Latest Posts

Who am I?
This week, I'm going to try to do something different. Rather than talk about actual comics or the comics industry or any of the usual topics I tend to cover, I'm going to go a bit afield and talk a bit about some of the philosophical tenets I hold. Not necessarily as they relate to comics, just the broad ideas that I just generally follow in life. Chalk it up to my being unusually reflective after the shitshow that's been 2025.

"Who am I?" is one of the most fundamental questions of philosophy. Naturally, there are any number of answers to this depending on your philosophical bent, but a reasonable answer might be: the sum total of my experiences. What makes a person unique is that no one else has done exactly the same things they've done in exactly the same way with exactly the same results. Who I am includes: getting laughed at on the first day of first grade for pulling my pants down around my ankles to pee, breaking my wrist on Thanksgiving when I was 10, trying out for the eighth grade basketball team and being one of only two people to not make the cut, having one of my assigned college roommates in freshman year never show up and another drop out after the first quarter leaving my one remaining roommate and I with a dorm room designed for four people... I could go on and on with everything I've seen, everything I've done, everything I've had done to me. All of that makes up who I am today.

But there's something of a paradox here. Even though I've got all those experiences to make up who I am, they don't define me.

Everything in my past is just that: my past. I can't change any of it. I can't re-experience any of it. It's over. Done. It's no longer relevant. As has been said before, time travel is possible, but only in one direction.

But how can it not be relevant if those same experiences make up who I am? How can that not matter if those experiences shape the person I am today?

That's because I am not just the sum total of my experiences. It's what I choose to do with those experiences, what I choose to take from them make me who I am right now. I have nearly half a century of life experiences now, and I act based on them. And it's those actions that really define me today. From what clothes I choose to put on first thing in the morning to what I tell my boss when he asks me how any given project is going to whether I choose to work out or not to what I choose to read/watch/listen to. Those decisions are informed by my past but they're still new decisions. And in the moment I act on those decisions, that is who I am.

We obviously don't all start at the same point in life, and we certainly don't all wake up each morning with things being completely reset. But every time you get up, you get to choose how to act and react to the day, whatever that looks like. I'm not talking about trying to maintain a positive attitude or anything saccharinely simplisitic like that; sometimes shit just pisses you off. But whatever you wake up with, that's what you've got going forward. Take what you've got here and now, and move on from there. Doesn't matter what you did yesterday or last week or last year. Wherever you are right now, that's your current starting point. You can try to go forward, or not, and whatever progress you make (or don't) sets your starting point for tomorrow, a starting point that you can't move retroactively.

Everything in my life up to this point has shaped me. But who I am depends on what I choose to do right now.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Ziggy's Gift

Kleefeld on Comics: Today's Fandom Behavior Is Not New

Kleefeld on Comics: How Are You Getting Webcomics News These Days?

Kleefeld on Comics: Multiple Publishers IP

Kleefeld on Comics: Where Are the Cut-Out Promos
Back in the day, the number of toys licensed from comics books was paltry (certainly by comparison today) and what was available was often made cheaply. Much of which had to do with the materials that were available -- you couldn't afford to make heavily articulated, plastic action figures. So what happened on occasion was that toys were made out of paper or light cardboard; those were materials that were pretty accessible, fairly cheap, and easy to transport. So you got things like the set of Marvel Family fliers pictured here. A little Tab A/Slot B action, and you've got yourself a Captain Marvel figure that fly around.

The thing I don't get -- and I've been trying to figure this out for a quarter century -- is why creators and/or publishers don't offer things like this as downloads today? Use them as promos for your new comic? A downloadable PDF that can be easily passed around and shared that people can then print out and put together some figures or a small playset or something.

I know Chris Schweizer has done some things along these lines for his Patreon backers, and Brian Fies did one at the conclusion of The Last Mechanical Monster, but I don't recall seeing someone try something like this as a promotional tool. There seem to be plenty of fans who put together custom-designed cubees of comic book characters, so it seems to me there's no real objection to the notion of papercraft or anything.

And while I get that there's some time and effort involved, a company like Marvel or DC literally has this material from years ago sitting in their archives. Back in the '70s, Marvel did a full playset featuring the Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and Peter Parker's apartment. There's the Captain Marvel fliers noted above, and I'm pretty sure both Marvel and DC later had similar versions for other characters.

Maybe it's just me. I think it's a clever, fun way to promote a comic and wouldn't cost anything more than a little time to design. Hell, I designed my own HERBIE the robot back when I ran my old Fantastic Four fan site. My point is that it's not that difficult. Just take a few cues from a half century ago, and put together some new promotional material that no one is else putting out there!
Random question of the the day... what comic has been published by the most number of publishers? As in, what property has been run by the widest variety of publishers discounting foreign editions? (I should probably also discount individual works that are repeatedly re-adapted over and over -- like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.)

