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Tycho

As of today, I’ve pretty much had it with Gabe.  The strip you see here every other day is the result of my pure gold being forcibly commingled with his utterly tragic shit.  For example, I know a seven syllable word for a common mental condition that he never lets me employ in the regular course of events.  Come Monday, you’re going to see Penny Arcade as it was always meant to be - with my own sure hand at the rudder.  Erudite sailing analogies are just one more thing I bring to the table.

The Eisners are for “long form” comic works I believe, which is why a lot of the comics you read online aren’t eligible for one.  Scott does a strip, sure, but apparently if you put the strips one over the other and put them in a book the judges become confused.  I’m sort of surprised that Scary Go Round doesn’t fit the bill, or maybe it simply wasn’t submitted, because it’s sort of irresistible and charming and has been from the word go.  Achewood has been an obsession for years, but one of the greatest things about it are the blogs by each character, something that wouldn’t fall within range of the judging apparatus.  It’s cool to see Kazu on there in the digital category, but I’m trying to figure out what exactly they mean by Digital Comic. 

Athena Voltaire is a pulp-action serial that could just as easily be printed out if it was presumed anyone would purchase it.  It doesn’t require this medium.  So when they say “digital,” do they mean that it was created with digital technology?  Whoops, now we need to include virtually every currently produced comic.  Let’s ratchet it back to manageability:  is it just that the shit is hosted online?  That’s kind of ignorant.  Scanning a piece of art and hosting a .jpg of said art is not a mystical process, akin to alchemy.  They make machines that will perform this apparently bold feat in under ten minutes.  So, in the case of Mom’s Cancer - which is excellent in the way all autobiographical comics aspire to be - he’s actually got a publishing deal which made him withdraw it from the web.  Is it still digital?  Sure, it’s up now, for judging.  When it hits print in 2006, will it be eligible for another Eisner, simply because it underwent an entirely trivial state change?   

I don’t think they’ve actually thought much about it.  Do they just want in on some of those Webs they’ve been hearing about?  The Internet is not the Ethereal Goddamn Plane.  It’s a display medium.  It has capabilities unique to it.  Will we have a “stone” or “clay” category, after the coming apocalypse?  I submit to you that we would not.  It’s an odd, irrelevant, insulting distinction that serves to demarcate otherwise identical work, for no other purpose than to corral the medium.  Period.     

(CW)TB out.

why does he always call me

Tycho

It seems to me that they should call it Take All Of Your Money Spot instead of Keenspot, because of how they take your money all the time.

I have a friend (Howard Tayler) who used to run a comic (Schlock Mercenary, a daily comedic space opera) on the “service.”  He had jumped ship, and so quite naturally I wondered how he was getting on without the breakweather of Keenspot to protect him from the dangerous and savage Internet.  Here’s what he told me.

Well, it’s GREAT. I was hoping that by getting Keenspot’s 50% back in my pocket I could double my earnings. It turns out that I’ll easily triple them.

It would be inappropriate for me to share dollar figures from Keenspot, so I’ll just say that the last three-month check I got from Keenspot covered something like 5% of my family’s bare-minimum living expenses for those three months. By leaving Keenspot I was hoping to hit 10%, minus a pittance for hosting.

Well, for the last ten days I’ve been running Google ads, and I’ve already
generated half of what my last three-month Keenspot check paid me.

Let me reword that for clarity. In ten days I made half of what Keenspot paid me for 90 days. I’m not going to trouble you with the trend lines or the statistics—I’ll just say that a conservative projection puts me at triple my Keenspot revenue just by running Google ads. Quadrupling or quintupling that revenue is not out of reach.

Obviously your results will vary. Returns on click-through-based advertising (which is all Google offers) are going to be all over the map. Maybe I just happened to strike gold with the ads that appear on my site. Maybe my readers are all wealthy telescope collectors. Or maybe, just maybe, the one-size-fits-all “impression-based” advertising with the mortgage cobras, big boobs, and other assorted monkey punching isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. My readers don’t seem to miss it, and I know that I don’t.

So that is completely insane. 

I had always assumed that it was basically a wash after expenses were taken into account, unless you resorted to selling your own ads or something which can be a huge pain in the ass.  But he’s talking about incorporating a system that is essentially turn-key and still doing better. 

(CW)TB