Hubris Comics

Posts Tagged ‘comic strips’

3 results.

Apr09

Convention time

by Greg Cravens on April 9, 2013 at 11:17 am

I have been giving considerable thought to bringing Hubris to various conventions around this country and Canada (Hey, Allan!) and so I’ve dipped my toe in, locally. Didn’t gamble much in the way of merchandise or table time, but it was fun, and I think there are a few new readers since then (Hey, guys!)

Here’s me at MidSouthCon-

I had some books to sell, a skateboard to sell, and lots of stickers to give out, along with some original pencil sheets for anyone who acted truly interested. I’d also like to point out that the outlandish buckskin jacket I was wearing was complimented more and more thoroughly at the convention than it has been for ten years prior.

There weren’t a lot of sales made, and it was tricky to keep the attention of the Convention-goers. Comic strips aren’t always the biggest hit at Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Comic book events. Comic Strips are for a different kind of reader. Some of you might take that as a compliment or as an insult when I point out that the convention-goers I was speaking to looked like this:

And like this:

└ Tags: Anime, buckskin jacket, Comic Books, comic strips, Convention, fantasy, kids, MIdSouthCon, science fiction, skateboard

4 Comments

Nov15

The Scourge

by Greg Cravens on November 15, 2012 at 9:12 am

Posted In: Blog

Cartooning- specifically comic strips- has taken an odd turn over the past couple of decades. The decline of the newspapers as the #1 source of information for most Americans has a lot to do with it. Way back (not THAT far back) when every major city in America had at least two newspapers, the value of any single comic strip or writer’s column could be measured in dollars gained or lost when a newspaper quit publishing it or started publishing it. If one paper quit publishing Doonesbury, for instance, and it’s sales and subscriptions declined while the other local paper picked up Doonesbury and its sales increased, then you could say that Doonesbury had a particular instantly provable value to a newspaper.

These days, not so much.

A writer I work with is also an auditor of newspaper circulation. Circulation (sales of newspapers, eyes available to advertisers in that newspaper) is how the newspapers set their advertising rates. Subscriptions and sales don’t generate a newspaper’s main income stream- it sets the scale for the newspaper to generate it’s main income stream… advertising. The newspapers are really good at inflating their circulation numbers in lots of ways, so they can charge more for the ads they run and therefore stay in business.

But I mentioned the decline of the papers, right? There’s that whole supply-and-demand thing. If advertisers are now running off to other venues, then the newspapers have to either drop their ad rates no matter what their circulation numbers are, or create a new value to advertising within their pages.

I hear from a lot of people (editorial cartoonists, newspaper illustrators, random newspaper employees, and circulation auditors) that the average newspaper’s decision makers are unwilling to make their jobs any more complicated by doing things that might attract readers. In other words, they’ve already given up. Sometimes, it’s even a matter of not backing up to a pre-automated method of doing things that’s the hang-up. Specifically, the idea that newspapers might draw in just the sort of interested reader they want to/need to by using webcomics on their comics page- hip, attention-grabbing, high-traffic comics used cheaply because it’s just another revenue stream to THOSE cartoonists- not the be-all, end-all of their income like for syndicated cartoons. The editor of the comics page of the paper I’m talking about said that it wouldn’t work because they now use a computer program that automatically drops in the daily comic strips and no one has to do any work. If the newspaper used webcomics, then the page would have to be worked on by someone every day, and then they couldn’t continue to leave at 2:00.

Of course, the other side of this is that it used to be that the only way to make a comic strip earn you a living was to be syndicated. You could draw a comic strip for your local paper, but one paper doesn’t make a wage out of one comic strip. The new thing is webcomics, where you have to be your own syndicate and sell anything and everything you can- T-shirts, hats, books, comics, sketches, originals, and of course, advertising- in order to make a fraction of what the syndicates used to be able to do for you. Stinky, for most would-be cartoonists, but it is an option. It’s a whole new business to be in.

There you have it. If you’re an old-guard syndicated cartoonist, it’s the beginning of the end. If you’re a young cartoonist who has time and energy to float a webcomic and work it like a business, it’s the beginning of the beginning.

