The real "holy *crap*" about Modern Tales

[demiurgent]

In Joey Manley's words, the other shoe just dropped.

A few people, when they congratulated me yesterday, grumbled about not wanting to subscribe to see what's going on. Or talked about... well, niche-like stuff.

The Modern Tales I'm editing? Is going to be free. Ad supported. And shooting to expand, to broaden in pretty much every way.

There will still be a subscription component, for a small number of series. But Modern Tales will be far more a community of really good comic strips that anyone can go to.

That's my mission. To find quality. To seek out the art and the story and the funny. To make the world a better place! To build a shining obsidian monolith of sequential GODHOOD!

Or, you know. To help make a really cool free comics site.

Comments

[dlobok.livejournal.com]

It's a trick.

*gets an axe*

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Look at the shiny watch! Loooooook at the shiny waaaaatch....

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

torrain, who is a MT subscriber who just renewed her subscription to get access to the stuff that presumably will be free, wants to know if the subscription gets rid of the ads.

Any clue?

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Actually, most of the stuff she just renewed to get will still be on the subscription. The free stuff will be added around it.

Details on the perks of subscription are being determined. I'll bounce things off of Joey and keep you informed as we know more. All right?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Sounds awesome to me.

[shaenon.livejournal.com]

Although I'm not the expert on this, I think the setup will be as follows:

1. Most or all of the comics that are currently behind the subscription wall (including mine) will stay there. New, free comics will be added to the site.

2. The subscription comics will be ad-free. The free comics will run with advertising space; whether ads run in the space will be largely up to the cartoonist.

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Wow, a lot of that press release read like a shot over Keenspot's bow.

This is gonna be interesting.

[jenni-the-odd.livejournal.com]

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Totally doing the Happy Dance right now. Both for you being editor, and for the more free comics. Hooray!

[david-wisdom.livejournal.com]

Can't it be both?

[sonictail.livejournal.com]

Man, and here I was thinking that 2006 would be "second verse, same as the first". Congratulations, Congrats and Hell, this is 100% awesome!

"We live in interesting times indeed"

[flit.livejournal.com]

Have I mentioned that I am really pleased with and proud of you?

I love watching people do what they love -- and TOUCH other people with it.

Go you!

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Wow.

That's going to be very, very cool. I look forward to seeing where you go with that kind of AWESOME GODLIKE POWER. (Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be accompanied by ittybitty living space bandwidth.)

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

I pretty much subscribe for Barr. I read other stuff on ModernTales, but those strips (like Narbonic) update reliably enough that I generally don't need the archives. Barr, however, is rather erratic and there's never any indication from her main page of whether a series has gone active again after a long dormancy. So archive access is pretty much required to be able to follow her. :/

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

I actually knew about this a bit in advance, since T called to talk about the future of Digger with the new model, and I was sort of wondering how y'all were gonna be dealing with it.... *grin*

Because obviously the workload of a subscription only site wasn't nearly big ENOUGH...

[graveyardgreg.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I was thinking of ramen at the time T called me, but I was hungry!

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Well, when AREN'T we thinking of ramen? I just assume ramen runs in a kind of lowlevel chant of ramenramenramen in the background at all times...

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

ramenramenramenramenramenramenramenramenMUSHROOMMUSHROOM....

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

Aaah! Tofu! It's tofu, aaah, tofu, tofu!

And it's ramenramenramenramen . . .

[troutman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yesterday, I was all "You know, Eric's cool and all, and I'm sure he'll pick great comics, but subscription webcomics are still retarded." So I guess you told me. Or told my rational thinking patterns, anyway.

[ryuko-midori.livejournal.com]

XD OMG! (squee!) This is totally frikin awesome. I might subscribe anyway, for archives access to Narbonic. (Oh why didn't I read it when it was free?)

[the-zaniak.livejournal.com]

I tried, but I only got through the first few hundred comics. Not enough time!

Is Narbonic becoming free? Please, please please. Please.

Narbonic is not becoming free

[(Anonymous)]

Shaenon has expressed a desire to stay within the pay portion of Modern Tales, at least through the duration of Narbonic (which ends in a year, BTW).

Joey
www.moderntales.com

Re: Narbonic is not becoming free

[the-zaniak.livejournal.com]

Aaaaw. What's the situation after it ends? Will the archives be freely available, or will you still have to subscribe to read them?

Re: Narbonic is not becoming free

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Well, now. That's a very interesting question. Very interesting indeed. Gosh, but what an interesting question that is....

(My God I love my job.)

Re: Narbonic is not becoming free

[the-zaniak.livejournal.com]

lol, I'm going to read this either as "I don't know" or "I do know but I'm not going to tell you because it's an awesome surprise." Want to clue me in on which it is?

[truebluespark]

Hey, because I haven't said so yet: congratulations! *grin*