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Commentator: Today I'd like to introduce my friend, Bill Barnes. Yesterday was the eighth
anniversary of his comic strip Unshelved about libraries. He has many books out about this
comic strip.
And five months ago Bill started a comic strip about the software industry. It takes a special
kind of person to understand his snarky one-liners and he's lucky to have found me because I'm
of his friends who does. I find him delightful.
Please help me welcome Bill Barnes as he presents "Cartooning In the 21st Century."
[applause]
Bill Barnes: Oh, thank you.
Kathy's been doing Toastmasters, so she's got, she's got the handshake. You always start
with a handshake and you end with a handshake.
[laughter]
I was a little nervous today because I quit my job in the software industry a little over
two years ago to do cartooning finally full-time, and it's sort of like when you, when you leave
high school and you go to college and you come back to high school, it's both sort of
exciting but a little nervous. Like how do I fit in? Am I cool? Am I not cool? And I
was worried about fitting in and then I realized that I'm overweight, I have a beard, I own
a recumbent bicycle and I was up all night putting up my Website. So I do actually feel
like I, I fit in here.
[laughter]
So do we have, let's see, developers here? Developers? Do we have any testers? One tester.
Marketers? Even marketers. Do you guys have program managers? No.
What do you, so are, anyone, anyone ex-Microsoft people? And so what, what is the sort of Google
equivalent to program managers here?
>>voice in audience: They work at Microsoft.
They're all the, they're all the ranks of middle managers at Microsoft. I completely
understand.
So today I thought we would talk about comics. I'm gonna talk about what are comics?
[pause - writing on board]
And where do they come from?
[pause - writing on board]
Where do they come from?
I'm
just more comfortable with a marker in my hand.
[pause - writing on board]
And then I'll do a little bit of history of why I do comics and the comics I've done specifically
[pause - writing on board]
-
Unshelved and now Not Invented Here; which is so long that it's just doomed to be abbreviated.
So what are comics? Anybody?
What is a comic? Someone define comic for me.
[pause]
By the way if you're not here this room is completely packed.
[laughter]
>>voice in audience: It's a very, very short graphic novel.
>>Bill Barnes: A very short graphic novel which, so now you have a recursive definition
thing going on, right?
>>voice in audience: A sequential visual narrative.
>>Bill Barnes: A sequential visual narrative, nice.
[laughter]
Will Eisner called them sequential art, which is very compact. And Scott McCloud in his
book "Understanding Comics", and this is always a mouthful and I have to look it up "juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or produce
an aesthetic response from the reader."
I think it is sometimes helpful to talk about what comics aren't. They aren't books.
[pause - writing on board]
They aren't movies.
[pause - writing on board]
Although I think people often confuse them with animation. And they aren't pictures.
They aren't just pictures anyway.
[pause - writing on board]
So, so they're pictures arranged in sequence and I think that's what everybody kind of
agrees on. You can have one panel comics, things always exist on the periphery whatever
definition you get this leaky abstraction problem with comics.
But they, they're in sequence and what I love about comics and one of the reasons I do them,
is this thing about what happens between this first panel and the second panel.
In the first panel somebody answers the phone they say, "What's that you hear? The bank
is being robbed?" And the next panel Superman is sort of flying off into space.
And your brain knows what to do, your brain knows how to connect those two things. But
it's your brain doing the connection and so you make a very personal, you, you inject
your own personal experience of what exactly happened in between those, those two panels.
I think we, we also see this, it's sort of a cut, right like in movies? In the old, in
the old movies, days of movies in the original movies you had situations where somebody'd
be like, "What's that? You hear the bank is being robbed?" And they'd put down the phone,
they'd walk over and he'd take off his shirt and they would cut away so you didn't have
to see him getting undressed, but then you'd get back and now he'd have this thing on and
you'd see him opening the window, jumping out, flying through space, and then finally
landing at the bank.
Over time movie makers have learned to make that more economical, and they've shortened
it and shortened it and shortened it, until eventually now it is kind of that thing, "What's
that? You hear the bank's being robbed." And the next thing you see him landing and your
brain fills it in.
Comics do that same thing. They're actually all about the cut and all about the stuff
that happens in between. One of the big advantages of, of comics over movies is they're a lot
cheaper to make.
And so one, one of the reasons you see a lot of comics being made into movies is that in
a way they are a ready-made storyboard. Right? Here, we've just laid it all out for you,
at very low cost of what it's gonna look like.
And so, in fact a lot of movie makers go back into comics because it allows them to like,
Joss Whedon has been doing Buffy Season 8, because it allows him to do a lot of stuff
that he actually could never have done, he would never have had the budget to do, very
easily because he just draws pictures.
So they're a little bit more than pictures; they're different than books, and I love books;
I'm a huge book reader, but neurologically you have a very different experience of comics
versus books.
Obviously with, with books there's descriptions of things and with comics they are just being
laid out for you. But even there there's kind of a continuum. And so you could describe
a tall, dark haired gentleman walked in, in a book and you think, you picture a tall dark
haired gentleman, whoever that person is in your head.
In a comic that can take lots of forms, it can be, obviously you can make him tall, but
it could be as simple as that. We were having a little talk at lunch about xkcd where really
you can't get even simpler than that.
Right? There's your tark, tall, dark haired gentleman and now you can project on that
whatever you want. Whatever that tall dark haired gentleman is. And the more detail you
add, it starts changing it. Oh, okay, well it's not that guy that I was thinking of.
It's somebody else; he looks something like that.
And so for me comics are a nice medium in, in the expressive thing. They're a very shorthand
way of doing stuff. I don't have to say the tark, tall dark haired gentleman, I can just
draw him.
And, there're actually have met people who cannot read comics, neurologically the juxtaposition
of the words and the pictures are too much for them. And their, their brains sort of
short circuit and they can't do it.
For me it's almost a perfect thing. I actually get a little tired of reading all those words
after awhile and so for me having a little combination works.
But it also works with my sense of humor. There's some people who really wanna tell
a long story, and you can do that obviously with comics. I really just wanna make a joke.
