How Reddit is launching the careers of webcomic?artists

Not many people get the opportunity to be sat down by the cartoon editor of The New Yorker and told their work isn’t very good, but Jody Zellman was lucky in that he was one of the very few to land a coveted internship at the magazine.

A few years earlier he had been attending Columbia University when he saw a note in the school’s newspaper advertising for an editorial cartoonist. “It was right in the runup to the 2008 election,” he told me. “I submitted very crude sort of drawings reflecting on Obama and McCain. And they took it.” Zellman launched a regular strip in the newspaper he called Jody’s Drawings; it started with one strip a week but then extended to two a week after the election.

It was during Zellman’s junior year that he got the New Yorker internship, and it required that he sift through the unsolicited cartoon submissions, most of which got rejected. He’d also take the accepted submissions and then comb through the New Yorker’s archives, making sure they didn’t duplicate what had already been done before. It was like receiving a crash course in cartooning. “I was exposed to a lot of single panel gag comics,” he said.

Bob Mankoff was the cartoon editor at the time, and one day Zellman mentioned to him that he was a cartoonist. “He was like, ‘Oh, bring in your comics, maybe we’ll publish them,’” he recalled. “I had this brief bout of megalomania and brought in my comics. And his response was, ‘These are terrible.’ He completely tore them apart. Pretty directly. It was mostly a reflection of the art — there was no consistency to them, no sophistication. They were crudely done on hand and computer. He made a comment that, ‘I know with some internet comics people are a little more forgiving, but we have a style we’re looking for.’”

Zellman didn’t mind the criticism. He welcomed it. Over the next few months he put his head down and continued to refine his style and approach based on Mankoff’s criticism. He never actually sold a cartoon to The New Yorker, but the experience opened his eyes as to what would be required of him if he ever wanted to be a professional cartoonist.

After the internship ended, Zellman set aside cartooning and spent a year traveling abroad. He returned to New York in 2012 and eventually landed a job, and it was only once he reached some level of financial stability that he started toying with the idea of launching a new comic. This time, however, he wanted formal training, and so he enrolled in New York’s School of Visual Arts, taking courses that would hone his technical skills, which at that point were sorely lacking.

It was in October 2016 when Zellman decided he was ready to launch a new comic. He began crafting what would eventually become Earth to Planet, a single-panel comic strip he now publishes three times per week. He refined the comic over a period of months, sharing it with friends for feedback, and then on September 1, 2017, he posted his first panel to the website.

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Zellman didn’t have any sort of audience, but he knew where he could go to find one. He had been visiting Reddit on a near-daily basis for years. Its r/comics and r/webcomics communities have a combined million subscribers, and the site has served as a breeding ground for up-and-coming webcomic artists. If your comic is good enough to generate a few thousand upvotes and make it to the front page, it can drive tens of thousands of views and kickstart a loyal audience.

Zellman wanted to know if his comic would resonate with Reddit’s users, so he immediately began uploading his strip to r/comics; rather than link directly to his website, he’d upload the image to Imgur, an image hosting site favored by the Reddit community. “The second one I posted, which was about a praying mantis coming of age, did pretty well,” he said. “I don’t think it hit the front page, but it got a few thousand upvotes. That was pretty great. I had a proof of concept, and people were seeing it, and that was the little bit of satisfaction I needed to keep going.”

Extra Fabulous Comics, a webcomic that gained early traction on Reddit, now has close to 300,000 subscribers across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Owlturd Comix, another Reddit favorite, boasts over a million subscribers on just Facebook alone. Jimmy Craig, who draws the comic They Can Talk, told me that he became a Reddit regular as a fan of comics long before he began submitting his own. “Extra Fabulous stood out to me,” he told me. “This is something that would probably never be published in the Sunday Globe, but I can read it regularly on Reddit.” The chance of discovering a new gem from an unknown artist is what got him addicted to r/comics. “Everyone would upload there and the community would filter out the stuff that they thought was worth reading. I wouldn’t even have to have this list of comic artist sites to check regularly, I would just check Reddit.”

I asked Craig about how he leveraged the Reddit community to grow an audience for his own comic, which now has nearly half a million fans on Facebook. He said it’s not always that easy to draw a straight line between a comic taking off on Reddit and a growth in subscribers on other platforms. “If something did well on Reddit, it’s not like I would automatically get a couple thousand followers on Facebook or anything like that,” he explained. “It would mainly be that other sites or blogs that look for content on Reddit would then feature my comics and email me asking for permission, and I’d say, ‘Hey can you link to my other social sites as well?’” Reddit, in other words, was a seeding platform that allows webcomics to get noticed by other influencers.

Aaron Alvarez, whose comic The Obscure Gentlemen has been featured on Reddit many times over the years, told me that the rush of Reddit traffic doesn’t create a huge audience overnight; it’s only through consistently landing comics on the front page that the Reddit community begins to remember your work and convert into regular readers. “We’ve been on the front page I think three times,” he said. “Usually with those it’s like, wow, all of a sudden we have thousands of hits. But after maybe a month it levels off. But with each leveling [the audience size] has increased.”

For most of its existence, the Reddit community has been hostile to users who seek to leverage it for self promotion, but the moderators at r/comics and r/webcomics seem to recognize the importance of allowing comic creators to submit their own work. But still, most artists don’t link to their own websites, choosing instead to upload the image either to Imgur or directly to Reddit’s platform. They’ll then leave a note in the comments section with links to where visitors can find more of their work.

Several of the artists I spoke to for this piece said they were timid about coming off as too self promotional. Craig recently published a book of his They Can Talk webcomic, and when a recent comic of his did well on Reddit, he left a comment pointing to where people could buy the book. “It still felt really weird,” he said. “I felt like someone was doing me a favor by just letting me post a link in the comments section of my own comic.”

Because many of the Redditors who hang out on r/comics and r/webcomics are big fans of webcomics, they can offer up a different sort of criticism than what these artists will see when their cartoons go viral on Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr. “I enjoy the criticism aspect,” said Alvarez. “Some of it can be really harsh. But at the same time I’m OK with it because it’s like this is why this person doesn’t enjoy it, so is there something in their complaint or comment that I can tweak or whatever? There’s always a way to learn from it.” For Craig, the comments are his favorite part of submitting to Reddit. “On Facebook it’s mainly people who love animals commenting, which is awesome. My loyal following is primarily on Facebook. But on Reddit I love the feedback because it’s primarily comic fans. And some of the comments have blown me away. When it’s on my own comic and the comments are positive, it’s the greatest feeling ever.”

For Zellman and his Earth to Planet webcomic, it’s still early days yet and he has some way to go before he can lay claim to a large, loyal audience. So far, he has close to 7,000 followers on Instagram, his primary distribution platform — not exactly a blockbuster following, but still impressive for a media property that’s only existed for six months. As far as Reddit goes, Zellman can’t always tell how much it contributes to his brand awareness, but anecdotally, he has real-world evidence that it’s helping him break through the noise. “The last time it hit the front page I had a buddy from high school who I haven’t spoken to in 10 years send me a message saying, ‘Hey, I saw your comic on Reddit.’ Or I’ll have coworkers who shout out in the office, ‘Hey your comic made the front page again.’ That’s cool and it sort of anecdotally tells me that people are seeing it without needing me to push them.”

Sure, it’s not the same as landing a cartoon in The New Yorker, but Zellman’s still come a long way since he threw together those crudely drawn cartoons of Obama and McCain for his university newspaper. The New Yorker can wait.

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.