Published: Monday, February 5, 2001 5:59 a.m. EST

Drawing an audience
Unknown cartoonists find a welcoming world on the Web

		Bob Roberds works on some new ideas for his comic strip, 'Soap on a Rope.' His day job is in tech support at IBM, but the Internet has provided a way for his comics to reach, at least theoretically, a mass audience. Staff Photo By John Rottet

By CHRISTINA DYRNESS, Staff Writer

Drop in on Bob Roberds at his South Durham apartment any weekday morning and you will find the television tuned in to "M*A*S*H" reruns, or maybe CNN. But Roberds isn't watching; he's drawing. From noon to 9 his day job at IBM, where he does tech support and some Web stuff, has him. But mornings are devoted to his 4-year old comic strip, "Soap on a Rope."

Pop into Westbrook Studios, a family-run photography studio in Burlington, and catch Jamie Roberston sketching ideas for a twisted, "Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer"-esque color comic strip called "Clan of the Cats."

Jeffrey T. Darlington's cats in Gibsonville, meanwhile, are in a huff because he neglects them in favor of the geek-humor-riddled world in his own strip, "General Protection Fault."

And another fictional bunch of software characters are coming to life at Christopher B. Wright's place in Raleigh, once he gets home from his day job as a technical writer.

Only two of these North Carolina comic artists have met, but they all hang out in the same spot online: Keenspot, a Web site that brags, "The best damn comics on the Web."

The Internet has transformed the world for cartoonists, as it has for many other other aspects of culture, business and human interaction.

What used to be a largely underground business, where the only way to hit the big time was to get into one of the syndicates that sell strips to newspapers, has found a bigger audience on the Web. And what used to be an occasional hobby for amateur artists, wannabees and far-from-mainstream cartoonists has become, well, a more regular hobby that holds a slightly greater chance of one day making them some money.

Keenspot was born about this time last year. A group of cartoonists got fed up when the Web site where they were posting their work -- PigPanda.com -- kept going down. They decided to start their own site -- of cartoonists, by cartoonists and for cartoonists.

Keenspot is co-owned by founder Chris Crosby, 23, his mom, Teri Crosby,

47, who live in Southern California and take care of the business end of things, and the two techies who maintain the site in Northern California, Darren Bleuel and Nate Stone. The guys in the north have never met the team in the south -- at least, not face to face.

Keenspot, which hosts 45 comic strips including the four from North Carolina, shares advertising revenue on a 50/50 basis with each artist. The amount each artist gets depends on the amount of traffic their strip attracts.

It ain't a lot of cash.

Wright, whose "Help Desk" strip gets about 3,000 visitors a day, says his monthly ad revenue checks vary from about $10 to close to $90. "It's nothing you can really make a living off of," Wright says.

And with dot-coms crashing left and right, nobody is really expecting online ad sales to go up. "It's still neat to actually get something," he says.

"When I started out, syndication was, I guess, my goal, and everyone's goal," says "Clan of the Cats" creator Robertson. "But a lot of us would do their comic strip no matter what. I guess I'm in that category."

But back in Durham, Roberds says his "Soap on a Rope" was picked up by an alternative newspaper in British Columbia. For each strip -- which is about a group of friends and co-workers dealing with extraordinary, ridiculous stuff in their lives -- the paper pays him a bank-busting $5. That's for four hours' work.

Still, it's another audience. And Roberds figures that the only way they could have found him was on Keenspot. "I don't like rejection, so I avoid sending out a lot of stuff," he says.

Plan Nine Publishing of High Point makes a living publishing collections of Internet comics. Founder David Allen started the company when he found great comic strips with huge fan bases that couldn't find a publisher in the mainstream comic press.

Spotting a niche, Allen put out his first book in 1996. He ran the business part time until last January. He doesn't want to share exact figures, but he says sales quadrupled in 1999 and more than doubled in 2000.

"I think you're seeing the genesis of where comics are going to go in the future," Allen says.

Though there are only a finite number of comic-strip slots in newspapers, which forces artists to compete against one another, Allen explains, the Web is a wide-open format. "I think you're going to see the next 'Calvin & Hobbes' or 'Bloom County' coming from the Web."

Not so fast, says Lisa Wilson, vice president of sales and marketing for United Media, whose United Feature Syndicate represents strips such as "Dilbert" and "Peanuts" and runs the Comics.com Web site.

From where Wilson sits, the comic strip business is still largely running the same way it always has, with the newspapers at the core of it all. "It's a tough, tough business," she says.

Still, Wilson has seen the Internet change things -- for example, the way the wild popularity of "Dilbert" was fueled partly by the strip's Web site and Scott Adam's e-mail address, which appears on every strip.

"The Internet allows us to see certain trends quicker and more easily," Wilson says.

But afficionados of Web-based comics pooh-pooh the importance of being syndicated. "A lot of people think the comics online are going to be better than you'll find in your average newspaper -- no offense," says Darlington, who recently published his second "General Protection Fault" book with Plan Nine, called "Gone with the Windows."

Darlington and Wright recently joined forces, meeting face to face for the first time in December. A plot twist that has been brewing both in "GPF" and "Help Desk" will be made public on the Web site today.

It seems that a programmer at Wright's fictional company in "Help Desk," Ubersoft, accidentally e-mailed the source code of an operating system (called Nifty Doorways -- a thinly veiled spoof of Microsoft Windows) to an old college pal during a drunken night of hacking. The pal, who works at Darlington's GPF Software, has just discovered a way to make it bug free. Next week, Ubersoft's boss will be on a rampage, upset that stable software will now be available to the world.

Is it any surprise that Wright says he started drawing "Help Desk" as a way to provide satiric commentary about the computer industry?

At any rate, the parallel plot got Wright and Darlington in the same room, something that doesn't happen a lot in the virtual world.

Terri Crosby, Keenspot co-owner, hopes a lot of Keenspotters will show up for the giant comic convention, COMICON, which takes place every summer in San Diego. "It will be kind of like a reunion for the first time," she says.

Staff writer Christina Dyrness can be reached at 829-4649 or cdyrness@nando.com

This article was later syndicated to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Rocky Moutain News, The Ventura County Star, and others.