If I could just go through my whole life cracking short jokes, I would do that, and so the comic
strip is, is the perfect medium for that for me.
[pause]
Comics started - anyone familiar with "The Yellow Kid?"
[pause]
The Yellow Kid was sort of the first popular comic strip. He looked not dissimilar to this.
I used to, I, I, well sometimes do pictures but I know this is gonna go up on YouTube.
And I didn't want to use any copyrighted images.
Yellow Kid in the late 1800's, in the New York, what was it? The New York World, Pulitzer's
New York, New York World, there was a comic strip called Hogan Valley and one of the characters
was known as the Yellow Kid. It was just a little kid, he was like six or eight, and
he wore this night shirt, a yellow night shirt and he never spoke, but words appeared on
his night shirt to tell his story.
He became hugely popular. There were literally Broadway musicals, a whole line of merchandise,
actually a whiskey with the Yellow Kid on it.
[laughter]
And he became so popular that Hearst who ran one of the competing newspapers in New York,
the, I have to look it up, The New York Journal American, hired the guy to come over and do
The Yellow Kid in his newspaper to compete; which he did.
But it turned out the man who, who wrote Yellow Kid owned the copyright to it so he just hired
someone to write Yellow Kid for the newspaper he had been working at. So The Yellow Kid
actually ran in both newspapers for several years.
And it was a this, a big circulation war; they were trying to get people to read this
incredibly popular character who today I think we would look at and it's hard to find out
what's funny about it at all. But in the time it was a big deal.
And that, that, became, those became known as the "Yellow Kid papers" and eventually
the yellow papers and that whole competition between the two and the things they would
do to get circulation is now known as yellow journalism because of The Yellow Kid.
There were comic strips before The Yellow Kid, but I think he kind of made it big and
showed what everybody could do and it was followed by Little Nemo in Slumberland and
Little Orphan Annie and, and some comics that we've even heard of today.
And somebody had the smart idea that if you took the newspapers that they're printed in;
print a lot of newspapers on 'em; fold 'em over twice, and then slice down the edge,
you could actually make a book of these comics. And that's the comic book. And that's where
that word comes from.
They're called comics because of course they were originally humorous, but rapidly what
happened is people started telling different types of stories. Instead of just collections
of comic strips in newspapers, they started having more original material.
Instead of comic stuff, you, you had an explosion of genres. You had nurse comics, romance comics,
war comics, and eventually superhero comics, when Superman came out.
Then in the '50's, and this is, this is fine, so actually America had a very burgeoning
comics industry; so did Europe; so did Japan. It was very popular. Then in the '50's a guy
named Fredric Wertham came along and he revealed that comics cause juvenile delinquency.
[laughter]
Which we know now is caused by video games, but they didn't know that then so -
[laughter]
And what happened was, there was this big freeze; there was a big Senate sub-committee
on juvenile delinquency; he told everybody this and oh my gosh, they imposed a thing
called the Comics Code which was a self-imposed, self-censorship of the comics industry and,
and from that point on there was a huge freeze and really the only thing left in comics after
this happened was the cleanest possible stuff, which was superheroes, characters of high
moral standing people, and Richey Rich and Archie and Veronica.
And that's why for a long time comics were just for kids. And if you think about it logically,
essentially what Fredric Wertham said is he started off assuming, he said, "Comics are
for kids. But look there's all these comics that are written for adults and kids are reading
them and it's bad for them. So let's get rid of these comics for adults and then comics
will just be for kids."
So he, he did a nice little chronological loop and it ended up back with what he wanted
which was for comics to be just for kids. So sadly this, this very flexible medium really
was confined for a long time to just kid stuff.
Over in Europe, over in Japan comics are for everybody. Literally read by all ages, all
sorts of genres. On the subway in, in Tokyo you have businessmen reading businessmen comics
or war comics or whatever. They're just another medium.
Finally after a while that started coming back into American comics. In the '80's especially
the rise of the graphic novel kind of legitimized it and now we have a, also influx of manga
from Japan, comics from Europe and it, it's kind of starting to go back to what it could
have been.
[pause]
And even the term graphic novel is kind of a misnomer. It's not always a novel; it's
not always fiction, but nobody has come up with a better word for it.
And what happened to comic strips? Which is sort of started all this. Well they stayed
in newspapers. And as there are fewer and fewer newspapers and the newspapers got smaller,
comics stopped being a thing they could use to expand circulation.
They became just a thing that the people would read, I think people still like reading comics
in the papers, but there's probably very few people who would choose a paper over another
paper because of the comics it had. And increasingly, of course, there's really
just one paper to choose from, so it doesn't really matter.
And comics, newspapers are primarily read by older people, because young people would
be like, "Why would I do that when I can just go to the Internet and read news?"
So you get this self-fulfilling prophesy: newspapers are for old people, the comics
in them are for old people; and so they're, they're old.
If you look at comics in newspapers these days with very few exceptions they're, they're
very hackneyed, they're, it's Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, and there's a few new things,
but for, primarily newspapers are trying to retain their older audience, and they're desperate
to hang on to them.
And so that's how comics have moved to the Web. And so now anyone can do a comic, I mean
that's the magical Web thing that varied entry is basically zero.
Everybody has comics on the Internet. Really tens of thousands of them, and there are some
really bad ones, because anybody can do it. And so any nine-year-old can do it.
Kathy has a 12 year old who's, who's working on doing, her's are, are very good, they're
much better than most of the stuff on the Internet.
[laughter]
I -
[pause]
I thought we ought to talk about this now. Yeah, so I was, I was, I often will like look
at comics on the Internet and just be, just be amazed. I mean it's sort of, it's sort
of sweet and it's sort of sad what people put up there and think is really funny and
it's just incredibly wordy and the punch line is lost and it, just takes some time, right,
to learn how to do this.
And the other day I was going through my own personal archives and I found the first few
comic strips that I started writing when, when as an adult I started delving back into
comics, writing comic strips again.
And it was, it was every inch the really bad beginner Internet column. That was just eight
years ago, right? So practice makes better. I was just really struck by, "Oh well. I,
I had nothin' on them."
