviously, I have no particular insight into Amazon's inner workings, but I'm inclined to think it was the last of these options.

Ray is obviously frustrated and annoyed with this. He kind of had all his webcomic eggs in the Amazon basket, so to speak. From what I can gather, though, it does sound like he's at least got some other income streams that are unrelated to Amazon. In addition to cartoons, he's also a musician and he seems to do a bit of dealing with re-selling vintage toys and collectibles. So the Amazon hit is significant, but he seems to have other income streams while he reformats his comics work for other outlets.

I suspect there are a lot more incidents like this going around, and I just happened to hear about Ray's. His is interestingly both a cautionary tale as well as a best practice. Cautionary because he put all his webcomics income into a single vendor, and became subject to their whims as to whether or not they're willing to sell his work. Best practice because he has other income streams to fall back on.

Regardless, this is increasingly the world we live in. Where they make so much money from so many other people that they don't care whether you remain as an individual customer or not. Whether you're trying to sell your comics online, or whether you just want to watch the latest episode of Invincible. Realistically, I don't know how much you can completely separate yourself from Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple and all the other monster coporations without removing yourself from society altogether and living in an off-grid cabin somewhere. But the more you're able to bring all your services "in-house" and actually own yourself, the better off I think you'll be.

I've mentioned before that I put together my own personal funny pages that pulls in the latest installments of a number of comics online; the intent is that I can read them all in one place and not have to go from site to site to site. Several of the comics use very regular/predictable naming conventions (usually based on the date) but many do not and I can only pull in an update through their RSS feed.

"But, Sean," you might ask, "if they've got an RSS feed, why are messing around with coding your own page? Why not just use an RSS reader?"

The 'problem' I run into with those are that the feeds sometimes do not include the comic itself. It will just have a link to the latest comic on the creator's website. And since my intent is to not have to pull up a bunch of different websites, what I find myself doing is reading the RSS feed for the updated information and then running some transformations on what is in the feed to be able to pull in the actual comic itself. (Basically, if they have a link to the updated comic page, I can use that to figure out what the link is directly to the comic image, and then just pull that in. If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, that's fine; just trust me in that it makes sense.)

Anyway, last week, I ran into an issue where suddenly a bunch of comics were no longer getting pulled into my page properly. I hadn't changed my code, so something clearly happened externally to change how many of the comics were being seen. I wasn't getting any useful information from the error messages, so I'm not exactly sure what happened. I was routing the RSS feeds through a third party proxy to avoid CORS header errors so I figure they changed something there. Weirdly, some feeds continue to run through that proxy with no problem, so it's not like it got shut down or something; but regardless, it means that I've had to rework much of my custom page.

My page has been built up over the past couple years so the code is unnecessarily bloated. Heck, there were parts of it that I copy/pasted from a similar effort I had done back in 2005, so it was very much a hodge podge of inefficient codes and hacks that I wouldn't put in any sort of production environment, but worked well enough for my single user situation. Some of the comics had problems on the first day of a new year (creators often put images into a directory labeled by the year they're uploaded, not necessarily the year they're going to be seen) and again on the first day of March (since February has a weird number of days) but I knew what the problems were and it wasn't worth it to correct them just for myself.

But knowing those various problems were in place and that I had to recode much of the page anyway, I figured it was a good time to essentially start over and take the opportunity to clean things up a bit. That's what I've been working on in my spare time over the past week or so. I've got the file size down from 120 KB to 90 KB. Probably not enough to make a noticeable impact, especially since I only ever view the file locally anyway.

Where I'm going with this is that I've had to put in some not insignificant effort here. It's not horrible, to be sure, but I'm certain I'd need to use this for probably decades to make up the time I'm 'saving' by not just going to each website individually. But what I'm able to do is handle this myself and I'm less reliant on how someone wants to code an RSS reader or some other aggregation platform; they're not going to suddenly close shop or decide to start charging for their service. I was talking back in December about owning your own media, and I see this as being similar to that. (If I really wanted to, I could add some functionality to my comics page that would save each day's installment as a discrete file that I could later call up from a local archive.) My point, though, is just that corporations are increasingly making everything a service that you need to pay ongoing fees for. But with a little effort, that's not necessary. I'm not saying everyone should build their own comics web page from scratch, but you do have much more control over your media than you might think.

Webtoon recently released their fourth quarter 2025 results. The short version is that recorded an operating loss of $13.2 million US in the quarter. And while they tried to spin that as an improvement over the fourth quarter of 2024, it's an increase from the $11.6 million US they lost in the third quarter 2025. They also had a decrease in revenue from Q3 -- $378 million US in Q3 versus $330.7 million US in Q4.

