AMA — Going from traditional media to online

Q.: What was it like mentally and emotionally going from more traditional media to mainly web and Patreon?

A.: My comics career has been pretty much web-centric since the beginning — when I started posting Greystone Inn on a GeoCities site in 2000. (You have to be really old to get that reference.) There was a brief period of self-syndication to newspapers, but it never amounted to much. The Philadelphia Daily News carried it for several years (and a handful of others carried it for a year or two apiece), but 90% of my work in comics has been online.

However...

Newspaper comic strips defined my self-image since the very start. My posting Greystone online was my ever-so-brilliant attempt to get the attention of newspaper syndicates. And both Greystone and Evil Inc were written with newspaper strips as a model. By the time I had launched Evil Inc in 2005, it was pretty clear that the newspaper industry was dying a slow dead, so I had long abandoned my dreams of syndication, but by that time I had already begun self-syndicating to newspapers (including the Philadelphia Daily News).

And it didn't hurt that — at that time — web publishing was very similar to newspaper publishing. Both were ad driven, for example, and that meant daily updates were rewarded. Likewise, it was smart to cast a wide net — again, to maximize ad revenue. So that meant keeping the content as G-rated as possible: No "dirty" words and keep the sexual content to innuendo.

Slowly, that began to change. Since Web traffic would crash over the weekend, I began updating Evil Inc on a Monday-through-Friday basis. The "Personnel File" strips and the Lightning-Lady-answering-the-phone strips were built to satisfy my commitments to the few newspapers I was self-syndicating to. I could cover Saturdays without spending too much time on it.

I chugged along like that for a long time. I even built my business up to the point at which I was confident in leaving my day job to become a fulltime cartoonist in 2012. But at that time, I was still following a very "newspaper" pathway.

That all changed when the use of ad blockers surpassed a breaking point — sometime around 2013 or 2014. My ad revenue withered away to practically nothing, and since I didn't have the income from a steady day job supplementing it, this was a pretty serious matter.

The death of the "free" webcomics business model (more appropriately called an ad-driven model) forced me to start re-evaluating my career. If I was going to survive, I was going to have to do something different. That's about the time that Patreon appeared on my radar, and I started experimenting with exclusive content. At that time, I was offering comics like Arch Bros and a PG-13 version of Courting Disaster as exclusives.

As I've said innumerable times, my readers' response to an X-rated Evil Inc strip on April 30, 2015 was a major turning point.

Once I saw that exclusive content could work as a publishing model, I started re-evaluating everything I was doing. It was no longer necessary for me to do daily updates to maximize ad revenue, for example, and in 2016, Evil Inc became an online graphic novel instead of an online comic strip.

That meant I could create pages that were designed with the final printed product in mind. Up until then, my graphic novels were created by rearranging the panels of the strips into a graphic-novel format... with varying degrees of success. Because of this change, Evil Inc: Under New Management is the most visually attractive book I ever published (in my opinion).

Moreover, that meant I could write the comic differently. Instead of breaking the online updates into four-panel-and-a-punchline chunks, I could write in a more natural voice. back in the day, storyline-driven comic strips thrived in a newspaper environment where cartoonists could rely on a captive audience of newspaper subscribers. Today, online readers get most of their content through social media. (Good luck finding a reader who even knows what an RSS feed is!) That kind of environment is hot death for a storyline-driven comic strip. Making the change to a graphic-novel approach improved Evil Inc immeasurably. And I would have never gotten to that realization if I were still self-syndicating (or still following an ad-driven model).

As the years went by, I focused more and more of my time on creating exclusive content for the people who were actively supporting me. I maintain the now-truly-free webcomic for two reasons. It kept more passive supporters around where they could be counted on for things like Kickstarter campaigns. And the free site attracted new readers who could likely become new Patreon backers.

Where I had once scheduled up to 12 comic-convention appearances in a year, now I was eliminating them entirely. The reality was simple: Going to a convention was a commitment that stole about five days from me. One day to travel to the con, three days (minimum) to exhibit, and a day to return home. I'd fall behind on my self-imposed Patreon schedule, and I'd be furious with myself as a result. AND, comic-con attendees were there for the cosplayers and the movie/TV stars — not for me. (And that's OK.) I wasn't making anywhere near enough money during those five days as I would if I just planted myself in my studio and cranked out comics. The decision was simple: Comic conventions were out. I haven't made a significant convention appearance in years.*

And with this, I had completely broken away from any semblance of newspaper comics — in every way. There is nothing connecting me with that world anymore. In fact, I totaled last year's output. Fully 85% of my posts were Patreon exclusives. People who were only accessing my public content were getting about 15% of what I was creating.

What does this mean emotionally? That's hard to put into words. When I was a kid, the only thing I ever wanted to be was a cartoonist. I've been able to fulfill that dream, and there's not a week that goes by that I'm not a little bit in awe of the fact that I'm doing this for a living. In a few weeks, I'll be celebrating 19 years of professional comics. The 12-year-old me would be gobsmacked. (Even though he wouldn't be able to read about 80% of what I do.)  It doesn't look anything like what I thought it would. I'm not working for Marvel or DC like I thought I would when I was a pre-teen. I'm not a syndicated comic-strip cartoonist like I thought I would be when I was in high school. I'm not a political cartoonist like I thought I would be when I was in college. It all looks and feels very different.

Different. But good. Very, very good.

If you're reading this, then thank you. Because everything I just said above wouldn't have happened without you.

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* I will be attending NCSFest in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 17-19. However, that's more of an excuse to visit my friend and ComicLab podcast co-host, Dave Kellett, and to take my older son on a tour of a few west coast universities. I'll most likely bring a box of EI:UNM books and very little more.