[laughter]
[pause]
A lot of times when people find out I do a comic strip on the Web, they ask me why, why
it's not more webby. Like why isn't it, why doesn't it have animation in it? I'm like,
"'Cause then it would be an animation, right? And I'm doing a comic strip."
I think one of the promises or at least one of the theoretical promises of the Web when
it comes to comic strips is you can kind of get rid of all the shackles and constraints
of newspapers; they had, newspapers they wanted all the comic strips to be a certain format
so they can line 'em up on the page. Well that's not really a problem if you have a
Website. It can be color now.
These days some newspapers have color comic strips, but for the most part they're still
black and white. They can be color, they can come out as frequently as you want. You could
do them three times a day, you could do 'em three times a week, three times a month; whatever
you want 'cause you don't have a daily cycle of the newspaper.
And what's interesting is that most of comic strips, most of the popular comic strips on
the web look a lot like comics you would find in the newspaper. Generally they're color,
that's probably the one big change and they might be a different shape. They might be
more square than they are panels, but they're, they're everyday or several times a week.
It, they are strongly resembling, it would be not out of place to put 'em in a, in a
newspaper although the language might be a lot stronger than you find in a newspaper.
I know the Penny Arcade guys were here a week or two ago, and so that, that doesn't really
belong in a newspaper, but visually there's not that much different.
And for me all I can say is I think that literally like a century's worth of development of the
comic art resulted in a vehicle that is, that is ideal for communicating small bits of story
and/or humor in a very natural way. There's just something about getting something every
day, having it be a certain size - I can't draw too much, I mean I can't have this thing
be enormous and delivered everyday, that would be too much work - so it's actually how much
work I can produce in a day, and also how much you can absorb in a day, and how, and
how much frequency - there's something very natural about that rhythm.
So even though newspapers may sort of being going away and the rhythm of newspapers may
be going away, I think that will survive.
[pause]
So that's why I make comics. They're, they're my sense of humor, they're the way I tell
stories.
I thought I would talk a little bit about kind of my personal journey and, and it's
interesting to see comics attract all sorts of people.
I started off as a kid; I read a lot of comics, I read sci-fi, fantasy, blah, blah, blah,
but I don't think I ever would have been a person who made them.
But when I was eight my family up and moved overseas; we moved to Nigeria where we got
essentially in this little armed camp because it was a dangerous place to live. So my house
had this huge fence around it with guards, and me and my sisters were kind of stuck at
home at lot and we burned through all the media we had; it was hard to get new media;
this was in the '80s and, and really there was one TV channel that had government sponsored
thing. They also had the Brady Bunch and Star Trek, which if I had to pick two shows to
have, those would have been them.
[laughter]
But even so my media was limited.
So we started making stuff. We started making our own stuff. It was very kind of Little
House on the Prairie. We're all sittin' around, I guess we'll like have to write our own stuff.
It wasn't Little House on the Prairie in lots other ways, but in that way it was.
[laughter]
And so my sister and I started making our own comics. In the beginning they were incredibly
derivative, like I would read The Avengers and I'd write a new comic and I called it
The Avengers.
[laughter]
But it had slightly different characters and it kind of went, well that's how you do it,
you, you take something, modify it a little bit and make it your own.
So after living there a couple of years I came back to the States and I started publishing
my own comic books. So I was at this point 10 or 11 and I would write and draw them myself
and then I started advertising in the back of comic collector magazines and sort of newsletters,
"Buy my comic book." And people did; I mean amazingly. I could say almost nothing about
it. I'd be like, "Buy it." And they go, "Okay," and they'd send me five bucks and I'd send
them a, a comic, which I would photocopy in my Dad's office.
[laughter]
And then I said, "Wait. I can, I can, I can move myself up the food chain." So then I
said, "You know what I need? I need, I need writers and artists for this comic book."
And amazingly people would send me stuff and they would, I would send all scripts and they'd
send me back these huge beautiful pieces of art that were nothing I could do, and I would
publish those on my Dad's Xerox machine in his office, and sell those. And eventually
at a, at an actual photocopy place. And I did that for a few years and that was super
fun.
But creatively I kept moving back towards the comic strip thing because the superhero
thing was kind of fun, but they weren't actually again the stories that I wanted to tell that
really moved me. I wanted to do much simpler stuff.
It turned out what I really ended up doing that, that when I look back today is the most
me, was a comic strip about my dog. My dog's name was Barnabas, after the character in
the Dark Shadows, the vampire.
And it was a comic strip called Barnabus The Wonder Dog and it was really just about him
and my family and our adventures, sort of slightly fictionalized. And I had the most
fun doing that stuff. And so I did that for years through high school. Sometimes I would
print it out for other people to see and sometimes I would just do it on my own.
And when I went to college and then around this time I started discovering computers
and so I had this, "What am I going to do?" especially going off to college, what are
you gonna do?
And I had to decide did I wanna do computers or did I wanna do art. And I decided to do
computers, so I went to Carnegie Mellon and I studied computer science. And I had a lot
of fun doing that.
I, I did a comic strip in college for awhile with a friend and it turned out to be important
because that comic strip that I did in college, is now the comic strip I'm doing today. It
has, it completely transformed and yet familiar.
It was, we were both in fraternities; we were in the two nerdiest fraternities on campus.
Mine was something like 60 percent computer science majors. And his was equally high in
engineers and stuff.
And so we did, we did kind of our version of what it's like to be really nerdy and yet
in a fraternity.
And it ended up centering around these two guys, and we decided as, they would be in
the, the worst fraternity on campus, it'd only actually had them. It was just a two-guy
fraternity -
[laughter]
because everybody else had failed out and so it was just them and no, but they couldn't
tell anybody 'cause, 'cause if they found out that there was a fraternity on campus
that only had two people in it, they'd get kicked off and so they did, did these elaborate
ruses and they had a rush and they got like three more people which exploded the size
of their fraternity.
