Free Comics On The Web

It’s getting to be strange days when people are making money by giving stuff away. There’s an entire movement out there that believe that all copyright should be done away with, and an even bigger group that believes in open licenses.

Which has what to do with comics, you may ask. Well, hold on, I’m getting there.

The first people behind the idea of giving stuff away to make money were musicians. I’m not even talking about the people who’ve realized that getting their singles all over the web is a good way to sell albums. No, we go further back.

Because really, this is what radio does. You get the music for free, in the hopes that you like what you’ve heard well enough to run out and buy the artist’s music. Television is making money from the same principle, selling you DVD sets that collect something you see for free in a convenient form.

And these days, comics are getting in on the action. Worldwide, comics tend to be a much bigger deal than they are here in the US, filling a different cultural niche. In the US comics, at least as single issues, are mostly limited to comic book stores, of which there are very few.

Which is basically saying that you’re not likely to blunder across comics unless you’re specifically looking for them. There are a few, very few, comics that sell in the hundreds of thousands, but the vast majority of them sell under ten thousand copies. Well under.

The audience for a lot of these books is certainly quite a lot larger than that, in the sense that there are almost certainly more people than that who would enjoy many of the titles if they could find them. Which is the long tail at work, where the numbers of other stuff being read can vastly outweigh the blockbusters.

The first person to realize that the direct market system that feeds the two thousand comic shops wasn’t doing them any favors and decided to forgo a monthly printed comic for serialization on the web was Phil Foglio.

A few years ago Phil and his wife Kaja took their series Girl Genius from the comic shop to the web, with spectacular results. They made the entire run of Girl Genius available, for free, on their website, and the readership skyrocketed. And so did the sales of the collected editions.

The Foglios were able to find an audience that they had never been able to find through the comics shops, something their female friendly comic was well suited for. Not only did they save more twenty grand a year in printing costs, they also began selling more of the things that really made them money.

They were soon followed by Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder, an astoundingly imaginative and complex work of aboriginal science fiction that was mostly treading water in the direct market, neither losing nor making money, while collected editions sold well.

McNeil doesn’t offer all of her past work for free, but readers can catch up on the graphic novel in progress at her site. For her as well, it’s been a good movie, saving printing costs while expanding her audience.

Ambrosia Publishing is the first publisher to jump on this, creating a business model that involves free serialization, with cheap downloads and then a graphic novel version of their series to follow.

Expect a lot more people to try this in the future, and if you’re interested in comics, you might want to see what’s out there. Heck, even if you aren’t, or don’t yet know you are, it’s worth a shot.

After all it’s free.