Not surprisingly, their statement tries to spin everything in a very positive light, heavily leveraging the recent agreement with Disney and talking up a number of upcoming projects. Aside from the agreement, though -- which was announced back in August -- they don't really have anything to actually show. Just the repackaging of seven Disney/Star Wars/Marvel titles from the past several years, all of which, I believe, had already been converted to a digital format for Amazon. Most of what they're promoting in their reporting is about all the grand plans they have in place for later.

Despite all the positive vibes they try to give off, it doesn't seem like the market is buying into it. Their stock price dropped ~10% almost immediately, and has lost another 10-ish% in the days since. As of this writing, it currently sits at the lowest it's been since just before the announcement with Disney, meaning that they've completely wiped out all the gains they got from the agreement in the first place and they're once again sitting at about 40% of the IPO price from June 2024.

Now a company doesn't live and die by its stock price, and plenty of companies operate at a loss for several years while they try to set themselves up for longer term success. Indeed, their 2024 annual report expressly states, "We have a history of net losses, and we anticipate increasing expenses in the future, and we may not achieve or maintain profitability. If we fail to control our content-related costs, the expenses we incur may exceed the increase in revenues."

Back in September, I wrote...

I don't wish ill against Webtoons, and don't want to rain on their parade exactly, but I think it's worth keeping some perspective here too... I think what we're looking at here is a company trying very hard to make things work, and they've thrown a crudload of time and money at it. But given their current operations, I don't think there's anything to be particularly excited about. This Disney deal doesn't strike me as likely to bring in a ton of opertaing capital -- if the licensing costs themselves don't increase their quarterly losses -- and I would just urge any creators posting through Webtoon to make sure that that isn't their ONLY venue for posting/earning money from their webcomic. You should never rely on a single source to begin with, and this setup with Disney doesn't strike me as being able to change Webtoon's direction.

In that 2024 annual report, they cite several potential risk factors. (Detailing risks in an annual report is pretty standard; don't read too much into the fact those are there.) They list three things that they'll need to nail down in order to grow their business and become profitable: attract high quality creators and their comics, attract more users, and "innovate and expand our advertising business." (The wording is a bit ambiguous there; I'm not sure if they talking about innovation broadly or specifically within the context of advertising.) That report is from March 2025 and I'm not sure I can say they've really done anything they mentioned about growing their business. I mean, you coudl argue they have high qualities creators by virtue of the already-created comics from Disney/Star Wars/Marvel, but that's a bit of a stretch, I think. Their "Monthly Paying Users" has remained pretty flat year-over-year, as has revenue. And I'm not aware of any innovations -- either within the context of advertising or without; indeed, my understanding is they've actually stripped away functionality.

I found a quote on GlassDoor from a former employee who was laid off in early 2024: "I thought the strategy, as it was communicated to me, was muddy and often changed radically with little or no notice... it's still unclear what direction the company is headed." I think that sums up my opinion as well. They really don't seem to have a sense of what to do with their platform to make money. Argueably, everyone who's tried making a "single source" platform for webcomics has failed, and the only reason Webtoon is still around is because they had several years being propped up financially by Naver. With them no longer in the picture, I have to wonder if they'll remain around long enough to discover that elusive formula for success.

When I started getting into webcomics with any degree of seriousness, it was about 2004. I had known of webcomics before then, but I didn't really start reading any with any regularity until then. I recall thinking at the time that I was coming to the webcomics party exceptionally late. I mean, guys like Scott Kurtz, Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahulik had been working for years at that point and they weren't even really the old guard. It already seemed like a crowded market, and I was thrilled when I could find the occasional webcomic that was JUST getting started.

But what I also noticed at the time was that I was largely on my own when it came to finding webcomic news. None of the usual comics news sites were reporting on webcomics with any regularity. Hardly at all, in fact. So what news I found was generally what was being posted by the webcomikers themselves underneath their latest strip. One of the reasons I started my webcomics column over at MTV Geek was because no one else was reporting on webcomics in any capacity. When MTV Geek shuttered its doors in 2013, though, there was still pretty much nothing else. Gary Tyrrell was doing his webcomics blogging over at Fleen but that was never really been a place for news per se. It's even less significant now, since he's been more or less on hiatus for the last several years, and a brief note from earlier this year about the birth of his son suggests he's not likely to re-start in earnest any time soon.

So when I moved over to FreakSugar, that was still pretty much it as far as anything resembling webcomics news. Brad Guigar has been running a few outlets for webcomics discussions (notably Webcomics.com and ComicLab) but those are generally geared for people making webcomics. News there is very much geared to an audience that is NOT a typical comics reader. Tom Spurgeon would occasionally post something he came across on social media, but those were very much a small part of his focus before he passed away. When my FreakSugar contributions fell to the wayside, though, and my former Comics Alternative podcast co-host passing away in 2019, I didn't see much else beyond what I could scrape from individual creators' social media feeds.

