Elseworlds Exchange: NSFW Comics

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Alright, let's get on with the show. Waiting down upon the underworld to smash gangland, come a friend of the unfortunate enemy of criminal. In a serious, all powerful character, a problem to the police, but a good state of law. Hello everybody and welcome to the Els World Exchange.

I am Sal, and joining me today, again, is my guest Brad Geiger of Web Comics fame, and just an all-around guru of many, many different aspects of this crazy culture that we find ourselves in. Brad, thanks for being on, man. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Like I was saying at the top of the show, I really enjoyed our talk. It's gotten a lot of buzz. And I don't know whether you started something that may be something that you don't want to lay claim to later, but I kind of got the bug and I've been doing short little 20-minute bursts on Web Comics.com where I'm talking about some of this stuff and it's been getting a super response. That's great.

So thank you for giving me the push. I need it. Oh, it's my pleasure, man. Yeah, let me tell you.

When we started doing podcasting on this channel, like more regularly, especially on a consistent basis, and when the live feature became a thing that was very easy and intrinsic to understand, it was great. And I really, really got addicted to it. So, and it's funny because you can find yourself being like, I have a good chunk of time. I could literally just jump on right now.

Right. And just start talking. And there'll be an audience there somehow. Like there'll be people waiting for you.

That's amazing. I've got to try that. Now, you may have to get in touch with you later and have me walk me through the ins and outs, but yeah, I was fascinated by how you handled that. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, it was great having you. You're always an amazing guest and you always give a great wellspring of information and experience. Some of them even be accurate.

I know. And I actually, I love seeing you in the conversation. If you haven't watched it, by the way, check out Brad's appearance on a previous episode of The Elsewhere's Exchange. We talk about web comics and whether they really do need to change or if they are in any danger of stagnation.

So check it out. It's a great one. But also do yourself a favor and go look in the comments because Brad gives some additional advice and guidance to those who have any additional questions. And I tried to provide a little guidance and actually that's going to be an upcoming topic is good promotion and useless promotion.

And you so much useless promotion out there. That makes you crazy. You encounter it and so many things. And of course, like when you first start, I think all of us are guilty of it.

Yeah. I know that when I was starting YouTube, it was a world of like, just trying to get anybody to look at what we were doing. And you know, you see, you went to like avenues and audiences that were never going to watch yourself or never going to sort of content. And for some reason, they're just, you know, you thought to yourself like, well, it's so good that anyone will watch it.

You know, exactly. Exactly. My mom says so. This is, I'm brilliant.

And why wouldn't everybody agree? Yeah. And but the bad thing about all that scatter shot kind of marketing is that you end up spending so much time on that that you're not spending time on what you should be doing, which is doing a good thing, whether that's a comic or podcast or whatever, instead of working on getting good because that's actually the best marketing of all is doing a good thing. Right.

That's always been your mantra. I know when we were working on comics years ago, I asked you about like what we needed to do. What was our best strategy? And you were like, the best strategy is always just to make the best content because the cream rises to the top.

That was your perspective. Yeah. It's impossible to hide good content on the web. Yeah, it's true today.

However, and not, not, not, however, we're just talking about speaking of hiding content. Let's talk about the kind of content that you can't view in a school or at work, not say for work content. Brad, you have entered into a whole different spectrum that I'm sure you were expecting to be in, let's say, five, 10 years ago. Yeah.

How did you fall into it? And then we'll get into like the pitfalls, possibilities and promise and perils of not say for work content. Well done, Sal. That was bad.

Well, here's the deal. And stop me if I've gone over this before because I think we might have treaded a little bit of this in the previous show. But the shortened version is quite simple. In 2014, I realized that ad blockers had put a constriction on my revenue that I needed to come up with something different.

I had to do something different. Or else I was going to have to change my application. I was going to have to find a day job. Right.

And as a matter of fact, just to bring things full circle, today is the five year anniversary of me quitting my day job at the Philadelphia Daily News. Congratulations, man. It's amazing to think that it's been five years ago. But it was March 28, 2012 when I made the announcement today is my last day.

And things went very interesting getting used to not having a steady paycheck. But ad revenue came in 2012 hit like on a monthly basis. And I could count on it. By 2014, that had stopped and completely constricted to a drip.

And I had to do something. I had to come up with something and luckily, thank God for Patreon. Patreon was rising just around that time. So I'm looking around at what some people are doing.

And what I basically tried to do was find something that my readers were willing to pay for. And I tried in all ages strip. They weren't interested. I tried kind of reviving the PG-13 version of Corning Disaster.

Weren't taking it. I tried doing digital collections, repackaging, trying to do this and that and trying to throw stuff out there. Weren't interested. Bonus cartoons.

I tried doing single panel comics, which was something I always wanted to experiment with. And I thought I'd put some really good stuff out there. No go. So I looked around and actually the guy's name, I'll always plug him.

