Comics Going Global! A Chat with GlobalComix CEO: Christopher Carter - The Short Box Podcast Ep. 444
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In this episode of The Short Box.
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And the reason why I flagged that specifically is because when you speak about comics in general it might not be the first place your mind might go from sequential art storytelling like, oh, but no, like there's a lot of like really capable creators coming from these places of the world that you might not even think about. The fact that we're able to give a platform to folks because of how we're constructed, if
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Their stuff is performing well with an audience. Their book can be right side by side with some of the bigger publishers worldwide.
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Intro music plays
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Yo, Shortbox Nation. Hello again, welcome back. Thanks for pressing play. You know the deal by now. New Wednesday, new pod. If you're new, welcome to the show. My name is Badr and this is The Short Box Podcast, the comic book talk show that brings you the best conversations about your favorite comics with the people that put their blood, sweat, and tears into making them. And on special occasions like today, that also extends to talking to the people who make it easier than ever to read digital comics. This is episode 444 and today you'll hear from Chris Carter.
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CEO and founder of GlobalComix. It's a free digital reading and distribution platform that first debuted in 2019 and helps comic creators and publishers share and sell their comics and license them globally. Currently the platform boasts over 78,000 comics and that number seems to be growing every week. Matter of fact, in October they announced they would be carrying DC Comics along with their current stable of popular comic publishers like Dark Horse, Image Boom.
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and a whole bunch of other indie publishers and small press, which is very promising to hear. As someone who personally reads like 75% of my comics digitally or on an iPad, I like to consider myself a champion, an advocate for digital comics, especially when it comes to platforms that are making them more convenient, easier to read and just accessible. I wanna see digital comics modernized and easier for everyone to access, regardless of geographic location. So I've been using Global Comics for a couple of weeks now. I like the app.
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It seems promising. Of course, I've got questions and probably so do you. So we'll hear from Chris about what he and his team are doing to provide comic fans with variety and easier access and easier accessibility to digital comics, but also how Global Comics is empowering indie comic creators and helping them get their self-published comics out to fans around the world, but most importantly, how they're helping indie comic publishers and creators get paid for their work.
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But first, I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out our sponsor and the people who make this podcast possible. The Short Box is powered by Gotham City Limit Comic Shop, Jacksonville's premier shop for comics, collectibles, toys, and more. So if you're local to Jacksonville, if you find yourself passing through Jacksonville at some point this month or in the near future, make sure you stop by Gotham City Limit. It's on South Side Boulevard, right next to Tencent Towne Movie Theater. You can't miss it. Tell them Bodder from The Short Box sent you. It's almost like a...
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Once again, patreon.com slash the short box. With that being said, we can finally start the show short box nation. Without further ado, let's talk about the future of digital comics and how global comics fits into that larger picture with its CEO and founder. Let's welcome Chris Carter to the show. Hey, Chris, how are you doing, man? Welcome to the short box. Hey, man, thank you so much for having me. Great. Thank you. We've been meaning to make this happen for a couple of weeks now. I have been excited to talk digital comics.
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And I guess first and foremost, I want to know what do you do as a CEO and I guess founder of a global digital comic platform? What's your responsibilities? What's a day in the life of the CEO of Global Comics? What's that like? I think this is one of the more fun questions that I've gotten in a while because depending on what period of time in the last four or five years you're asking me that question, I would give you a different answer.
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Until we raised our first institutional fundraising and we brought on PUT72 and Willem-Mars and Debra. That gave us the capital to be able to hire an engineering team. Prior to that, I built the entire platform myself. I got done with code. I wrote all of the web platform. I wrote all of everything. That's the kind of thing that you do as a founder. You put on whatever
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realize that. Not so much anymore. Now we're 18, 19 people. So what do I do? Well, really, it's kind of around alignment and strategy and around communication. My role these days is really around, it kind of boils down to how do I make sure that the people on my team are empowered to move forward?
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the speed that they need to? How do I go in and remove blockers? And how do I participate in business development in a way that enables my team to be successful? Like, at the short of it. But what does that actually mean? Well, it means that my day is kind of just filled with meetings. Sounds a lot like my day job. It's like back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back.
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What's been the funnest meeting, even though fun in meetings is almost like an oxymoron, but have you had a chance to talk to some cool people, whether they're creators or people that work for publishers? Sure. That happens on a frequent basis, actually. It's not that meetings are bad, per se. The fun meetings are the ones where we get to speak with people that are super passionate about something.
