The concept of webcomics is what we are most passionate about at Zingerding.  What we don’t like is the term, the actual word, “webcomics”.  The quotes are in the headline for a reason.

As media migrates to the internet, there grows a rivalry between the classic method of publishing print comics and the new forms of doing so online.  This battle is going on between newspapers and blogs, television and video sites, telecoms and voip, etc.  It’s not unique to comic strips.

It’s not a novelty anymore to find anything online.  There need be no distinction between a comic strip in a newspaper and a comic strip on a website.  The term, webcomic, exaggerates that distinction.  The craft and talent of a cartoonist and the final product are the same.  The difference is the publication method.  However, “webcomic” is a noun that defines the product, not the form of distribution.  One can argue that the word implies the publication and not the art form, but let’s look at how it’s used.  People read webcomics.  They email webcomics.  They post webcomics on Facebook.  They laugh at webcomics.  You can see how the term implies the product itself.

Wikipedia defines webcomics as comics that are published online (my abbreviation).  Their definition rightly focuses on the publication but as explained, it’s not how the term is used.

So this leaves us with an inappropriate word that’s catching on.  Traditional news media often likes to talk about webcomics as if it’s still a novelty that a comic strip is on the internet.  They are pushing the distinction.  Cartoonists have also taken to the term, partially from a time when it was a novlety, and are only pushing the distinction to their detriment.

Here’s why “webcomic” is harmful.

Readers know that what they see in the newspapers are ‘professional’ comic strips.  They also know that it’s easy for anyone to post anything online and that the quality of content can be much lower on the web.  When there is a focus on the distinction between the two, it will remain harder for mainstream readers to see beyond the “web” in webcomics, regardless of the quality of the strip.

It creates mental barrier to acceptance.  For the highly talented cartoonist whose work is on par or beyond what we currently deem professional, the term is harmful.  For the majority of cartoonists whose work is somewhere in the middle, who want a chance to share their passion through their art, improve their craft and build a readership, the term is also harmful.  In context, webcomics are ‘lesser’.

The problem with “comics” in general.

Like “comics”, the word “webcomics”, is broad and creates confusion.  It can mean comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, single-panel comics, etc.  These are different art forms the same way that music and writing have sub-genres.  Streaming music isn’t called “webmusic” and everything from blogs to online books to Twitter posts aren’t grouped under “webwriting”.   They’re all referred to as their respective form.  So just because a comic of any type is published on the internet, it gets unfairly grouped in to the greater category of webcomics.  Let’s stop generalizing.

How Zingerding addresses “webcomics”.

We don’t.  We won’t use the term.  In our view, a comic strip is a comic strip, regardless of where it’s published.  All cartoonists, from the seasoned newspaper artist to the newbie on their blog deserve to have their work defined for what it is.  Comic strips are an art form we greatly respect and our aim is to elevate their perception.  Zingerding will not make unnecessary distinctions with a word that doesn’t fit.  So yeah, we don’t like “webcomics”.

Now tell us, what do you think of the term?

Show your ZingerPride with ZingerStuff direct from Zingerding. Wear it on your sleeve, your kid, your spouse, or even while you cook. Support the revolution of comic strips by purchasing stuff from our ZingerStore.

Our Chief Artist (amongst other Chief things), Steve Lowtwait, has created designs that embrace the change sweeping the comic strip world including “Power to the Cartoonist” and “Free the Comic Strip.”

We have a variety of products including shirts, hats, mousepads, aprons, and lots of other stuff.  We have men’s, women’s, and children’s styles for nearly everything.

So, head on over to the ZingerStore. Your soul will thank you.

Here at Zingerding, we are obsessed with our mobile phones.  All three of us at Zingerding have iPhones and use them constantly.

Starting today, this blog is now specially formatted to work on mobile browsers including the one on the iPhone.  We’re using this very cool plugin called MobilePress which allows our blog to change its format when it “sees” a mobile browser.  To experience it yourself, just point your phone to this blog and see what I mean.

This is just one way Zingerding keeps on the cutting edge of technology as we take comic strips into the future.  Let us know what you think!

Sometimes the syndicate rejections are just so impersonal.

I always wished they would give a little more feedback when I was submitting comic strips.  I know it’s not easy for them when they have hundreds of rejection letters to send out at any moment.  Still, a photocopied letter isn’t a welcome answer to the serious cartoonist.

Read earlier Zingerding Ink strips comic strips.