He does a comic called Zombie Roomie and his name is John Wigger. And I was looking at his Patreon and he was doing great. And I looked and he was doing once a week, not safe for work version of his comic strip. Four panels that handled adult themes and nudity and so on and so forth.

And so I had seen John at Comic Conventions forever and ever. And he's always giving me his business card. I was at the time I was thinking about trying to learn manga studio. It's called Clip Studio Paint Now.

A horrible name. Yeah, manga studio is easy to understand. He's really straightforward. Whoever named that freaking software does not have any idea how much bio artists feel towards the idea of using clip art.

And that word clip being the first word in there turns my stomach every time. He immediately jumped to that conclusion. I was immediately clip art was the first thing I thought of. Must be clip art.

But anyway, he was always happy to if he goes if you want to learn it, I can teach you blah, blah, blah. Super nice guy. So I called him up. I found a dig through found his business card.

I said, OK, tell me what you're doing. And tell me how you do it. And he gave me a lot of really good advice, including something that I still use today, which is I never call it porn. I never call it even adult comics or three X's.

I always call it NSFW. That has been the most it's it's it's it sounds a little bit like dog whistle kind of talk, but it's it's kind of an accepted term. Everybody knows what you're talking about, but you don't use words like porn and stuff, which is a real turn off. Just people.

So I gave you a lot of advice. It gives you oh, sorry, I was just going to say that like using labels that are associated or affiliated with the not safe for work bubble or umbrella kind of hamstring you because they know the sudden you're I think you're you're describing labels that you don't want or they don't want to be affiliated with. And also it restricts you in a big bad way. You know, it sells people like it not safe for work doesn't imply or suggest or or mean pornography.

So why give yourself like why limit yourself in that way? Well, and really that to be fair to be completely honest with you, the where this went, it would be very accurately described as pornography. Right. Right.

But it's a little bit more tasteful on social media to say not safe for work. And I've had very I don't think I've had anybody that has come to Patreon and left clutching their pearls and the gas. The gas and offended. Yeah.

I think everybody kind of knows what's going on. But maybe once you see some of the preview images that I've got up by you kind of figure it out real quick. Oh, yeah. No, you're a little bit naive.

Experience in your your your your craft. You know what images are going to be tasteful yet implicit in the tone. Right. I was just thinking about your in your evening after dark cover of mismatch where you're like, Okay, I know what she normally looks like.

I used actually for this cover using old image of her from an original link cover. Yeah. But there's a lot. There's a significant shift.

And I think there's no way you can misunderstand what the content is here. Yeah. Yeah. And Alex Hoeberling who is my colorist did an amazing job on that image.

That is that is a that's a killer from start to finish. It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, you it's it's implicitly explicit. Let's put it that way.

It gets the job done. And so John kind of walked me through what he was doing everything. And so I'm like, I'll give this a try. You know, I I'm always trying I always like to be open to experimentation.

And it goes back to when I first started doing Web Comics in 2000, all of the prevailing professional cartoonists at the time were syndicated people. And what I saw from them was a real resistance to change. They were frightened of change. They were they they they they they they they didn't like what they were seeing and they wanted to put the brakes on.

Right. Got it into my mind so much that I didn't want to ever be that guy. Right. And I always wanted to be open for experimentation and see what happens.

You know, that that's what I wanted to kind of embrace even as I got old and crusty. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to give this a shot. And I threw it open to my readers and I said, Hey, well, and I think I posted one courting disaster that was uncensored. And courting disaster for the uninitiated was a series of cartoons, single panel cartoons that I used to do for a newspaper that accompanied a sex advice column.

So of course, it had to be newspaper friendly. It had to be PG 13 at best. And so and Scott Kurtz always got to tease me that was the best sex comics with no sex in it. That's true.

So so I'm like, okay, here's a courting disaster with actual nudity and so forth. And and I had done that and one four panel strip that I just posted as a proof of con proof of concept in March of 2015. And my patreon, which had stagnated at a certain level for seven months prior, tripled by the end of the month. That's that's numbers.

You can't deny. I can figure it out. What happens? Even I can be like, Oh, I see what's going on here.

This is the end and that's become my phrase when I'm talking about patreon. Now I found the thing that my readers were willing to pay for. Yeah. And I think that's the key to success and patreon.

And it doesn't necessarily mean not safe for work stuff, but it does mean finding the thing that your readers are willing to pay for. And I think that's gonna be a different thing for every person. Yeah. For me, it was not safe for work comics.

And by the next month, I said, screw this, doing it once a month yet. Let's do this once a week. And at that month, that number that had settled in three times the previous, that number doubled by the end of that month. So it became a one-upsmanship between myself and my readers.

I said, okay, you like that? How about a full page instead of four panels? How about we do a full page? They loved it.