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Whether they be partners or potentially investors or folks internally on the team or creators that are part of our ecosystem or something like that. The thing that really makes it fun is when I can see people's passion and motivation and engagement and I can see that we're actually living into something that they're looking for. That we can be a really positive force in their life or in their business or in their
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rear and their what have you, right? Like, and those are the ones where I walk out of those calls and I'm like, Oh, this feels good. We're doing something that makes a difference in people's lives. That's rad to hear. But before we continue on this train talking about global comics and the business, I want to get to know you a little more because you mentioned before we hit record that originally from Norway, you're currently living in, in
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So maybe I might see a C2E2 next year or something. But I'm curious, what is your earliest memory of comic books? What was it like growing up in Norway and finding comics? How did you find comics? Do you have an early memory? Or what was the first book that got you to be a fan of this art form? Oh, that's super easy. In Norway, even to this day, you have weekly comic magazines that show up in the supermarket and on the Spinner record.
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even the spinner act, there's a wall. And I think I was like five or six or something like that. And it was the weekly Donald Duck, Don Rosa's Donald Duck. And it was just, you know, like stories from the Disney world, from the Donald world. And it was, you know, like if I had to pick a character that stood out to me back then, it would be Gizmo Duck.
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You know, like this guy that was driving around with a wheel and it was kind of like a robot, but also with a robot suit kind of thing. Uh, it's very much characterizes the type of personality that I am. I'm very technically oriented. I'm very technically savvy. I'm very like interested in technology just in the first place. And it's like, Oh wait, like this character is really cool. Um, but that being said, you know, like
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I've also had a penchant for history. And so comics like Asterix, for example, that took place like thousands of years in the past and Roman Empire and this and the other also have a really big impact on me as a child. And it really wasn't until I was in my late teens, I'd say around like 15 or 16 or so, that I started reading more American comics exported. And I started with Spawn.
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You know, like that's a pretty violent comic and it's like a little for a team. If you jump from Gizmo Duck to, you know, Spawn, that is one hell of a jump for sure. Yeah, those are the memories that stand out to me, really. You know, I was reading your bio on the website and it said that, you know, you come from kind of a manga background and it seems that manga kind of served as your gateway into digital comics. Can you tell me like how those two worlds?
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collided or connected for you and what kind of manga do you like? There was one of my friends back in Norway back in I think 2002 or so. They're like, oh I discovered this anime show called Naruto. I'm like okay cool what's that about? Well it's about this boy that has this crazy demon spirit inside of them and it's like ninjas and skills and jutsus. I'm like...
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It sounds cool. I'm going to, I'm going to watch that. So, you know, I spent, I went online or I downloaded this stuff. This is way before streaming was available on the internet. And, um, cause I think I've binged all of it. And I was like, holy crap, this is so good. How do I get more? And then I realized that this was actually something that was adapted from the manga side. Like the animation part was.
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And then, so, okay, so I went and I read online the manga part of it. But then I realized that international distribution of manga was at the very best 24 months behind where it was originally, you know, keep in mind, this is the made-too-early-loss and we're like, this doesn't seem right. We have the internet here. We should be able to do something with it.
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And so I participated in creating this community of translators of folks that were really interested in comic and manga fandom. And I helped give them the tools that they needed to do translation and localization, have peers review those translations. Then eventually what happened with that was kind of... We let them host.
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picture version of that translation. And that grew like exponentially, you know, and this was like that, the really, really early scanlations. The thing that was really, really important to us that we're doing this or we're building this, this website and this community was that we wanted so hard for these publishers to be present online and to be available to everyone else in the rest of the world.
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And we were able to set up a meeting in Tokyo in 2009. We reached out to, you know, like Shuisha and these folks through the European Vis Intermediary. And for a lot of different reasons, the timing wasn't right. And so, you know, they're like, okay, well, we can't really work with you guys in the context and construct that you exist in.
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So we're like, okay, well, in that world, if you want to stop what we're doing, that's fine. Just ask us. And it took, I think, nine or 10 months or something. And there was a post in one of the Shonen Jumps in 2010. People are asking, these international scandalations. I was like, would you please? And so I saw that and I'm like, yes. And within 72 hours, the whole website was just like, all content was there.
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And that's because this was something that we did out of respect, out of passion, and out of desire to support the stories that were coming out of Japan, that were coming out of manga. So you're saying the goal wasn't to like monetize or, you know, make money off of this. It was purely like, hey, there's something missing here where there is a want. We want to be able to read these and support these titles and these creators like on the up and up.
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at the publisher level, they're not willing to, you know, I guess maybe adopt the technology or, you know, provide it digitally, which I think is still an issue now. There's still a lot, I think, is it Viz? I think it's Viz or the other one, Kadansha, that for the most part still does not have any, like their digital offering is very lackluster. It's kind of aggravating for me. There's so many manga titles that I want to read, but, you know, I have to resort to, you know, less than, you know, official means.
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And so hearing you say that you built this community of people willing to do translation and do scans, I'll be honest, I probably was a visitor of this site at some point, because sites like that and communities like that were critical for me getting into manga and finding different creators and dipping my toes into that, because there just wasn't any means to actually go out and buy this stuff in the store. And it's still kind of flabbergasting to me.