In the past five years, we've seen a significant rise in more corporate efforts at webcomics, most notably with Webtoon specifically. That has come with some news coverage on more 'traditional' comics news outlets like The Beat or CBR. (As a curious aside, though, a search for "webcomic" on The Beat turns up exactly one article from 2025 and only two from 2024, but a similar search on "Webtoon" returns 22 results from 2025 alone, most of which cover various business agreements of the company.)

So, for me, here in 2025, most of my news about webcomics still comes from the creators themselves. Either creators I'm directly following, or from mutuals who re-share something from the creators. Pretty much exactly the same way I was getting webcomics news two decades ago. Well, back then, it was the creators' notes and subsequent forum discussions on their own websites instead of social media, but social media wasn't really a thing in 2004. (MySpace had only just launched in 2003.) So in twenty years, we've got a slight platform migration, but no real substantive change.

So what am I missing? Is there still no good source of webcomic news? Are readers still relying primarily on the creators themselves to let them know what's news? How are you learning about webcomics now?

On Wednesday, Webtoons announced some more licensing arrangements. I wasn't going to comment beyond the quick Mastodon post I made, but then with their quarterly report coming out yesterday, I think the two speak to a larger story.

Their Wednesday press release seems straight-forward on its surface. It says Webtoon is partnering with Warner Brothers Animation to bring some of Webtoons' comics into animated form. The press announcement only lists some of the properties -- a standard marketing tactic is to spread out the announcements of specific properties over a longer period to keep interest ongoing -- and it also doesn't note the distribution venue at all. But it also states that "the companies intend to enter into an agreement" (emphasis mine) meaning they haven't actually finalized the contracts yet.

Now, as you may recall, Webtoons made a few headlines in September around some contract deals with Disney. Following that up so quickly with an announcment about making a deal with Warner Brothers struck me as a very cynical business plan. Those are two massive deals in a very short amount of time, but they're also both agreements without any actual content behind them. I mean, yes, there are specific titles involved but the announcements are all about plans and "forthcoming projects." They essentially don't have anything to show besides the contracts. And in one case, not even that.

That screams to me that Webtoons is trying to generate as much market buzz as they can. Without any content to back that up, the buzz is all about the company itself, meaning they are trying to drive up the stock price. And the only reason to inflate the stock price is to be able to sell. Either a good percentage of their shares or the company as a whole. Stock prices are intended to reflect the value a company has in bringing its goods/services to the market; the prices are an ancillary result of a business doing well. By intentionally driving the prices (in either direction, honestly, though most people focus on "up") that signals that you're business model is focused on selling stocks, not on doing business.

But then we also have their third quarter earnings reported yesterday. A single quarter loss of $11.6 million, down from $20 million in profit during Q3 2024. Despite a nearly 9% increase in revenue over the same period. That is, they brought in a lot more money but spent so much of it that they went in the hole. They further forecast that their fourth quarter earnings this year would see a revenue decline of as much as 5%. This despite increases in both monthly users and monthly paying users. Which is to say that they're going to continue spending more money than they're taking in even as they bring in more money!

Now, admittedly, the old axiom of having to spend money to make money has an element of truth to it. But it seems to me that Webtoons, since its IPO last year, has been spending more cash that it's bringing in and, more notably, has mostly been spending much of that on licensing agreements instead of content or app improvements. (I noted earlier this year how they've in fact actively made their app worse.) But yesterday's earnings report saw an immediate drop in their stock price by 25%! Webtoons is not only spending much more money than they're making, but over the past year and a half, they've got nothing to show for it. A bit of vaporware and that's it.

There is nothing I'm seeing in Webtoons this year that doesn't strike me as a cynical plan to sell stock, and they're not doing all that great a job at that. When Webtoons was still part of Naver, we weren't privy to their finances, but rumors were circulating that that part of their business was continually run at a loss. While this year's news doesn't 100% confirm those rumors, they certainly lend a lot of credence to them!

Yesterday, Alan Gardner decided to wade back into a 15-ish year old debate: webcomics versus print comics. He even went back to get some reflections from two of the most vocal debaters, Scott Kurtz and Ted Rall.

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.

It was very much an in-group/out-group situation, with print cartoonists not giving a crap in the first place until webcomics started to become a thing in their own right and draw attention/eyeballs away from their own comics. Honestly most webcomikers at the time didn't care one way or another and said, "Whatever, olds. If you can't figure out how the 21st century works, that's your problem. No skin off my nose!" The only ones (like Kurtz) who raised a fuss were looking for validation from professionals that had long aspire to be among. And there were indeed some old school cartoonists (Rina Piccolo and Greg Cravens come to mind) who maybe didn't understand how webcomics worked, but recognized the old newspaper syndication system was dying and that webcomikers were doing something different.

