A few hundred comic strip cartoonists (who knows how many) entered the Comic Strip Superstar Contest sponsored by Amazon.com, Andrews McMeel Publishing and Universal Press Syndicate.  The entries were pared down to 250, then 50, then 10 by a panel of professional cartoonists, before a singular comic strip was chosen by the public.  Only the top 10 were publicly announced.  A strip titled Girl was deemed the winner yesterday.

At the start of the contest, there was a lot of buzz forming within the cartoonist community.  It sounded like a grand new opportunity, a new path toward syndication.

I’ll say though, yesterday’s big announcement seemed quite anticlimactic.  I don’t mean it as a criticism of Girl, rather a criticism of the contest itself.

I previously compared the contest to American Idol, but for cartoonists.  However, the level of hype and excitement behind the popular television show was exactly what the Comic Strip Superstar Contest lacked.

Amazon, Andrews McMeel and Universal Press Syndicate did little to publicize the contest.  There was an air of mystery shrouded around the judging as each level of finalists were announced.  Months passed in near silence from the contest officials and the only clues came from cartoonists themselves.  Nobody got to share the experience of those who were cut or moved ahead (outside of family or Twitter followers).  Amazon published a very rudimentary page to showcase the contest and eventually the 10 finalists.

There was no drama, no tears, no fanfare.  I think the creators of the contest intended to do for comic strips what American Idol does for singers.  But the mood around Comic Strip Superstar was nothing like it.  Of course, a TV show about music and a web contest about comics will have different atmospheres.

But there’s something to be said about fanfare and creating big anticipation.  It’s important not so much for the sake of showiness, but to rally people around the winners.

Dana Simpson, creator of the winning comic strip, Girl, has won an impressive contest.  On the merit of her talent, she rose to the top.  From what I could find with a moderate search on Google, Twitter, some blogs and forums, nobody is talking about it much outside of the cartoonist community.

When a performer on American Idol triumphs in the end, a nation of fans explode in cheer.  The amazing thing is that this fan base is brand new.  Before the show, practically nobody knew the talent of the winner.

Now who’s celebrating Girl?  Where are the fans?  Where are the people already pining for the book release and the possibility of reading it in their local papers?  Yeah, I’m sure some exist… somewhere.

Do you realize how rare it is for a comic strip to make it in today’s newspaper climate?  It’s one of the most challenging fields to break into because the space on a newspaper page is severely limited and old strips don’t die easily.  A single comic strip now has a chance at joining the ranks of Peanuts, For Better or For Worse and Get Fuzzy.  Few strips earn the opportunity to touch the lives of people on such a scale.  Girl has an opportunity.  If you ask me, she deserves fanfare.

What Amazon should have done was created a marketing engine behind the contest.  There should have been a blog, tweets to follow, a Facebook page, sharing features, etc.  These staples of today’s internet are what creates hype.  These aren’t small companies with minimal resources.  Major corporations ran this contest.  The internet – beyond cartoonists – should be celebrating, signing up on Dana’s email list and buying copies of her past comics.

What we’ve learned is that quiet competition neglects fans, which in turn neglects the cartoonist.  Now Dana will be working hard to push her strip to the level of newspaper syndication (if it’s not already).  By next week, many of us will have let Girl slip to the back of our minds.  Perhaps in a year from now, she’ll be popping up in some papers here and there.  Maybe the public will remember the contest – most will never have heard of it.  The result will be that Girl will be in the same position as any new strip trying to build a readership from scratch in a struggling newspaper industry.

The saving grace might be Dana herself.  If she can build momentum from this point forward and create her own fanfare, she might have a good chance at success instead of just a chance.

Following the contest has been an eye-opening experience for those of us who want to launch the next set of great comic strips.

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!

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!

One of the things we are working hard on here in the Zingerworks is licensing of works. One of the main goals is to enable our artists to both share their work with the world and enable them and Zingerding to make money from it. It’s one of the more intellectually fascinating things we are grappling with and we have been doing a lot of research on the subject.

