Q&A 42 Special: syndication (Patreon)

Aaron posted this message in the chat and I thought the questions were all interesting enough that I could break it down and answer like a mini interview.

I'm fascinated by the adaptation of Steeple and Solver to Webtoon and Tapas. There is also the long-running syndication of Bad Machinery, and now Solver on GoComics. I don't know if this is getting too much into the weeds, but I'd be interested to know how it all works out in terms of financial viability and audiences. Just from looking at the comments, there seem to be fairly different audiences on GoComics, Webtoon and badmachinery.com - but perhaps not.

One of the biggest problems for legacy webcomic artists like me is finding new readers. My audience seemed much larger during the heyday of Scary Go Round in the 2000s. But I've retained a loyal readership from that period - miraculously so, it seems, talking to contemporaries from that scene.

These are the only readers I really know about, because they announce themselves as such. There must be newer readers of the comic at badmachinery.com, or here, but forming habits around personal websites is not really the modern way. There are hardly any comic review sites left, or the sorts of personal blogs that would do thoughtful reviews of what I am up to who might bring readers in organically. I never feel like Bluesky or Instagram are bringing in anyone who didn't know me already. Giant Days has been very popular, and still finds new readers, but I have had very few interactions with people who found Solver or Steeple that way.

So I have to do outreach by other means and this is the only way to do it. And as you say, the audiences are different everywhere, and I have extremely limited say in how my work is exposed on sites like Webtoon and Tapas, where you are subject to the editorial controls of sites with thousands of series on them. But given the sizes of their audiences, it seems wise to meet them where they are just in terms of trying to build my modest readership.

In terms of financial viability - GoComics pay me for the syndication. Steeple runs on Webtoon Originals through a tie-up with Dark Horse. Solver runs on Webtoon Canvas and Tapas which are free-to-access platforms and I paid for them to be edited into the vertical scroll format by a freelance editor. Editing all the stories in volumes 1 and 2 of Solver (plus Circus Windows) will have cost two years of GoComics money, and those pages will take less than a year and a half to run at Webtoon pace (a chapter a month), so if there is no financial benefit from doing it, and no return from Steeple on Originals (who knows?) it's not financially beneficial.

These aren't magical money trees, alas. The only way the experiment works is if it eventually brings new readers to my work where I control it - on the website, and here.

As a longtime reader from the Scary Go Round days, John A comics are the only webcomics I still habitually read on a web browser. I've read enough webtoons, that reading Solver as a vertical made me realise that there is a lot in common with some of the cadences of other webtoons I've enjoyed, with the tight focus on characters hanging out, and a kind of cozy serialization.

I think my work has a faster pace, but shares things with some manga genres, and you can see them more clearly when you can compare it directly like this. Manga has been an influence in the 2020s on how I break stories into chapters. It feels to me the acme of serialised comics.

One difference is that in your comics the density of the jokes (as was discussed in a recent Q&A), but also the amount of detail in the language the drawings is a lot higher per panel. Many (although not all) webtoons often seem to be a lot of talking heads shown at close-up or mid-distance, with stretches of word balloons floating over backgrounds or gradients to break it up. Sometimes there might be captions juxtaposed with extreme close up of a meal, a hot beverage, fluttering leaves etc! This isn't meant as a criticism of other webtoons, just an observation that the narrative styles can be quite different, and I would assume the labour (and therefore economics) of drawing is very different as well.

I think the fluttering leaves and hot beverages are tonal things from manga too. I do more things like that than I used to, to break up pages so they aren't just figures, figures, figures, which I now find slightly exhausting. I like a closeup on an object, though for me it is often a busy object like a hand or a phone screen or some other malfunctioning object. Webtoons are very eonomical in how they're drawn, partly because if you're doing one on your own, it's a vast amount of work. The typical number of panels for a weekly update is around 30. I draw on average, 15-18 panels a week.

The best example of the economy of Korean webtoons that I found was a comic called Cheese In The Trap. The drawing looks hasty but the anatomy and precision of expressions is incredibly precise. It has the correct amount of detail for a small phone screen, focussing on exactly what matters. The backgrounds are barely there but again, precise. Colour does a lot of work. I thought it was brilliant.

Compared to a comic like this, there's a LOT in one of my pages, even broken down. I've found ways to layer actions within a single panel, to get more onto a days's page, to move the story on faster. I like that, but it's not optimal for little screens. My widescreen panels end up tiny - a huge amount of work to be squashed down to almost nothing. Though they do look gratifyingly like i employed a team of assistants at that size to be able to throw away so much drawing.

I enjoy reading your work in the page format because of how you lay out pages (or strips) is often a part of the storytelling, and can frequently be part of a joke. This seems to be a harder way to write than vertical scroll comics, where punchlines or beats can occur without needing to fit into a Tetris-like puzzle. I guess I'm wondering if reformatting your old comics for these platforms has made you think about the way you write and pace stories?

I have to be very careful about thinking about the badmachinery.com or Patreon PDFs as in anyway subordinate to these syndications. I already think about the pages in terms of a thrice-weekly webcomic, the Patreon subscriber downloads, and a complete printed thing. There's additional story and visual density for the former, and carefully constructed pacing for the PDF, and page turn reveals for the print. Plus I design the pages with bleeds and formatting that will work simultaneously at both A5 and traditional US comic book size. I can't also think in terms of greater granularity for phones. I struggle as it is. The one thing that really hurts the editing for phone screens is the big collage pages or splashes with multiple figures in a complex scenario. I make a real rod for my own back trying to tell someone how to chop those up. But there is usually a logical way (a way that involves me having to put different parts of the page on different layers, while filling in the background, and weeping).

I was encouraged to see that the first few episodes of Steeple on Webtoon seem to be doing pretty well! Is it too early to cross our fingers in hopes that this could lead to more stories in that world down the road?

I think it's too early to say. There are the three Dark Horse volumes of stories set up to run there. It's just gratifying to see it being read by new eyes - a nice little afterlife for the series.

Thank you Aaron for your thoughtful questions!