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.

So the big news in webcomics over the past month and change is that A) Disney and Webtoon announced a licensing agreement last month such that Webtoon would host comics from Marvel, Star Wars, and other Disney-owned properties, and B) Disney and Webtoon announced yesterday that this would be done via a new, as-yet-unnamed platform. (Though presumably, it would look similar to Webtoon's current one.) There was a fair amount of hoopla during both announcements, and Webtoon's stock price rose markedly in the wake of each announcement.

What has largely gotten omitted from the discussion, though, is those stock bumps -- while pretty nice from a percentage point of view -- amount to very little. Webtoon launched their initial public offering (IPO) in mid-2024 at around $21 US per share. It dropped to almost half of that within the first month and spent the rest of 2024 hovering between $10-$13 US and the first half of 2025 just below $10 US. So the "huge" stock price bump of ~90% from last August meant they got as high as $18 before dropping back to $14 the next day. Better than they had been doing, but we're talking about four, maybe five dollars difference. Yesterday's announcement also cited a "soaring" stock increase of 55%... except that 55% is based on a month-over-month comparison from just before the first announcment. The stock price went from $14.27 US to $15.98 US. And within an hour, it settled back down to around $14.90 making the actual increase from yesterday's announcement... four percent. Not nothing, but it's a far cry from 55%!

Webtoon's quarterly report from August -- literally days before the first Disney deal was announced -- showed they ran a net loss of $3.9 million US for the second quarter, after a net loss of $22 million US in the first quarter. Their third quarter outlook projected revenue growth about equal to what they did in the second quarter, suggesting they'll probably be operating at a loss of ~4 million US again unless they somehow found a way to cut a boatload of expenses. We won't know for sure until they release their Q3 report, probably in mid-November.

Back in 2021 -- before Webtoon went public and had to disclose their financials -- I noted that Naver, who wholly owned Webtoon before the IPO -- was ostensibly running that part of the business at a loss. Naver had wrapped their Webtoon operations up among other business segments for Naver's financial reporting, so we couldn't see any details, but that was the rumor going around. While Webtoon rightly notes in some of their more recent financial disclosures that launching an IPO is expensive and that explains many of their loss numbers from 2024, that's not an excuse they'll be able to fall back on for long.

Now, Disney owns two percent of Webtoon per yesterday's announcement. (Or at least it will once a bunch of paperwork gets formalized.) Theoretically, Disney has a lot of talented accountants and lawyers that think this is a good idea, so there must be something to this, right?

Well, maybe. My counter-argument to that is that when Disney sees something they have great confidence in, they will buy it outright. Marvel, for example. There was no "well, let's get a stake in the company and see how it goes before buying them." They saw Marvel had their shit together, had something of great value, and Disney just dropped a ton of cash to own it. They're very much NOT doing that with Webtoon. They easily could. A controlling portion of Webtoon -- before Disney announced any deals with them -- would've cost around $600 million US if they just bought the necessary number of shares on the open market. If they worked out an actual agreement, it probably would've been closer to $300 million US. Not chump change, but this is the same company that bought Marvel for $4 Billion US in 2009 (about $6 Billion US today).

So, in my mind, Disney getting a 2% stake in Webtoon is barely worth mentioning. Their bigger deal is whatever Webtoon is paying them to license Spider-Man and Darth Vader, and the 2% stake just means they get some extra profit if it suddenly becomes wildly successful.

Which is by no means a sure thing. In the first place, I'll refer to the news from back in May when Webtoon changed their primary platform by dropping their "Daily Pass" option and effectively charging more for less. Enshittification of the platform, which I had predicted several weeks earlier.

In the second place, if Webtoon is launching a SECOND platform for their Disney-related material, that means that they will have effectively zero crossover users. People who come to the platform to read Star Wars will not see or have access to any webtoons over on their 'main' platform. And any existing users likely won't bother trying to create a separate login with separate costs to read Disney material. Webtoon will be siloing their audiences. Granted, the two sets of audiences probably don't have a LOT of overlap, but by putting them in separate silos, there will be ZERO.

In the third place, my understanding is that this new platform will be hosting old material. Basically doing what Comixology did before Amazon bought it. You'll be able to read Amazing Fantasy #15 and Fantastic Four #256 and whatever else is in their back catalog. But none of that was created for the vertical scroll format. Yes, they can retroactively adjust the layouts and reconfigure things so they will work... but that's just another version of Comixology's "Guided View" option, which was okay for what it was but it still made for awkward reading since, again, none of those comics were designed to be read that way. Guided View made things less bad than just trying to sort through a whole page on a small screen, but "less bad" is not a great user experience.

