The author of PvP, a webcomic that I really don’t read often enough (though that should change now that I discovered their RSS feed), has decided that the newspaper comic syndication racket isn’t for him. So, instead of giving up all the rights to his strip, he’s going to investigate syndicating it himself for free.
This last year, I was contacted by Universal Press Syndicates about PvP. They know the strip and were very interested in syndicating it as a feature. I would love to see PvP in newspapers and we started talks. I let them know that there were six years of archives available and that I could edit the strips to conform to family paper editorial standards. The only thing I could not do was give up my ownership and rights to my creation.
Under no circumstances would I relinquish my copyright, book deals, merchandise deals, rights to market my strips, etc. If they wanted PvP, we would agree to a newspaper distribution deal and that was it. After six weeks the syndicates returned with their answer: They wanted PvP…all of it. If they could not have the rights to the feature, they weren’t interested. So we parted ways.
But I’ve already become attached to the idea of seeing PvP in the papers, and that’s why I’ve decided to start a new program. In the coming months, I’ll be putting into effect, a program in which papers can receive PVP for free. That’s right, free. They don’t have to pay me a cent for it. I will provide for the papers, a comic strip with a larger established audience then any new syndicated feature, a years worth of strips in advance, and I won’t charge them a cent for it.
Best of luck on this project. From the sound of it, if this is a success, it could be the first step in rather radically changing the comic strip industry.
iTunes: “Love on Haight Street” by BT from the album Movement in Still Life (2000, 6:18).