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Comment by fernly | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Watterson really believes the gag line for the third strip, "Nah, the art form's dying"? He might, being (apparently) a neo-luddite of some sort. But there has never been as many, or as good, comics as there are now, or as many busy, thriving comic artists. Hint: they are not found at gocomics.com.

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"I could do better if I had more space"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes#Syndication_a...

Berkeley Brethed ran several Bloom County strips which featured the need for more space too, such as: http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add.php?iid=82665

Someone should introduce the man to the internets capabilities. Bill Waterson can have all the space he needs.

I don't presume to speak for Bill Waterson or anyone else (and I don't mean this to be specifically about comics), but having all the space you need is, creatively, usually worse than having not enough space.

There's a sweet spot in the middle where you have enough freedom to realize the gist of a vision, but also a number of unwavering hard constraints to rein you back in.

In his interview on Mental Floss he states:

"Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with."

http://mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclusive-...

He could just be talking about comics in newspapers. The art form he practiced, not what’s going on elsewhere. That's certainly how I understood it.

It's also quite possible that Watterson is kinda mocking himself here. Cartoonists tend to do this.

source: I'm a cartoonist

I seriously doubt it. As an art form, newspaper comics are going the way of newspapers, but comics in general are thriving more than ever. The Internet has provided the perfect platform for them, and crowdfunding works quite well for strips with a following.

The question wasn't whether or not comics is a dying art form. The question is if Bill Watterson BELIEVES that it is, with the suggestion that he might believe so because he possibly doesn't like computers very much and therefore might not be fully aware of web comic artists.

It's a dying art form. Just because they are thriving doesnt make them art.

Really? The sort of comic I was thinking of would include, let's see, Sinfest, Romantically Apocalyptic, Drive, SSSS, Questionable Content... I could go on, but each one of these extends the field of comic-strip art along at least one dimension, and outstrips in subtlety anything attempted in newspaper comics. I'd even include XKCD, which certainly wouldn't seem like "art" to a casual glance, but what would you call the well-nigh insane depth of "Time"?

Sinfest: http://sinfest.net/

Romantically Apocalyptic: http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/

Drive: http://www.drivecomic.com/new.html

SSSS: http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=1

Questionable Content: http://questionablecontent.net/

XKCD "Time" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)

It's hard to prove it either way, but my suspicion is that there are already more people making their primary living from online comics than there are making their primary living making newspaper comics. And if that isn't true, Patreon will make it true in less than a year from now.

Patreon really is a miracle worker from this sort of niche content. I've seen fairly niche people put up a Patreon campaign, then actually freak out about how much money they end up getting, because you aggregate a couple thousand $1-5/month donations and Holy Shit. (Suddenly it's a Real Job (TM).) It's incredible feasible to go from "scraping by, annoying your parents and friends with what looks like a vow of poverty to do your Stupid Shit and living in constant money stress" to "comfortable middle-class lifestyle with reasonable income assurance". Not perfect, of course, but reasonable.

I mean, look at this: http://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith

Any halfway-well-respected online comic artist not running a Patreon right now needs to get on it.

And Jeph Jacques, from the aforementioned Questionable Content: http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques

Keep in mind these people also still have their other sources of income: book runs, merchandise, etc.

Yes, Patreon is really transformative for those people who haven't had other means of monetizing.

I really think that in the long term Patreon is more important than Kickstarter for the arts. Kickstarter by its nature is much splashier and makes the big news articles, but it's Patreon that changes lives by chugging along month after month after month after month.

Can you imagine what Watterson could get directly from the public on Patreon? Most assuredly a better offer than any newspaper could ever offer him now.

I was thinking that exact same thing (re: Watterson and Patreon) after I wrote that.

Yes, I can't stress this enough. I'm an investor in Patreon, but I've also been working closely with artists (like Zach) for the last few years as we've managed + run their crowdfunding campaigns on kickstarter and the like.

Patreon is the next stage in the evolution. It is my belief that this platform will spur the second renaissance for creators who can at last focus entirely on their art without just one well-funded patreon (e.g., Harper Lee and To Kill A Mockingbird).

Woah, Drive is still updating? I thought he basically got too busy, the updates seemed to be once every month or two. Must have changed RSS feeds on me or something.

Comics aren't thriving more than ever. Comics peaked in the early 20th century. Look at the internet comics and then look at what people were doing from 1900 up to WW2. They were working with full newspaper pages at times so they were making more use of space than most webcomics. They also had much larger audiences. Ridiculously larger. Tens of millions of fans. Rube Goldberg received a contract to work exclusively for one paper that I think paid around $50000 a year... in the 1910s. The fact that you're talking about crowdfunding at all is a reminder of how far comics have fallen; comics as an independent underground thing is taken for granted now, and crowdfunding is(while incredibly useful) frequently a way to squeeze as much support as is possible from a small audience. The options for that comic market are much better than they were, but the market taking the shape that it has is precisely because of its falling popularity. The equation of superheroes with comic books was similar; in the dying comic book market, superheroes were one genre that survived, but even that survival was fought for in the form of specialty shops for fans; the mainstream support was already lost and the characters maintained popular support through other media like cartoons and films.

