Today saw the news that Zuda Comics, DC Comics' online imprint, is to close down - or rather, is to be "folded into DC Comics’ exciting, new Digital Publishing initiative".
I will confess, in the interests of full disclosure, that I've not really paid much attention to Zuda in the past - what I saw of strips like High Moon was undeniably of excellent quality, but the godawful Flash-based navigation system meant I never really returned once I'd caught up with the archives.
From my understanding of it (mainly culled from the Wikipedia page), Zuda was a talent-scouting operation in the style of The X Factor - independent creators submit an eight-page comic, ten are selected by the editorial board and then readers vote to select a winner from those ten. The winner gets offered a contract to continue making their comic.
This serves to reduce the risk of a new title turning out to be a flop, on the theory that readers will vote with their wallets the same way they vote with their, uh, votes.
And in quite a few regards it worked - it gave a massive boost to the careers of several online comic creators, it exposed some new voices to a much wider audience than might otherwise have been the case, it garnered a number awards and nominations for some thoroughly deserving titles, and it let a few fortunate (and talented) creators get remunerated for doing what they loved - and isn't that the holy grail of many webcomic creators?
But the thing to bear in mind is that this was never an altruistic gesture on Zuda's part (or by extension DC's). Ultimately the objective of the Zuda imprint was thus:
- Pick out the best new talent from the up-and-coming generation of comic creators.
- Find the ones that best appeal to the modern comic-reading audience.
- Bring them into the DC Comics fold.
- Make money for DC Comics.
It's had some positive results - there are a lot of 8-page comics that would never have been created if not for the incentive of a lucrative contract up for grabs, and that's excellent. There is a handful of exceptionally talented creators who now have the recognition they deserve, and I'm vicariously delighted for them.
But it was never going to be a viable path for the vast majority of webcomic creators, simply because the vast majority of webcomic creators don't meet the high standards of Zuda's editorial board. Harsh, perhaps, but there you are. The good news is that you don't have to adhere to DC/Marvel standards of What Is A Good Comic in order to make it as a webcomic creator.
Overall, I don't think the Zuda experiment has had all that much of an impact on the wider webcomic scene, because it was never really interested in the wider webcomic scene - or in exploring the potential for interesting and novel business models that it presents. It's my (admittedly cynical) suspicion that only the lack of a digital distribution system kept the Zuda imprint alive for this long. The release of the DC Comics iPhone App makes it pretty clear that they're returning to the traditional business model - paper or pixels, if you want to read their comics you pay for them up front. Now that there's a means by which DC can easily charge people to access their comics, there's no longer any need to paddle in the "let people read your stuff for free on the internet" pool.
I don't entirely blame them, as they're a large company with costs to meet and staff to pay, and they can't afford to take the risk on an exploratory and experimental business model. That means it's down to the smaller independent creators. That's us.
That said, I am by no means proposing a stubborn adherence to the "let people read your stuff for free on the internet" model. It's not a matter of principle. If it turns out that the iPhone/iPod/iPad is a viable distribution system for webcomic content then I'll be joining the line to get my comic on an app. But until then I'm going to put more faith in hard work and perseverance than winning a contest.
