The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: Doc on November 12, 2008, 08:52:14 am
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An awesome return to form (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=11112008). Which I guess is kind of good since this is probably going to be the only comic for November. The small things that give Molly joy amuse substantially, Ray is a wheeler dealer yet still kind of crappy, Pat's a dick, Phillipe is retarded, Cornelius is a gentleman to a stripper and the last panel makes me so, so happy.
Edit: fixed link, grammar error in subject line. Education.
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This has made my day.
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Ahhhhhhh.
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Show of hands: Who else completely forgot LN was dead?
Happy Molly was pretty awesome, too.
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That's a hell of a tree by the way too. I wish Onstad would do a landscape heavy painting. I wouldn't buy it of course but I'd compliment the hell out of it.
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What's this, a new strip? It's been so long I was actually surprised to see a new strip thread.
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Show of hands: Who else completely forgot LN was dead?
Not I.
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Show of hands: Who else completely forgot LN was dead?
Yeah, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on in that panel.
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Cornelius : Polly :: Lester Freamon : Shardene
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Cornelius : Polly :: Lester Freamon : Shardene
My mind is blown.
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Not I.
Yeah, me neither. I was starting to wonder if Onstad was ever going to bring him back or if he killed him off because he didn't like writing the character.
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Cornelius : Polly :: Lester Freamon : Shardene
Oh yeah... That did feel familiar for a reason.
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What little nephew died? Can you post the link to that one?
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What little nephew died? Can you post the link to that one?
Yup (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07252008).
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KOODGE
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KOODGE
I actually remembered the Koodge before the comic opened. That's some high quality onomatopoeia.
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So achewood is a weekly now I guess?
Or maybe Chris should actually schedule himself a few weeks of vacation a year.
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I think it's only fair to give him a chance to actually post a strip late tonight before we start whining about only one strip this week. Hey, Saturday is still part of the week, even.
Hope is the thing with... a barbed penis?
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The 'thanks for your patience' bit appeared very shortly after I posted that. Or my browser cache is behaving weird. But my ego will go with the former.
So anyway if you're reading this, Chris: take your time. love the strip. And good god, not guest weeks. I hate those things.
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If, y'know, he hadn't shit on and pissed off every other webcomic type guy out there.
Too bad he doesn't have your sense of tact.
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Or dude could'a been slowly building a backlog of short out-of-continuity "gag" strips to parcel out in situations like this.
You know, like the flow-chart bits and so forth or Phillipe's newspaper or whatnot.
Or... all of the content that is now hidden behind a pay-per-view wall that could've been purposed to grow and maintain the continuance of a fanbase during times like this.
Instead of losing recent adopters of the strip to long stretches of nothing and slowly curtailing the growth of the product.
You know. Just kinda my theory.
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Or dude could'a been slowly building a backlog of short out-of-continuity "gag" strips to parcel out in situations like this.
You know, like the flow-chart bits and so forth or Phillipe's newspaper or whatnot.
Search earlier days of the board for the occasions when O has made an appearance. This very idea was suggested to him but he's dead set against it. Alternatively he could not publish for a week or so and create a reserve which would allow him to publish regularly. Dude will. not. do. it.
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Well, okay...
But even if it was just a week jam-packed with the in-character blogs, you know?
Which... seem like they've been shifted to the PPV section.
I don't know. Ultimately, I'm way too un-web-design-saavy than to ever do a web comic and so maybe I shouldn't been judging the dude's kitchen but...
No, wait. I've NEVER believed in the "you've never done it so you can't judge" thing. It is the weakest sauce of all.
If it is your goal to have a continuing entertainment resource, that is awesome and it is even forgivable if you really just can't do nothing.
But when the material that should've been your patches for just such an inability to draw for a couple of weeks is the material that you've made into your "exclusive pay-site stuff"... you've robbed Peter Paul and Mary to feed Mama Cass, if you'll excuse me the mixed metaphor.
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In the abstract, it makes sense that not updating regularly etc are bad business strategies.
However, you may recall from another recent thread that he just had a book signing in New York where the line went around the block till midnight and people waited for two hours to get books signed. And reports from all the other signings have been similar.
My friend who was going to meet me there so we could have dinner afterwards - who has a book coming out in January - scoffed at my warning that she might have to wait. She said even mega-best-selling authors never had more than a dozen people at a book event in New York City.
When she got there and saw the line, she was flabbergasted. She asked who his PR guy was so she could hire him. I had to break it to her that he didn't need a PR person to get those lines. She nearly wept.
So, whatever we think about his business methods, they seem to be working for him, you know?
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So, whatever we think about his business methods, they seem to be working for him, you know?