That turned into stories, which is now what's being collected into the book. That turned into stories that get updated exclusively on patreon. They've got the exclusive content there. My readers have the first look at all that stuff.

No one else can see it. And that turned into that. I started doing disaster. I started doing those more frequently.

And then I threw it open to Commissioned Illustrations, which is gonna be the third book that's being kick-started as this package. I put up a commission's list and they would purchase commissions at a discounted rate through Patreon because at the end of the day, I was gonna turn around and use that commission illustration as more Patreon content to get more people in the town. So it turned into this, every month, we were adding something new and adding something new. And by 2016, I had gotten to the point where I was making, on average, one exclusive Patreon post a day.

Wow. For every month. Now, not all those were not safe for work. Some of those re-link stuff and collections and stuff like that.

But I stepped up my Patreon game so much that now, and there's very few, I think there's one month in there that was an off month. And actually March was tough because we had Emerald City, I saw you out there. Yep. I fell way behind doing that.

But we poured it on and I will be announcing probably in Thursday's blog the numbers. But once again, we'll be able to say that we've had, on average, one post a day for March. Wow. It's hard to conceive of when you consider the original workflow and the original way in which you produced your content.

Do you find that you're feeling it? Do you feel like, wow, I didn't expect to have to work this much? Or do you find that you're just kind of enjoying it and you're kind of in it? No.

I love it. See, here's what happened after doing this. It actually kind of all gelled at the same time because I've been doing this for 16, 17 years. February was, would have been the 17th anniversary.

And I've been doing a comic strip for 16 of those years. I kind of shifted over in 2016 and started creating my comic as a graphic novel and updating it in half page bursts. It's very similar to like table Titans and drive and so forth. And that was a nice challenge and that was felt really good.

But what I've actually found is that not safe for work comics is the biggest challenge really that I've had yet. It has an all around channel. Writing humor is number one. Writing humor is the number one challenge.

It'll never get boring. It'll never get easy. It's indisputable. Yes.

What I've found for me is a close second is doing adult comics because it's the whole package, the whole enchilada. You've not only got to be able to draw really well because as I found out very quickly, you're not good at anatomy and you've got two people and things aren't lining up. Those scenes don't make any sense. So I had to up my anatomy game really quick.

I had to become a much better artist than I was before. The same old combinations get very boring very quickly when you're talking about concepts and the writing. Peanuts vagina, peanuts vagina, vagina penis, penis penis. There you go.

You've got to find something interesting to do with that or it's going to get boring really quickly. So as a writer that became a real challenge. Are you, do you find that you have to compete directly with that larger market? I use my own example just to kind of, because that's, I'm an expert in my own examples.

Thinking about how like when you make content that is very specifically geared towards a niche, right, you are competing with your niche. But when you find that you're making content that while it is geared towards your niche, you're not making the kind of content that is directly competing with your perceived peers. You find yourself in a larger pool and competing with those who you didn't think you were competing with. I'm really round about getting to.

Do you find yourself competing slash jockeying for attention slash readers and viewers and eyes with the larger NSFW community as opposed to with your own comic peers? That's a great question. I've got two answers for you. There's two things that immediately come to mind.

Number one, am I competing with Pornhub? Not necessarily. But, and this was, this may have changed, but last year they released one of those, and they've been doing this a lot. What were the top search engine search strings that got put into Pornhub?

Adult cartoons was number one in one of their categories or for one of their strata. Cartoon's is one of the things that's being looked at. I'd like to think that Pornhub is competing with me. Although I think if we traded paychecks, I think it might be a little bit on top.

But, do I think that I'm competing with them? No, I don't think I'm competing with them at all. You know who, if there's any competition to be had, it's like internal, it's like I see other people who do adult comics, and I want to try and do this as good as they do. Real Folio, number one.

For me, he's the gold standard, his series called Xenophile with three X's. You can still find it. And fantastic sci-fi, smart, absolutely fabulous stuff. And just playful, happy sex.

It was really, there was a joy behind his writing. I try to channel that as much as I can. My readers will let you know if I'm being successful or not. But it's a constant challenge.

Spike Trautman, right from Iron Circus Comics. She's doing phenomenal things. I actually got a chance to walk up to her face, but I think that she's amazing. The things that she's done with adult comics has been really inspiring.

And the list, in fact, I'm following some of these guys on Twitter and stuff, and their work inspires me in different ways. There's a whole lot of people that I'm not really competing with, but I mentally use them to set the bar. Right on. That's great.

Here's the second answer. Okay. And it's weird because it hit me just the other day. The National Cartoon Society came out with their list of top five, mainly syndicated.

I think all five of them are syndicated. A syndicated cartoonist that are up for the Cartoonist of the Year award. Okay. You may not know it.

If you don't know me well, I'm kind of competitive. I'll be honest with you. I'll bear my soul. Every time the eisner's are announced, the Harvey's are announced, the cartoonist of the year, there's a little part of me, a little part that's like, damn it, they missed me again.