One of the interesting things we’ve uncovered is that in today’s digital media world, copyright law falls a bit short. Copyright law basically says that you can’t do anything with your works unless you have expressed written consent of the copyright holder (the creator of the works). That means that even if you want people to freely share it with the world, they can’t unless you tell them to. The process, by design, is really cumbersome and painful and prevents artists for enabling others to share or even alter their works legally even if the artist wants it.

Creative Commons is the antidote to this ambiguity. Set up by Larry Lessig, a Stanford Law professor and political activist, Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that provides more options that many modern artists need. Consider remixed songs: altered songs that can provide a new dimension on its original and thus increase the reach of the original artist. Dido, for example, was made into a multiplatinum start only after Eminem used her lick in Stan. While I’m not privy to the actual dealings, I can guarantee that there had to be significant negotiations to enable Eminmen to use Dido’s work. Creative Commons cuts through this “red tape” and provide artists express rights to make new works of the original without needing negotiations.

Creative Commons license are very useful but are not easy to understand.

Fortunately, Creative Commons has recognized this problem and has created comics to help people navigate the licenses. You can check it out here: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works While the comic is a bit cheesy and not the best drawn, it does summarize the whole concept well.

What does this mean for Zingerding? Who knows. Still, it’s interesting to note as we start to dive into the complexities of setting ourselves up.

Most likely your idea already includes some characters, a setting and a context. We use a context rather than story in comic strips because most strips are not based on a single linear storyline from strip to strip. Even for those that do, the short format of a single strip breaks up a longer story into small segments, thus putting an emphasis on context.

The context is the circumstances of which define your characters, setting, theme, etc. and how it will be related to your readers. When you tell someone you have a comic about an alligator and bird who are documentarians of the human race, that is the context – the core of your idea.

Yeah, so now what? You might be tempted to jump in and start drawing comics! But slow down, pilgrim. You need to develop the idea first. I know you’re a cartoonist and the fun part is drawing characters doing funny things but trust me, the development stage can be really exciting too!

So let’s start with the fun part, designing the characters. Taking into consideration their personalities and situations, you can start sketching. The trick is to keep drawing them over and over doing many different things with different expressions. We will explore in depth character development in this blog but repetitious drawing is the best way to solidify your designs.

As you do this, you will no doubt think of many ideas, jokes and situations for individual comic strips. Jot them down so you can go back later when you’re ready. Keep these ideas in a single place so you can access them easily to add more. My cartoonist likes to keep a separate sketchbook just for comic strip development. Mark a few pages just for ideas and for now, have fun filling up the rest with character sketches!

How much do you like to draw your characters?

Where do you begin? All creative endeavors start with an idea. But where do you get this idea? This new strip of yours has got to include characters, a setting, written and visual styles, but a comic strip can’t rely on any of those things alone. It’s got to have a reason for being and that reason is your own unique voice. You are more than just an artist who can draw funny cartoons, you have a viewpoint to share with the world. That is the core of your idea!

One of the biggest mistakes cartoonists make when starting a comic strip is… thinking that their grand idea is based on a single comic ingredient, for example, a character. Let’s say you got this character who is a bird. (Gee, where did I imagine that?) You like drawing birds. You came up with a good one that works at burger joint and is obsessed with motorcycles. Now you’ve got a character design and some ideas about his life. This has promise, right? Well… perhaps, but not really. The mistake is that this is not an idea, rather it’s what should be the result of an idea. The same goes for settings, genres, drawing styles, etc.

Coming up with an idea isn’t easy and it’s arguably the most important step at the beginning. You need to ask yourself questions about what you want to say in your comic strip.

• What in your own life and experiences do you want to share?
• What values are important to you?
• What things do you find humor in?
• What subjects are you passionate about?

Answering these will help you find your unique voice and begin to steer you toward the core idea behind your new comic strip.