This is going to sound kinda douchebaggy, but I'm not as concerned with how they work for him, as how they work for me. At this particular moment in time, I'm far less inclined to spend money on Achewood stuff, because I'm starting to forget that the strip even exists. This board is starting to take a place in my mind as "the board about that strip I used to read when it was active."
Then there's this:
Gargantor multi-strip coming late night today Saturday. Many strips in one. We're working hard on our next Dark hoss book, thanks for your patience.
So yeah, it's great for Onstad that he's got a book deal for new stuff. Way to go. It just makes me sad because I can't afford to buy it, no matter how awesome it is. Achewood is no longer free, which means it's too expensive for me to enjoy.
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Golf, I hear you, because while I can afford to buy Achewood stuff, I am sad that the board is so slow when he's not posting strips, and activity on the board is not something that money can buy.
But as I have said many times before, it is a totally bizarre modern phenomenon that we expect creative people to give their stuff away for free. People have to make a living. And it's odd how even someone like LFM, who is a writer, underestimates how much work it is - as if "just a week jam-packed with in-character blogs" is something Onstad could toss off in moment while he's packing for the next book signing.
I know I go on and on about this, but it's because this isn't just about Achewood, I am worried about the state of culture in general and to some extent my own paychecks as well.
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I actually remembered the Koodge before the comic opened. That's some high quality onomatopoeia.
Me too! And then I thought "alright! something funny to post! a one-liner even!" until I read one message down. One of my many betters beat me to it.
He could have scheduled himself a guest week or two instead of letting the site go stale.
Is it just me, or does anyone else dread these days? There have been a couple, maybe a handful of exceptions, but I'd rather go back through the archives (currently here (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05122005)).
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My friend who was going to meet me there so we could have dinner afterwards - who has a book coming out in January - scoffed at my warning that she might have to wait. She said even mega-best-selling authors never had more than a dozen people at a book event in New York City.
Oh goody, I get to tell my Dan Rather book signing story.
In case you weren't aware Dan Rather is from Houston. I don't know if that is significant, but when he had a book signing the line was all the way from the back of the store to out the front door (about 2-300' approx.). It's a big store that used to be a theater actually. See here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmcd9/946417191/).
Back at that time I had a thing about the music charts and had started buying Billboard magazine from time to time. This was the only store in town that sold Billboard. Also at the time I was living way out in the outskirts of town about 35 miles from this midtown store.
So I made a trek to the store one Saturday afternoon and discover when I arrive that Dan Rather is having a book signing and there are hundreds of people waiting in line to see him. As I said the store is an ex movie theater and they have left the insides basically the same as it was only instead of rows of seats there are rows of books. The magazines are up on the stage area and that's where Dan Rather is set up. He's sitting at a table right in the center of the stage area facing to the right. The line is coming in from stage right and exiting to the left.
When I get down to the stage It's roped off. I can't get to the magazines. So I start looking for the manager. He's down in front of the stage area so I go there. I tell him that I want to buy a magazine and he says that "The area is shut down until the signing is through. If I want to wait until it's over or come back later..." I explain to him that I live a long way away and it would be extremely inconvenient for me to have to come back later. He says "in respect to Mr. Rather we have shut down that area." I said (a little too loudly) "I don't give two shits about Dan Rather I just want my magazine." I forgot that I was basically standing right in front of him. He looked up from the book he was signing turned his head to the right and looked right at me. We locked gazes and It seemed like time froze. I know our staredown couldn't have lasted more than a second, but it seemed like much longer.
I guess I unnerved the store manager wishing to avoid a scene. He still didn't allow me back to where the magazines were, but sent one of his people back there to find me a copy.
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That is an excellent story.
As for the other topic we've wandered onto: I was just about to check if there was a strip yet, and suddenly thought, how dull it would be if there was just a strip posted like clockwork every morning. This way it's like hitting the lottery.
You know that the reason people get addicted to gambling is because that kind of unpredictable, intermittent reinforcement is so powerful. Good animal trainers know how to use it, too. He's messing with our minds, is what it is.
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TWO SUGGESTED WAYS TO IMPROVE PAUL'S DAN RATHER STORY:
1. After the staredown, Dan asks Paul, "What's the frequency, Leroy?"; or
2. Hot oil wrestling.
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But as I have said many times before, it is a totally bizarre modern phenomenon that we expect creative people to give their stuff away for free.
I mean, it is also a pretty weird modern phenomenon to think that creative people will make money by selling their product to the masses.