Watterson was very outspoken about his displeasures with the art form and the grinding newspaper production process throughout the life of C&H. His beliefs, then, predated almost all online comics, but he discussed a modern take recently:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclusive-...

Could you please share where I could find wonderful comics? Are these good places to look: http://www.webcomicsnation.com/ and http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevintang/42-web-comics-you-need-to-...

That second list has some very good ones. Some other ones that are or were popular:

Girl Genius, winner of several awards for both story and art, a story about a world ruled by MAD SCIENCE: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

8-bit theater (finished now), an overall parody of Final Fantasy: http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/episode-001-were-goin...

Megatokyo - it used to be pretty big among manga fans, I don't know if it still is: http://megatokyo.com/

Savage chickens, a strip drawn in sticky notes: http://www.savagechickens.com/

Basic Instructions - hard to explain, but still, very funny: http://basicinstructions.net/

Penny Arcade, one of the first "big" webcomics, from the same guys that run PAX: http://penny-arcade.com/

Manly guys doing manly things, an overall parody of macho characters in popular culture: http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/

XKCD, terrible (minimalist?) drawing, truly great writing (if you are geek and/or math inclined): http://xkcd.com

Keep in mind that for new readers it is usually better to start from the first strip and move on, but that usually means that you have to endure some pretty terrible artwork (check the "first" button, and move on).

Also, it depends a lot on what you like reading - XKCD is almost exclusively math-oriented while Penny Arcade is not really funny if you are not into videogames. Then again, that's the good side - there's something out there for everyone.

http://www.qwantz.com/ is pretty interesting as well. the same art every time.

Two more for the list:

Sinfest: http://sinfest.net

Why you should check it out: Great illustrations. Mid-to-Long story arcs, with single shorts thrown in full color panels on Sundays. And it is SFW.

Questionable Content: http://questionablecontent.net

Some find it a bit insipid and too self-referential at times, but it has it's brilliant moments. Also (mostly) SFW.

Among other great comics cited in various replies around here, I would also suggest :

• The not-updated-often-but-still-great « perry bible fellowship » : http://www.pbfcomics.com

• The overly optimistic « Buni » : http://www.bunicomic.com/

• The Norwegian POV : http://www.optipess.com/ (relevant to main topic http://www.optipess.com/2010/09/20/no-girls-allowed/ ; or to news http://www.optipess.com/2010/10/08/missing-piece/ )

• Not always SFW (depends where you work of course) :

  • Science, Sex and Fun  « Saturday morning breakfast cereal » : http://www.smbc-comics.com

  • Often trashy but also often very funny « Cyanide & Happiness » : http://explosm.net/comics/

I'll link to favorite strips of mine instead of to the home page :D

Piled Higher and Deeper - grad students. http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=591

Extra Ordinary - surreal humor. http://www.exocomics.com/05

Boy on a Stick and Slither - surreal humor. It's dead now, and judging by my friends is a minority taste, but has several of my favorite strips to its name. http://archive.boasas.com/?c=286

minus - more surreal humor. Also dead, but excellent. http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus13.html

Jesus and Mo - making fun of religion and the stupid things it inspires people to say. http://www.jesusandmo.net/2006/05/11/skin/

Sam and Fuzzy - Hard to describe. The cartoonist does a great job making sure there's a joke in every strip, despite involved continuity. http://www.samandfuzzy.com/1482

Station V3 - originally great. Hit such an awful dry spell that I unsubscribed, but hey, maybe it's funny again. http://www.stationv3.com/d/20110722.html

Of those already listed, I also endorse savage chickens, xkcd, basic instructions, and sinfest.

http://xkcd.com/349/

http://www.savagechickens.com/2010/11/identification.html

http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2010/1/10/ho...

http://sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=4746

Not exactly a comic, but MATT from the telegraph often cracks me up no end:

http://telegraph.newsprints.co.uk/view/14935264/tg3482987_ma...

Pretty good stuff. The obnoxious copyright symbol is unusual though. I wonder what possible reason there is for that.

I can definitely recommend Achewood (21 on the buzzfeed article). It can take some time to get into it, and it has a distinct flavor that you might never learn to like, but if you do, it's amazing. I haven't really read any of the comics in years, but I still find myself using 'Achewood' language in some of my conversations.

I rather like these two: http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=12282007 http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=01272003

Probably my favourite is actually Calvin and Hobbes which I missed out on the first time around and are being rerun on GoComics http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/. Monty's good too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_(comic_strip)

Also see Sluggy Freelance, running for six or seven years now. Long convoluted story arcs punctuated with frequent gags, and a cast of characters I've grown to love. I keep wondering/worrying when Pete Abrams is going to burn out.

http://sluggy.com

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