Back in 1904, a strip debuted by the name of Foolish Fred. It wasn't successful, lasting only a few months, and is pretty unremarkable even for strips of the time.

In fact, the only reason, I supsect, it's remembered at all is because it was by C. W. Kahles who, only a year and a bit later, created Hairbreadth Harry who was perpetually trying to save Beautiful Belinda from the evil plots of Relentless Rudolph. Kahles continued working on the strip until his death in 1931, and the strip carried on under the hand of F. O. Alexander for another eight years. Even if you haven't seen Hairbreadth Harry, you're likely familiar with Alexander's work -- he did the original illustrations for the board game Monopoly, which are still being used today. (Although my initial thought was that Alexander stopped working on Hairbreadth Harry thanks to the royalties he received from the wildly popular board game, it looks as if he was never paid at all for that work!)

In any event, you can see from the example above the concept of Foolish Fred isn't that interesting or original. It's not really bad, but just a fairly standard gag strip with little characterization to interact with or appreciate. I will say, though, that I am impressed with the execution of the brickwork in the final panel above, which is rendered only through color and without any linework to "hold" the individual bricks. Very nice and effective use of the medium, but hardly enough to save an otherwise mediocre effort.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: How to Webcomic Review
https://ift.tt/3keRQne

Kleefeld on Comics: Joe and Asbestos
https://ift.tt/3BZ9xgE

Kleefeld on Comics: Vince Fago Did More than Funny Animals
https://ift.tt/3okeqfL

Kleefeld on Comics: Creative Connections
https://ift.tt/3HcKj2j

Kleefeld on Comics: It's 2021; Don't Fall Behind
https://ift.tt/3Dcw7Eb

My day jobs over the past 25-ish years have all been based around the web. Sometimes design, sometimes development, sometimes management... but always web based. By contrast, I have a friend who, until a couple weeks ago, had spent the last 20 years at a newspaper. He finally got fed up with how he was being treated there, and I helped him get a job at my current employer.

Earlier this week, we had a global staff meeting where they relayed the status of various major initiatives, new clients we've signed, etc. Since my friend is less than two weeks into the job, I was shooting him some message to provide some context. And about half-way through the meeting, he said felt like he'd been in the Dark Ages before. But interestingly, he wasn't responding to the technology -- I think going from a primarily print business to a primarily online one comes with some understanding that you're going to work a little differently. What he was responding to more was the organization of the company itself: who was in charge of what, what internal initiatives were underway, how the company responded to employee concerns and issues... basically how the company functions.

I like my employer and I think they give a lot of consideration to their employees. But the roles they're creating, the processes they're putting in place to accomodate growth... they're nothing particularly revolutionary or even that progressive. They're more-or-less standard best practices for businesses the 21st century. This is the stuff being taught to MBA students today -- hell, this was stuff I was taught during my MBA nearly 20 years ago! And yet the newspaper my friend was working at had none of that. Whether they hadn't heard about any of it to begin with or knew about but actively ignored it, I don't know. Heck, maybe someone there was pushing for it and it was one guy in upper management who said "no." Regardless, much of it was new to my friend.

When COVID started really blowing up last year, my company was able to pivot quickly and make a number of changes to how it operates. Our industry (online education) was one that was very much buoyed by the pandemic, but it was only because we weren't sticking to old thinking and old scripts that we were able to capitalize on those external factors. Had the newspaper been able to move remotely similarly, they might not have had to let go over half their employees.

And that's why I bring this up. When people complain about how entire industries (like, say, comic strip syndicates) aren't keeping up, it's generally not about the technology. That newspaper has computers and posts their content online; they send their files to the printer digitally for their print edition; the company's physical assets look very much like any other similarly sized business. But they're still holding to old thinking. Not just an archaic business model, but the way the company is organized and structured, how decisions gets made, who's in charge of what... all the elements that allow a business to be successful. This is why long-running companies often fail -- not because their product is suddenly no longer wanted (although that does happen sometimes) but because they stuck in old practices that prevent them from moving quickly enough to adjust to a changing market.