This is the third of three reviews where we discuss and demonstrate comic strip generator websites.  The first was about StripGenerator.com.  The second was about Pixton.com.

ToonDoo.com

ToonDoo.com is the next generation of comic strip creators.  It takes what StripGenerator and Pixton do and brings it up several notches with excellent usabilty, powerful features, and a fun look-and-feel.

Like Pixton, ToonDoo gives the user the ability to create your own characters with absolutely no drawing skills.  Called Traitr (not the best name IMHO), you can select your characters’ basic traits (hair, eye color and size, facial hair, clothing, body type, etc.) and adjust them with clicks of the mouse.  Probably the most unique tool is the positioning of the eyeballs.  If you want your character to look left, move the eyeballs left; to have him look right, move them right.  A very simple tool, it provides a lot of expressive capabilities for the drawing-challenged like me.  It’s way cool.

After you’ve created your character you can bring them into your gallery.  From here you drag and drop them into your strip from which you can still make adjustments to eye direction, expression, and tons of other traits.   In essence, the Traitr tool creates a template where you can adjust some of the attributes as your strip calls for it.  The whole Traitr system gives users the ability to quickly create unique characters and modify them just as quickly.

In comparison to Pixton, Traitr is much easier to use, but somewhat more limiting.  Whereas in Pixton you can adjust the posture in an infinite number of ways, ToonDoo’s Traitr only gives you a handful of choices.  Click on the arms and drag your mouse in Pixton and you can move them as precisely as your mouse moves.  In contrast, ToonDoo’s Traitr only allows you to click on a “posture” button which scrolls you through a handful of options.  ToonDoo’s is much easier to use but at the cost of flexibility.

Besides Traitr, ToonDoo has lots of “canned” characters and objects.  From people, to bears, you can add them to your strip at will, resize, and rotate.  You cannot adjust their characteristics like a Traitr character.  Still, the additional art gives you a much larger palette to make your strip unique.

ToonDoo also allows you to upload any image you want.  So if the don’t like the bear or the characters created in Traitr,  make one of your own in Photoshop and upload it to system. This feature alone makes ToonDoo stylistically unique and gives a user unlimited creative freedom over Pixton and StripGenerator.

ToonDoo also has excellent community features with voting, commenting, and extensive sharing.  An especially neat feature is the ReDoo it where  you can take what an artist creates, copy it completely, and rewrite it the way you want.  Like the strip but think the colors are off? ReDoo it.  Want to change its dialog?  ReDoo it.  This feature could help strips extend the conversation.  Just like YouTube enables respondents via video, ToonDoo’s ReDoo could potentially allow strip responses with strips.  It’s very powerful and very cool.

All in all, ToonDoo is defintely the most feature-laden of all of the strip creation websites reviewed, and is also one of the easiest to use.  While it may not have all of the customizations that Pixton has in its character generator engine, it makes up for the lack with a very comprehensive toolset and the ability to upload your own artwork.

All three strip creation tools reviewed in this series will get even the most novice users creating strips.  So, what are you waiting for?

This is the second of three reviews where we discuss and demonstrate comic strip generator websites.  The first was about StripGenerator.com.

Pixton.com

Pixton recently generated some buzz at the South-By-Southwest interactive festival in Austin last month.

What makes Pixton really interesting is the amazing control you have over the characters.  Using the expression editor, for example, you can make your character smile, show fear, or express other emotions.  For people like me who can’t draw, this functionality is liberating.  I have made many stick figures in my life but have always fallen short of truly showing angst, hatred, or bliss.  With Pixton, I can do much more and all I have to do is select the words of the expression.  It’s very neat.

Similarly, there are editors for colors, clothing style, skin tone, girth, posture, and many more.  With Pixton, I don’t have to move lines or have any of the technical skills to make my character look fat.  I just do a few clicks and voila, my character is fat.

Although possibilities are limitless it comes at a significant cost of usability: there are so many controls, it was often hard to figure out how to use it.   The learning curve is much steeper than StripGenerator.com. Plan to spend some time with the interface to get used to it.

Another drawback to Pixton is that you are confined to create strips within their design parameters.  In other words, while you can make lots of changes to your characters and your strips, you cannot import your own designs.  Not only does it give all Pixton strips a very similar look and feel, it limits artists that want to push the envelope on the look and feel of their strips.

From a community perspective, however, Pixton excels. You can comment, vote, and share each strip.  This functionality seems pretty robust and up to par with other community systems (read: YouTube).

