Hairy Steve, funding, and building worlds.

I've written a few blogs recently about art and the internet, such as the trials of promoting your art online www.fumboo.com/blog/the-art-of…, and trying to get the internet to play nice www.fumboo.com/blog/how-i-trie…. To make this a triad of blogs, I just wanted to write a few thoughts down about where to go with it all.

HAIRY STEVE the webcomic begins on Monday (www.hairysteve.com). It is drawn by Steve Bright, and written by me (usually, i'm too self-obsessed to let any other artist draw my ideas, but this project needed Steve from the start). You may recall we set up an indiegogo campaign www.indiegogo.com/Hairy-Steve to raise money for it. We asked for $2,000 within a 90 day deadline. I said to Steve before we started, 'lets not get our hopes up. We may get a few hundred out of it'. As it happens, within the first three days we'd exceeded our target. We were totally stunned, the sheer amount of contributions coming in were way beyond our expectations, and they're still going. Since there's still some 85 days left on the campaign, it's still very much open to contributions and i'm intrigued to see how far this can go.

It's actually quite a beautiful system. People donate money, and in return they get incentives. Incentives is an ugly word, maybe stuff is better. They get STUFF. Principally, a copy of Hairy Steve the comic when it's finished, signed by us both. But donate a little more and there is original artwork for grabs, the chance to be drawn as a zombie, and i've a few ideas of other things we can offer further down the line too. But while I'm really proud of what we're offering, I must say I don't believe the rewards are the main reason people are being so kind. A large chunk of it is goodwill. We asked for help to get this project off the ground, and people responded. The comments and feedback have shown that our contributors really want this to succeed.

And best of all, we promised if we reached a quarter of our target (which we did in the first hour), we would put the comic online as a free webcomic. Contributors get rewards, interested parties get a webcomic, Steve gets paid (not me, I wrote the script about four years ago, it is Steve doing all the hard work now). Everyone wins.

The amount we asked for, $2,000, isn't a specific amount. It's not to pay for printing our comic (too much), and it's not to pay Steve a page rate for the artwork (not enough - it would equal about £30 a page after conversions and tax, which is nothing for a day's work). And anyway, who gets paid to draw a webcomic. The amount we asked for was to FACILITATE us getting this idea off the ground. Steve couldn't afford to work on it for free, and we needed a sizeable chunk of his time to get the comic produced. The idea of funding him like this was to allow him the space to work, to make this an actual project rather than a whimsy.

And this, I think, is where the system works best. An understanding that by funding Hairy Steve you're not paying for a specific thing, you're adding a hook to haul it into reality. You can't say an artist (or art) is worth a specific amount, but you can say a concept is good enough to be given the chance to breathe. People liked the idea of Hairy Steve (thankfully), and of what our partnership might produce, and responded in kind. In return, we respond. It's a circle.

When the webcomic goes online, people can still contribute in return for STUFF, for the next three months or so. I want to see how this goes and I hope we can raise our total higher, and higher. God knows Steve deserves all he'll earn out of this, and we can gauge the support for us to carry on and perhaps do more. This isn't just a webcomic, or a limited-edition printed comic, or a crowdsourced campaign, it's all of those things working together.

And THIS is what I love. It's organic. It's planted and then grows purely by enthusiasm. And it changes, and it adapts, and it becomes something everyone can benefit from. If you do a webcomic, there are two main ways you are supposed to earn a living from it. Either you put a 'donate' button on your website which everyone will ignore, or you produce merchandise based on your webcomic. Now here, the theory is sound. Your webcomic, despite being the content, is instead working as the advertising. It is the free and enjoyable body of work which will then get your fans coughing up for tshirts or books. I love this idea but in reality, it's incredibly hard to master. A tiny fraction of webcomics make their living this way, but the vast majority only sell a tshirt or two here and there, even if the webcomic is really popular. And while you draw a webcomic because you love doing it, not for the financial reward, any money coming in would of course buy you more time to work on it, maybe even help you produce more strips. Producing work for free on the internet, and earning, are two incredibly hard things to splice together.

I've been thinking about this for a long time. I do wonder if the traditional way artists show their work online is beginning to falter. We all have our little corner, where we post up our work, people may comment, then repeat. And there are so many of us doing it, so many wonderful artists doing it, we're in danger of getting lost amongst ourselves. I've seen truly amazing artists with only a tiny audience on the net, just because they couldn't shout loud enough.

Instead, I wonder if artists should be concentrating on what they do, when what they do is build worlds. Every artist creates their scenes, their characters, plays god with what happens, creates and destroys and has a FLIPPING BRILLIANT TIME doing it. We are what's in our heads. And if you're creating a world, rather than show it to people, wouldn't you rather they climbed inside it? Instead of 'here's my work, have a look', could it not be 'i've made a land out of the brightly-coloured bits of my brain, come in and have a paddle'. My point being, art should be immersive and involving, something an audience can really feel a part of. And I'm throwing these thoughts out there to invite comment, I'm describing my thinking process for my own work and wondering if others see it this way. You might think I'm being over-flowery. You might agree but notice I'm curiously quiet on the specifics. Every artist would need a different approach to evoke what they're doing, every corner of the net would need growing in its own distinct way.

I have a rather over-ambitious idea I'd like to put into effect next year, which i'll need a lot of people's help with, and will earn me nothing. But it's the thrill of making it flesh that is the motivation, the same reason I put so much work online for free (there must be an absolute mountain of my comics piled up on the internet by now), and the same reason I've become fascinated with our Hairy Steve campaign. It has invited people in to be a part of it and they've responded so generously.

Lets see how far it can go, and how much we can give back, and make this entire process symbiotic. Everyone involved in this Hairy Steve project, from us, to those who contribute money, to anyone who reads the webcomic, is part of the same thing and makes it a whole. A big wobbly balloon filled with support, appreciation, hairballs and zombies.

We should make everything this much fun.