Triumph of the Nerds - Comics | Hacker News Reader

Triumph of the Nerds - Comics

economist.com

47 pointsmichaelbrave7 comments

"In Britain Punch coined the term “cartoon” in 1843 to describe its satirical sketches, which soon spread to other newspapers."

It's slightly misleading to say "coined," because the term was already in use for the similar drawings that artists made for e.g. tapestry-makers to copy. (Judging from the name I'd guess these were on large pieces of paper.)

I have often tried to compare Webcomics artists with say Independent game developers or app developers. They ought to be similar but yet so different. I think it boils down to the effort required in generating content.

It is quite hard to regularly churn good games or apps like a webcomic artist would despite all the higher level tools that we have today. I think once it becomes easier to convert a game design into a working game say in less than a day, then we would have the rise of artist-centric games as an industry.

I wish Dresden Codak took a day to produce. I think you're underestimating the time it takes to produce a webcomic, especially ones that aren't independent, gag-a-day format.

I disagree heavily - converting a game design into a working game in less than a day means that all of the real work was done by an automated tool. You can build houses the same way - an architect designs a house and then it gets duplicated into a suburb with all the houses looking nearly identical. House prices plummet and nobody wants to live there unless they can't afford better.

So sure, you could have a functional game in an hour off some automated process... but it's not going to be art, and it's probably not going to be fun to see the 3rd game come off that tool, let alone the 300th.

Webcomics work because there is no automation. You start with a blank page and you create everything on that page by hand directly from your imagination. Games that do the same (unique indie and older games, such as minecraft or king's quest) are always far far better than some auto generated box2d jumping game that are all the rage these days. These little quick games are fun for all of 2 minutes before you close them and never look back.

I think it would be hard to visualize using existing tools. Imagine the jump from assembly language to scripting languages. The effort required reduced by many orders of magnitude for the exact same result. We don't have such game creation tools yet. We only have cookie cutters like RPG Makers or game engines mods. So probably this is just a wishful dream for now.

Anyone have some numbers on web comics? Are they loss leaders into ecommerce? What are the business models here?

Webcomics cost next to nothing to run, you just need the time and equipment to draw cartoons on a regular schedule. You then put them on a website with some cheap hosting. If the cartoon becomes popular, and that's a big if, you can sell advertising on the site itself, merchandise, and original artwork. You can also transition to commissioned artwork or use the comic as a resume point to get a good job as an artist. Most full-time webcartoonists, attend a lot of comic conventions and use them to network, publicize their work, and sell merchandise to fans.

From what I can tell, the biggest source of income for most cartoonists is merchandise and the biggest cost center is conventions (both the cost of travel and of renting a booth.)

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