How Ape Lad harnessed the social media.
Cartoonist Adam Koford has made a (made-up) name for himself online as “Ape Lad.” Through his Hobotopia blog, his Twitter updates, and a Flickr photo stream, Koford spreads the cartoon adventures of the two hobo Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, Pip and Kitteh.
Pip loves Caturday (a.k.a. Saturday).
The whimsical cartoons are loaded with running themes, including Caturday (i.e. Saturday), Kitteh’s favorite cigars (”stogees”), Pip’s love of leaves (or “leafs,” as he would say), hobo stew, boxcars, and the proper contents and use of the hobo’s bindle. Both cats speak in the misspelling-laden lolcat dialect enshrined by I Can Has Cheezburger?.
Besides simply enjoying the comics, I’m struck by how “virtual” Koford’s LOLCats business is: the cats’ way of speaking arose from the Internet, and the project itself arose from an Internet-distributed project (see below). Moreover, social media technology means Koford can promote and distribute the comics without the intervention of any agency or syndicate.
Last month I got in touch with Koford to ask him some questions about how social media outlets have helped him build a thriving Internet-based and -driven business in LOLCats cartoons. The fruits of our conversation follow.
Pip loves leafs.
BIZ: From a commercial standpoint, how did your current mix of work evolve? And what role have social-media tools played?
Koford: Here’s the short version: Mark [Frauenfelder] of BoingBoing.net heard [John] Hodgman’s 700 hobo names and suggested cartoonists should get to work illustrating them. A year and a half later I had drawn all 700+ and invited people to order their own via my blog. That evolved into inviting people to have me draw monkeys (and other things) for them. As the LOLcats phenomenon emerged from the mists of the past (and the primordial soup of the internets), I figured it was time to reintroduce Kitteh and Pip to the world.
Flickr has played a key role in my work, and I’m not sure what I’d do without it. Most artists crave outside validation for their work. It was surprising and reassuring to me to get almost instantaneous feedback on my stuff. Flickr has the distinction of being surprisingly civil, which is nice as well.
I only started really posting actively to my blog once I started selling drawings directly to people. Blogger is like the outpost with the general store on premises, and Flickr is the HQ in my business model, such as it is.
The Hobotopia feed on twitter would be the telegraph lines. And I’m the Sheriff. I has a posse.
Kitteh handles most stew-making chores.
BIZ: From a creative standpoint, how does the current mix of interactivity affect you? And how do you keep up such a pace of cartooning?
Koford: I welcome suggestions from people who order comics. If they want a specific meme or cultural reference worked in, I can usually pull it off. There are cases where the reference might be too obscure or far out, but I still try. One minor hazard of this system is that some readers think they don’t get a gag if they’re told up front it’s a reference to a certain tv show or movie. If I hide Reed Richard’s Ultimate Nullifier in a comic, I try to make sure it’s there as a minor background element, and not the key to the gag. Fanservice with a smile.
One side benefit is I’ve been introduced to all sorts of things people are into that I had no idea existed.
As for my pace, I work fast and late into the night. I also work fairly small at 4 by 6 inches, so that helps. Also, I’ve been drawing forever and have streamlined my process quite a bit.
Since we talked, Koford has released his first book of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comics, available from Lulu, which itself is a great example of an Internet-enabled technology / business that again removes the need for middlemen.
My prediction is that we’ll see ever more work like this being done, as more creatives — and professionals of all stripes — figure out new uses for social media and put them into action. If you have other examples of creative types building businesses around social media outlets, please share them in the comments.
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Great interview.
Another example: Jessica Hagy runs a great blog called Indexed where she’s also secured a book deal. Do want.
http://indexed.blogspot.com/
Hey Tim,
This might not be the place, but this post reminded me of something:
I met a printmaker a few weeks ago and he was going into his lengthy process, the many stages of sketches and drafts he goes through. He didn’t have a website, and I suggested that he should think about just starting a Flickr account and a blog to get himself out there, start a viewership, etc.
His response was, “I don’t want to start creating work for the internet.”
I asked him to explain.
He said, “A lot of the artists I know who start posting their stuff on the net…they start CREATING their work for the net.”
Now, as an artist who has embraced blogging and “Social Media” whole-heartedly, at first I found this to be really, well, kind of backwards. I mean, my kind of ideal business plan for young artists these days is: embrace the net, put yourself online, create a readership, find a way to sell your stuff directly to your readership. Forget galleries, forget publishing deals.
But I have to admit: since I started blogging, my art has changed–a lot of it is small– not bigger than a sketchbook page. It fits nicely on the computer screen. Instead of writing short stories, I do visual poems. I’ve gone from thinking about doing a graphic novel to thinking about doing a “webcomic.”
And I wonder: is the internet helping me to think “big” or think “small”? Is using my blog as my primary artistic outlet limiting my work?
Back to the printmaker: he makes these huge, colorful monoprints–stuff that you probably can’t process on a tiny screen. How can he harness “social media”? How can he use it to his benefit? How can it help him and not detract from his vision?
My answer is to document the process-side of the work: the sketches, photos of the in-progress prints, etc.
But I wonder: will being online create a temptation for him to think “smaller” not “bigger”?
Let’s hope not.
Good points, Austin. Here’s one tack to think about: most literary novels today are MUCH shorter than the grand novels of the 19th century, whether we’re talking about Russian epics like Anna Karenina or British triple-deckers like Phineas Finn. Sure, sometimes we get an Infinite Jest or a Mason and Dixon, but for the most part novels just plain run shorter than they used to. The canvas is smaller, at least in terms of what publishers want and what sells.
But think of all the *good* work that has been written in the shorter modern vein. Many of Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s or Woolf’s books would have been seen as less than full-length to the Victorians, but so what? And this whole movement hasn’t prevented the emergence of good longer works, too.
If your printmaking friend doesn’t want to make art driven by the Internet, that’s great - for him. If you want to post sketchpad pages but also do mural-sized canvases, you can do that, too. And there’s nothing to keep you from posting a page per week (or whatever) of a 900-page graphic novel onto your blog.
I’m a big believer that artists create art for any medium, whether they’re writing an epic or a haiku. The constraints can be liberating or they can be constraining - but all of that is in the mind of the creator, eh?
well-put and well-thought-out as usual, my friend! I’m going to stop thinking about it and go make something now :-D
[...] making our art live online create a temptation for us to think “smaller†not “biggerâ€? And as my friend Tim points out, maybe it’s not a bad [...]