wz42

Just got a Playbook over Boxing Week (I know it's not the best tablet for comics but whatever) and was quite surprised that there's no site out there for for indie comic books and comics for artists who have no interest in the corporate model?

I know there are a number of places for people to upload their own independent work for other forms of media (Youtube, Archive.org, PublicDomainTorrents.com etc) so when I looked I was surprised there isn't something out there for legal, free, non-corporate comic book artists to upload their work.

I have come across in the past various comic strip artists (college newspapers etc) who uploaded their work on the web so I would have figured a large repository of all this would have been a given by now.

resinrats

Indie comic artists do need to make $$ as well. Except for samples, if they upload their work for free, you know there would be people that would demand EVERYTHING be free & wouldn't pay a penny for anything because the others stuff was free.

wz42

Even a repository of the free sample issues they upload would be something. However there's many out there that just put it all online for free (musicians for example) licensed under the Creative Commons.

If an independent comic book artist doesn't want to go that route that's totally cool and I wish them the best of luck with perusing his chosen business model...I simply won't be buying/viewing the content.

kodave

Maybe it has to do something with the fact that their own websites won't get noticed and therefore other works or news or announcements won't get noticed if readers have no incentive to check their websites because they can just grab everything off torrents.

And maybe those websites make them a little bit of money from ad revenue, so if you're not going there to get their content, then they're not making money. Not to mention the websites can be used to track statistics and those stats can be used to actually get a small publisher to publish them on paper and they can make some green that way.

Plus I can't imagine there is a huge demand for free independent comic books in general, which is probably the ultimate reason no such site exists.

Oh, also: Probably in terms of web comic strips, they'd just make their own apps for iPhone and Android. I assume full sized comic books would be published in a format that could be read on Comixology or whatever the comic reading apps are.

wz42

Well I guess I could see them including info for their website within their comic dowload and perhaps exclusive content not on the aggregator site to encourage me to visit the main site.

Well a site could list total numbers of downloads that would track interest as well as user reviews. Ad revenue could also include selling page ads within the comic like paper comics. Youtube even has a ad revenue sharing program for publishers.

For the rest I see your point but for a noob like me, now that I have hardware to make it easy to read the stuff without sitting at a PC, I'm not going to be able to know where to find these sites.

Worse yet since there's no cross-comic reviews and ratings like Amazon it'd be a massive task to find all of them and find out which ones I'd like (anybody out there with the comedic sense of John Waters or Todd Solanaz?)

That's a shame...I was always under the impression independent comic books did well enough as a sub-culture.

I don't pirate and, if I'm able to find if it's worth money (like seeing Seinfeld for free so I had a good idea I'd enjoy Curb Your Enthusiasm), I'll buy it however I do need excellent value for dollar. Then there's stuff like, if I'm a fan of the free comic, buying stuff like T-shirts or posters off their Cafe Press store.

As such I would have figured with the independent nature of many comic book fans (annoyed the Comic-con has gone Hollywood for example) there'd be more like me interested in a non corporate model.

I've read about that in passing on this forum - I'm guessing that's a commercial type program similar to those programs that read cbr and cbz files? If so, for either or, I could see this working with any of those programs.