A couple of examples spring to mind. ElfQuest started basically as a self-publishing venture. (WaRP Graphics literally stands for Wendy and Richard Pini.) Marvel published it for a while in the 1980s and DC has picked up some rights. Currently, Dark Horse has printed collected editions. Apple Comics and StarBlaze both had the title for a bit in the '80s as well. That's six US publishers who've run the series.

Another that I can think of is Groo. The character debuted under Pacific Comics, and soon after went over to Eclipse. Marvel had the title for a decade, and Image ran with it for a year. Graphitti Designs ran a special, and Dark Horse has printed them most recently, I believe. That's also six. Plus, IDW had an Artist's Edition version -- arguably, that might not count, but it could be a potential tie-breaker.

Interestingly, Star Wars does not have many comics publishers to deal with, despite a more robust publishing history. There's Marvel and Dark Horse, naturally. Blackthorne did a 3-D version in 1987, and Tokyopop did a manga version a couple decades later, but I think that's it.

Star Trek has actually been passed around more. It started at Western Publishing, but later hit Marvel and DC. Malibu had it for a short while in the mid-1990s, and Tokyopop has done manga versions of it as well. It's currently published by IDW.

Tarzan might be a good candidate, just based on the character's longevity. A lot of the major comic publishers have taken turns on the series: Marvel, DC, Dark Horse. Both Dell and Western took their turns. Malibu's and Blackthorn's names pop up again. NBM did some collected editions, and Williams Publishing based some books off Burne Hogarth's newspaper strips. Although technically illegal, Charlton did a short run in the mid-1960s too. That's ten publishers, for those of you keeping score.

What about The Shadow, another long-lived property? Here again we see Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse. Street & Smith did the original run here, though. Archie Comics also took a stab at the character briefly in the 1960s. Dynamite is the current publisher. Six again, it appears.

I'm drawing a blank on who else to check. I know several that have had two or three publishers like Airboy and Bone. There are a few more than float in the five-to-seven-ish range -- a lot of the bigger Disney titles and Conan, for examples. There are some, like Judge Dredd and Tintin, that I wouldn't even count since they didn't originate in the US -- America's versions would be the foreign editions.

So, Tarzan then? Tarzan's had the most publishers of any comic? That's really curious given how notorious the ERB estate has been with licensing the characters. I recall an interview from several years back where Roy Thomas complained a lot about the hoops they had to jump through with Tarzan, both before and after securing the license at Marvel, while Robert E. Howard's Conan was infinitely easier. (Which is partly how Red Sonja came about -- the Howard estate said something to the effect of "New characters? Sure, go ahead! Even if you do retain ownership of them!") But the restrictions of what Thomas could do with Tarzan severely limited his storytelling potential.
Header image of children in a classroom learning about comics
When I started getting into webcomics with any degree of seriousness, it was about 2004. I had known of webcomics before then, but I didn't really start reading any with any regularity until then. I recall thinking at the time that I was coming to the webcomics party exceptionally late. I mean, guys like Scott Kurtz, Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahulik had been working for years at that point and they weren't even really the old guard. It already seemed like a crowded market, and I was thrilled when I could find the occasional webcomic that was JUST getting started.

But what I also noticed at the time was that I was largely on my own when it came to finding webcomic news. None of the usual comics news sites were reporting on webcomics with any regularity. Hardly at all, in fact. So what news I found was generally what was being posted by the webcomikers themselves underneath their latest strip. One of the reasons I started my webcomics column over at MTV Geek was because no one else was reporting on webcomics in any capacity. When MTV Geek shuttered its doors in 2013, though, there was still pretty much nothing else. Gary Tyrrell was doing his webcomics blogging over at Fleen but that was never really been a place for news per se. It's even less significant now, since he's been more or less on hiatus for the last several years, and a brief note from earlier this year about the birth of his son suggests he's not likely to re-start in earnest any time soon.

So when I moved over to FreakSugar, that was still pretty much it as far as anything resembling webcomics news. Brad Guigar has been running a few outlets for webcomics discussions (notably Webcomics.com and ComicLab) but those are generally geared for people making webcomics. News there is very much geared to an audience that is NOT a typical comics reader. Tom Spurgeon would occasionally post something he came across on social media, but those were very much a small part of his focus before he passed away. When my FreakSugar contributions fell to the wayside, though, and my former Comics Alternative podcast co-host passing away in 2019, I didn't see much else beyond what I could scrape from individual creators' social media feeds.

