Clear Blue Water, which was dropped by Universal Press Syndicate last month, has been relaunched as a daily webcomic on Karen Montague-Reyes’ new web site.
From her blog she writes about the transition:
I am excited about the new direction and the new freedom this change brings with it, but sad about the fact that it won’t be in newspapers any longer. I enjoyed having a national audience (albeit a smallish one), and I especially enjoyed it when one of my cartoons struck a nerve with that audience. I hope I can continue to do that from my place on the web.
The blog also has running commentary of behind the scenes information about doing a nationally syndicated comic such as “Sunday comic strips are rated G in an X rated world.”
Wishing Karen great success–the web can never have enough excellent online comics!!!
Looks like she’s converting the B&W to bitmap and consequently has no anti-aliasing on her line. That’s good for print but looks awful on the web.
Hey great to hear that Karen isn’t letting the syndicate dictate the fate of her strip. Stick it do da man!
Good luck Karen, ditto to Larry’s comment — this makes me wonder how common is it for previously syndicated strips to re-launch as web comics? And, does the audience make the shift with the strip?
re: Bitmaps — I emailed her about it.
For the record, at the tiny resolutions we use for the web, bitmaps are horrible for print. If you want it to look good at 72dpi, you’ve got to anti-alias, or what you see on the screen will be crisp and full of jagged, bitmapped edges in print, too.
Of course, if you have to take a 72dpi web image to the printer you’ve likely done something wrong. I had this happen with a convention program book — they didn’t bother to use the high-res artwork I offered. They just grabbed images off the web. YUCK.
If you’ve got enough pixel density to go 300 dpi or better then your bitmapped scan is fine for print. Perfect, even.