Zuda Comics

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

~ the goodbye ~

Zuda was an argument inside the American comics industry, staged on a website, and I was not in that argument. DC Comics announced the imprint in july 2007 and put zudacomics.com live on 30 october with its first competition running. Ron Perazza, a vice president on the creative services side, ran it. Paul Levitz was publisher of DC at the time and signed off on the whole thing.

The premise was that webcomics had produced a generation of cartoonists the direct market never met, and that DC could find them without reading a slush pile. Ten creators a month submitted eight pages. Readers voted. The winner got a contract to make fifty-two more screens, paid, with DC's name on it. Some strips skipped the vote entirely as instant winners, which is how Jeremy Love's Bayou got in.

The format was strange on purpose. Zuda comics were not pages, they were screens, drawn to a 4:3 shape so you could read one without scrolling. That constraint is defensible. What it was wrapped in was not: the whole reader lived inside a Flash viewer, so the work could not be copied out and could not be linked to a specific panel by somebody who liked it. DC built a webcomics platform whose comics could not travel across the web.

By 2007 I was out of university with a real line into the apartment, and this was not something happening in my language or my market. Turkish comics culture of that period was its own thing and did not intersect with an American publisher's talent search. What I recognize now is the technical decision, because I have made the equivalent one: you choose the container that gives you control, and you find out later that control was the thing killing you.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the contest ~

High Moon and The Black Cherry Bombshells came up through the voting, as did Supertron. Instant picks brought in Bayou and The Night Owls. Four titles made it to print between 2009 and 2010. Bayou volume one was named a Great Graphic Novel for Teens by the American Library Association in 2010 and took Glyph awards for Love. An Eisner nomination came on top of that. The talent was there.

The structural problem was in the rules. A monthly contest means ten creators do finished work and nine of them get nothing for it, and the one who wins is the one who was best at getting an audience to click, which is a different skill from making comics. It also capped every strip at eight pages before anyone could judge whether it had a story in it. Plenty of good work died on page eight because it was building slowly.

~ the funny part ~

The voting got gamed, which anyone could have predicted. When Perazza suspended the competition in april 2010 he listed what had gone wrong, and it reads like a description of every online contest ever run: accusations of cheating, confusion about how the process actually worked, spamming carried out in the name of promotion, and behavior toward rival creators that he described as argumentative and dismissive at best.

There was also criticism from the start about the submission contract and what rights a creator was handing over for the privilege of entering. That noise never entirely went away. A talent search that begins with an argument about paperwork has already told you which side of the table it is sitting on.

~ the long tail ~

On 1 july 2010, effective immediately, DC closed the site. The announcement went up on the Zuda blog, weeks after DC launched its digital comics app. Perazza said the existing Zuda comics would stay reachable through the DC app and through Comixology. Dan Didio and Jim Lee said DC would build a larger submissions system covering everything the company needed rather than just webcomics.

That larger system did not really materialize in the shape people were told to expect. What survived is the print volumes and whatever the creators kept for themselves. The Flash viewer that was supposed to protect the work is the reason so little of it can be read today in its original form, and Bayou, the best thing Zuda ever put its name on, is remembered as Jeremy Love's book rather than as a DC webcomic. That is the correct outcome. It is also not what the imprint was for.

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