There's always that and I'll admit to that. I have that inside me. It's like, God, how come I'm not on that list? And to be honest with you, the one time I made the list for the eisner's, my first thought was, it was for fables, which is PHABLES.

And who is it? Bill Willingham's comic fables, FABLES. I was convinced that they had just chosen the wrong fables. Like I misspell it.

So I couldn't even let myself have that. But here's the thing. I am free. What I realized just the other day is I'm free from that because I kind of know that I'm doing the kind of comics that is very good for putting food on the table, very good for running a successful Kickstarter.

But this is not the kind of work that is ever going to get an award. No, that's fair. I'm going to get an award for this stuff. And I kind of realized that I made peace with it long before that I had to become conscious because I saw that list.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, these guys are all really good. And I didn't have that initial rush of jealousy because I'm like, nah, you know what? The thing I'm doing now, it's great. And I love it.

And I don't think that sex is something that we should be ashamed of. I think doing a sex comic is every bit as valid as doing a comic that has blood and guts and violence. In fact, to be honest with you, I kind of like the choice I made. I like people make each other feel very much better than people in a blood and guts kind of comic.

So no, I don't think there's anything to be ashamed of. But let's face it, we know the reality is that this is never going to be award-winning stuff. I'm not going to be up there accepting the Eisner Award for even like after dark. And that's OK.

Yeah, I mean, awkward speech to give anyway. Sure. I've noticed that you do you feel that you've kind of been studying trend or do you feel like you've kind of just been like you are acknowledging the future? I've seen that a couple of your peers have also kind of followed suit with this idea of taking their originally not to say for a comic and then giving people an alternative version of their property.

I'm thinking of a short pack, for example. Do you take that as an indication of things to come or do you think it's more just like, well, yes, stupid. Look at how good we're doing here. Well, I think to be honest with you, I think short packed was on the train law before I was.

But it's hard for me to say that. It's hard for me to really say because it's OK, I'll liken it to this. If you've ever been car shopping and all of a sudden you decide, you know what I kind of want is a Mazda 5. And then you're driving the next day and all you see on the road is Mazda 5.

It's kind of like that. I really didn't give this kind of work a whole lot of attention before. I mean, I knew what Josh Lesnick was doing with the origimania because I had roots that go back to with him back to Keene Spot in early 2000s. So I was familiar with what he was doing.

But it wasn't something that was really on my radar. And now that I'm doing it and my ears are kind of to the ground on this, I'm seeing it happen a lot. Is that a cause and effect? I don't know.

I think it's kind of that I'm going to buy a car. Yeah, Josh. I have a question regarding Patreon because we have a Patreon as well. And it's just not necessarily really what's tangential related only because Patreon was the impetus behind it.

Patreon is the kickstarter of itself that kind of made this whole thing happen. As an online business person, how much we make has always been a closely regarded secret? It's something that we really don't like to showcase or talk about. And it's something that as Americans we really kind of keep very close to the chest.

Patreon does not care about that at all. And they are completely open with what you say, how much you are making. And it's right there on the front edge. It's kind of like it's not unlike comparing measurements.

Yes, exactly. So when that, okay, when you realized that that was a thing you couldn't make go away, how reticent were you to the idea of Patreon and how quickly did you get over it? Two things. Number one, I'm happy to announce that Patreon has since made it possible for you to hide your measurements.

No, if you do hide your measurements, now it looks bad. Right. Yeah, it does. I was wondering whether I was the only person that felt that way.

But yeah, I'm always a little suspicious. So here's the deal. My words to you are embracing it, okay? Because what I found out very quickly is that I used that number, that public facing number as a promotion point.

That's a marketing point for me. And much like Kickstarter, when I was starting out, I would do social media announcements. That would say stuff like, hey, we're getting close to 2000, we're getting close to 2500, where I would start milestoneing that thing. And what started to happen, I found out, and it's very palpable.

Once you start to get up to 1000, 2000, and so forth, what happens is that nothing succeeds like success, kind of the higher that number goes, that is a testament to the quality of the stuff that's inside. Yeah. People are much more likely to sign on to a $1000 Patreon than they are a $25 Patreon. True.

I'm not going to lose that number. I keep that number public for the very sheer reason that it's good marketing. It speaks to the fact that a lot of people have seen this, they've stayed with it month after month. Some of them, and here's something that we also need to talk about because I want my Patreon backers to hear this as well.

And yours. Some of them come and go and come back, right? Yeah. The big mistake I see a lot of people making with Patreon is that they expect that patronage to be a constant, that someone's going to sign up and they're going to stay.

And that doesn't happen that way. You know from your own life, you don't know that that's true. You like ample subscriptions that way. So I'd expect your patrons to.