Overall, Pixton, is a great way for beginners to explore the comic strip creation world.  True artists might hit a wall with their creativity but for the rest of the stick figure drawing world, it gives us new levels of power and control.

Next Up: Toon Doo!

Here at Zingerding, we try to be at the forefront of the web comic strip world. That even means discovering sites that are doing things similar to what we’re trying to do.

This is first of three blog posts where we discuss the sites and demonstrate what they can do.

StripGenerator.com

StripGenerator.com encourages you to start creating your strip right from the home page.  A big orange button labeled “Create your strip!” greets you front and center.  Clicking on it brings you right to StripGenerator.com’s rudimentary, but very usable, strip creation tool.  You don’t even have to log in!

Using a simple drag/drop interface you construct your strip by placing the items on each panel, attaching some type of bubble and putting text in the bubble for the dialog.  The items include Humans, Beings (think animals, aliens, and other weirdness), Objects (TVs, baseball bats, etc.), Shapes, and Bubbles (a wide variety of text bubbles).  The simplicity of the interface encourages you to roll your sleeves up while the potpourri of items gives you a decent range of options.  This, in conjunction with the responsiveness of the interface, gets you going on creating the strip.

While the interface is inviting, you are limited to only objects in StripGenerator, a big drawback.  In other words, if you have your own that you’d like to feature, you can’t upload it into the system.  Not only would this dissuade the “power” artist to use the tool, it makes all of the strips look the same.  Could you imagine if your Sunday comics all looked the same?  While you still may laugh at the words, your eyes might be bored.

Another limitation is that strips can only be three panels or less.  While three panels is certainly common for comic strips, it can be severely limiting.  Would Bloom County have been served as well if there were only three panels to work from?  Probably not.  Creative freedom is key if a an artist wants express his/her ideas.  This includes the number of panels provided.

Promotion of the strips is a bit awkward through StripGenerator.com’s strip blogging.  From the home page, this is a separate link.  While it is definitely convenient to not need a login to to create strips, it also unnecessarily complicates the site if you want to share your strip with the world and engage in a conversation.  While this may be good for the people who prefer anonymity if they want to make a point (especially if it’s controversial), it isn’t for those that want to engage in a conversation.  The very nature of the Internet is a vehicle for conversation: the unexpected give-and-take between content creator and consumer.  This lack of tight integration chokes the flow of that conversaion.

All in all, StripGenerator.com is very good site for those that want to get their Comic Strip chops.  It is so easy to use that it practically invites everyone to create their own strips.  Still, after you get your initial chops, you may find its limitations too constraining.

Next Week: A step up with Pixton.com!

Scott McCloud is credited with the idea of an infinite canvas.  This is the notion that digital comic strip artists don’t have to be contained by physical space and can create limitless comic strips.  Whereas Charles Schultz was limited by the physical space of a newspaper, a digital comic strip artist, theoretically,  has no bounds.  The  combination of unlimited bandwidth and storage space means the “cost” of displaying a few inches of a panel is no different the same as a few feet.

Recently, Microsoft Live Labs released an application that embraced this concept and put it in a practical, navigable form.  Called, not coincidentally, Infinite Canvas, artists can upload an unlimited number of panels and stitch them together into a single, seamless strip.  The tool also allows you to arrange the panels any way you wish.  A “birds-eye” view of the whole strip using the “Zoom-To-Fit” button.   Want your panels laid out in a square? You can do that.  How about a triangle?  You can do that too.  Infinite Canvas makes the layout a potential dimension on the strip.  If your strip is about baseball, Infinite Canvas enables you to lay it out like a baseball diamond. (Art Spiegelman experimented with this in his book In the Shadow of No Towers where he laid his strips in the shape of the twin towers.)  Forward and backward buttons allow you to scroll between each panel in order.

The tool is free and open to the public and allows you to wade through comic strips of unlimited length.

While the site has a very experimental feel to it, it does include a few features strips from the Neil Gaiman and Scott McCloud himself.

Is it good?  To be honest, I’m not sure.  While the concept seems revolutionary, none of the examples were particularly enjoyable.  We here at Zingerding are all about pushing the future of comic strips.  While having an unlimited canvas to will lend itself to the “long form” comic strip there is something to be said to having some limitations.  Brevity yields creativity.  Would the Far Side have been the same if Gary Larson could tell a story in 10 panels instead of the standard 1?

To that end, I would consider the Infinite Canvas almost a new medium onto itself similar to how blogs are different than a newspapers which are different than magazines.  On the surface they compete with one another, but in the end, each serves a particular purpose that compliments more than competes.