In the past five years, we've seen a significant rise in more corporate efforts at webcomics, most notably with Webtoon specifically. That has come with some news coverage on more 'traditional' comics news outlets like The Beat or CBR. (As a curious aside, though, a search for "webcomic" on The Beat turns up exactly one article from 2025 and only two from 2024, but a similar search on "Webtoon" returns 22 results from 2025 alone, most of which cover various business agreements of the company.)

So, for me, here in 2025, most of my news about webcomics still comes from the creators themselves. Either creators I'm directly following, or from mutuals who re-share something from the creators. Pretty much exactly the same way I was getting webcomics news two decades ago. Well, back then, it was the creators' notes and subsequent forum discussions on their own websites instead of social media, but social media wasn't really a thing in 2004. (MySpace had only just launched in 2003.) So in twenty years, we've got a slight platform migration, but no real substantive change.

So what am I missing? Is there still no good source of webcomic news? Are readers still relying primarily on the creators themselves to let them know what's news? How are you learning about webcomics now?
Over the weekend, I came across this post on LinkedIn, referring to a recent quote by one of TikTok's brand managers...
Dr. Carroll is right, of course. Even just a cursory knowledge of fandoms highlights this. Honestly, even if you don't study fandoms at all, did you not see news of late night release parties for every one of the Harry Potter books? Did you not see coverage of all those "weirdos" who dress up in costumes and travel to San Diego every year? Are you completely unaware of fantasy football leagues?

I did think, "OK, maybe I'm taking that one statement from Dean out of context." It's part of a larger article, after all. But when I went back to read the original piece, I saw that Dean is also quoted as saying, "We are already seeing broadcasters and streamers provide quick and easy access to data — ball-tracking, player speeds, distance travelled."

Yes, because box scores in baseball haven't been a thing since 1859! Because announcers never mentioned every player's key stats when they came up to bat. Because the back of every baseball card doesn't have any metrics on it. Because fans wouldn't sit with notepads in stadiums and update that information for themselves in real time during games! Yes, those stats are available more quickly and easily to a general population that doesn't pay close attention to every game than they used to be, but for the types of people we would generally call "fans," they've been doing exactly this for over a century!

I don't mention this to call out Dean specifically. I don't know him at all, nor have I ever had even the remotest interest in TikTok as a platform. But this is ultimately the problem with the vast majority of corporations that own/manage brands have trouble with: the people they generally have working at that level aren't fans. And I don't mean they're not fans of that particular brand that they're trying to promote, but they're not fans of anything!

The specifics are different from baseball fans to comic book fans to Star Trek fans, but the root passion of it is all the same. You don't have to understand why an individual loves a particular Lord of the Rings character, but it's not hard to relate if you say they love them in the same way you might love your favorite football player. But if you don't have that type of passion for anything, then you get comments like Dean's, which show a complete obliviousness to the idea. Which is maybe fine if your job is the accounting department or in production or something, but not having a base level understanding when your job is engage -- either directly or indirectly -- with the folks using your product or service seems to me like a massive failure.
Ziggy has been a staple of newspapers since 1971. Created in 1968 by Tom Wilson while working at American Greetings, Wilson turned the strip over to his son Tom Wilson II in 1987. Ziggy's first foray into animation was actual part of an interview that Wilson did on The Today Show on April 22, 1981. I can't seem to find a clip of the segment, but after Wilson talked with Gene Shalit for a bit, Shalit turned his attention to an easel with an animated Ziggy who, among other things, denied rumors of his dating Miss Piggy.

While the overall segment was to promote Wilson's new book, Ziggy Faces Life, it was also likely a test for animating the character because the following year saw the broadcast of Ziggy's Gift, an animated holiday special that first aired on this day in 1982. I can't find much in the way of production details, but a half-hour special like that probably took the better part of a year to make so the animation sequence on The Today Show was likely part of a trial of some sort. Seeing how well the character could be animated or how audiences responded or something. The most directly obvious impact it had was that Ziggy's Gift has the main character remain mute because evidently a number of people wrote in to complain that the voice used on The Today Show didn't remotely match people's expectations of what Ziggy "should" sound like. Since I can't find an actual clip of the sequence, I don't know what he actually sounded like, and I can't even seem to find who provided the voice. But it was enough to reinforce the idea Wilson already had -- that providing Ziggy with a speaking voice would never satisfy everyone, regardless of who the character.

In any event, Ziggy's Gift went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program and was broadcast again in 1983. However, despite being very well-received, it was only re-broadcast for a couple years. It was released on DVD in 2004 (the copy on the back of the box suggests it hadn't aired at all after 1984) and it is not currently available on any streaming platforms. So to fill that gap on the anniversary of its first airing, here is Ziggy's Gift...