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Well, I dunno, people have been buying books and newspapers for over a hundred years now... cursory Googling reveals facts like, the first paperback novel in the US was published in 1840, if you believe what you read on the internet. Music is technologically different of course but before people could buy recorded music they bought sheet music. So I'd say that paying money for creative works has been working for a pretty good while now. But perhaps you have a different definition of modern.
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1. After the staredown, Dan asks Paul, "What's the frequency, Leroy?"; or
A can for having my idea before I did.
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I guess instead of Modern I meant Recent.
I don't know. I have a lot of contradictory beliefs about intellectual property and all of that stuff. And this is one area where the more I think about it, the more I am inclined towards extreme positions.
I just started talking to my roommate about this, and he stated that he believes that (visual) art should be unbelievably expensive. But also, he thinks everyone should have art.
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I'm not so much underestimating the amount of work that goes into the blogs or any other part of the strip and more saying...
That it is kind of slitting the neck of a goose that lays eggs of a precious metal to take the material that you could be using as a stop-gap in situations like this and charging three bucks a month for it... and then having the mainstream of your site, that actually builds your fanbase and drives merch sales and might build the kind of people that would cough up the bread for a subscription service, basically go all but dark for weeks at a time.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not that I'm saying "dude! create more!"
I'm saying... that it just seems kind of crazy to let the main thrust of your business model flounder for the sake of a much-smaller-though-steadier corner of how you're making your bread.
It seems really short sighted.
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like, whatEVER man!
you sound like my roommate! "daniel, stop putting habanero hot sauce on that jumbalaya! it's already really spicy and you're going to regret it!"
like,
who are you to use facts to tell me what might happen in the future!? I am so OVER that crap. I totally love doing content only for paying subscribers while ignoring my loyal fan base burning my mouth with habanero hot sauce.
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LFM, if you and I had book signings with lines around the block maybe we'd be qualified to criticize his approach to his business model, but until then... I mean, I am the kind of person who, if I was in that business, I'd have strips done a week in advance. I write blog posts in advance for a blog no one reads and submit things five days in advance to an editor who I know never reads anything until like twenty minutes before it has to go out on the wire. So on one level it drives me crazy that he doesn't just have more rational-seeming work habits. How hard can it be to give me my free comic every day - hey, all those other guys I read do it! But he's the one who's supporting his whole family on a comic strip whereas I'd be happy just to get my agent to answer my danged email more than once in a while... so who are we to talk about what makes sense?
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Besides, it's not like he's obliged to make any kind of sense, is it? Maybe he'd prefer to keep the last-minute process even if it meant losing a spot of cash here and there.
Being savvy is all well and good but it'd be horrible to become successful doing something you love and then turn it into a grind in the name of business models.
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rant {
I subscribe to the PPV part because, honestly, it's really really cheap. If there were more new content in the books, I'd buy them. I really don't make much money. Like, less than $10 / hr working less than 40 hours a week. But I do spend *some* money on entertainment: books, movie tickets, cable modem bill, restaurant meals with friends, live music. It seems we expect our pixels to be free because so many of them are.
It has to be majorly frustrating to be getting millions of page views a day (or hundreds of thousands or whatever) and selling a few dozen shirts and books a day. If I owned
a shop where fewer than one in a thousand people who perused the merchandise actually made a purchase, I'd probably burn the place down for insurance money no matter how well I was doing off those one in a thousand.
People have been paying for art and entertainment since ancient Athens. There are maybe 20 or 30 people in the world making an actual living off of their webcomics, so the correct way of doing so is hardly set in stone. If the new practice drives off half of the viewers who were disinclined to buy shirts and books in the first place, then honestly all Chris has done is saved himself some money on his servers.
It's kind of cruel to expect webcomics to have to make indirect money only. I don't care for themed shot glasses. I don't really cook. I don't wear T-Shirts with logos or text on them. So should the years of enjoyment I've gotten out of Achewood net its creator nothing plus some bandwidth?
And even if we do start getting a free weekly instead of a free tri-weekly, then we still have a nice free comic. Perry Bible Fellowship was slighly less than weekly before it closed shop, and it was fantastic. We aren't entitled to crap. I'm also a bit worried that this scheme could backfire, but I'm sure he has his numbers and can change course if it does.
I also believe that culture should in a sense be available for free. But more like public library free than Napster free. It should all be there to be browsed and borrowed with a bit of inconvenience. If it's going to sit on your shelf or harddrive forever, it should cost something. The 20th century saw such an incredible explosion of culture and creativity in almost every possible medium, and it was nearly always done by pros or people who aspired to be pros. DIY and amateurism are nice and cool and should be encouraged, but they aren't sufficient for our entire culture. As long as we live in a capitalist society, then art is going to need to position itself to succeed within the bounds of capitalism or it will just die.