But we kept coming back to the relationship between these two guys. And one was this guy
named Bob. He was more sort of the manipulator and this guy named Dave, and Dave would do
whatever Bob suggested. It turns out Dave has a substantial trust fund which was what
was keeping the, the fraternity moving, and Bob would take advantage of that.
And I really liked the interaction of these guys. It wasn't perfect, but we played with
that for a few years. And then that was the last thing that I drew for three years. I,
I graduated college, I went off and worked at Microsoft, I did the software thing for
a long time.
And years went by and I got married and I would always whine about this cartooning thing,
"I wanna be a cartoonist." It's sort of one of my dreams. Everyone kind of had that thing
that they wanted to be. I wanted to be a fireman, actually I want to be an astronaut for a long
time, but for me it was always the cartooning thing and I had really just abandoned it completely.
I think I just said, "Well obviously I'm not gonna be the best at it, so I'm not gonna
do it at all."
And I was whining to my wife about it and she said, "Well why don't you just start doing
it? Start drawing comic strips I mean you don't have to be in the newspaper, just start
drawing comic, comic strips." "I don't know", I'd do it once in a while, but not really
incentive.
So we, we developed an incentive program. And the incentive program was when we got
married we'd worked out our budget and what we were allowed to do and stuff, and we had
this thing where I could get a new car every eight years. I'd been one of these Microsoft
guys who got like a car every six months for awhile -
[laughter]
and I had to kind of get off that habit, it was not working out for me. I was addicted.
So I said, "Okay, I can stick with this car for a long time."
The deal we worked out was if I, if I drew a comic strip everyday for a year, I could
get a new car. At the end of the year I would walk into a dealership and I could buy the
car.
And this was, this was like the thing, this was the wedge that I needed, I just kinda
needed that reason to get up and do it. And, and it was easy. And then, I don't have to
show them to everybody, but of course I did. And I had just a sketch book which I still
have which is the comic strip I drew everyday for a year.
It was mostly about my life, it was some other stuff, it was fairly personal, but it was,
it was kind of a joke every day. It wasn't always drawn well, it usually wasn't drawn
in ink it was just a pencil, but it was something I did that proved to me that I could actually
write something every day.
I always thought I was a guy with a sense of humor and I always thought I'd do it; but
there's a big difference between being a funny guy and actually writing a joke every day.
And so I did that. And at the end of the year I not only got a car, but I had an enormous
amount of confidence about it, because it, because towards the end it was really easy
whip it off, I'm like, "What happened today? Oh, nothing." Brrrrrr. And it just got, it
got very easy. So my confidence was much, much higher. And shortly after that I decided
to start a real comic strip.
And so I did and this was based on my wife and I's nine month RV trip. We, I, I'd quit
my job at Microsoft and we bought an RV and we traveled around the country for nine months.
We, we visited 38 states, even a couple of provinces in Canada, 26,000 miles, and we
had a great time.
And it was a, it's a very strange sort of sub-culture of, of all these RV parks around
the country that people who travel - many of them don't have homes at all - and it just
seemed whacky and crazy and funny. And I started doing that.
I worked on that strip for about six months and it went nowhere. And I was really frustrated
because it'd been so easy to write this comic strip about my life, and really what I did
is I, I was still writing about my life, I was just writing about my wife and I's trip.
And I hit a few road bumps. The first one I did was I realized that I could not have
a character in the strip that had my wife's name, that looked like my wife, because if
I had that character say something my wife would not say, a complaint was filed -
[laughter]
in strong terms.
[laughter]
And so I changed the character's face, changed her name and immediately the complaints stopped.
[laughter]
But the problem with that strip was it was this husband and wife traveling around in
an RV. They were traveling around and they would hit all these interesting problem situations,
but there was no opportunity for a supporting cast. It was just the two of them because
they were always on the road. You would just get to know someone and then you'd leave.
By the way, that was what the life was like and that was probably the hardest thing about
life on the road was we didn't really have any friends for, for nine months that we had
steady contact with.
And it was, it was a road block. I still, I've never resolved that. For awhile I tried
adjusting the strip; I had the characters, the male character's ex-wife following him
like with her husband -
[laughter]
she always to outdo him so it was like she and her new husband had an even bigger, fancier
RV following him around and that was sort of funny; and I have an ex-wife too, so I
got a little chance to vent a little bit in that. But it structurally was just not gonna
work.
And it was around this time that one of my wife's best friends came back from teaching
overseas and this is the guy that we call Gene Ambaum, his, not his real name it's his
pen name. But that's how we refer to him.
And Gene had gone to library school and had gone overseas, found a wife, come back to
Seattle, was settling in and was starting to work in a library.
And he came over and he would tell these absolutely dark and awful stories about working in libraries.
Because libraries are these places where everybody goes. I mean literally everybody goes to the
library at some point or another; often as kids, but we often go back as adults especially
is you have kids - trust me right now libraries are full of unemployed people trying to find
work or at least figure out how to file for unemployment - everybody goes there. And so
some very fine upstanding citizens there and some less so.
And so he told me this story one day of the old man who was looking to relocate and he
wanted to find the state with the lowest age of consent.
[laughter]
And that was like one of the sunnier stories.
[laughter]
And I'm like, "This is comedy gold."
[laughter]
"This is the sort of thing upon which a comic strip is built."
[laughter]
And so we started talking about working together. I'm like, "Dude, you gotta start writing this
stuff down and I will draw it for you."
And it was going along slowly and then we went to a comic con together down in San Diego,
just to kinda gawk. And on the flight back, he's really scared of airplanes, and so to
distract him we started brainstorming the strip that would become Unshelved.
And it was all about this one kind of hip young librarian dealing with stuff. And, and
that strip from day one has just wrote itself. Because it is, it is the essence of a sitcom.
It is a regular cast which is these librarians and also the regulars that come to the library,
the kids, the adults and stuff; plus anytime I wanna talk about anything, I mean if I wanna
talk politics I can have someone walk in and ask the question and look for help on stuff
like that.
