Holy Shit: Goats Mentioned In Washington Post

Looks like someone was paying attention to our little experiment. The Washington Post has published an article about making webcomics work as a business. There's an image of the front page of the Business section here. The article focuses on a number of different approaches, such as those employed by Goats, Modern Tales, Keenspot, Sluggy Freelance, PVP, Penny Arcade, and more. Detail-wise, probably not much that you didn't know before, but there are some interesting numbers in there.

The funniest bit of the article comes not from any online persona, but from Jay Kennedy, editor of King Features Syndicate, a man who once told me that mixing animals and humans in a comic strip confuses the readers. After two pages of discussion of successful online cartoonists, this tidbit appears:

Jay Kennedy said it is too early to tell how well comic subscriptions will fare online.[...] "The online market for comics is still very much in its formative stages," Kennedy said. "We know when large numbers of people enjoy something there should be ways to derive revenue from it so the art form can be sustained. The trick is figuring out what those mechanisms will be."

UPDATE: Looks like the article (or part of it, anyway) was picked up by the LA Times website. Can anyone confirm whether or not it appears in the daily paper?

UPDATE 2: It has been confirmed that the article appeared in Friday's LA Times. It also appears to be running in Saturday's Detroit News. If anyone out there in the Detroit area would be kind enough to mail us 2 or 3 copies, I would be happy to reward you with a book or t-shirt. Email me for details.

So that's two coasts and a heartland. Not bad.