You know what changed Marvel's fortunes? Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before Disney purchased Marvel, before the successful movies based on Marvel characters done apart from their own studio... the big shift for the company was around 1999 when they stopped looking at themselves as a comic book publisher and started calling themselves a "character-based entertainment company." That change didn't alter what their actual assets were, that change didn't affect their publishing schedule, that change didn't affect any of the licensing deals they'd already brokered... What that change did was alter everyone's mindset in the company about what they should focus on. The bean counters still had to account for where any money was being spent, the editors still were editing the comic stories to the best of their abilities, the sales folks on the licensing team were still trying to push contracts with t-shirt companies and the like... the change was in thinking how their work serviced the company as a whole. They were no longer selling a Spider-Man comic book or licensing a Captain America lunch box, they were promoting an intellecutal property. The Hulk coffee tumbler wasn't intended to help promote and sell the comic any longer; it was part of a lifestyle brand. Same with the comics. And the t-shirts. And the lunch boxes. And the movies. And the action figures. And everything else.

That's the shift that companies find difficult. That's how they don't move into the 21st century. Yes, it's a cynical approach to operating and, on an individual level (if you're making a webcomic, for example) it might be something you actively avoid because you just want to make good comics, but in the American flavor of capitalism today, that's how you have to operate, lest you go out of business. The technology is important to keep up with so you can work effeciently, but it's the broader thinking and general mindset you need to keep up with in order to continue to work at all!

I took my first real foray into manga in 2007. Before that, I'd read the First Comics highly Americanized versions of Lone Wolf and Cub and seen a handful of (again, largely Americanized) anime movies and shows, but that was pretty much it. A decade-plus on now and I still know far, far less about manga than I'd like. More than I did back in 2007, certainly, but I still have a lot to learn.

I've also been trying to get more knowledgeable about European comics. I'd read a number of them as a teenager, but generally without the knowledge that they were in fact created on the other side of an ocean. Still lots to learn.

Same with Canadian comics. And Australian ones. And Indian ones. And...

One of the reasons I first looked at those Lone Wolf issues back in the day was because the covers were by Frank Miller. (Bear in mind that this was 1987, shortly after his Dark Knight Returns blew everyone's socks off.) I recall reading somewhere that Miller was happy to do the covers because he had seen some of those stories before and they were very influential on his Daredevil run.

And I think that's an interesting notion. That Miller's work on Daredevil and Dark Knight looked revolutionary to American audiences because it had a Japanese influence that most people in the States hadn't seen in any capacity at that time. When you distill that idea down even further, that's basically what creativity is: putting together two or more ideas that no one has before. Miller took elements of Japanese manga and merged them into an American superhero story.

I don't say that to diminish Miller's achievements on those works. He understood the power of Goseki Kojima's art style/storytelling, and figured out how to adapt some of those elements to what was essentially the Jack Kirby method of storytelling. Not an easy task, certainly a creative one, and Miller was able to execute on that very well.

And that's why I try to see what's going on (and has gone on) in comics beyond those created in the U.S. You never know when/where something really cool and useful will come up, or in what capacity. Different cultures approach problems (like storytelling) in different ways, and they could well have ideas and methods unique to their culture. And those might be perfectly valid and usable in my own work. Even though I don't actually write comics themselves.

The more you know, the more you're able to make those connections no one else is making.

If you've studied Golden Age comics more than a bit, you've almost certainly run across the name of Vincent Fago. After working for Fleischer Studios, he headed over to Timely Comics in 1942 and did any number of funny animal books. He became the defacto Editor-in-Chief (though not officially called that) when Stan Lee went into the Army. But after Lee returned from World War II, Fago is all but forgotten in comics history. One might conclude that he left the field of comics altogether. In fact, he continued drawing funny animal comics through the 1950s and then worked for Golden Books in the 1960s.

But what's even more rarely mentioned is that in the early 1970s, he started his own publishing firm, Pendulum Press, and began putting out comic book versions of classic literature. He scripted most of the books himself, adapting and abridging the originals as closely as possible given page limitations, and then got talented "newcomers" like Nestor Redondo to illustrate them. Indeed, for many of the books, he acted only as editor and got others to write the scripts.

Fago's stated intent was, like the Classics Illustrated series before him, to use the comic medium to encourage children to pick up the great works of Western literature. I don't know of any actual research done to see if this indeed works on a large scale, but I can vouch that it did work for me. Two of his books I received as a youngster were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Treasure Island -- both of which remain as two of my favorite stories. And Fago's versions were so powerful that I still find closer association with those stories than the incredibly commanding performances of James Mason or Robert Newton in the Disney versions. (Though I will admit that Mason's and Newton's voices do carry through my head when I hear those characters!)