And really I, and from the second we started working this I'm like, "I can't believe no
one else has ever done this." Like how has no one else ever done this? And I just want,
it's, it's that thing when you got like that, that idea for the software product and you
just know someone else is working on it right now in their garage and you wanna get it as
fast as possible. And I did that thing.
So we kinda rushed it out there and our plan was, of course we wanted it to go in newspapers
'cause there still were newspapers, but we, we knew we had some development to do. And
so we, we came up with the idea that we'd put it on my Website. I'd had, I'd done this
a little bit with my other comic strip, very limited capacity.
Rob were you getting the, the first comic strip? The -
>>voice in audience: Yeah.
>>Bill Barnes: Yeah. An old friend of mine and so he was one of like the dozen people
who read that first comic strip about the RV. So we did it again with, with what was
then called Overdue. And we started putting it out there eight years ago yesterday. And
three days later we got outed at a librarian blog.
Yeah, there's a blog for everything and there's a big blog called librarian.net.
And it was one of those nice problems to have because this was really just a research project.
At this point we didn't feel like we had our characters right; absolutely the art wasn't
where I wanted it to be; but we wanted to put it out there just as a point of accountability.
Just get it out there and, and my friends, my 40 friends and family will see it and that'll
be good.
So we started putting it out and days later we got outed on this blog. So we went from
40 readers to 1,000 readers overnight and 3,000 by the end of that week, and now it's
about 50,000.
So that was great except that we didn't, we didn't kind of have a chance to do the research
and development part of it. We just were there and everyone was watching, everyone was watching
And I will say that it's gone incredibly well for that, that, the characters we started
off with which were very kind of stereotypical characters pulled out of libraries we manage
to evolved them and they, they've added some depth.
The library audience turned out to be quite magical and I think we planned a little bit
of this, but most of it was kind of lucky.
Quite magical because it's a very heavily networked group so when they all read that
blog; when they find out about it, they find out about it, the one's who didn't read it
found out about it on a listserv the next day and so forth. And that's worked out very
well for us.
It turns our librarians also gather often. I think they're people who are unappreciated
in their jobs and so when they have a chance they zoop off to a conference to hang out
with other librarians and complain about the people that they work with.
And so we can go to a library conference and just buy a booth, which is a fairly expensive
thing to do, but every single person who walks by is a potential customer.
And so at the beginning we would go to library conferences and literally sign up a thousand
people over the course of four days to read the strip just by getting them to write their
email name and then we'd add 'em to our email list and start delivering it.
And other cartoonists I know have comic strips that are broader and I think much better than
ours in, in every way, it's just that they can't go to a conference and do that.
And one of my favorites is a comic strip called Sheldon which is about an eight year old billionaire
and his pet duck who talks and it's, is really the most beautiful, heartwarming, funny thing.
It's very nerdy too, but he, there's just not that boy billionaire conference he can
go to to find his audience.
[laughter]
Also the Unshelved audience was very predisposed to buying books. And so after we'd been doing
this just for a year, we decided to publish our first book and we did it ourselves.
We just found this printer up in Canada that gave us a good price. You know we just spun
the big wheel and we said, "What the heck?" And it was, it's very expensive comparatively
to not spending anything which is what we had been doing. It's a big investment; we
printed out 3,000 copies, but over the course of just a couple of weeks, even before the
book went to the printer, before we actually had to write the check to the printer, we'd
already pre-sold enough books from our audience to pay for the entire print run.
And, and that, that pattern has been, it's happened ever since. It's all the, all the
stars were in alignment on that one.
And I'll tell you, you go back and look at the, the books you have are our latest book,
and I think I've actually become a pretty good cartoonist, but you go back and look
at volume one and it is pretty primitive stuff. It is not the worst stuff you'll find on the
Internet, but it is, it is pretty primitive - I think our writing was actually okay from
the beginning, we were both very concentrating on the writing - but I was, I hadn't drawn
in years. In fact my writing had definitely, my, my drawing had taken a dip and if you
go look at my old stuff you'd go like, "Wow, he used to draw pretty well, what happened?"
[laughter]
But practice makes better and over the last eight years I've probably kinda hit that 10,000
hour mark that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in "Outliers", which is where your, your brain
circuit neurologically organizes around a skill in such a way. And I, I think I'm actually
an expert cartoonist, still not like anywhere near the best artist around, but good enough
to actually tell the story, draw the characters reasonably resembling what they look like
yesterday. So -
But I was lucky enough to, we were lucky enough to have an audience that kind of went with
us on the journey, watched me, watched me learn to draw, watched me jump off the cliff
and, and build my parachute in real time [inaudible].
[pause]
After I'd been doing the comic strip for awhile people said, "Well aren't you gonna do something
about the software industry? You worked there for like 20 years." And I, I, I, I wasn't
even interested for awhile. Like I would, I'd been doing, I mean I was doing it for
a while, I was doing both for awhile. And the last thing I wanted to do was kind of
take my work home and then do more of it. I kind of needed the escape from it and I
think I also in retrospect needed some perspective on it.
It's very hard to look around at the stuff you're in and have any perspective.
And I had, I had left and then come back to the software industry, but as I was preparing
to leave again, I actually felt I had enough perspective and I started to spin up the next
comic strip, which has become "Not Invented Here" which will be launched on September.
And that was an interesting process. I started taking notes about these characters and what
I ended up doing it reaching back into that comic strip that I did in, in college, the
one about the two guys; 'cause I liked their relationship and so the idea I came up which
was a very simple pitch was about these two guys and the comic strip has actually changed
quite a bit from this, but these two guys who have started four or five companies together
and each one had gone down in flames. Like horribly and terribly burning every bridge
along the way.
[laughter]
And so they were stuck working at this IT company. And these guys, at least one of them
was very talented, it wasn't clear about the other one.
[laughter]
But they, they're a team, and they always went everywhere together. And so they're working
at some, I don't know, some IT company, I, at one point I, they were like in the IT department
of a shoe company. It was just gonna be the most banal possible place to end up as a developer,
but they literally had no other choice 'cause no one else would hire them or go anywhere
near them.