I want my patrons to feel free to jump out when they want to and know that I'm always happy to see them coming back when they come back. That's all part of the deal. I don't get upset when I see them go. And I am thrilled to announce that because I'm a little bit obsessive.

I check this stuff every day. I have a very good rate of seeing those people come back after a couple months time and time again. And I think that that is a universal with Patreon. I think you're going to see the same thing.

When people leave, you know, sorry to see you leave, but I'm also going to be happy to see you come back. I mean, and most of the time, at least in my experience, the folk that leave usually leave because they're like money got tight. Like, you know, I have to do this one. Like, we're safe enough for this or I've got it.

You know, it's never like I am dissatisfied with your content. I'm happy with the rewards. And it's true in general. I mean, it's like any other relationship.

This is this falls directly under. It's not you. It's me. Yeah.

And if you look at your patron, if you look at your patron exit surveys, you'll see that that that holds out every now and again. You see somebody who might maybe had expectations that you didn't meet for whatever reason. Maybe they were realistic expectations. Maybe they weren't.

But expectations weren't met. All right. Well, that's something you got to learn from and try to improve in some way in the future. But nine chances out of 10, it's about the patron.

It's not about you. Fair enough. It's like, don't feel bad sound. All right.

No, I'm very curious about this whole world because I was really reticent to join Patreon because on one hand, it meant more production out of us. And on the other hand, it also was like, for me, when it first came on the scene, and this was not too long ago, but still long enough ago where it feels like I'm a funny guy for complaining about it or for being suspicious of it. It was who is going to, or how audacious of me to expect my viewers to pay for my content, which feels like, and it's why we're here, it feels like the old model of web comics where it's like, well, I have to give away my most well-regarded property that I put lots of time, effort, and energy and talent into. And I have to give it away for free otherwise they won't come.

Right. Right. It's an amazing sea change that happened right around, I place it around 2013, 2014. But I'll go even further back than that.

I tell this story quite often. In 2010, I took Web Comics.com from a free site to a subscription site. Yeah. And the subscription broke down to about $2.50 a month.

People were furious. People were up in arms ready to kill. And that was a tough storm that I kind of weathered. And all because I was asking a subscription for this thing, then I was putting a significant amount of time in.

What happened between then and now? Amazon, Apple, and a couple other significant players made it cool to pay $2.50 a month. Small amounts of money for things. Right.

The iTunes Store gave you those 99 cent MP3s. Amazon, Christ, one click shopping. You don't even bother to put your credit card in. Back in the day when we started the idea of getting somebody to put the credit card number into your website was like, are you kidding me?

You might as well just drive my bank account over to your house and dump it in. It was crazy. Now we're so used to it. Think about all the things that you've not number one not only bought online, but all the subscriptions that you have that you handle online.

Whether it's Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Bitbot, Beep. It makes sense. It makes complete sense. It's just giving people the convenience and the accessibility is key.

And now we've come around from those web cartoonists that wrote in and pissed off the syndicated cartoonists and is like, oh, man, this is how we're doing things now. Now we've come full circle. Now we're the ones that are resisting doing that pay model because we're so used to this other thing. But that's where the internet has led us.

Without a doubt, that's where the internet is leading to more and more paid content. I'd look at the number of things that you pay for already. This is just going to be one more thing. Now as far as getting back to topic on not safe work and not safe work comics in general, I've found and when I say I've found, I mean, I have a couple of peers who have dabbled in that world.

Even as far back as I'd say 2005, 2006, my friend of mine who was a very talented artist or at least he was on the cusp of becoming a very talented artist. He was very talented and he was honing his skills and working very hard. He found himself in a position where he was like, I want to do, I want to do cartooning as a business and Marvel and DC aren't paying me to do it. So I'll have to do this for now until they notice me, that kind of thing.

And he was drawing and he threw it out. I think he was on deviantart and he was like, I'll do commissions. And he found that the most consistent commissions that he was getting were not safe work content. Of course.

And at first he was frustrated and kind of annoyed at that idea. And he was like, when are the real commissioners going to show up? Yeah, yeah, when's the real? So when am I going to be painting them on?

Exactly. Well, I think he eventually dropped that mentality because you could not deny the money. But it was funny to say, OK, and I think the bread and butter, I think it's been long enough. There's been enough time where I can describe what the things that he was asking, that people were asking of the drawer.

But it was like female characters, cartic, female anthropomorphic characters that were laying eggs. It had to be that. And that very specific thing. And I'm like, dude, that means that you had one person who has just needed to see these things for many different varieties.

But it's funny that that gave me an insight into a whole world that I had no wonder what I was understanding of and had no real experience interacting with or considering. It was the fact that there is an audience out there that wants to see a specific type of content and they are starving for it. And if they can find someone who will do it on a level that is of professional quality, that will allow it to exist in a world that is as good as their mental projection of it, they will pay through the nose to have it. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And if you can become that guy or that woman, you can do well. Yeah, I've got to be honest with you. I've been very lucky.

