I have removed the Patreon login requirements for reading the PvP and Table Titans archives.
In the glory days of webcomics, cartoonists could monetize their work with online advertising. But those halcyon days are behind us. Online advertising via banner ads is a thing of the past and we have to find other ways to earn money from our ha-ha drawings. Perhaps offering new comics via Patreon is a winning combination, but placing old archives behind that kind of a paywall is kind of a bust. So the archives are open again and free to read.
However, if you browse the comics on this site, and enjoy yourself, you can always leave me a tip via kofi.com
Let’s assume you want to “break into comics.” Of course, you may not want to, which is fine. You might have other personal goals in mind. Hopefully what I’m about to say will apply to whatever it is you hope to accomplish.
I get asked “how do I break into comics” all the time. The answer to this question is pretty simple, although it’s rare that anyone likes it when they hear it.
“Have you tried just making comics?”
I know, it sounds snarky, but you would be shocked at how often the people asking me how to break into comics have never actually made one. Ever.
I was equally guilty of this behavior prior to launching PvP in 1998. I dropped out of college in 1991 and got a day job at a sign company. At night and on the weekends I worked on submission packages for newspaper syndicates (at the time, that’s how you became a comic strip artist).
I spent five years doing this and I never completed one submission package. I never sent one off. I went through a ton of useless motions that I thought made me a cartoonist, without ever realizing all I had to do was make a comic.
PvP changed all that for me. When I was offered an opportunity by Mpog.com to get paid for a regular updating comic strip I jumped at the chance. PvP was something I threw together without much forethought. I took a comic strip about elementary school teachers I had been working on and converted it into a comic strip about people working at a video game magazine.
(here’s a comic from that old strip featuring a proto Brent and Skull)
Working on PvP was very different from working on my submission packages. Unlike my submissions, I didn’t care if PvP was good. It didn’t need to be good, just good enough and that wasn’t hard to produce. The people I was making it for were pretty pleased with anything I gave them, even if it was a lame joke, poorly drawn or a little late.
Now here’s the crazy thing: The ONLY reason PvP had a chance to succeed is because I didn’t care if it was good or not. I knew it wasn’t good. But I didn’t need it to be good to get paid. This wasn’t the next Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes. It was something stupid I did on a lark and the money was great and I got to say I was a professional cartoonist. So I just kept drawing them.
PvP developed a following. People loved the characters and the gags. I had over 1 million pageviews each month and after moving the strip to the UGO network (this was back during the dot-com boom of the late 90s), it earned enough money to allow me to quit my day job.
Success happens when opportunity meets preparedness. I was well into my intial run on PvP when the opportunity to move to UGO.com presented itself. I was able to make my dreams come true not by trying, but by doing. I did it all with a comic strip I never even attempted to make good.
Breaking into comics is pretty simple. You just make comics. But make them. Set a reasonable goal (I usually start by suggesting completing a simple five-page story) and reach it. Then set another goal. Then another. And keep going. Don’t worry about anything but getting it done. Don’t look back. Just look forward. Keep going.
Brandon Sanderson was giving advice to some aspiring writers and he told them that their job wasn’t to write a great novel. Their job was to make themselves good enough to one day write a novel.
If you don’t love making comics, even if they aren’t very good comics, then you won’t make it. Period. You have to love the process. That’s the goal. That’s the secret. That’s all there is. It’ll never be good. It’ll never be perfect. It will always and forever just be the last thing you drew.
Once you accept that, everything will change, and you’ll have broken into comics.
Hello, and welcome to Toonhoundstudios.com, the home of Scott Kurtz and all the stupid stuff he draws.
Over the last two decades, I’ve written and drawn a lot of comics and I felt it was time for all of it to live in one place. This is that place. Toonhoundstudios.com is the new home of PvP, Table Titans, Mort, and all of the other odds and ends I plan to make in the years to come.
Don’t worry, the URLs you have bookmarked for PvP and Table Titans still work, they just take you to their individual sections of this new site. New website launches are always dicey. Things might break and I’m sure we’ll find plenty of stuff to tweak so bear with us.
One thing you won’t find on our new website is ads. Over the last couple of years, online advertising and really taken a nose-dive in both quality and value. It was a never-ending game of whack-a-mole trying to manage our ad network to stop displaying intrusive and sometimes even malicious ads. The minute we’d block a bad-faith advertiser from the site, another would pop up.
Instead of monetizing my work with ads, I’m hoping you’ll join our Patreon. Even becoming a backer at our lowest tier for a few months would generate more revenue for me than spending a year visiting the site with terrible ads on it.
Patreon is heavily integrated into this site. While some things will always be offered free of charge I ask that you join our Patreon community to enjoy the breadth of my vast archives. There are thousands of comic strips and hundreds of pages of adventure for you to enjoy. As well as informative looks behind the scenes at my process and access to live events and podcasts.
This is a bit of a scary move for me. I’ve always given everything away for free and used ads to compensate me for my work. But things have changed. Adblockers are baked into every phone and browser (and for good reason). So it’s time to adapt.
I’ve been posting my comics online since 1998, and every year since we’ve faced a new challenge. But every year you kids stepped up and supported us through those challenges and I have no doubt you’ll do the same once again. I love making comics for you. I love sharing my process and my story with you. And I hope you’ll continue with me.
Here’s to another year of challenges! Let’s swing for the fences.
To celebrate the completion of my new website, I decided to draw a new PvP comic strip so that when the site when live there was something new there to read on the PvP page.
I still have to color this, but I thought I would share it with you guys early.
The new Toonhound Studios website is complete and we’re doing the final tweaks and testing before we put things live. I’m uploading content manually since it’s not really possible to transfer the archives between our old sites and the new ones.
I can’t help but skim the strips as they go up, which is the first time I’ve read these books since I posted them the first time. When I read the strip above, I got a smile across my face.
Val says “I was just some dork who showed up to play, then you guys made me a Titan.”
That’s the book I’m working on now. She’s talking about being in middle-school and meeting them for the first time. I didn’t know that when I wrote it, and I didn’t remember the line when I outlined the new book. But it lines up.