By Cameron Kerkau, Staff Reporter.
It’s not easy to be successful in the comic book industry. Thanks to the internet, however, more and more creators are discovering that they don’t need to wait for a publisher to share their work. Instead, they publish their work themselves as a web comic. Many popular web comic creators have gone on to be discovered by publishers, and others have opted to stay online.
“Back in the day if you wanted mainstream exposure then you’d have to go through one of the big publishing houses, but you don’t have to do that anymore,” says creator Tom Parkinson-Morgan.
Parkinson-Morgan is the writer and artist behind one of the most creative web comics on the internet “Kill Six Billion Demons.” It tells the story of a human girl that gets pulled from her dimension into a ruined Heaven ran by world-spanning crime syndicates. Parkinson-Morgan started publishing “KSBD” in 2013, but he’s been making comics since he was 16 years old and he began participating in online original character tournaments. An OC tournament is a competition where two creators each make a web comic using one of their own characters and a character created by their opponent.
“They did one on Penny Arcade a long time ago and I got into that and that really got me into a comic mood so I ended up doing that for four or five years,” says Parkinson-Morgan.
Penny Arcade is a web comic written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik which debuted in 1998. Not only is it one of the most popular and longest running web comics on the internet, but it also acts as a blog and news source.
After a few years of participating in OC tournaments and illustrating the web comic “Glamrock Gorilla,” Parkinson-Morgan decided it was time to start his own project. Though he never expected “KSBD” to end up as popular as it is.
“Doing it full time wasn’t really an accident I’d say, but it was an unexpected boon I suppose. I didn’t know that there was so much support for it,” says Parkinson-Morgan.
He supplements his income through the site Patreon, a crowdfunding platform popular with artists, musicians and content creators. “I’m just making something and people are supporting my artistic work which is pretty incredible. I don’t think it’d be possible without things like Patreon or before that stuff like Kickstarter. It just so happens that format works really well for web comics in particular,” says Parkinson-Morgan.
He believes that the internet has given artists more opportunities than there were available in the past.
“I think it’s entirely a creator friendly atmosphere nowadays,” says Parkinson-Morgan. “If you get a web comic started, there’s a huge chance that someone will promote your comic from another comic’s site… The exposure kind of multiplies on itself because the community is so vibrant.”
He encourages anyone thinking about starting a web comic to give it a shot. “If you’re looking to get into it you should absolutely do it. There’s no barrier there, right? [There’s] nothing stopping people from putting their work out, which is great,” say Parkinson-Morgan.
The creator of “The Adventures of Dr. McNinja,” Christopher Hastings, found success through web comics when he began publishing on the web in 2004. “Dr. McNinja” blends absurd action with comedy following the exploits of a doctor who is also a ninja.
“I sent off Dr. McNinja to some small press publishers and then waited months for them to get back to me and I kind of got tired of that waiting for someone else’s permission to make my comic,” says Hastings.
Following the success of “Dr. McNinja,” Hastings has gone on to write the miniseries “Deadpool: Fear Itself,” and “Longshot Saves the Marvel Universe” for Marvel Comics. Currently for Marvel, Hastings is writing “the Unbelievable Gwenpool,” an ongoing series that will debut in April of this year. Hastings is also writing the Marvel miniseries “Vote Loki,” which finds the Asgardian God of lies as a candidate in the U.S. presidential election. It will debut in June of this year.
He’s also works on the ongoing “Adventure Time” series.
Hastings explains that there are benefits to starting a career on the internet. “The freedom and the ability to publish whatever you want and have the opportunity to get to an audience is huge,” says Hastings.
Though there is nothing stopping an artist from putting their work online, there’s no guarantee that it will find its audience. “You start to deal with other situations where there aren’t necessarily gatekeepers between you and your audience but there are now, tastemakers, so… your work really relies on other people spreading the word,” says Hastings.
There are a lot of behind the scenes issues that come with having a web comic, but as Hastings says “When you’re doing your own thing it doesn’t feel terrible to own your problems,” as opposed to perhaps dealing with someone else’s problems at a day job.
Working with a publisher, however, typically provides a larger budget and more resources.
“I have multiple editors and that’s because these companies can pay them a salary and these editors can really know how to help make a story great,” says Hastings.
More than that though, big publishers like Marvel have their own marketing departments. “This Gwenpool thing was announced through an interview that they set up with Entertainment Weekly. That’s amazing, I never thought I’d do an interview with Entertainment Weekly,” says Hastings.
After ten years of updating his web comic, Hastings has decided to end “Dr. McNinja” later this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is done online. “I would like to keep some sort of toe in a web comic. I can write a page in the morning and pencil it throughout the day and have it uploaded and read by thousands of people by that afternoon. Which is incredible, that’s an incredible advantage and I don’t want to throw that away.”
