My fundraiser to get enough money to buy an iMac is now at $1870 out of $2500 needed. Thanks everyone!
I’ve received a few comments and emails from people who wonder if, I can’t figure out how to make a living anymore doing cartoons and columns, I shouldn’t just quit. It’s a valid question. I’ve asked it myself. I would ask it of others.
And I don’t have a good answer.
All I can say is that there are a lot of things that seem to require donations from the public in order to go on: poetry, a lot of art, NPR. These are all things that people seem to want. If they didn’t; there wouldn’t be any donations, right?
Until recently cartooning and writing was a difficult living, but a living nonetheless. Now they’re not. But people obviously still seem to want them. So the way I look at it is: I’m giving you, my readers, the option of keeping me doing this. If you don’t want to or can’t contribute to the cause, then obviously I will fail and try to go back into banking or maybe find a professorship at a college or become an Afghan warlord. That’s the free market. If I succeed, then maybe we’re showing that there’s a market for this sort of thing.
An obscure webcartoonist recently raised $1.2 million through Kickstarter. It was just a gift from his fans, a thank you for his work, since all he really needed was $2,000 or $3,000 to reprint an old book (he asked for $25,000). He didn’t even draw a single new cartoon for that $1.2 million.
If people don’t kick in for left-wing editorial cartooning but do kick in for comix about role-playing games, guess what kind of cartooning will be left online?
So I guess I do have an answer after all.
6 Comments.
Joy always sells better than anger. That being said, this post finally prompted me to pony something up. Good luck!
@Russell: thanks! If you look at the Order of the Stick and think it’s worth $1.2 million, well, I don’t know what to say.
Personally, I haven’t read it in years. Poorly drawn, and basically just one joke.
But its target audience is young nerds… many of whom are young software developers and even in this economy, that’s a group that has a lot of members with more dollars than sense.
The one web comic I still follow is Skin Horse.
“thanks! If you look at the Order of the Stick and think it’s worth $1.2 million, well, I don’t know what to say.”
You’re looking at it the wrong way. It wasn’t about getting 1 person to think the comic is worth $1.2 million, but to get thousands of people to think it’s worth $15-20. That’s how movies make so much money, after all: sell millions of tickets at $8-10 a pop. And that’s how most anyone who has come to earn a living off the Internet has done it. They work at it, develop a fanbase, and by getting a few dollars from 1/X of that base (through t-shirt or book sales, or now Kickstarter accounts) they make some money.
It’s a different model than what you went through when you started, I get that, but your disparagement of Burlew just comes across as sour grapes. Nevermind your views of Order of the Stick itself, that’s not the point here. But I mean, calling him ‘obscure’ just sound petty. ‘Obscure’ as far as the population at large goes, sure, but where do you or other editorial cartoonists rank by that measurement? But within the world of webcomics he’s one of the few who’s making a living at it, which he’s earned by working on his strip for the better part of a decade now. He’s not a Johnny-come-lately who just happened ask people for money and ended up with a million dollars.
Also, I have to correct you a bit on your comment that Burlew didn’t draw a single new cartoon and his fans (I among them) just gave him that money. As if the donations were unconditional. You’re wrong, both in the general tone of your comment and the actual meaning. One of the reasons his fund drive got as high as it did is because during the entire drive he kept adding new goal lines for donations and incentivized them. In addition to the original rewards offered (like every Kickstarter drive seems to have) he offered new reward for almost every milestone he added. Patches, magnets, a coloring book, reprints of his older books, and yes, three times he promised that he would do daily updates (which is a pretty big deal since he’s one of the webcomic artists who doesn’t have a set schedule).
So yeah, he did draw new cartoons in response to the drive, and that was part of his general program of offering additional rewards as new milestones were met to encourage people to donate. Whether the incentivization itself is a good or bad thing, I don’t have much of an opinion on, other than it seems to be the new model and it’s unlikely to be going anywhere. Burlew made it work for himself, much better than he or anyone expected, so more power to him.
@Philip: No doubt, Burlew is on to something big. I owe him a drink for helping me to break out of my print media box!
In terms of the quality of the strip being sub-par, well, it is. But that’s also enlightening: it proves that everything has changed, that competence is less important than getting people to care about your work.
Honestly, this has caused many of us older cartoonists to rethink our model in a way that, say, Scott Kurtz’s bluster never could.
My computer fundraiser is the beginning of my attempt to adapt.
Next: something much bigger. You’ll hear about it later this year.
Good points, Phillip. Years ago, Ted, you tried setting up a subscription service. You sent your comics by email and said there would be “exclusive content not available on the Internet.” I subscribed for a year and never got anything by email that I couldn’t see on your website.
So I dropped it. Just a couple of extras and I’d have stuck with it. Instead, you got nothing from me until yesterday.