Sluggy Freelance

The first two sites I wrote about were old sites that I've known about for years, so I figure why break the trend. Sluggy Freelance is the oldest site of the three. It's a webcomic, and it's one of the oldest and longest-running webcomics out there. It's been around since 1997. I've been reading it myself since 2002. It started out as a gag strip with pretty crude art, then found its footing with some pretty good pop culture parodies. As the years went by, the characters got a bit more fleshed out, and the stories got a bit more complex, and now, 12 years into its run, it's laden with complicated interweaving plots and a ton of backstory.

In fact, it's almost difficult for me to imagine at this point how someone could come to Sluggy Freelance never having read any of it and get into it. You can't really read today's strip and know anything about what's going on if you haven't read any of it before. When I started reading it in 2002, at the recommendation of a friend, there were five years of previous strips for me to read, and I was unemployed at the time so I didn't have much to do besides read it, and it still took me weeks to get caught up. I don't know if anyone would put the effort in to read 12 years of old strips. Maybe if they had a really persistent friend recommending it.

Like the Chapman brothers, Sluggy Freelance cartoonist Pete Abrams has been able to make a living by selling merchandise on his website. He's cultivated a pretty loyal fanbase over the years, and they've supported him. I remember a few years back he ran into tough times for a while where it looked like the merchandise alone wasn't going to be enough to support his family. Then he instituted Defenders of the Nifty, a new part of the site, which people would have to pay if they wanted to access, that would give them extra content that wasn't available on the free version of the site. That seems to have been successful enough for him to continue not having to go out and look for a nine-to-five.

I want to try and figure out what it is that's made the three sites I've talked about this week so successful. I think they've all been fairly lucky to some degree. They have all relied on the viral nature of word-of-mouth on the web. Like I said in my previous post, with e-mail and search engines, lots of people can find out about a site very quickly. But there are a ton of sites out there that most people have never heard of anyway, so there's definitely some amount of luck involved here. But I think the more important thing is that all three of these sites have good creative content that appeals to a lot of people. There are probably a ton of sites that a lot of people have heard of, but just looked at once and then forgot about. Whereas these sites, people checked them out and remembered them, and kept going back to them, and told their friends about them. And the reason for that is because these sites are producing a good product that people really enjoy. There are probably a lot of things you need to do to stand out on the web, but that's definitely one of the most important.