I thought his hardcover, black & white versions were short-lived and I had a great deal of difficulty first finding anything about them online. Indeed, I'm still not sure how many and which of these books were ultimately produced. But I was quite surprised, in going through my father's collection years later, to discover that Fago had evidently re-published the books with new covers in the early 1990s as prestige format comic books... Curiously, while these books use the exact same art, there's no scripter credit in the newer version. They've also been colored (to the detriment of the series, if you asked me) but no coloring credit is noted either. Fago's own name as editor is stripped of the series, leaving only art credits.

The introduction to each book, and the "Other Books In This Line" list at the end, note that there were to be 72 issues in the series. However, I can again find only the barest of information about this online, and what I can find suggests that the series was discontinued after the sixth issue.

I've only got a couple versions of some of these stories in comic book form, but I'm half-tempted to seek out other iterations to see how Fago's version holds up against the others. They all certainly had great material to work with, but it'd be interesting to see how fared in a sort of head-to-head competition.

But more importantly, the work that Fago (and others) did to bring great literature to a younger audience is noteworthy. And sure, the comic book versions are "dumbed down" a bit from the source material, but getting these books into the hands of kids is only guaranteed to entice them to seek out more. And I suspect that Fago's biggest hinderence to not doing that more successfully was simply one of distribution. After all, the world's greatest work is worth nothing if nobody can find it!

Back to my original point: if you run across the name of Vince Fago and how he did all these wonderful funny animal books, I'd like you to take a second or two to remember that he wasn't JUST a funny animal cartoonist. He was a man who had an impact on kids, like myself, whose first introductions to prose novels were his comic books.

There are, of course, any number of instances in the anals of comic history where something was written or drawn that would be considered offensive today. Joe & Asbestos is one such strip, and it absolutely astounds me that it ran up until 1971! (You'll see why in a moment.)

Ken Kling created a strip called Joe Quince in the early 1920s. (I've seen start dates of 1923, '24 and '25.) The title character was on the hunt for a get-rich-quick scheme, and he frequently found out that there were no shortcuts. Despite that, however, he returned to gambling on horse races repeatedly, eventually befriending a stable hand known only as Asbestos. Kling evidently knew little about horse racing, though, and pulled horse names from actual races. And although Quince usually lost in the strip, the horses he bet on frequently won in the real world. Readers in the Baltimore area (the strip was never very widely distributed) started using it as a guide, believing Kling had some kind of inside information.

The Asbestos character initially became somewhat popular, and Kling changed the name of the strip to Joe & Asbestos. However, some papers continued calling it Joe Quince through 1926. Of course, the obvious problem in the strip is that Asbestos is drawn in blackface and is given stereotypically bad traits. Fortunately, Kling decided that the strip had run its course and he quit working on it in 1926, switching over to an unrelated strip called Windy Riley.(Although he does continue using blackface caricatures there as well.) Unfortunately, there was still plenty of reader interest and even demand for Joe & Asbestos so Kling returned to that title in 1932.

Kling seemed to broaden the strip's focus somewhat, although always kept horse racing as general theme. And sadly, he also kept the bad caricature that was Asbestos largely unchanged as well. Right up until his death in 1970. (That's based on the reading I've found. I haven't actually been able to find an instance of the strip after around 1945.) That this was largely left alone for so long seems to be primarily due to a very low syndication towards the end. In fact, it was only running in one paper for its last several years: The New York Daily News for most of those last years and then a brief run in The New York Mirror at the very end. Not to mention the niche focus of the strip meant a lot of people never bothered with it, even if it was in their paper.

It seems like a strange throwback. A strip so rooted in its time/place of origin that it never could outgrow that, but still managed to continue on despite that. If you look at other strips that started around the same time -- Gasoline Alley, Blondie, etc -- they made changes to reflect the society around them. Perhaps not as quickly as some readers would like (leading to complaints of retreading the same, tired jokes over and over again) but they changed nonetheless. That Joe & Asbestos didn't... honestly, I'm not sure what to make of that.

Earlier this year, Star Prichard ran a Kickstarter project to publish How to Webcomic! The Ultimate Guie to Making Online Comics. With my long-running interest in webcomics (*cough*cough* check out my Eisner-nominated book on the subject here *cough*) and the simple fact that only a handful of books have ever been written about webcomics to begin with, I of course jumped on board, eager to see what Prichard has to say. Prichard, if you're unfamiliar, has been running her current webcomic Castoff for about six years now, and had a couple of shorter ones before that. So she's definitly got some first-hand experience, but she also young enough that she's grown up with webcomics being a thing and isn't coming to the table with either baggage from print-exclusive expectations or the we're-making-this-all-up-as-we-go approach that earlier webcomikers had to forge.