Well, I don't want to say lucky because I don't think that there's any, I don't want to shame someone that's got like the egg fat. No, exactly. They do your thing. I'm cool with it.

But I will say this, the commission requests I've gotten have all been very creative, have all been very interesting. I haven't gotten anything that's that far a field at this point. And it's very interesting to note that there is one theme that I do see quite often. And it's the giant theme or the opposite of that, the miniature.

So one of the characters either turns into a giant or gets shrunk down to miniature size. I've seen those requests and to be honest with you, those are kind of fun to draw. Those are a unique perspective challenge, always a unique anatomy challenge. So those are, I'm happy to do those all day long.

But now here's my question for you. Your friend, did he work on deviantart under his own name or did he use a non-deplume? Yes, he used to suit it in the more non-deplume. Oh no, he questioned.

He was, he used an alias. Yeah. Well, see that's kind of interesting because I mean, everybody's got to make it. They make their own decision on that.

But that was the decision that I had to make very early was, okay, am I going to use my name on this or am I going to use a pseudonym? And it was obvious, I had to use my own name for a number of reasons. I mean, there's no way I could do the link after dark and put it under the title of, you know, somebody else like it's going to be. Yeah, yeah, Uncle John Smith.

Well, first of all, you were very distinctive style. I think that if anybody was drawing, you know, mismatch or whatever, doing something illicit, it's like, Brad, we know it's you. You can come up from behind the thicknesses that drives you. Who do you think you're pulling here, man?

Like, what are we doing? But on the other hand, I don't know. Everybody's got to do their thing. I get that.

But I am, let me put it to you this way. I am thrilled when I see more and more people doing not safe for work stuff under their own name. Because again, I don't think that this is something that anybody should be ashamed of. I reject the shame that that is implicit in sex and sexuality.

And I think that it's something, and I don't think it's the career breaker or the career ender that might have been back in the day. Oh, yeah. So these books back here, Secret Identity, look it up on Amazon. It's right there.

Joe Simon, the creator of Superman, did some fantastic erotica back in the day. Now, in his day, you had to work under a pseudonym. But yeah, he did amazing stuff. Let's see.

Oh, I'm sorry. I said Joe Simon. I knew I was getting that wrong. Joe Schuster.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I'm in Schuster, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Somehow I did that. I mean, I'm very happy BDSM stuff.

The guy was great. But in his day, yeah, you had to use a pseudonym because that's why we've got Stan Lee working in comics itself. You had to use a pseudonym. Yeah.

But I'm really happy when I look around now and I see more and more people kind of owning it and saying, yeah, this is what I do. It's all about access and the fact that if Schuster wanted to draw erotica and he was unafraid and unashamed of his work, it would have hurt his career just unquestionably. And even if, and like let's say 2000, like 2002, if Mike Krahulik or Scott Kurtz wanted to draw erotic versions of the character, I think it would have been right. But I think it would have hurt their careers because it was just they were trying to get in and they were trying to get acceptability and they were fighting.

It was like, we have enough to worry about. We have enough uphill battles to fight. Let's not also champion erotic fiction, please. Like, let's start here.

Let's start with just take a look at what else would have happened in 2002. Excuse me. They would have been bounced off of every advertising network. That's right.

Since the name of the game was advertising back then, they would have shot themselves in the foot. The only way they could have made any money is through private commissions. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it wouldn't have been enough of those. And we were not at the point to, you know, we're patron and Kickstarter.

We're going to revolutionize this thing that we do. No. So yeah, it would have been, although I do have to tell you, I spent a good amount of time in Seattle telling Scott that he really ought to consider PvP after dark. Oh my God.

But I don't think he's going to do it any time soon. But the other neat thing was his business manager, Corey Cassoni, when he did a couple of walks around the floor and we're hanging out after the show one night and he says, tell you this brand. One thing I definitely noticed is that you're way ahead of the curve. I go, what do you mean by that?

And he says, there's more and more people doing what you're doing and putting their name on it and just putting it out there. And this is quickly becoming a trend. That's got to go. Yeah.

Well, I take complete and absolute credit for it. Man, it's an interesting and fascinating yet also difficult to discuss world because it's hard to say. Like, okay, let's talk about a rock comics and how that's working out for everybody. And yet, the fascinating world.

And let me tell you this. Let me tell you this. Tara, your co-host, right? Tiffany.

Tiffany. Oh, God. Edit that out. So I don't look like an asshole.

So you guys came up to my table last year. We were at some convention or something. You go, hey, Brad, what's going on? And I go, I'll tell you what's going on.

Patreon is going on. And I start to, and I'm starting to explain, I think for the first time what I was doing with not safe-for-word comics. And I kept looking over at him at her to wait to see if her expression was going to change. Right.