And that brings me, in a hugely roundabout fashion, to my point:

Hubris has another ad on the site. There are some Google ads which pay a tiny bit every so often, and a Foxy Bingo ad which will stay up for at least a year per agreement, and now I have a Project Wonderful ad. It’s over there on the right hand side just below the Hubris Book Ad. Right now, the bidding is young and tiny, but if you see anything keen on there you’d like to read, by all means, click that thang and check it out. The more click-throughs there are from Hubris, the better reputation I get for being a good adspace to run in, and the revenue goes up by tiny bits.

And there you go. The business of Hubris.

Also, I’m about to add stuff onto the Outdoor Galore Store Zazzle page, just in time for your Christmas shoppin’.

Ugh. I’m a money-grubbin’ hack now. Gotta go skate.

└ Tags: ads, advertising, book, circulation, comic strips, comics, hubris, Newspapers, Outdoor Galore Store, syndicate, syndication, zazzle

3 Comments

Jul17

Lazy @%^$#@s.

by Greg Cravens on July 17, 2011 at 3:45 am

Posted In: Play Nice

Remember when the television censors finally caved in and let the word ‘ass’ on reg’lar television? Suddenly it was like every character on tv was organizing every exchange to culminate in the word ‘ass’. The writers were having a field day both fitting ‘ass’ in cleverly designed gags and just tossing it in whenever it felt ‘right’ or ‘real’ or whatever.

The censors were bowing to Cable, where everyone could already say ‘ass’ of course, and anything else they want to say. I had the HBO series ‘Deadwood’ soundtrack a while back, and I couldn’t play it if there was a chance that the kids were anywhere around. There were lots of words that it’s not my job to teach them, since I’m trying to teach them to speak as though they have an education.

I’ve addressed the larger phenomena in my syndicated strip ‘The Buckets’. Frank the grandpa explains in one Sunday cartoon that when he was a boy, there was no real incentive to stay a kid- you WANTED to grow up because all the movies and most of the TV shows and all the good stuff in the stores were for adults. Now, of course, it seems like everything is geared if not for kids, then for adults who want to have all the same great stuff they were sold as kids. Kids get all the best stuff, and so there’s no incentive to want to be an adult, or in common parlance, “to get boring.” So now there are cartoons just for adults with language that used to be associated with sailors who had a third grade education and hadn’t been in the company of a non-professional woman for months. Tricky to explain to your kids that ‘Ugly Americans’ is a cartoon show they’re not allowed to watch, even when the commercial shows one character ordering another character to poop in front of him. Kids’ll tell ya, that %$#@s hiLARious.

The newspaper comics are still mostly under fifty-year old restrictions about what you can and can’t say. Widow Churchchoir down the street can surely kick up a ruckus in the newspaper editor’s office if she complains about the language in a comic strip these days. I’m thinking the widow doesn’t have cable.

Comics on the web are different. Many have been accused of being nothing but a series of fart and dick jokes. Early on, that might have been more true. Or maybe even now- amongst the sorts of comics that the younger crowds are doodling and reading. I tend toward the slicker, more carefully written and drawn material. It’s full of the same kinds of exchanges that current cable TV is full of, though. ‘Issues’. Gay and lesbian characters, relationship angst, bathroom humor, guys and girls, … ‘Real’ stuff, to be sure. As real as the kinds of jokes that people used to trade in private but you’d never hear from the cardboard lips of the contrived characters on TV before ‘ass’ was allowed.

So I wonder where Hubris is going. It’s up to me, but it’s not. So far, the gentle humor in the Hubris comic strips is the sort of indirect wording and situation from P.G. Wodehouse stories. Bertie Wooster might call a rival an “Excrescence”, but he’d NEVER call him a “shithead.” That kind of thing. Soon though, I’m going to run out of gentle humor strips written for the newspapers and the new material will flow. I’m old enough to want the Sociological Pendulum to go ahead and swing back toward educated, sophisticated humor- oblique stuff where you can refer to someone as a ‘Son of a Bachelor’ and it’ll be cute. That, instead of saying “Yo mama a whore” and throwing a laughtrack of rough hoots and howls over it. The latter ain’t funny, it’s designed to make you laugh, but not to think while you’re at it.

Anyhow, stick with me, and tell your friends about Hubris. We’ll all have to wait and see if and when it’ll be funny for Hubris to say “ass.”