I know I'm on "vacation" and frankly considering the last year I deserve it. But I was surfing along and I ran into this rather interesting article from last October that I completely missed.
It starts off a bit wacky but if you hang on for the ride the author makes a very interesting point that I think says something very interesting about the way many of us hope to make our living. He does mention two webcomics in the article but to me that's only tangential to it's relation to the subjects we discuss here.
This article says a lot about the problems that entertainment media in general are going to have in the future. And he rightly points out that much of the income for artists will be largely based on what he refers to as FARTS.
My one and only issue with his article is that when certain elements of pop culture do reach that critical mass in which the number of people who know about it (or
Q Score) exceeds some magical number that makes that property or product "famous"; many folks want to be or own a part of that experience. Why else would people buy webcomics books when all the strips are on line for free? Why else would people but T-Shirts and various nicknack's that pertain to the property unless they wanted to somehow be a part of it?
If anyone wanted to they could easily make a "Remedy" T-Shirt. They could steal the art or have an artist reproduce it. But given today's technology that is still far more costly than simply buying one of the shirts I'm already selling. So until those Replicator's he mentions are capable of making art and then printing it for us on our daily replicated clothing I think we're safe.
Here's the article in question.