And then while they're there they like they have the idea and this is the one. Like they
actually had a good idea. And it's gonna go someplace, but they couldn't do anything because
no, they couldn't attract any capital, no one would go anywhere near them. So they decide
to start the company from within the other company.
[laughter]
And they were gonna, which I know never really happens, right?
[laughter]
But they'd be working at their day jobs and like in their day jobs they'd be working on
the other thing. I even had an intern who was gonna come work for their startup, but
like on the grounds of the company they were working for.
[laughter]
And I thought this was very clever and a good idea and I still think it's a good idea. In
retrospect, kind of an unimaginable, unmanageably complex situation for a comic strip. I think
it would work for a sitcom where you can explain a lot more, but it's too hard if you've only
got three or four panels to establish the context of, are we talking about the company
they're working for or the company the company within a company that they're working for?
[pause]
But anyway, this was the idea I had and for awhile I was gonna both write and draw this
one.
Now, Unshelved I, I worked with Gene who writes it and I end up editing a lot of his stuff
and then I draw it. And as I started spinning up this idea for the new comic strip I thought,
"Well I can work with Gene again. He could help me write this one; I'll source more of
the material."
And as I looked at it, I just didn't wanna draw another comic strip. I, the drawing has
never been my favorite part. I like it fine, but I didn't really wanna double my drawing
workload.
And Gene didn't really have anything to add in terms of the genre. Like he didn't know
anything about the domain; he's not from the software world. And so what I decided to do
was to kind of switch roles and hire or at least work with an artist.
And so I started hunting around after I had developed the original idea and I found a
guy from Tacoma named Mark Monlux who I really like his stuff; he's an illustrator but he'd
done some comic strips and I'd met him at some cartoon events.
And we worked together for a couple of months and he did some stuff that I really liked
and then after a while we were both, we were like, "This is not working out." Because he
was a professional illustrator and when you're starting something like a comic strip it's
a lot like starting a startup. It actually takes a lot of hours, you're not gonna get
paid for a while, and you're kind of building up equity and that's about it.
I couldn't, certainly couldn't afford to pay for his time, and eventually, I eventually
he said, "Yeah, I just can't, I can't put all this time into something that I don't
know is gonna pay for me and my family."
And literally we just had this conversation and the next day I found out that one of my
favorite cartoonists a guy named Paul Southworth; he did a great comic strip called Ugly Hill,
just beautiful; and so professional illustrators just love this guy because the things he,
the things he did were amazing.
He was drawing that one to a close and he had been doing some drawing for another artist,
for Scott Kurtz who does PDP. And Scott has a sort of side comic strip called Ding which
is about a bunch of people in world of war craft, so it's sort of, the comic strip of
them in world of warcraft having their adventures.
And Scott had hired Paul to draw that strip and that didn't work out for some reason and
so Paul had just said, "Oh, I'm not gonna do that anymore." And I jumped on the phone
and called him up and said, "You should come work on this comic strip with me."
And so he and I started working together about, about a year ago something like that. And
starting we did all the process all over on this thing. And in doing so the, he helped
simplify this overly convoluted story about these two guys and their software company,
and it, it simplified to just two guys working at some unnamed and sort of unknown software
company; became a little simpler and a little less epic and a little more conducive to the
medium of comic strips.
One of the things I thought I'd do if we can get our AV working is I'll show you some development
of the characters or one of the characters on -
[pause]
There we go.
Okay, so to back up we, I started this comic strip in, in college and we had these two
characters they were called Bob and Dave. And Bob was, Bob was actually the more clever
of the two and the more manipulative of the two and Dave was the one who did all the work.
And I basically liked this balance between the two. And as I developed the strip it ended
up looking a lot like the relationship between what at Microsoft we call program managers
and developers.
There's the people who say what to do and then the people who actually do it. So, so
we kinda went with that and, and the development is that over time the program manager character
who is now called Owen, became dumber and dumber and dumber.
[laughter]
To the point where it's like how does this guy remember to breathe? And then the developer
character got very sort of, well he got, he actually got smarter because he became a better
developer; but maybe simpler in the ways of, of humans. I summed it all up software developers
sometimes have challenges in those respects.
[laughter]
Looks at her husband.
So I thought I'd show you the development of Owen. So Owen actually starts off as, I
actually flipped the two, the two visuals of the two characters; Bob went away in the
visual and Dave survived to become Owen, and he's a character I always liked drawing.
This is an Unshelved strip. So I'll read to you: "I'm the smartest person in this library.
Next to me you are all intellectual Lilliputians. I need a book but it's got to be challenging."
And he says: "Then let me show you the book on manners."
[laughter]
And so this is the character who used to be Dave in the comic strip. And he just showed
up here 'cause I always enjoyed drawing him. I always enjoyed his little lip of hair he
had.
[laughter]
Which is almost a hat, but not quite.
[laughter]
And then so as I started working and sketching on the, the new strip, I sketched in my sketchpad
and here's a page from my sketchpad. My [inaudible] of the character who'd become Owen and he
basically, guy with, guy with, and also he looked more and more like me is what happened
as I started drawing more -
[laughter]
His hair started receding, he got a goatee, and his eyes be, became very expressive, in
Unshelved most of my characters just have dots for eyes, but I really wanted to have
a different look for this strip; a little bit more realistic. This is when I still thought
I was gonna draw it.
So then after I decided not to draw it and I started working with Mark, he did his take
on it and we ended up with a different character design; here's a couple of panels. And so
[inaudiable] "Rich client or thin client? Sir, if I may I agree with Brook Astor who
said you can never be too rich or too thin."
[laughter]
And so that's, that's Owen there standing up and it turns out he was not invited to
the meeting. That's the punch line of this, this strip.
[laughter]
So Mark has, I actually like the simplicity of Mark's style and it could not be more different
than the next artist I worked with, Paul.
So after Mark and I parted ways, I actually didn't show Mark's designs to Paul, 'cause
I didn't want to pollute the waters. I just showed him my design. And he sent me back
a bunch of sketches of Owen. And so character design is kind of what Paul does; he's, he's
really good at it and I try to give him as free reign as possible.