I don't wish ill against Webtoons, and don't want to rain on their parade exactly, but I think it's worth keeping some perspective here too. The Disney deal is significant but not enough to fully bridge the gap between the lofty IPO expectations and the day-to-day realities of running a business about webcomics. I think what we're looking at here is a company trying very hard to make things work, and they've thrown a crudload of time and money at it. But given their current operations, I don't think there's anything to be particularly excited about. This Disney deal doesn't strike me as likely to bring in a ton of opertaing capital -- if the licensing costs themselves don't increase their quarterly losses -- and I would just urge any creators posting through Webtoon to make sure that that isn't their ONLY venue for posting/earning money from their webcomic. You should never rely on a single source to begin with, and this setup with Disney doesn't strike me as being able to change Webtoon's direction.

In case you couldn't figure it out, I tend to be a bit progressive when it comes to technology. My school reports were typed and printed with digitally drawn covers back in 1985; I was logging in to BBSes by 1987; a friend and I started a virtual design studio in 1993; I was fully invested in and using my PDA for daily tasks by 1997; I got a robot to vacuum my floors in 2004... I'm not bleeding-edge, by any means, but when I see a technology that works and improves my life in some fashion, I try to take advantage of it. I see the potential it was designed to achieve and maximize it as much as I can.

That's one of the reasons I love the exploration of web comics -- how the medium is being taken advantage of during a digital revolution. My biggest surprise so far was just that it's taken me so long to get on board. (I didn't really start reading any regularly until 2004.) And now, seeing how great the possibilities are, am almost as surprised that more isn't being done in this arena. That the big guns in comicdom are being extremely cautious about this whole online comics notion. I know Marvel and DC at least both have people specifically hired to put their content online. Their job is, in part, to give their respective companies the best presence possible online. I know I would have been arguing for developing more comic content online for a couple decades now if that was expressly my business.

Now, to be fair to those tech guys, they're only allowed to do what their superiors let them. If Marie Javins and C. B. Cebulski (the current EICs at DC and Marvel) say, "Don't put our comics online" there's not a whole lot they can do. But if I were in that position, I'd have gone back again and again with different methods to get something out there and new business models and get the bean counters to run numbers and whatever I could to drag those companies into the 21st century.

Now, this is Marvel and DC we're talking about and, like the Titanic, they don't exactly turn on a dime! Admittedly, they have made some attempts in the past couple decades but they haven't made much progress since. In a lot of respects, Marvel in particular has back-tracked considerably. DC's current efforts -- their handful of Webtoons titles -- seem to finally be successful at least from the point of view of the fans, though it's unclear if those actually within DC see it that way.

Now I don't expect Javins and Cebulski to be lead champions of online development. They're not tech kinds of folks. Which is fine; they're not supposed to be. But you're supposed to hire talented tech kind of people to tell you how to improve your company in the tech area and, more importantly, listen to them! They have expertise for a reason!

Several years ago, I read The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. His basic premise was that technology has gotten advanced enough that it levels the playing field for everybody. The fact that you've been around longer or have more cash to spend on marketing matters less and less with each day. The old ways of doing business are being superseded. The global village is virtually upon us (pun intended). And it's why a company like Naver -- originally just a tech company that built their own search engine -- seemed to come out of nowhere to a lot of people as a major force in webcomics. They were leading on the technology front and overlaid comics on top of that, giving deference to their IT folks for developing a user interface and experience that didn't just try to replicate printed comics on-screen.

Jack Kirby was once asked in the 1980s what he thought the next big thing in comics was going to be. He said that he didn't know, but it was almost assuredly going to come from some guy sitting at home by himself, and not from some corporate office. Jack was mainly talking about style and genre, but I think it applies just as well to business models. You want to know what the next big thing is in online comic development, Marvel and DC are the last places you want to look!

In 1998, a new restaurant opened in New York City called Mars 2112. It was a theme restaurant of the type that were popular in the late 1990s, with this particular theme being, to no surprise, an immersive Mars visit. Supposedly, the owners had studied prior theme restaurants to see where they failed and tried to incoporate as many learnings as possible.

Patrons would enter via the "Cyberstreet" waiting area which featured space themed arcade games. When enough tables were ready, groups of two or three dozen would be "boarded" on a shuttle that took them on a simulated four-minute ride from Earth to Mars and, upon disembarking, they'd be seated in the "Crystal Crater" which was set to look like a hollowed out crater on Mars specifically for the purposes of dining. The waiters and bartenders were all clad in shiny uniforms that looked like they drew inspiration from The Jetsons and Lost in Space, while a few actors would roam the dining room floor in alien costumes to meet and greet the customers. The menu consisted of space-themed meals and drinks which, supposedly, were much better than your average for a theme restaurant.

