I'm not certain if I've mentioned how much I looooove Checkerboard Nightmare lately. No, it's not just the strip that I like, it's the whole package. You've got Chex, the cross-brand marketing phenomenom, saying the banner ad. You had the ChexTips, where Chex told the reader to go through the archives and reload each page ten times ("It's fun!"). You've got the insane "I want to raise $86,000 in donations!" bar that I promptly ripped off and upped the anty. And now there's his answer to Websnark.
For those of you who don't read Websnark, shame on you. One of the recurring themes at Eric Burns' Websnark is the idea of working for the audience. To simplify, if you are a cartoonist that makes a living from your work, you damn better well stick to a schedule and update your strip. "It's your job," goes the snark. If the strip isn't your job, the readers aren't owed anything. The readers are lucky to get whatever you have the time and energy to produce.
So we look at what Randy Mulholland of Something Positive did. A while back, Randy, fed up with members of his fanbase demanding that he update more often, told his readers to put up or shut up. Give him a year's salary and he'll quit his job and do the strip full-time. Then if he misses a day you have a right to bitch. Surprise, surprise, his readers sent in $20,000. So now, he has to post his comic, stick to a schedule, and all that because he now owes his readers. (At least for a year. If they'll cough up another $20K+ next year, I guess he'll have to continue. I could go off on a tangent about how $20K a year salary is a very low professional salary, but if that's what he wanted...) A few other cartoonists tried to jump on that bandwagon, but have nowhere near the readership to pull it off.
Back to Kris Straub's strip, Checkerboard Nightmare. He takes Eric's "It's your job!" position and Randy's questionable success and inverts it. "I've already quit my job," Kris says. "And the meter is running." Yes, now instead of a donation bar, if you visit Checkerboard Nightmare, you'll see an "Unemployment Lack-Of-Donation Deficit Bar" where he's tracking how much you owe him. It's his job now, you readers. You owe him a year's salary. "I'm working for you now. Haven't you noticed the increased strip quality? The new merchandise? The promise to improve my line art?" he says. "I'm serious, fork it over."
Posted at October 4, 2004 11:08 AM
So here's the tangent. $20,000 a year? For a professional salary? What the hell was Randy doing before he quit his job? Look, if I said I'd quit my job if you paid me a year's salary, it's going to be something that's worth living on: something that'll not only pay for a house mortgage payment (or rent on an apartment), put for payments for a car, insurance for car and health insurance for me (that I'll have to get on my own), basic utilities, and food. Then add on your other expenses that one would like to do: perhaps buy a game, get new clothes every so often, go see a movie. No, you'd have to pony up at least $36,000 for me. And that comes with two weeks of vacation that I'll be taking from the strip -- when I'm gone, no bitching. No bitching if I take a sick day, a personal day, or a federal or state holiday off, too. You get to do that in the real world, I should be able to do that here. (Although I would try to use my work time to prepare some filler strips or work far enough ahead that when I come down with a three-day long flu, I don't miss days due to the ick.)
I would've asked for at least thirty-six thousand.
Posted by: cartoonlad at October 4, 2004 02:57 PMRandy has stated that he's not going to be a professional cartoonist for more than a year; he's not going to be soliciting donations again. Of course, he still has plenty of time to change his mind on that.
Before quitting he sent out bills for MediCare (or MedicAid, something like that), and he put the $22,000 limit because that was his annual salary at the time, and he wasn't expecting to get they money; he just wanted to be able to say "See? You're not prepared to pay for the comic, so stop complaining about it. Jerks." So he had no reason to ask for more than what amounts to a smybolically chosen amount of money.
Of course, that all backfired on him.
Posted by: wintermute at October 5, 2004 01:42 AMYeah, see I wondered what he did before that. For some reason, I thought he worked as a clerk in a copy shop like Kinko's.
I'm glad that his plan backfired. It shows that some of the online cartoonists out there can make a living off their work. It might not be a yacht-buying living, but it's still a living.
Posted by: cartoonlad at October 5, 2004 08:41 AM