One of the challenges I think anyone trying to write a "how to" book for webcomics faces is trying to establish what assumptions you need to make about your book's audience. What I mean specifically is: what do they know about making comics broadly speaking? Part of making webcomics is just the ability to make comics, so how much of that ground do you cover before getting to the elements that are unique to webcomics? How much do you go over storytelling? How much do talk about character design? How much time do you spend on lettering? That is all integral to webcomics, but not unique to it, so how much of your book do you devote to those aspects versus just telling your reader to go read one of the many books on how to make comics before starting this one?

In Prichard's case, she uses about the first two-thirds of the book to cover general comic book creation. She's coming to the table assuming her audience has a very limited understanding of making comics in any form. In the book, she makes reference to the fact that she made her first webcomic when she was a sophomore in high school, so my guess is that that's effectively her audience. She wrote the book that she wishes she would've had back then. And from that perspective, covering a lot of "how to make (not-necessarily-web)comics" makes sense. The last third of the book focuses more specifically on the more unique aspects of creating a webcomic. She talks about what should be on the site (besides the webcomic itself!), social media, how you might be able to make money, dealing with online haters that come to your site, etc.

The tone of the book is very casual and positive (with plenty of spot illustrations and cartoons by Prichard) but also realistic. Prichard goes out of her way to note that you likely won't make much money from your webcomic and, if you do, it sure ain't gonna happen quickly. But there's a definite "who cares if no one else likes it; tell the awesome story you want to tell -- you can do it!" vibe to the whole book. You can almost feel how eager she is to see some 14-year-old trying their hand at making webcomics for the first time.

As of today, the only other still-in-print books on how to make webcomics are the two written/published by Brad Guigar. Both are longer (The Webcomics Handbook is over twice as long!) and go into more depth, but I can see that being a turn-off for a certain sector of potential creators. Prichard's book is, in some respects, less intimidating and might be better suited for younger audiences with less self-confidence or those still trying to ascertain whether they really even want to try pursuing this webcomic idea. So while there is some overlap in material, I think there's easily enough differentiation between the two audiences for both.

I do have a few things I didn't care for with this book however. First is that Prichard never provides any actual sources. There are several places where she does list out different software people can use, collectives they can join -- examples of other sources people can reference -- but she never provides any URLs. Including for her own webcomic Castoff which she uses as an example repeatedly! The only URL in the entire book is her personal website on the About the Author page. While some tools are indeed unique enough that they'll pop up first with a simple Google search, that's not necessarily always the case. And even if it is, given her presumed audience, will it be obvious enough that they've gone to the right site she was talking about? I think it would've been easy to just include some URLs to save readers a bit of efffort and potential confusion.

The other issue I had was that she has a few instances where she very overtly hand-waves away some large gaps in her knowledge. In her chapter on making money for example, the entirety of her comments on not just Kickstarter but crowdfunding as a whole are: "When it comes time to print your comic, a lot of creators hold crowdfunding events to help fund the printing of their physical books! I don't have enough experience to go into detail myself, but there are plenty of resources out there to help!" That's it. Not even a broad outline of crowdfunding as a concept, or even a basic definition, much less any direction on what to even consider looking for. Although that is the most obvious example, she does basically the same thing a couple other times in the book as well. I respect not trying to bullshit your audience if you're not a complete expert in literally every aspect of making a webcomic, but I think you undermine your own credibility if you go to the trouble of listing out all the things, but only explain the ones you're familiar with. I think you should either learn enough about the ones you're not familiar with to present the same type of information as the ones you are familiar with (and we're realistically only talking about a cursory overview anyway) or speak to the topic more broadly in a fashion that covers everything more-or-less equally.

If you've already started a webcomic and are hoping to find out ways to grow your audience or start to actually make money off it, you're probably better off with one of Guigar's books. But if you're struggling with a webcomic idea and don't know how to really get started with it, or maybe you've got some pages drawn and are thinking "now what?" Prichard's How to Webcomic is probably more up your alley. She is, as of Friday, still in the process of fulfilling her Kickstarter pledges, but for $20 US, you can order it from her site and I expect she'll be able to get to those orders fairly soon.