So he took the very basic thing and did a lot of variations on it. And impossibly fast.
Really, I mean I could be like, "Paul, I need a new character." Pfft - ten seconds later
he's just got it in front of him.
[laughter]
Both his talent and his work ethic are, surpass mine.
So I think I went with, I think of all of these the ones I personally liked, I'm looking
at them now – but it's funny because the Hawaiian shirt and the moving over to Desmond
the other character - I guess the one I liked was kind of the bottom left and the upper
left.
So I took that -
>>voice in audience: [unintelligible]
>>Bill Barnes: What's that?
>>voice in audience: [unintelligible]
>>Bill Barnes: It does say butt chin, yeah. Yeah -
[laughter]
that's one of the [inaudible].
[laughter]
He kind of has a butt nose now actually.
So I took one and I, so this is my, I took his sketch and I Photoshopped it, and I made
it look a little bit more like I wanted it. So one of the things I liked is that he's
sort of semi-well dressed. Like he's the guy who should be going to the meetings in a tie
and stuff; he doesn't really take it very seriously. So he's just kind of got a dumpy,
well dressed look; and a hat 'cause his hair is thinning; totally unlike mine.
And I sent that to Paul, and Paul liked that and he ended up refining it into this guy.
This is starting to look, this is starting to resemble the final character. It's, so
his lines are all cleaned up; but the nose and the chin are about to change, 'cause this
is what is looks like now.
[pause]
And so that whole process took, well I mean in a way that process began 20 years ago,
but that last part of the process took probably a couple of weeks at least to get to, to get
to that point. And the first couple of, he drew a couple of non-event [inaudible] strips
which he then redrew later, in fact we have [inaudible].
Two different versions of the strip and it's amazing how much the character design changed
between then, and then he ended up with characters designs he was happy to start with so launched
in September.
And even so you go back and look at the, and this is a guy who's been drawing his whole
life, you go look at the strip in September 21st, which is when we launched, and the strip
even just a few months later and it's amazing how much the look of the strip has changed
and the characters have changed.
It's just something that happens and I certainly noticed it with my own work that as I draw
the characters everyday, I start doing shortcuts and noticing the things that really work and
don't work about the characters and there's nothing, you will never get it right ahead
of time. I actually think it's a lot like writing code. It's one thing to kind of plan
that ahead of time, this is how it's gonna be, and then when you get in the trenches
on it, you start rounding the corners and figuring out what works and what doesn't work.
So I'm really enjoying writing the new strip, I love Unshelved and I don't wanna in any
way imply that there's something wrong with it; I've been doing it for eight years and
I still love the characters and in fact we're gonna, we're gonna shake things a little bit
in the next year. We're gonna have more things happen to the characters than have been happening.
In part because we've been doing this strip for eight years and we need to make it a little
more interesting for ourselves.
But what's fun for me about writing Not Invented Here is a very different strip. Is it absolutely
is a way to channel my experience of working in the software industry. It was just a place
I was never like, never quite found my, my home in, but then I had lots of experiences
there.
I was a developer for many years, I was a manager, I was a program manager; my last
job I had, I did user, user interface design; my last job was actually a [inaudible] trader
for an executive over at Microsoft because I enjoyed public speaking and I'm, I'm good
at, at taking things and figuring out how to talk about them. But it was, it was infuriating
to work with 19 different marketing groups and stakeholders and try to figure out what
to say. So that was just sort of life at a big company; or at least that big company.
But it's a lot of material. But the comic strip's not really about the software industry
it's really about these two guys and their friendship. And as I first started developing
it, at first it resembled the working relationship of, of myself and Gene, the guy who I write
Unshelved with, because that's the working relationship that I have the most direct knowledge
with.
But what's really interesting is that the relationship between these two characters,
between Owen and Desmond, the program manager and the developer, very closely resembles
the working relationship of a writer and an artist. Like scarily close. As, as I rate
these things, the metaphor is, is, or the analogy is very close.
And so very quickly Paul and I sud, realized that, that Desmond is Paul and Owen is me.
And I'm not quite as dumb as Owen, but -
but the, the, the relationship between the two, and their, the things they perform. And
so Owen goes to Desmond and says, "Well here's this thing we're gonna do and I've, I've figured
out here's the basic approach and here's what I want it to look like." And Desmond's like,
"Well, that won't actually work, but let me tell you what would work."
And that whole thing is exactly like what happens when I go to Paul and I'm like, "Well
I have this idea about how to, how to do this and I think it's gonna look something like
that." Paul says, "Well that won't actually work, but here's something that will work."
And so, and so the characters, we're starting to kind of write each character not exactly
separately, but Desmond has taken on more and more personality characteristics of Paul,
and Owen is taking on more personality characteristics of me. And, and the program manager/developer,
writer/artist relationship is what's coming to the front.
And so that's fun, because that, and I think not only is that fun to write, but I think
it's fun to read something that feels real. And the more, the more it is about the, the
very true interaction of, of myself and my creative partner, the more it's not gonna
feel like some academic exercise and talking about software.
Very quickly, yeah, so, so, there's a sort of an obvious business model for this comic
strip which is to appeal to the people who work in software. But it's also a challenge
because I don't want it to just be a comic strip for software industry, although I'd
be thrilled if it, if it became popular there.
Because it's, it's actually written pretty broadly. And even when they're talking about
software stuff you could almost have a word bubble that says, "Gobbledygook here." And
the people who from outside the software industry can just be like, "Well I don't understand
that word bubble, but I totally get the relationship." And that's, that's how I try to write it most
of the time. I try to drop in a little, a few little rewards to the people that know
what they're talking about.
The same thing on Unshelved; sometimes we'll talk about library stuff, but I guess you
have to be a librarian to understand. But very seldom; most of the time it's just a
background; and it just stays in the background and that's my goal.
So that is about all I, I brought to talk about. I, we have a few minutes so if anyone
has any questions.
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>Bill Barnes: Desmond.
[pause]
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
[laughter]
>>Bill Barnes: He's, he has an unusual head design.
