Who needs a business model?

I don’t remember if I mentioned it here or not, but for a while there I was thinking of submitting New Comic to Modern Tales. See, Modern Tales has a ‘vacancy’ of sorts because Jon and MT agreed that he would do Patent Pending on goats.com instead of Modern Tales. So they put out a call for submissions for comics that could perhaps fill this vacancy. And I thought New Comic would be a good submission. I consider it my best comics work to date. I don’t know whether it fits with what Modern Tales is looking for, but I’m sure that if I said I would, I could pretty easily keep up an every-other-week update schedule for it.

*changes tracks in mid-stream*

If you ask most people who do web comics (that are aware of the print-comics industry) what their reasons for doing a webcomic are, not facing the editorial control of a syndicate will likely be among the reasons. They want to be able to write what they want, to have storylines be as banal or controvercial as it behooves them to create, and to not have to answer to corporate america about it. To have long-running stories or one-a-day jokes about playing video games, and not to have to worry about whether some executive thinks they appeal to a broad enough audience. To be able to use profanity, or whatever they want. But really, so that they don’t have to answer to anybody byt themselves (and maybe their audience) about their comic.

*Clank-clank! Tracks changing again*

So, MT was asking for stuff like a description of the path the comic was to take, of the characters and settings of the comic, the themes, all normal stuff. They asked for a link to the comic if it exists, or to drawings/sketches if it didn’t exist yet. I thought, no problem. I have an idea of where New Comic is going, and I could easily get a 4th episode of it online before the April 15th deadline, so there’d be plenty to look at, and an interesting and complicated story to look forward to. Up until about a week ago, this is what I planned to do. And I didn’t post anything when I changed my mind, because I was giving myself leeway to change it back.

Except that as of right now I haven’t drawn line one of the fourth installment on paper, and to keep the quality level where I want it, and because I’m going to be in Phoenix Monday and Tuesday (the 15th) and unable to work on it I’d have to get the whole thing done tonight, I’m not going to try to get a fourth installment done before the deadline.

There’s something else though, other than procrastination. There’s this weird feeling at the back of my creative drive that keeps telling me not to sign on with Modern Tales because “they’re just another syndicate.” (Plus, they obviously are trading on the name of Modern Evil…) My mind tried to convince me otherwise – they’re in it for the creators, not for themselves. They don’t own the rights to the comics and you can stop at any time – as evidenced by Jon stopping. They don’t take editorial control or censor people – there was an entire comic on their site about a rabbit’s hardon! But that nagging feeling kept nagging and I decided that I could just keep doing New Comic, just keep posting it here on Modern Evil. The potential for income that Modern Tales represents will not exist here, but that’s not Why I Do Online Comics, is it?