Modern Tales

» see moderntales.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

modern tales never reached me. in 2002 i was 18 starting computer engineering at university, the english-language webcomic scene was at most a name on a forum thread for me. the paywall side of webcomics was even more invisible from ankara, the audience was the english-speaking indie-comics readership that already knew james kochalka and harvey pekar from print. close enough. that audience was small even in the us, the turkish slice of it was effectively zero.

joey manley had been writing about webcomics since the late '90s and ran the early webcomic-criticism site comixpedia. anyway, the modern tales pitch was that pro cartoonists could earn from the web the same way pro writers earned from magazines. the rate card was $2.95 per month or $29.95 a year. recent strips ran free, the back archive sat behind the paywall. close enough. the march '02 launch had a roster of around thirty cartoonists. the editorial line was strong indie-comics writing first, the strips were not gag-a-day humor.

the roster grew through '03-'06. will eisner contributed work in his late career, harvey pekar's american splendor work appeared on the network. james kochalka had his american elf diary strip running on a sister site. gene luen yang shipped early work that later became american born chinese, dorothy gambrell of cat and girl came aboard the same window. close enough. shaenon garrity took over as editor in '06. the peak numbers were 10-15k daily visitors with around 3,500 paying subscribers, which sounds small but at $30 a head it was enough to actually pay the contributing artists.

manley spun off sister networks through '02-'06. serializer.net plus girlamatic plus graphic smash each had a focused editorial frame. by then, webcomics nation launched in '05 as a free hosting tool. comicspace was the social-network attempt in '07. close enough. the whole modern tales family at peak grossed around $100k a year, which paid manley plus a small editorial team plus the contributor royalties. that revenue line started shrinking in '07-'09 as free webcomic aggregators absorbed the same audience without the paywall.

manley closed modern tales itself in 2012 after a decade. the remaining sister sites wound down through early '13, the last shutdowns landed in april. joey manley died in november '13 of complications related to a long-running illness. close enough. the people he had paid through modern tales were already in their next phase, gene luen yang was working on print graphic novels at first second, shaenon garrity was writing skin horse. the paywall webcomics experiment that manley had run for eleven years did not survive him as a brand or as a business model.

~ the record ~

~ the family of sister sites ~

the modern tales network was really half a dozen editorial sites under one paywall login. serializer.net ran long-form narrative comics. girlamatic ran work aimed at female readers, with an editorial team that became a small launching pad for cartoonists like raina telgemeier early in her career. graphic smash ran action and adventure strips. american elf was kochalka's daily diary. webcomics nation was the freemium hosting attempt, comicspace the social-network attempt. close enough. each site had its own editor, the whole network was united by the single subscription plus the manley-led editorial culture. that family model is what made the gross revenue work, no single one of the sites could have paid the contributors on its own.

~ what the paywall proved ~

modern tales was the loud counter to the "webcomics must be free" assumption of the early '00s. the standard webcomics economy was free strips supported by ads or merch or kickstarter. manley's model was the opposite, a small paying audience for high-quality archives behind a hard paywall. close enough. it worked at the small scale of a few thousand subscribers, it did not scale past that. the substack and patreon eras of the late '10s essentially rebuilt the modern tales model with better tooling, the same pitch about paying for indie creative work directly. that lineage gets read backward into modern tales as the proof-of-concept.

~ what manley left ~

joey manley spent eleven years convinced pro cartoonists could be paid for web work. the cartoonists he paid mostly went on to print graphic novel careers afterward. gene luen yang became a young people's literature ambassador. raina telgemeier became a number-one new york times bestseller. shaenon garrity kept writing. close enough. that print-graphic-novel cohort of the '10s contains a noticeable cluster of people who had taken paychecks from manley in their pre-fame years. the modern tales paywall did not last but the careers it bankrolled mostly did.

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