A second location was opened outside Chicago two years later, and the owners were trying to raise funding for additional spots in Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Minneapolis when 9/11 effectively slammed the brakes on all US tourism, which the restaurant depended on. The Chicago location was quickly closed and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. The New York location remained opened but made a number of cutbacks. They continued to struggle, filing for bankruptcy again in 2007, and eventually shuttered entirely in 2012.

Now you may be asking, "What does any of this have to do with comics, Sean? Did they produce some kind of comic to promote the restaurant?"

No, they did not. However, Dumbing of Age creator David Willis worked at the second location as a shuttle pilot that ferried patrons from Earth to Mars. Willis recently noted that he was one of the few people who liked doing that job "because 90% of it was sitting on a chair alone in the dark." Given the limited time that location was open, it completely overlaps with the production of Willis' It's Walky! comic and he said he did a lot of thumbnail sketches for that strip while the simulator was running. Although he didn't say expressly, it seems likely the Mars 2112 gig influenced the space theme of It's Walky!

And as it happens, there is in fact footage online of Willis in his role as a shuttle operator! This isn't professional-grade camerawork by any stretch, but Willis is plainly visible as people enter and exit the shuttle, and he very clearly introduces himself with his real name. Enjoy!

On this day five years ago, my Webcomics textbook was officially published. It was supposed to formally debut at that year's ALA conference, but that was cancelled due to COVID. As was pretty much every other conference in 2020. I think that kind of screwed up my publisher's promotional plans, and the book never got the level of coverage that I think they typically give their books. But it still garnered some attention, the majority of which was very positive.

I haven't seen many reviews of the book, but the ones I have seen were, by and large, positive like I said. I think the two biggest criticisms I saw were 1) it doesn't reference enough other academic material, but they immediately added that that was a broader problem with academia because there was so little about webcomics to reference in the first place, and 2) none of my "key texts" featured any Black/brown creators. That last one is a reasonable criticism; I did include one creator of Japanese descent but the other six webcomics I highlighted were all by white people. I did reference various creators of color throughout the book at large, but their absence in the Key Texts portion was very much an oversight on my part. Although not commented on, none of the Key Texts were by any LGBTQIA+ folks either. Again, they're brought up throughout the rest of the book but not as one of the more in-depth highlights.

Interestingly, the book has not gotten as out of date as rapidly as I feared it might. I believe a couple of the webcomics I briefly referenced in the book have since gone offline, but none of the primary examples. In fact, the most out of date portions are that multiple creators I talk about transitioned since I first submitted my manuscript, and are referenced in the book by their deadnames. I was able to get in a last minute footnote about one of them, but I believe there are three others that are incorrectly named and gendered in my book now. I have to admit that that is very much NOT how I anticipated my book would start to go out of date!

The book ended up offering me some unique opportunities that I never would've even considered in my lifetime. I know that a copy got purchased for and now sits in the Library of Congress. In 2021, the book was nominated for a frickin' Eisner Award! And while there was no in-person ceremony that year and the book ultimately didn't win, I can still call up the YouTube video of Phil LaMarr reading off my name next to the book's cover as one of the nominees. But almost just as amazing, I was asked to be a judge for the 2023 Eisners! It's kind of even more impressive than the Award itself -- after all, they give out around 30 trophies every year, but there are only six judges! I'm sure I would never have been asked to judge if my book hadn't come to the Eisner committee's attention previously. And now, as an academic textbook, Webcomics is starting to get cited in other books and papers and articles.

When I was a teenager, I got my first fan letter published in the pages of Fantastic Four #318. I thought that was incredible because my name could now be linked to comics in perpituity. Admittedly, in an absurdly insignificant way but I was still happy with that because I figured that was probably the most I could ever hope to achieve in the medium. But getting a 300-page book about Webcomics written and published? Well, that's up there with running a marathon -- something I never thought I had the tenacity to accomplish. But then to have it recognized by the industry at large as a work significant enough for one of its biggest awards? Never ever ever ever in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that!

Webcomics is an academic textbook, so sales aren't exactly eye-popping. But that's not why I wrote it. Writing for me is a means to an end, not the end itself. But in the five years since Webcomics was published, that end has given me some absolutely amazing opportunities and even if nothing more ever comes of it, it's already been an incredible journey!

A few weeks ago, Webtoons hired Priya Girishanker as head of marketing for their English-language division. I noted at the time that her background, while impressive, was very much not based in storytelling and that signaled Webtoons' focus as not being on putting out good comics but their interest is more in ensuring that you become and stay a paying customer. I concluded...

Does this mean I think Webtoon is going to be enshitified the same way those other platforms have been? Well, no, not the same way certainly. But if your company's focus is not on delighting your customers but on simply customer retention... well, that's going to lead to different types of 'innovation,' isn't it? I'm not going to lay all the blame here at Girishanker's feet, by any means, but I think rather that her hiring is a symptom of what we can expect to see from Webtoon as a company overall...

