Modern Tales
Shaenon Garrity | |
URL | ModernTales.com (archived) |
---|---|
Launched | March 2, 2002 |
Current status | Discontinued |
Modern Tales was a
In the first four years of Modern Tales' run, its most recent webcomic pages and strips were free, and the site's archives were available by subscription. The website's archives eventually became free to read as well, as
Concept
Working in
The most recent update of each webcomic on Modern Tales was freely available, and readers could pay US$2.95 per month or $29.95 per year to get access to the website's archive.[2]
History
Modern Tales launched on March 2, 2002, with a roster of major emerging artists and cartoonists. Its launch line-up included Lark Pien, Jason Shiga, Jesse Hamm, Gene Luen Yang, James Kochalka, and Dorothy Gambrell. Established heavy hitters like Harvey Pekar and Will Eisner contributed later, but Modern Tales was generally a showcase for new artists.[1] The website grew rapidly in its first week: while Manley predicted his website would accrue around 150 subscribers in its first year, Modern Tales actually earned over 700 subscribers in its first week.[3] Manley attributed this to high cost of bandwidth and the relatively low number of high-quality webcomics available at the time. As time went on and the number of high-quality free webcomics increased, the subscriber count of Modern Tales went stagnant.[4]
By August 2003, Modern Tales' back catalogue featured over 4,000 webcomic pages. The website ran a section, curated by
In January 2006, Manley launched a secondary,
Spin-off sites
Manley spun off several other websites based on Modern Tales' subscription model, including Serializer.net, Girlamatic, AdventureStrips.com and Graphic Smash. Each of these sites had a different editorial focus from that of Modern Tales, such as alternative comics and action comics.[10] Manley also published two single-webcomic subscription sites under the Modern Tales umbrella: Kochalka's American Elf and Lea Hernandez' Rumble Girls. The entire group of subscription sites Manley published were known as the "Modern Tales family."[11] Manley launched the free hosting provider Webcomics Nation in 2005 as he took note of the changing Web economy. Whereas Modern Tales and its family was constructed in the style of traditional editorial magazines, Webcomics Nation was set up more as a service-bureau business.[3]
Closure
As Modern Tales declined in readership, it was shut down in 2012.[1] The remaining family of subscription services closed down in April 2013, and Manley died in November 2013 of pneumonia.[10]
Success and impact
Manley's stated goal when he launched Modern Tales was for subscription revenue alone to provide a living wage for artists within five years, and the services did do solid business.[1] Due to Modern Tales' revenue-sharing model, the most viewed webcomics like Garrity's Narbonic generated the most income and, in the best years, Garrity could have lived solely off her Modern Tales earnings had she lived somewhere less expensive than the San Francisco Bay Area.[11] Six months after the site's launch, Donna Barr was "impressed" that she was regularly making US$100 per month from Modern Tales.[3] Other Modern Tales artists made comparatively little; in 2005, Hernandez described her income from Modern Tales as "gas money", and Dave Roman said he typically made less than US$100 per year on the website.[12] Before his comic was canceled, cartoonist Jason Shiga was able to make US$70 per strip when he was published in a weekly Bay Area newspaper, but he only made US$4 per strip on Modern Tales in 2003.[13] Some artists on Manley's other sites, such as Kochalka with his American Elf, were able to make more money than the most profitable artists on the original Modern Tales site.[11]
Manley said in July 2003 that Modern Tales was attracting between 10,000 and 15,000 individual visitors daily, and that 3,500 people had signed up for a subscription. In an interview with
The Sunday Times of Britain criticized the website in 2006 for its unintuitive homepage and slow page loading.[15]
References
- ^ Garrity, Shaenon (November 15, 2013). "Joey Manley, 1965-2013". The Comics Journal.
- ^ MacDonald, Heidi (December 16, 2005). "Web Comics: Page Clickers to Page Turners". Publishers Weekly.
- ^ a b c d Deppey, Dirk (July 2006). "The Joey Manley Interview". The Comics Journal. Archived from the original on September 29, 2018.
- ^ a b Spurgeon, Tom (November 2, 2007). "Newsmaker Interview: Joey Manley". The Comics Reporter.
- ^ Sharwood, Simon (August 30, 2003). "The rebirth of comics: Comics online". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 5.
- ^ Manley, Joey (March 6, 2004). "Modern Tales Releases First Annual in Full Color". Comix Talk.
- The Comics Reporter. January 2, 2006.
- ^ Manley, Joey (August 1, 2006). "Meet the new new editor of Modern Tales". Talk About Comics. Archived from the original on August 20, 2006.
- The Comics Reporter.
- ^ a b c Melrose, Kevin (November 8, 2013). "Modern Tales founder Joey Manley passes away". Comic Book Resources.
- ^ Garrity, Shaenon (April 18, 2013). "One of Those Things". The Comics Journal.
- Wired.com.
- ^ a b Ho, Patricia Jiayi (July 8, 2003). "Online comic artists don't have to play panel games". Alameda Times-Star (Alameda, CA)
- ^ Venkatesan, Sathyaraj; Yuvan, S. (July 7, 2018). "Panels in Pixels". The Hindu.
- ^ O'Brien, Danny (February 26, 2006). "The tooniverse explodes". The Sunday Times. p. 27[S].
External links
- ModernTales.com, as captured by the Wayback Machine in July 2004 and