Norm Feuti’s Retail character “Cooper” has started a blog. The blog appears to be corresponding to the story-line of the strip so that Retail fans can get an additional insight into the story-line – kind of like a DVD’s extra features. Launched Saturday, January 6th, it already has a several comments for each day’s blog post.
As I look over this new site, I can’t help but think if this is going to be a trend with other strips – at least I hope so. If the last few years has been any indication is that blogs are big and people want to have a dialog about the things that they love – and people love their comics. It also creates a new metric to establish popularity of a comic feature. One short-coming to the client list as a metric is that “Feature A” is bundled with several other features and delivered to the readers whether they like “A” or not. A far better indication of a feature’s success is in book sales or in some other activity that requires the reader to spend their own money or time – it’s a much better metric – but much harder to gauge. Hopefully Norm’s/Cooper’s blog does well and more features will follow suit.
That’s a cool idea! I’d actually thought about doing that with my old webcomic, but I ended the strip before I got a chance to try that out. Plus, I don’t even know how to blog my own thoughts, much less a fictional character. Now I wish I’d have plunged forward and done it. Best of luck to Norm/Cooper!
Thanks for the shout out, Alan!
Any of you interested in trying something similar might want to check out the cartoon strip Achewood for a version of this technique that’s been going a while.
I think Michael Jantze did it first with TheNorm blogging his wait in line for the “Star Wars” movie.
See http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9500E7D8173FF933A15755C0A9649C8B63