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Digital Comics

© Dave A. Law

It is an unfortunate fact that in recent years the comics industry has been severely depressed and there just are not the same number of comic jobs available as there were in the past. Unless you are lucky to find a legitimate assignment, your only choice is to self-publish, which costs a lot of money and requires the business experience that most comic creators do not have. Oh, you will always find ads from new publishers starting up, but be wary of them, as most amount to nothing. The Internet, however, has opened new opportunities up in the forms of web comics and e-comics. While both are fledgling fields and not much money (if any) can currently be made through them, there is nothing to say that over time they might not become a viable alternative to print publications.

Web comics are simply put comics published on Internet web pages with new installments added on a regular basis. These comics can be anything from a traditional comic strip to a single or series of comic pages. The more sophisticated web comics use animation and technologies like Flash to bring their comics alive. Setting up a web comic is relatively simple, so long as you know a bit of html or have a web-page building program that can help you. Web space can be found to place your comics for free or inexpensively if you want your own domain. Making money off web comics, however, is much more difficult. Typically, creators of web comics make money through advertisements on their sites. For advertising to generate any sort of money you have to have quite a few people coming to view your comic on a regular basis. As a result many web creators have grouped together on a single web site to help bring in more traffic. Keenspot http://www.keenspot.com is an example of this. However, it should be noted that such sites expect you to have a proven track record of publishing your web comic with a significant amount of traffic before they will consider adding you to your line up.

E-comics on the other hand will start earning you money immediately. Just don’t expect to get rich off of them, in fact you may earn very little over a year. Simply put e-comics are exactly like their print version except that you can download the comic from the Internet and read it on your computer. This is unfortunately, why sales to date are still low. Most people do not want to read on their computers. All of this may change over time. You create an e-comic in the same manner as you would create a comic currently, and then, if necessary, scan your pages into your computer. Finally you use a program like Adobe Acrobat to add the pages into a single file. To actually start selling your comic becomes a little more difficult. You can sell your comics on your own web site, so long as you can set the web space up for e-commerce, which fortunately is starting to become easier. Unfortunately, selling your e-comics this way is not likely to generate a lot of money, if anything, unless your web site is extremely popular. There are, however, e-comic distributors/publishers popping up that will list your e-comic on their site. The ones that are more particular in what they will list are also the ones where you are more likely to make the most money off of. Unbound Comics http://www.unboundcomics.com is an example of one.

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