We’re launching a new initiative to garner momentum for the Comic Strip Revolution.  Join the cause on Facebook to declare your support for comic strips on the internet.  If you’re on Facebook, simply click to become a member of Free the Comic Strip!

You’ll then be able to invite your own friends to spread the word.  This isn’t only about Zingerding.  It’s about showing that you, as a cartoonist or a reader of comic strips, want a better experience online. That’s the larger cause!

Click the image below to view or join the cause.

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.

Zingerding is out to ignite a revolution in comic strips, and we need six talented cartoonists to join the cause.  Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Humorous comic strip, any genre.
• Publishable at least three times a week.
• Quality in writing and craftsmanship.

Here’s what cartoonists get:

• Slick, easy publishing tools and comic management.
• Each series gets its own profile and each strip gets its own page.
• Cartoonists earn 70% of revenue.
• Readership feedback and statistics.
• Zingerding’s marketing engine will find you readers.
• Exclusive opportunity to help shape the revolution.

This is only the beginning, though.  It’s your chance to get in on the ground floor.  To apply, visit Zingerding.com and “Zing in on the action”.  If your strip is already online, please provide a link.  We’ll be in touch shortly about what happens next.

For questions, email marilla@zingerding.com.

“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?

Josh, one of the members of our Zingerding team, has had his hands full lately with his new little one…congratulations!

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!

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!