Syndication.
If you’re not familiar with how the funnies get into your newspaper,
here’s a quick summary: In exchange for giving up distribution rights
for his creation to one of several press syndicates,
a comics creator will typically also give up all merchandising
rights and even the copyright on the strips and the characters
themselves to that same syndicate. What a deal!
Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, Scott Kurtz (creator of
the popular webcomic PvP) wants
to sink this derelict ship. In a recent writeup of his
webcomics panel at Comic-Con, Scott covers a brief history of comics
syndication, and reveals that he’s about to offer PvP for free
to newspapers wishing to carry it:
This last year, I was contacted by Universal Press Syndicates about
PvP. They know the strip and were very interested in syndicating it as
a feature. I would love to see PvP in newspapers and we started talks. I
let them know that there were six years of archives available and that
I could edit the strips to conform to family paper editorial standards.
The only thing I could not do was give up my ownership and rights to my
creation.Under no circumstances would I relinquish my copyright, book deals,
merchandise deals, rights to market my strips, etc. If they wanted PvP,
we would agree to a newspaper distribution deal and that was it. After
six weeks the syndicates returned with their answer: They wanted
PvP…all of it. If they could not have the rights to the feature, they
weren’t interested. So we parted ways.But I’ve already become attached to the idea of seeing PvP in the
papers, and that’s why I’ve decided to start a new program. In the
coming months, I’ll be putting into effect, a program in which papers
can receive PVP for free. That’s right, free. They don’t have to pay me
a cent for it. I will provide for the papers, a comic strip with a
larger established audience then any new syndicated feature, a years
worth of strips in advance, and I won’t charge them a cent for it.
This is a huge deal for independent creators everywhere. It’s hardly
the case that every webcomic (or even any other webcomic) could
possibly try to pull something like this off today. But, instead of
another “blah blah blah Internet killing old media” story, this one
might end up an interesting symbiosis between independent Web properties
and traditional print media. Keep an eye on this one.