March To-Do List
Get out your calendar and start circling dates. It’s time to do a little webcomics planning.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.Get out your calendar and start circling dates. It’s time to do a little webcomics planning.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.Poor Man’s Copyright is a system of attempting to establish copyright through mailing a copy of the art to yourself (some people suggest using Certified Mail). The artist then files the envelope — unopened. If their copyright ownership is ever threatened, all they need do is open the envelope (in a court of law, one supposes) and present the document with a flourish. You even see some very prominent artists advising young people to use Poor Man’s Copyright. There’s only one problem: It’s complete bullshit.
We talked about it waaaaay back in 2007, when we were doing the Webcomics Weekly podcast. Poor Man’s Copyright doesn’t stand up in court. According to the US. Copyright Office:
The practice of sending a copy of your own work to yourself is sometimes called a “poor man’s copyright.” There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration.
Copyright in General, Copyright.gov
In general, you own the copyright to your work the “moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section ‘Copyright Registration.'” [SOURCE]
NOLO.com has an excellent explanation:
The U.S. Copyright Office is the federal agency charged with granting and administering all copyrights in the United States. Registration of one’s work confers many benefits, including the ability to sue someone for infringing your work, in a federal court.
(Again, if you only write down your creative work and mail it to yourself, you cannot actually initiate litigation for infringement).
Registration also clearly and unequivocally establishes the date upon which you begin to “own” the work. This can be particularly important in situations of copyright infringement, where both sides will typically argue that they created the work before the other.
Fortunately, the Copyright Office’s website makes the registration process fairly self-explanatory. You simply select the type of work you wish to register—such as literary work, visual work, photographs, and so forth—and follow the instructions.
The Electronic Copyright Office, knows as “eCO,” allows you to upload the work (as a PDF, JPEG, etc.), along with your application. Once submitted, the staff of the Copyright Office will review it and then, hopefully, approve your application and issue you a formal copyright certificate.
The Copyright Office will charge fees for your registration. Fees change each year, and depend on the nature of your intended registration, but typically run between $50 and $100.
Cartoonists Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar talk about how social media can make you crazy. Today’s show is brought to you by Wacom, the maker of the powerful, professional, portable Wacom One! This week, we’re playing the Bad Tweets game — once we can identify lazy social media, we can focus on strategies that work.
Questions asked and topics covered…
Brad Guigar is the creator of Evil Inc and the editor of Webcomics.com Dave Kellett is the creator of Sheldon and Drive.
We use dominant personality traits to find our place within groups — whether it’s friends, co-workers or neighbors. One might be the “mamma bear,” while another is a “loner.” The members of the group will begin to identify each other using these personality traits. They’re using character archetypes.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.Recently, a comics creator was having trouble drawing a character who is Black. A colleague said that he should focus on simplification. He said that the artist would regret having a lot more curls to draw. I think that’s the wrong attitude.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.When Google entered the domain-registry field in 2015, I wrote that it was a game-changer. One of the most-important aspects of Google Domains was that your privacy is built in. For many other domain registrars, privacy will cost extra.
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.Cartoonists Brad Guigar and Dave Kellett discuss the recent self-immolation of Gumroad on Twitter — over NFTs! Today’s show is brought to you by Wacom, the maker of the powerful, professional, portable Wacom One! After Gumroad, we’ll be talking about cartooning after retirement.
Questions asked and topics covered…
ComicLab is hosted on Simplecast, helping podcasters since 2013. with industry-leading publishing, distribution, and sharing tools.
It’s one of the great Good News/Bad News situations in independent comics: Someone wants to buy your work! That’s wonderful! But… how do you determine a price?!
The content you are trying to access is only available to members.I like writing about the writing process — especially humor writing. It’s a topic that I find many people who write cartooning tutorials shy away from because it’s so difficult to quantify. But it’s something that’s essential to what we do. So even though I know I’ll never be able to write a step-by-step guide to writing the perfect joke, I like sharing little moments in which I think I’ve gotten a greater understanding of the process.
While teaching my Sequential Art class, I had exactly that kind of moment.
We had gotten through the midterm-project critiques more quickly than I’d anticipated, and I had class time remaining. And I hate wasting those few hours we get together every week. So, I decided to spend a little time doing some writing exercises that I had planned for an earlier class (but never got to).
The first exercise was relatively straightforward. They each received one character type (clown, spy, child, hero, cowboy, maid, etc.) and one setting (moon, airport, DMV, coffeeshop). Their assignment was to write something funny that combined those two elements.
Although many of them found the Clever. Few of them found the Funny. All of them felt overwhelmed.
So we moved on to a second exercise. The were told to map out four panels. Then, they were told to start the first panel with a character and a sentence — nothing more.
Once they’d finished, I had everybody pass their paper to the person on their left. Now the instructions were to simply build on the first panel. Find the drama. Build the tension. Expand on the idea.
Once that second panel was completed, the pages got passed to the left again. Each student was now presented with a fresh two-panel set-up. The goal was simple: Keep building the tension and try to leave a clear path to a fourth-panel punchline. If they did their jobs well, the next person should be able to bring that fourth panel home with an easy slam dunk.
The results were funny. Very funny. Way funnier than the results of the first exercise. The resulting critique was punctuated by giggles, laughter — and suggestions for improvements, follow-ups and stinger gags*.
What was the difference between the first exercise and the second one?
In the first assignment, the students were thrown two random elements and were put in the awkward position of finding something that connected the two. Hopefully that connection could be exploited in a humorous way.
It’s not a bad way to get the creative juices flowing — and it’s a decent writing prompt for single-panel comics. But it relies on some humor-writing chops that some of my students were still developing.
The second project, however, was different. Instead of trying to make lightning strike, the students focused on the basic craft of a comic strip:
Introduction -> set-up -> build tension -> punchline.
And, when they were simply focused on doing each step to the best of their abilities — instead of trying to be funny in the first step — the very process…
Introduction -> set-up -> build tension -> punchline.
… often brought them to a place from which they could easily identify a punchline.
Moreover, this approach could be coupled with a brainstorming technique (like Cascading Brainstorming) into your writing routine to help find the Funny more consistently. In other words, instead of doggedly following a single set-up to a single build-tension to a single punchline, a writer might experiment with several set-ups. And then, one could follow those set-ups to alternate build-tension moments (and several subsequent punchlines). Better yet, the development can happen in all directions. A good set-up might suggest an improvement on the introduction. And the way those two panels work together might suggest a path to a punchline that is a huge improvement over the initial glimmer of a joke.
And why? Because it’s hard to be funny. Sometimes it’s beneficial to break the process down to its elements and simply concentrate on doing each step to the best of your ability. My students found that focusing on the structure of setting up a joke took them to a place from which they could write better punchlines.
If you struggle with writing humor — or if you’re feeling brainlocked and need something to kickstart your creativity — maybe this is an approach that could be beneficial to you as well. If you do experiment with it, please report back and share your experiences!
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* Little punchlines that follow the main punchline that serve to deepen the humor.
This post originally appeared in 2018.
“How do you study to improve and how do you fit that study into your schedule?”
That was the tweet of a cartoonist who was trying to figure out how to find more time to learn the craft. I checked his Twitter feed from earlier that day. They had posted twenty tweets that day alone — counting replies to tweets, that number went much, much higher.
Earlier this month, I was actively promoting a Kickstarter, my Patreon, my comic, two podcasts, this website, and god-knows-what-else (making sure I was covering each of the Three Cs…). During that time, I rarely came close to 20 tweets in a day.
This person has the time to devote to learning comics, they’re just not using it.
For webcartoonists who are trying to improve their skills, I think social media is doing more harm than good.
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