Now let's take a look at this bit of yesterday's news from K-Comics Beat...

On the app, the “Daily Pass” icon still appears—but it’s now grayed out, replaced by the Ad Pass symbol. Tapping the info icon confirms the news: the Daily Pass is no longer available.

With this change, readers must now purchase coins to unlock episodes. Each episode costs three coins, meaning a reader could spend at least $9.99 a month just to follow a single series, assuming they haven’t previously unlocked any chapters. Longer series will, of course, cost more.

And there's the start of Webtoons' enshitification right there. I'm only surprised it hit so quickly. It's almost too quickly relative to Girishanker's hire; I suspect this was a move that's been in the works for rather a while longer. As I said when she was hired, any issues that might happen to coincide with Girishanker's tenure are not necessarily indicative of her efforts, but rather that her hiring was simply a part of an already-in-place shift in strategy. Girishanker's relationship to this move, at most, will be reviewing whatever press release or announcement Webtoons might release about it. (As of this writing, I can't find any formal announcements from them.)

Now I'm not a regular user of Webtoons. I've got an account and checked out some comics there; the UI and UX is not appreciably better or worse than other similar platforms; I just haven't found many comics there that held my interest that weren't also being presented in another format I prefer more (i.e. their own websites). So this change doesn't really affect me. But I am familiar enough with how businesses work to see the direction this will continue to head down. I don't know precisely what moves Webtoons has got planned and in what timeframe(s) but I'm certain they'll continue pushing these types of changes out, one at a time. If they're adept enough at it, the changes will be small enough and incremental enough that most users will put up with them, and cumulatively they won't be pushed past a breaking point. As with most businesses that slowly degrade their products over time, Webtoons is counting on users' laziness and inertia to continue chipping away at features and functionality that they could actually charge for.

It's not uncommon to see people today complain about how Google/Amazon/Facebook/pick-a-platform has gotten worse over the past several years. The Webtoons would head this direction as well is hardly surprising. As I said, they won't be snhitified the same way as other platforms but they'll keep making things worse as long as they can keep finding ways to save themselves costs or bring in more revenue. Welcome to 2025. If you're not expecting this kind of thing now, where they hell have you been?

One of the things I noted in my Webcomics book was how the business model has changed over time. I referenced, in one example, how Dorothy Gambrell had to realign her webcomic business after what she called "the great t-shirt crash of 2008" when just selling t-shirts suddenly no longer paid the bills. The explosion of browser-based ad blockers in the mid-2010s forced another radical shift in how webcomics earned money. I'm now seeing the first overt evidence of another shift transpiring.

Earlier this week, Zach Weinersmith over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal posted, instead of his usual virtually-daily comic, a bit of a screed on some sudden and visibly obvious shifts on his site. He basically notes that he has parted ways with Hiveworks, who've largely run his site and the ads and the merch store for several years. Weinersmith still owns all his material, but he's in the process of setting up new versions of all those things manually now. Which he adds is something that he hasn't done in over a decade. He said, "I feel a bit like I'm stepping into a racecar after having thought I was permanently retired from competition."

Now, while Weinersmith's message is polite and cordial about everything, the abruptness of the change without his having a backup system in place strikes me as the result of a last straw heel-turn. Some new policy or something that Hiveworks implemented without much warning that's very much not in creators' favor, and Weinersmith just said, "Enough is enough! Screw this noise!" He notes in particular the problems with the ads being displayed and how more and more of the money his site earns through them goes to social network platforms instead of himself.

The broad enshittification of everything certainly contributes to my hypothesis here as well.

But, in short, Weinsersmith is in the process of doing all the work for his site and his business by himself again. He notes that he's been doing webcomics as a career for 20 years now and it would seem that he's leaning into the business model he used at the start. Or a model relatively close to it.

Jennie Gyllblad, creator of Jenitales, had a similar set of issues towards the end of 2024 and she basically re-did her whole site herself manually and even got her own payment processing system set up. Her particular concerns were more along the lines of her "adult" comics -- and more to the point, who/how any given platform defines "adult" and when they decide that their definition retroactively changes. It's clear in some of the videos she's posted where she explains what she's done and why that it was not an easy transition. Which makes sense. After all, she's an artist and wants to tell stories. She's not a marketer or accountant or website developer.

But I suspect we're going to see a lot of this type of thing throughout 2025. Either from creators getting fed up with increasingly awful terms of service, or because of asinine political policies seemingly designed to tank the economy and run some providers out of business. Hopefully, other creators will have the agility and/or general savviness to avoid the worst problems, but it wouldn't surprise me to see other webcomics running into some unintended hiatuses while they sort out how to continue to make a living. As Weinersmith said, there has been "more than one tough passage" when it comes to being a webcomic creator over the past couple decades. He and many others did survive those. But others did not.