[laughter]
It's true. And it's, it is actually the most consistent piece of feedback I get from people.
It took me awhile to get used to Desmond's head.
[pause]
It looks something like, it looks something like this.
[pause]
And it's not exactly how people's heads are shaped, but I see -
[laughter]
I see going back to my original sketches for, for Desmond how this sort of came about because
my idea for Desmond is that his head would be the same shape as his body. And so my,
my, my original shape was like this; it was more like a human head. And then his body
would also be kind of the same. It would be like this and he's have this big belly. Alright,
it sort of looks like a developer to me.
[laughter]
And, and I think Paul loved that and as he usually does just kind of magnifies and makes
him come real.
It's one of these things where if you get too extreme of characters and the eye cannot
recognize it as human, and I think Desmond is actually just on the edge. But I, but I,
I got used to it pretty quickly and I just assume other people will too, but I think
that design will probably evolve over time as well.
I know it wasn't actually a question you asked, but -
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>Bill Barnes: No, no other, there, there's been a couple, but nothing, no serious effort.
There's a, there's one done by a library page called Turn The Page.
Comedy writing is actually really hard; writing a comic strip is hard. It's hard to if, if,
if you try to be pithy on Twitter you know what it's like to edit your thoughts down
to the point where they fit in 140 character slots and it's very much the same skill as
I wrote a, I was reading, I won't name names, I was reading a comic strip on the Web the
other day that was a little political thing and it, it literally was this conversation
I think it was, "How dumb is Sarah Palin?" And, and the President says, "How dumb is
she?" He's like, "When she went out, she had, to speak the other day, she had written on
her hands, 'breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.'
Which is okay, it's not a bad joke. And the other character says, "She's nutty."
Oh, it made me so sad.
Why couldn't he just leave it there? But that's sort of, that instinct and that sense of how
to, of how to write in an economy of words is, is just something you get by doing it
a lot; also reading 'em. I mean I've been reading comics my whole life so I have probably
a good sense of the rhythm of it, but again going back to the stuff I was, I was working
on eight or nine years ago, it's pretty bad. It's amazing the number of words I would use
to get across a simple message.
And so, and so practice makes better. And so people who, who come out with something
I think they put it out and they instantly compare it to what else is out there, and
it's not as good and they're like "Oh, I guess I'm not good at it." And it's sad because
they're, they will get good at it; they'll absolutely get better at it. You just can't
not get better at something if you practice it.
But you have to stick it out and, and absolutely with Unshelved we were lucky enough to have
an audience that was willing to stick it out with us, and, and sort of pay us indirectly
along the way.
[pause]
>>voice in audience: So you mentioned that [inaudible]
>>Bill Barnes: Yeah.
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>Bill Barnes: There's an intellectual property problem or a potential one actually. It's
the sort of thing where it doesn't really matter if you have the right on an intellectual
property, it's whether you can afford to have your lawyers prove that you have the right.
[laughter]
There was a, a little short, a funny little short on the Web years ago, some little, it
actually appeared on I think Cartoon Network which was called Overdue. And it was a take
off from Cops; it's just a librarian driving around retrieving overdue books. Overdue
- boom. That's was it; it was just a title and you can't even, you can't trademark a
title. You can trademark a title of an ongoing thing, but not of like a book or a, just a
of a short.
And so we thought, "Okay, that's not too bad." And so I called up the company. I actually
found the company that made it; it was just a little, little production company, and I,
I explained the situation and they said, "Absolutely. We would sign whatever you want. We're never
gonna pursue this." And they said, "Great. We wanna get out first book out and we wanna,
we're just incorporating right now." And they said, "Great. Actually is this gonna take
a few weeks 'cause we just got bought by Scholastic."
"And so it's gonna take a while and we're gonna - so like the next day we walked in
and we said, "We gotta change our name."
And honestly I don't, I don't think they particularly were gonna pursue it or anything but we just
So we had a poll among our readers and we had everybody send it in; we got like 500,
600 different suggestions. Many of which were pretty bad, but some of which were really
My personal favorite that we didn't do was Shelf Life which is - but one of the big advantages
Unshelved had is it had an open domain name.
So that, that will often trump other things -
and for Not Invented Here we, we went through a similar thing; originally it was gonna be
called Company Town, because it took place in Silicon Valley which is a town with companies.
And then we, we found some stuff, that was a little too close and again I couldn't get
the URL for it, and so we brainstormed for awhile and came up with Not Invented Here
and NotInventedHere.com was owned by one of those companies that scoops up domain names
and forces you to pay for it.
And then somebody suggested that we get notinventedhe.re which is an island called Réunion for a French
protectorate. And so we got that and, and then, eventually did buy notinventedhere.com
from one of those companies. I think they got a little desperate as the economy got
worse and I got it for a reasonable price.
Yeah, the, absolutely probably the most frustrating thing of a new project is an [inaudible].
Because the names are important and, and we wanted something that sounded funny and invoked
something of it and Not Invented Here is like in the industry it's a great name, outside
the industry a lot of people don't know what that means and they just kind of do this
- that's okay because they're probably not gonna read it anyway but, as a name I think
it's superior to Company Town for invoking something about the strip.
And it is kind of funny and, and also very appropriate for me because I, I do everything
myself. Like I totally wrote my own blog engine and comic strip. I just wrote my, I just rewrote
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>Bill Barnes: Well, I actually do it, I actually do it intentionally because, because I'm writing
about programmers and I feel I need to stay connected to what's going on.
And like I just did a cutting edge MVC application and I actually sort of know what's going on
with that now. Which I wouldn't. So, also if this doesn't work out it'd be nice to go
back to that industry.
So it's good to keep my skills going. Also the other ones weren't good enough.
[laughter]
It's not an educated thing, absolutely all through it I'm like, "They don't have the
exact perfect [inaudible]. I'm gonna have to write about that. This was, it was like
the worst possible use of my time."
>>voice in audience: [inaudible]
>>Bill Barnes: So it's sort of an ironic thing for me because [inaudible]
Alright. Well thanks for comin' up guys.
[applause]