Scott Kurtz: Cross-Platform Team-Up

Scott Kurtz of the online comic strip (with Image comics iteration) PvP has put up a short essay that looks to be drawing A-list comics blogger attention. Kurtz starts with Bill Watterson's 1989 address at Ohio State University named The Cheapening of Comics, particularly those sections that call for improving the comic strip even if it means leaving the syndicates and newspapers out of it. Kurtz opines that the Internet may represent that alternate avenue that only existed as a potentiality in Watterson's speech.

Ironically, what Kurtz's essay reminds me of the most is a similar brand of message board and Usenet hue and cry from six to ten years ago that called on Bill Watterson himself (Kurtz's is directed at recent bailed-on-his-dailies cartoonist Bill Amend, and to a lesser extent some other names with feet in the on-line and print worlds) to enter into print comic books in order to draw attention to the non-superhero portions of that field. The idea, I think, is that these comics (the imagined Watterson print comic; the projected Bill Amend on-line effort) are so popular they will draw people to a type of work they hadn't considered before, and be attractive enough to push revenue models from the vague and promising to the specific and universal.

All of this is worth thinking about, particularly the underlying assertion that independent actors might bring a greater variety of solutions and models to the table. That makes some sense -- just as an example, a syndicate's on-line plan is likely to include some role for the large variety of features that a syndicate carries, which may make them less likely to lock into a successful platform if it ends up the best on-line future of comics is fewer features more widely disseminated.

Where I think all of this falls down a bit is in underplaying how thoroughly success on the comics newspaper page is bound up in the delivery system, the platform itself, and how it allows certain work to reach a certain type of audience. Like a television star attempting a film career, or vice-versa, there's no guarantee that a comic's appeal will translate from one platform to another. Further, any that do may do so in such a specific way that it will mean little to nothing for other practitioners. And yet, it still feels that there's a way of doing strips out there to meet newspapers' changing on-line needs that no one's quite figured out, and if Kurtz can convince someone with a good idea to recruit appropriate talent from any camp in comics that offers them, he'll have done his medium of choice a service.
 
posted 2:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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