Best of luck to Weinersmith, Gyllblad, and everyone else who is dealing/will soon deal with all this.

A few years ago, I noticed a couple of things. First, there was an increasing number of natural disasters that were causing larger and larger amounts of damage. Natural disasters, of course, have been around since literally the beginning of the planet, but climate change has had enough of an impact at this point that both their frequency and intensities are impossible to ignore regardless where you live. Second, the federal government is decreasingly able (or even willing!) to assist people who have been impacted by these disasters. Hurricane Katrina is kind of the poster child for this type of thing, but we're seeing it more and more. Worse still, we're also seeing clearly man-made disasters happening more and more as well. This means that you're more likely to get hit by a disaster, it will likely cause more damage than it the past, and you'll get less assistance.

So despite not living in an area prone to earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, or any other natural disasters, I began putting together an emergency preparedness kit. A crate of supplies that we could rely on in case we're cut off from... well, anything. Matches, first aid kit, flashlight, radio, multitool, etc. After I pulled some basics together, I expanded to include bottled water, MREs, camping supplies. My wife and I each put together a bag with spare clothes we could grab if we needed to race out the door. Extra food for the pets. A waterproof/fireproof lockbox with a handle for important papers. Rain barrels for non-potable water. A small generator. Everything we can think of (and afford!) to prepare ourselves for any sort of emergency.

Some of the basics here are spelled out on variety of websites of folks like the Red Cross and the ASPCA. But I found a lot of that to be dated. I mean, they are keeping up to date by mentioning things like extra phone chargers, but the thinking behind these sites still assumes the government will come to assist you in a few hours, maybe a day at most. So to get more/better information, you almost have to start looking at prepper culture.

Preppers are the folks who take the idea that you'll be on your own to the extremes. They're also sometimes known as survivalists and are preparing for what they often call a SHTF scenario. Like, full-on Mad Max types of situations. Society is gone, and you are completely on your own. There's a lot of overlap here with gun culture. There's an entire industry built up just around building underground bunkers/fall-out shelters that caters to this community. There are some sane, pragmatic folks out there advocating prepping, but there's also a lot of deep conspiracy theorists that are genuinely fearful of a for-real zombie apocalypse.

So, for me, trying to do more than the Red Cross suggests, but who's not so paranoid as to buy and retrofit an old missile silo as a bunker (yup, that's totally a thing), there was a LOT of crap to wade through in order to get to some practical and useful information.

Which leads to my notion that someone needs to make an emergency preparedness webcomic. As far as I can tell, there's nothing out there like this currently. There have been a few emergency preparedness comics that run a basic story about preparing for an emergency and make some high level recommendations, but they tend to be light on specifics. Which I suppose is good enough to get people thinking about it, but it doesn't do much beyond that. I've also seen a few comics that try to show a prepper or some survivalists actually in a SHTF setting, but the focus there seems to be on the story of survival after the event, not on the preparations beforehand.

So what I think we need is an instructables-type webcomic that shows how to go about getting prepared for emergency situations. I'm thinking it would need to be a webcomic versus a printed one because while individual portions would be linearly narrative, the overall piece would not be; so if you had it as a webcomic, people could check out the specific portions they felt were most important and/or they were most ignorant of without having to wade through everything else. There might be some sections that just talk about some of the supplies you'd need under different emergency scenarios, or for different geographies. Another section might look at administering first aid. Another might be packing a Go-Bag versus a Bug-Out-Bag, and why you might need one over the other. Maybe something about what you think you need versus what you most likely will need. What about legal emergencies? Do you have a will, power of attorney documents? Are they secure? Financial emergencies? How much should be in your emergency fund? Digital emergencies? Is all your data backed up?

The basic point of the whole thing would be how to implement the old Boy Scout motto of "be prepared." Obviously, not everybody was in Boy Scouts in the first place, and I'm sure many who were haven't thought about some of those ideas since before they had a spouse and kids and day-to-day job responsibilities and whatever. But, like I said, in a day and age where disasters are getting deadlier and more damaging, with less likelihood of any help from the government, I think something along these lines would prove incredibly beneficial if it were done with practical steps in mind. I think there's a lot of far-out-there people in the prepper community that give them all a bad name, and turn off others from even entertaining the notion of emergency preparedness -- you wind up sorting through bizarre conspiracy theories just to see a list of items to include in a Go-Bag! There are some decent folks out there with YouTube channels and such, which is great, but a webcomic would stand out since there simply isn't anything like it out there right now. People just starting out could check it out without getting scared by the crazy tinfoil hat types.

Somebody get on this!