Oh, yeah. And I think the more I looked at her, the more I was making her feel uncomfortable because here's this guy who his eyes keep darting over at me. But at the same time, it's one of those topics that as you, it's very delicate to start talking about it. And you never know who's going to be like, oh, man, that's really cool.

Or who's going to say, ah, you know what, that's not for me. And I feel icky. Yeah. But yeah, I remember distinctly talking to you in Tiffany and kind of watching to see if her reaction was going to change.

And true to her good nature. If she did disapprove, she certainly didn't show it. That's great. Yeah.

And she's in a big bad way. Like, what, the winds are changed. Yeah. Yeah.

And she's like, yeah, right on. You're doing as respectable and a natural, I think, progression from where we were to where we were going. Well, and not only that, but I mean, take a look at the last, easily the last five years of Evil Inc. I kept going up to the line and up to the line and up to the line.

And to the extent of not only cleavage, but sometimes the hand-brush shot, stuff like that. It had been, jokingly enough, I said to one of my readers, it's been pretty much 16 years of foreplay. Next step. It's fair.

Because I had been going right up to the line as much as I could allow myself, especially back when the comic was carried in newspapers. But then when I finally let that die, then I not only have, I allowed myself to go further obviously on Patreon. But if you read the Evil Inc. public strip now, it's much more typical for you to hear a completely different language, a completely different sensibility.

Because I don't think that that was reflecting my readers' sensibilities at the time. That G-rated newspaper stuff. My readers are much more open to me dropping a couple of words like an asshole here or a shit there. If it fits the moment.

And again, for those long-time listeners of Web Comics Weekly, what do we always tell you? Never use those words because you want to cast a wide net. And that's because that was all based on advertising. Now that the world is shifted, it's a whole different ballgame.

I feel completely comfortable dropping a little bit of foul language or going into situations that I would have never, even for the public strip, situations I would have never touched. Because this is a whole different thing we're doing now. It's interesting, I've noticed, because I'm really, really happy that for comics for you specifically that the world has changed or the climate has changed to the point where it went from we have to make this content that is going to be accepted by our perceived betters. And we have to hamstring ourselves and not embrace the openness of the format.

It's for everybody. There's no censor. There's no editor I can make. Whatever I want, for whomever I choose.

And yet I will pigeonhole myself to some degree to make content that I think would appeal to the authority. And now we're in a world where I could always have done that, but now I can actually monetize that. Now you can do that without the negative consequences. Exactly.

I found there's positive consequences for doing that now. I found that interestingly enough with a couple of other mediums, particularly the one that I'm in right now, that in the beginning, the openness was something to be shared, explored, and celebrated. And yet the more, the further along we get, the more, if you express that freedom, the less opportunities are available to you now. Because people are like, well, I can't sell this.

I can't monetize that. I can't add that. How can you expect us to get a sponsor now? Exactly.

I can't sponsor that. I mean, you're literally making shows that appeal to a very specific niche that television is incapable of reaching. And yet I can't get a sponsor in there because you say the F word in it, you know. But now we're here and it's like, but that's the whole point.

The whole point of this format was to explore and to express yourself and to try new things. But we're finding that like, if we had done that in the beginning, we probably would be doing a lot better. Yeah. Maybe that's an interesting thought to experiment.

One thing is for sure, right now is kind of the culmination of a lot of great things for independent artists in general, whether you do music or whatever. We've not only has the delivery system become robust, but I mean, look at us, we're doing a live show right now on YouTube. It doesn't get better than that technologically speaking. And monetization has never been more robust.

We really are kind of living in a great time. That's when I get really nervous when I hear things about net neutrality and stuff like that, because what we've built over the last 17 years is so perfect and so fragile that I really don't want anybody fucking it up. That's true. No, I completely agree with you, man, because that's, yeah, every time that they talk about throttling or data breaches and just wrecking out the whole system, I'm like, you are in direct contrast to progress.

Like, we are trying to develop a whole, people make a living here. You know, it's like, whenever I, whenever I argue with our cable provider, with our, like, my job, I left, I left teaching to do this. And so I do this every day and we have multiple live shows. We have this one.

We have another one that I do with my other colleagues. And it's regularly scheduled and it's a thing we do. And it's a show that brings in a lot of readers or a lot of viewers and a lot of content, a lot of new potential audience when the internet doesn't work properly. You know, when we get a spike or a drop and you can't afford to have that anymore.

And yeah, but the people who run it don't understand that like people make their living off of this. This is where, you know, you call your cable provider and you're like, hey, I can't have outages anymore. You know, like, well, it's okay. Like it's just going to be like a 30 minute thing.

I'm like, 30 minutes is my show, man. 30 minutes. Yeah, 30 minutes is a lifetime, especially if you've got a schedule. Yeah.

