First, a word about me. I like comics. That's why I wrote Comictastic, because I wanted an easier way to read comics. I'm sure many of you may disagree, but I find it's a pain—especially on dialup—to visit 20 websites every day just to read the comics I like. I'm doing this because of my love of comics, not to make money off of your hard work.
Second, I would have appreciated a thoughtful e-mail from some of you before you advocated full-scale war against me and MY work. I am more than happy to work with cartoonists to help them develop new sources of revenue through my software, but thus far, I have never been contacted with any such proposal, and the e-mails I sent some time ago to several popular web cartoonists were either turned down cold, or ignored. Consider: I am a big enough fan of comics that I would spend countless hours of my life developing software to make reading them easier. I am your biggest fan, not your enemy.
Considering the popularity of Comictastic, doesn't it seem obvious that there are a lot of people who want a better way to view comics? By using my program, your users are sending you a message: they want convenience. Stubbornly sticking to antiquated banner ad-based revenue methods will not help you. In the future, you must expand your audience, not restrict it further.
Now that I clearly have the attention of every comic artist on the planet, I would like to make a proposal: Add an RSS feed to your comics. Observe the incredible success of RSS in the news and blog sectors—people love them! It's easy, it's fast, and best of all, the author controls the content of the feed. Without a news feed aggregator like NetNewsWire, I would never read blogs, and the same goes for comics. I am more than willing to add support for RSS feeds to Comictastic, if cartoonists are willing to provide the feeds. In the feed, you could put ads, plugs for your merchandise, and of course, the comic. If a significant portion of your readership switched to these feeds, the benefits could be huge: less bandwidth usage and a larger group of happy regular readers.
Since some of you seem to have some misconceptions about how Comictastic works, I'll try to clear them up. Comictastic is a specialized web browser. Nothing more. The legal and moral issues are nearly identical to say, OmniWeb, a Mac web browser that 1) costs money, and 2) can block ads. If there are cartoonists who would like to be removed from the default list of comics within the application (and very few of you are on that list), then by all means send me an e-mail and I'd be happy to oblige. However, I cannot and will not control what my users use the program for. I could just as easily call it a "periodically updated image browser," and it would be an accurate description.
As for charging for Comictastic, I do this only as compensation for the countless hours I spend working on and supporting my software. This is not some hastily thrown together application I made over a weekend. It represents a significant portion of my life. As I've already said, I wrote it for myself at first, and released it as freeware. But then it started to be popular, and people requested features. After several months of working on a major upgrade, I decided to charge a modest fee for my work. So no, I am not trying to profit off of your comics, just trying to justify my obsession with comics in some way.
In conclusion, the choice is yours. Either you can spend your time and money fighting people like me and my users, or you can embrace what I believe to be the future of webcomics, and work with me for everyone's benefit. People want this technology; don't deny them that.
Respectfully,
-Jan Van Tol
Comictastic Developer
