Amazon.com and Andrews McMeel Publishing just announced a contest to find the next comic strip “superstar”. The winner will receive a publishing contract for the submitted strips, a paid deal to develop more strips and an opportunity for possible newspaper syndication.  Sounds pretty good.  Are you a superstar cartoonist?  Maybe so, but is this contest for you?

First of all, it’s good to see a media giant like Andrews McMeel (which owns Universal Press Syndicate and the well known Uclick.com and GoComics.com) put some innovation into finding new comic strips beyond the usual syndicate means.  Syndicate editors and 4 syndicated cartoonists vote down the submissions to 10 finalists.  Letting the internet audience select from these finalists is zinging great!  But let’s explore the pros and cons of this contest.

Pros

It’s a big dream for many a cartoonist to land a syndicate contract.  This is a new opportunity with a different path to that goal.  Not only are syndicate execs judging your work, but so are established cartoonists.  This injects the selection process with a fresh breath of air by using talented artists with decades of experience (Trudeau, Johnston) as well as newer entrants in the field (Tatulli, Hilburn).

Hosting the contest on Amazon opens your work up to a new, wide audience.  The contest ends with registered Amazon customers voting for the 10 best series.  Web 2.0 hits the syndication process… finally!  Like I said earlier, bringing the reader into the process is great.  It breaks from the status quo of mysterious syndicate editors in unknown offices judging your work on behalf of readers.  Now readers get their voice heard before a contract is even offered!

Cons

Speaking of contracts.  Read the fine print before you decide if this contest is for you.  The process is set up with an accelerated pace.  Due to the nature of a public contest, if you become one of the 10 finalists, you need to sign 2 “non-negotiable” distribution contracts with Uclick.  If you don’t do so within those three days, you forfeit your position.

Now, let me get this straight, only one winner will be awarded the publication opportunities.  But 10 talented cartoonists have 3 days to decide to sign something or not, even before they are deemed a winner?  With the traditional method of submitting to syndicates, if they are interested in your work, they offer a contract.  Then you (hopefully with a lawyer) counter some of the provisions and find a contract that works best for both parties.  When you come to an agreement, and this probably takes longer than 3 days, you, the lucky cartoonist, get an opportunity in syndication.

To be fair, there are 3 contracts associated with this contest.  The main one, the coveted syndication contract is the one stated as “open for good faith negotiation”.  The other 2 contracts, the publishing contract for the submitted strips and the development contract for further strips, are what’s non-negotiable.  From the contest rules:

“The agreement with Universal Uclick is not negotiable, and Grand Prize Winner must sign “as-is” upon receipt of executable contract.”

Wait, what?  This throws up red flags.  Essentially what you have to agree to is that they can publish your strips, no less than 200 of them, in a book, under their predetermined provisions.  Yes, you get a $5k advance on royalties.  But they get to decide what those royalties (and other terms) are without your consent.

You also need to agree to the development contract.  This means that they will pay you $300 a month for two years as long as you submit 20 strips a month.  They can cancel this contract at any time.

One last con is that the deadline for submission of 12 strips (10 dailies, 2 Sundays) ends September 12th.  It’s not uncommon for the development of a great comic strip to take several months or longer.  This contest really seems to be for cartoonists who already have work put together.  But if this contest inspires you to start from scratch, then you better get drawing!

Conclusion

I was kind of hard on the contractual aspects because, quite frankly, newcomers have a lot less leverage than the established pros.  Newly syndicated cartoonists will most likely give somewhere and when their careers take off, then they get more negotiating power.  The important contract, the syndication one, is open for negotiation as it should be, should you get to that point.

The other two contacts are sort of extras that might help you along the way.  You need to decide whether you’re okay with them or not upon entering the contest.  A $5,000 advance for a book and $300 a month for continual development might fit with your budget to put in the time and creativity.  But it also might not.  Generally speaking, non-negotiable contracts are not a good idea and it’s harmful to the entire cartoonist community when just one cartoonist accepts.