But like, and yeah, yeah, it's the most frustrating thing is when people who don't understand your business interfere with it. Right, right. It's bad enough. I mean, believe me, it took me, well, yeah, I left the day job in 2012.

So it took me 12 years to get to a point where I could truly call myself a cartoonist. And then after that, it's so hard to explain to people what you do for a living and that somebody could actually make a living doing this thing that you do. And it's more dicey now than it ever was. But it's even more difficult when the person you're explaining it to is the cable company.

Yeah. That's the biggest mess. Yeah. But there you have it, man.

Any other thoughts and addendums you wanted to make to the topic at hand before we wrap up? Like I said, I think this is a great time to experiment with stuff like that. And that's what I'd really want to underline is that, especially if you're an artist and you're looking at this and you're like, you know, what should I do? I don't think that it's necessarily an ZFW work.

But at the same time, I wouldn't let things like shame and being timid or not being confident to make you stop. I think you should try it, at least for yourself and see where that takes you. It might just, you know, like for me, this opened up an entire avenue that I had never even considered before. And also as a reader, as someone who is a consumer of this kind of stuff, it's like the deviant art example.

Believe me, there is a cartoonist out there. There's a creator out there right now working in your niche. If you think that you're weird, I got news for you. You're not, right?

And you can find somebody doing your thing. That's the beauty of the web. And if this is your starter spistle, then yeah, go out there and find that stuff because it's out there. And then when you do find it, support that guy, support that woman, support that creator that is doing that thing because that's the only way to make sure it sticks around.

And I think that is the future of niche content is direct support for your artist. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a certain way it always was.

But yeah, if you compare just the numbers, just to go a little bit deep baseball with you for a second, on an ad rate, ads were sold on a CPM basis cost per 1,000, the Amazon and the Numera Lab. Everybody thinks it stands for millions. But if you got $1.50 or $2 CPM, you were out dancing in the street. So one reader reading through my entire archive at once maybe generated me, what, three bucks, four bucks, five bucks tops.

If they read everything that I had done, I think I've done like between Greystone and Evil Link and throw in some Corning disaster, I've done $5,000. They generate very little. Now obviously not every one of my readers becomes a Patreon backer. But you can see even the $1 a month, Patreon backers, are not only generating so much more income for me than I had under the ad system, but it starts to become an exponential growth once you start $5 and $10 and even $20 a month backers.

That for me, this has become a far superior revenue generator than advertising ever was. Sorry, it's funny that I was thinking about how the individual creator support system that we live in today and how it's just a direct translation of fandom in general. I think of an example where it's always been there. There are movie directors or cartoonists or artists or musicians who make something and the fans come and they patronize that service and the artist maybe only gets a certain percentage of that page.

And yet you see how fans will follow that creator throughout their career. And now we're at a point where the fan is just saying, it doesn't matter what you make at this point. I just want you to keep making, keep existing because of something you've done in your vast career. So they just provide it.

And it's fascinating to see because it's something, it betrays an inherent goodness in humanity that I didn't think was really there. Well I don't want to disagree with you. I think those people do exist. What I would caution you against.

I wouldn't make a business model after this. Yeah, that's what I mean. And again, I see people making a mistake on Patreon treating it like a tip jar. I think people still expect good quality stuff when they become your patron.

But you're right. There is an element of that where somebody says, you know what I've been reading you for a hundred years now. I'll become a $1 patron just because number one, they kind of reason they're not even going to feel it leaving their bank account. A dollar, that's almost like another user fee that your bank would instill on you.

Except this way you get a good feeling instead of a bad one. But you know, those people do exist. I think that the name at the end of the day, it's always been as it has been and always will be good quality content. That's the name of the game, folks.

Well, Brad, thank you so much for being on this episode of Elle's Works Exchange. We talked about not safe work content and yet I think we had a very safe work conversation. Well, I hope we did. I was very careful.

I didn't want to. We started off the show and I said, yes, this thing has a lot of ins and outs. And I thought, I got to make sure that I don't say stuff like that. Jump on that.

No, I mean, yeah. Well, as long as we continue to maintain our sensibility and our sense of humor, those kinds of jokes are always welcome on here. Oh, good. Guys, check out the description box below this video to go visit Brad Geiger's Kickstarter that's happening right now for the next three days.

That's right. So three days that we are very close to everybody who orders an even like after dark book getting automatically upgraded to a hardcover. So that's really super exciting. I've always wanted to do a hardcover.

So I'm hoping we get that mark. That's exciting, man. Well, check it out. And of course, check out everything that this great gentleman makes.

Everything. Good at Geiger.com to find everything. But check the description directly to check out that Kickstarter. And we'll see you guys later.

This is a bonus episode at Elle's Works Exchange. So we'll see you later today on Tuesday, around 5.36 o'clock for the weekly pull. And of course, on Wednesday for another episode of the Elle's Works Exchange. So long, everybody.