}
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That it is kind of slitting the neck of a goose that lays eggs abloo abloo abloo
The guy gets a lot of my money so he doesn't have to care about you. I am the guy ruining your Achewood experience.
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If I owned a shop where fewer than one in a thousand people who perused the merchandise actually made a purchase, I'd probably burn the place down for insurance money no matter how well I was doing off those one in a thousand.
Well, then you wouldn't be a very good businessman.
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Oh, don't get me wrong. I like the strip a lot, when it is actually happening... and I've bought more than my fair share of merch, both for myself and for the one non-online friend I have who is also a fan. I'm just saying.
Thousands of people never getting into it enough to buy hundreds of dollars of books and posters and whatnot > a few hundred people throwing down three bones a month.
A growing fanbase over years > maybe a car payment every month after taxes and administrative fees.
Don't make no sense.
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I don't know, man, I also have never bought a shirt (don't really like advertising on my shirt and try not to), but I subscribe to achewood premium or whatever it is called. I have always meant to buy a shot glass or pint glass or the books but never have. I did subscribe to this.
Also, I would guess instead of "hundreds" there are somewhere between 1 and 5,000 subscribers. Also. Administration fees? WTF? You know about the internet right? It can't be that much more (any more?) than the site without it.
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Drew of toothpastefordinner.com says that 99.9 percent of their readers never buy anything, and they've got 850,000 readers, so it's not like they don't have a fanbase. Assuming that's typical, and comparing that to the lines of people I saw who had put down cold hard cash for the GOF book, it actually makes perfect sense to me for Onstad to write only a couple of free strips a week because he's working on another book.
Rather than it not making sense, he'd be crazy not to prioritize that way. I doubt the premium stuff is really what takes that much time away from the strip. It's kind of like a gussied-up Twitter feed with pictures.... Hey! I missed a bunch of posts. He met Jon Stewart!
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And if something as lame as toothpastefordinner has 850k readers Achewood must number in the millions.
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I don't think he's making another book. I gather that he's making one of these dealies: http://www.myspace.com/darkhosspresents?issuenum=14&storynum=3
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Awww. He ate the toast all by himself.
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Show of hands: Who else completely forgot LN was dead?
Happy Molly was pretty awesome, too.
Hells no. I've been waiting for that storyline!
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I don't think the strip gets neglected for the premium stuff. Have you seen it? I'm almost at the end of my 1st month and I recall maybe two things that were notable.
The book signings did take time from the strip, but I still think that's Onstad 'giving back' to the fans as well. I don't feel like I'm being neglected, he's just taking some time to tour and sign books.
Meh..
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I think this was a bad month for the premium stuff too, with the book tour. I think there was more in previous months.
I wasn't crazy about it at first, but now I think it is a nice addition. One of the cool things about Achewood is that it is not just a strip but the other stuff - the blogs where you get the characters' first-person voices, a cookbook where even the recipes tell you things about the characters. At first I found the third-person writing about the characters a bit offputting, but now I like the different perspective. And you know, he is just a good writer - I am often frustrated that there is no way for me to use some great phrase from the premium stuff for a thread title.
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I'm just saying that the "give every piece of content away for free and sell some shirts" model of internet publishing doesn't actually support all that many people. I'd like to give Onstad the benefit of the doubt in that, he's working every day to support a family by writing about stoned cats and has probably spent a great deal more time thinking about the specific details of doing this sort of thing than you or I have. I'd like more strips too, but I don't want to jump to the conclusion, based on vague supposition, that "this is displeasing to me, therefor it has to be a bad idea for him."
We don't have any meaningful numbers. We don't even know if the subscription service and the tour are the main causes of the infrequent strips. Dude has a life, anything could be going on (and he's among the more private of internet celebs). I don't think we should presume to tell the man how to run his business.
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But where's the sport in that?
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To see how to be successful at this you have to look at how it was done when print ruled because comic strips have always been basically free, included in something that most people buy for another reason. Or even if you were really into the comics it was just a tiny part of the whole. But they didn't stay free. To this end Onstad could just remove the archives. Leave maybe the last 20 strips up or something like that. Maybe a gallery of alltime great strips. People who come to his site, would get a glimpse of the strip, develop a habit for it and get hooked. When they want to remember a strip that played two months ago they will be forced to purchase one of the books. Or maybe that is too old fashioned thinking. You could pay for access to the strip and download it. Hell I don't know, I just know that's sorta how it worked for me when I was little. Sure I would read Charlie Brown every day in the paper, but my archive was the little paperback books my mother bought me.