To say we live in uncertain times is an understatement:

• The U.S. economy is in a deep recession and the pillars of our economy, banks, are failing left and right.
• We’re in two wars and peace in the Middle East seems even further away than before.
• Global warming is making our weather wackier.

Even though we just inaugurated a new President who is calm, cool, and collected, it’s hard to chill out.  I think it’s human nature to worry, to see all the potential pitfalls when things are looking a little glum.  It doesn’t seem to matter that we’ve been through things like this before.  It always feels different and it’s human nature to expect the worst.

Comic strips, especially funny ones, have always been a great daily escape.  I got through the early 1990s  reading the daily funnies.   My enthusiasm of graduating from college was being severely tempered by a recession, a war in Iraq, and a Bush in the White House (sounds familiar, huh).  My daily read of the paper started with the funny pages: Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, and the newly started Dilbert got my day going right.

But what about today?  Newspapers are shedding comic strips left and right. Most strips online are difficult to read en masse: you have to go to their individual websites to see them.  Where can we get the same experience as a daily strip read online?   Fortunately, there are a few options but they have some limitations:

• Comics Curmudgeon - This blog compiles many of the popular comic strips today into one easily scannable read.  Even better, Josh Fruhlinger, the author, provides great color commentary on the comics.  While it’s a great compilation, it isn’t necessarily your compilation.  What Josh likes may not be what you like (and vice versa).  Still, if you need a way to get your fix, this might be it.
• iGoogle - Google’s do-it-yourself portal has a way to add any gadget under the sun, including comic strip ones.  Many popular comic strips are available to be added as an iGoogle gadget.  While this is definitely cool, you tend to be very limited with what strips can be added.  Most of the major syndicates have iGoogle gadgets so those are covered, but independent strips tend to not be there.  So, while you can get your fix, you still may be craving the strip you want.
• Zingerding (coming soon) -  Our goal is provide fans with some of the best tools to consume their comics online.  Also, all of our content will be completely independent and unique.  It’s comics the way you want them.   Sign up now to learn more.

Berekley Breathed, the gifted artist of Bloom County, Outland, and Opus, had a rare gift of combining timely topics along with humor and beautiful imagery. While there are certainly lots of topical comic strip artists (Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury), humorous ones (Gary Larson of Far Side), and masterfully drawn ones (Hal Foster of Prince Valiant), very rarely do you see anyone with all three talents. Berkeley Breathed, in the eyes of this author, seemed to have all three.

But in November 2008, Berkeley Breathed retired Opus leaving, for the third time in his career, a huge void in the comic strip world.

A question you might ask, Where is the next Berkeley Breathed? It’s probably impossible to compare one artist to another. Still, here are a few that artist mentioned are probably worth a look:

• Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine) - Pearls Before Swine is the comic strip tale of two friends: a megalomaniacal Rat who thinks he knows it all and a slow-witted Pig who doesn’t know any better. This strip has a great chemistry quirkiness to it that is reminiscent of Berkeley Breethed’s Bloom County Opus and Bill the Cat. It also can be extremely timely/political as is the case of a recent comic discussing our national debt.
• Jerry Holkins (writer) Mike Krahulik (Penny Arcade) - Penny Arcade is a webcomic that (primarily) topical video gaming news comic, there is little plot or general continuity. While video game culture wasn’t covered by Berkeley Breathed, Penny Arcade’s appeal to geek culture aligns closely with Bloom County. For example, a famous Bloom County featured the gang running away from the AT&T globe logo of the 1980s, calling it “the Death Star!” noting its resemblance to the iconic Star Wars space station. If that isn’t geekdom, I don’t know what is!
• Aaron McGruder (Boondocks) - Boondocks is an episodic series about inner-city African-American kids who move the suburbs. Inspired by Bloom County, Aaron McGruder captures the language and the culture that usually not represeted in comic strips. McGruder has acknowledged with a few aspects of the strip bearing more than a passing resemblance to important Bloom County features. Additionally, episode of the animated series where Uncle Ruckus calls Breathed “Master Penguin Draw’er”.

While it is probably foolish to ask “Where is the next Berkeley Breathed,” a little digging into the modern comic strips reveal some gems. In many ways, modern comic strip artists somewhat owe their careers to Berkeley Breathed.  He has shown how you can create a long (and prosperous) career out of being a comic strip artist.  He was a model of his craft in his day like the folks mentioned here are trying to be ours.