The Comic Strip Superstar Contest is about giving you a new shot at syndication.  But I hope you are asking yourselves these days whether syndication is really the dream you’re chasing.  Newspapers are in a decline that will most likely never recover to what it once was.  100, 50, 20 years ago, comic strip syndication was an exciting dream.  The internet has indeed changed everything.  Uclick is being innovative in the online and mobile spaces (like iPhone apps) but their core business is still rooted in the ever-more-difficult newspaper industry.  They are bound by an outdated business model.

This is still a fantastic opportunity for the right cartoonists.  The Amazon platform will bring a wide range of readers to your comic strip and the selection process promises to be interactive, fun and educational.  The possibilities for a book deal and development contract are exciting.

It’s a fun contest, American Idol for comic strips – star judges, community votes, the big winner.  If you were a talented singer, would you try American Idol or would you go the traditional route of auditioning for Broadway?  The different avenues attract different personalities, regardless of level of talent.

If you are hesitant over the contracts, give it a little more thought.  But time is ticking.  If you think this is your chance at superstardom, go for it!

If you’ve ever submitted a comic strip to the newspaper syndicates, you know it can be a process of both exciting growth and emotional strain.  It’s a fact that the rejection letters do come.  And sometimes it feels like this:

Get up, dust yourself off and keep going!  Keep drawing.  Keep improving.  Keep trying.  It doesn’t always have to be this way.

Read past ‘Zingerding Ink’ strips.

“The medium is the message.” Marshall McLuhan

Comic strips have, from their inception, been defined by the paper they’re printed on.  From the size of the page, to the frequency of printing, to the type of ink, I would argue traditional comic strips have been defined by these constraints.  For example, it used to be that only Sunday comic strips were printed in color while the rest of the week remained black and white.  Only 14% of the time could a comic strip cartoonist illustrate the color palette of their worlds.  This meant that Jim Davis could only show Garfield’s orange fur once a week.  The rest of the time, the reader had to imagine it.

Artists are still using this line of thinking and most online comic strips today have not yet pushed the creative envelope.  They can only be distinguished from their print counterparts by a few key characteristics:

1. No limits on color means many online strips are vibrantly colorful.  Printing color on paper is expensive; newspapers have been slow to adopt it daily.  Printing color on a computer screen “costs” nothing more than black and white.
2. Limitless publishing means unlimited strips – The cost of hosting a website, and thus publishing to the world, is basically free.  This means that anyone with a computer, an internet connection, and a sprinkling of creativity can have their own strip (you don’t even have to know how to draw).  This has enabled an explosion in the number of comic strips.  No longer do you need a newspaper to have your own strip.  Just publish it yourself and let the world find you.
3. The strip is an engaged community – The social networking net has also caught comic strips.  Most online comic strips have a very strong social network functionality.  Users can comment about the strips, share them with others, and create conversations around them.

That is until we stumbled upon this strip called about DIGITAL COMICS by Balak01 on deviantART:

Screen Capture of About Digital Comics on Devian Art by Balak01

It’s a comic strip where you need to page through each panel.  Think of it as a slideshow where each screen is another panel of the strip.  So instead of consuming the whole strip at once, you must interact with it in order to advance it.

Why is this game changing?  Because it changes the experience of the web comic strip in the following ways:

1. You can’t see the whole strip at once – This gives the artist the element of surprise.
2. You can do pseudo animations – Through clicking the arrows the artist can reveal pieces of the picture.  When used correctly, it will  give an animation effect.
3. The canvas is limitless – Instead of being bound by the limitations of one web page, this “slideshow” style enables unlimited panels.

The about DIGITAL COMICS by Balak01 is especially clever because it does an excellent job of explaining how this format pushes the medium.

What is noteworthy is how its the limitations of the medium creates its unique characteristics.  For example, the fact that you must page through each frame or the fact that it doesn’t have sound, makes this distinct from animation.

While some may think these limitations make it less exciting than video, these very limitations are what gives it potential.  While we all love 30 frames per second experience of a movie, we also love seeing each moment in time captured in a single panel.

What do you think?