To be really successful, I'm talking Garfield successful, you gotta get big enough that it becomes viable to market your product to things beyond tshirts and pins and little shit like that. Achewood lunchboxes, achewood halloween costumes, achewood designer clothes, achewood soup. The possibilities are endless. You gotta be big to do these kinds of merchandising deals because there is a steep front end cost involved. It's not worth it unless you move a lot of units. I don't know how big achewood has really become, but if lines around the block for his book signing is any indication he's bound to be getting close to that level.
Also, Onstad has always been slow to deliver new content. This is nothing new. The only reason he's been particularly slow as of late can be attributed directly to his book tour. But I'll bet he's used this time to come up with a lot of great new ideas he's going to share with us over the next few weeks and months.
Like how he's going to tell the Lil Nephew story so long in coming.
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Sorry to keep this going but... there's a BIG difference between newspaper and online comics that I think invalidates the comparison:
Even if it does take merchandizing to make the big bucks, newspapers and syndicates pay cartoonists directly to make their art. Very few cartoonists would get to the point of being able to sell all that junk if they had to work dayjobs up until the point where some office lady wanted a stuffed animal and a calendar. Most print comics through history didn't have those extra sources of revenue, and yet their creators lived decent middle class existences. Sure not everyone gets to have the orbital Taj Mahal that Jim Davis has his checks forwarded to, but that kind of success is always the exception to the rule, not the case you base your expectations on.
One of these days I'm going to get around to actually inventing some characters so I can do more than aimlessly doodle all the time. While I certainly don't count on being successful, I'd like to think that just maybe there is a path to success that doesn't involve selling ads or secondary merch. I have this strange belief that artists should be able to get paid for their art, not just for consumer goods and promotional materials that surround their art.
All that said, micropayments are unpalatable, and I think will always remain a pipe-dream of the 90s, and the only thing people can be relied to subscribe to is porn. I'm being such a stubborn defender of Chris here in part because I really want to see what he's doing work, it would be a big and important first. The more ways there are for creators to support themselves online, the more online creativity we're going to see.
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only thing people can be relied to subscribe to is porn.
Pay for porn?
HAH!
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I have this strange belief that artists should be able to get paid for their art, not just for consumer goods and promotional materials that surround their art.
You and me both. But now that I have thought about the last two posts...
Paul is right that newspaper comics are essentially free in just the way online comics are. You're buying the newspaper or the internet access for a variety of reasons and you'd probably do so even if comics didn't exist. And in that sense, the daily comic from either source is like an advertisement for the book of comics that they want you to buy. And Colmore is right that the difference is that newspaper comics get paid even if you don't buy the book, whereas the webcomic has to pay to put itself out there on the internet.
BUT, the way things have changed is that it's almost impossible to break in as a new syndicated comic strip anymore. What's more, I think they also don't get paid much. I don't think you can make a living on it when you are first starting out.
Now, for new artists, the advantage of the web is that the artist can start selling books and merchandise almost immediately. He doesn't have to be successful enough to convince some company that a million people will buy the lunchbox.
So... why would anyone want to be a newspaper comic strip artist these days? You're eventually going to make the real money from books and merchandise anyway. Why not get your 'advertising' out there where everyone can potentially see it, instead of just the people who read a few newspapers? Especially when you could be dead long before a significant number of papers pick up your strip.
The conclusion seems to be that getting directly paid for a comic strip isn't all it at first seems to be cracked up to be, at least not nowadays. How does this apply to other arts? It works in principle for musicians, who can give away a song at a time. And it works for certain kinds of writers - if your blog gets popular and you get a book deal, you've basically done the same thing, giving away your writing a bit at a time and then getting people to pay for a chunk of it.
In contrast, I'm doing something exactly like the newspaper comic artist - getting paid by the piece for small chunks of writing, and hoping it leads to a deal where I can sell a big chunk of it. It's not working out like it's cracked up to, so far.
Damn, I think I finally understand the 21st century economy for creative work and I don't know what to do about it. I'm in too deep old-style.
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i would pay untold amounts of money for an old-style metal lunchbox in an achewood theme. i would not even require a thermos.
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But I do spend *some* money on entertainment: [...] cable modem bill [...]
Dude! That's not entertainment! Internet access is almost as much of a necessity as indoor plumbing, or oxygen.
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I lived for a year without internet access (I was about 4 or 5 blocks from a library and I had it at work) and honestly, it was fantastic. It just means the thought "Well I have nothing to do... now what?" Takes a few moments longer, but I would occasionally wind up doing something I'd actually remember a few days later.
Anyway, yeah, an Achewood lunch box would be rad squared. Chris Ware made one for his character Rusty Brown a few years ago, and it's where I keep my photos.