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And maybe that's what I was excited about getting you on the show is that, you know, it's still flabbergasting to me that digital is still seen as a secondary like thing for a lot of these publishers. And it's like, guys, there's so many hungry fans out there that want to consume this content, that want to like support it. But you know, what is the block with publishers and providing digital, you know, versions of these titles? I still don't quite get it.
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There's no one size fits all answer to this question. Right. Like, and the motivations and the strategies for different companies are different. And sometimes it's a strategic decision. And sometimes it's a, well, we just know we don't know kind of this. And sometimes it's a licensing decision. And so kind of navigating this space isn't, it's not as straightforward as you would like it to be.
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bucketed into three groups if we presume a timeframe for answering that question is now versus in the past. Right? I think on the Western publisher side, I think there was a, for better or worse, there was a lot of kind of this conversation around, well, will having things available digitally
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cannibalize our print sales. And that was proven time and time and time and time again that it wouldn't. And so the combination between that and COVID happening and having a lot of businesses tying all of their primary revenue in one distribution channel, that didn't actually really fully work during COVID. That was a learning experience for my business, I think.
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But I think also kind of at the same time, if you look more globally, it's this understanding between how do things work domestically and what can you get away with and what kind of price sensitivity exists and what are the motivations of the people that are consuming stuff and what are the behavioral patterns that doesn't replicate globally at all, right? Like, like
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Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. And having this understanding that you need to treat a global audience differently than where you have your primary core business and where you have your physical print sales is tantamount for being able to make sane business decisions. And I think that's kind of this realization that a lot of the industry is coming to now, is that it's not just about the business.
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when we start thinking about the world as a global audience, as opposed to, you know, how many comic book stores can we reach and what is the reach of those comic book stores in aggregate, you need to make different decisions. And you kind of, you can't think of digital as a channel, per se, right? Like, and that's the core shift that we've seen over the last two, three years.
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in our conversations with many of these partners is that they're starting to think about digital as the top of, okay, well, how do we introduce the maximum, the majority of people into these stories, these IPs, these franchises, these series, so that they can come into our world and our universe and become fans and become collectors and become this, that, and the other.
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And how do you think about it? Is it like a channel or is it like a part of the funnel in the first place is the biggest and most important distinction that we can make of what's what's taking place over the last four years. Chris, when you look at the state of digital comics today, I guess, have we come far? Is there still some more to go? I mean, like, what would you grade the state of digital comics on a scale of, you know, classical?
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school grading system, A through F. Do you think there's still a lot more work to be done? Is it reaching the right audience? Is it helping comic creators and the comic industry push forward and advance with the current offerings we have? Or is there still more work to do? It depends on the country that you're in. Japan or South Korea has an obviously different audience and offering than the United States. But even then, right now, US, E. Japan,
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Korea? That much different. So, wait, what are they doing that much differently? In those countries, consumption and appreciation for this kind of storytelling is more built into the pop culture. It's just part of everyday life. And as a result, access is built into everyday life. I am so glad you said that. We had a fan mail listener question submitted. My guy T-Mix, big shout out to T-Mix.
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and he was asking about manga versus American comics. And that was a point that I brought up that manga is like a national treasure, it's a national export for Japan. For God's sakes, they had Goku and Naruto and One Piece in their branding for the Olympics when they hosted it. That level of respect is insane. We're not gonna see Batman hosting the Olympics. I think to your point that having that whole country back.
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an industry and an art form goes a long way. Right. You kind of have to break it down into how are they supporting individual channels of their pop culture? Now, if you were to say the same thing about, take Japan and music versus United States and music, the grades are shifted. It's because what is right now
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generally accepted, push, promoted pieces of pop culture that large audiences can get behind. But that is also changing, right? Like you look today at anime, for example, and this is very much kind of a result of Japanese pop culture and anime pop culture becoming more of a global thing than just a Japanese thing. You know, it seems like, all right.
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Ariana Grande with a manga tattoo and you see folks, like with Naruto in one piece jerseys and football games. You know what, and I need to correct myself. I said manga is a national treasure, national export. I think that still stands, but anime, I think is what I meant to say. And anime being such a easy pipeline to go check out the manga and them kind of going hand in hand, I think goes a long way. Yeah, your point, definitely.
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All right, so how did the what is the origin story of global comics? What was the the series events that finally led you and your team or I guess you at that point to launch global comics and try to solve the issue of distributing comic books to a global audience? I had too much time in my hands. And I think I was going to go out and build a global digital comic app. I got time. It's Tuesday. It's kind of like that, which sounds really, really weird.
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If I just put it like that in the nose, but no, really, I was working at a company called Shapeways in New York City. It was a startup. Really quick around what time frame we talking? Well, I worked there from 2012 to 2017. And around 2014, I was like, okay, well, I'm already committing a lot of my time to this company and I'm like, cool. And I'm learning a lot of stuff.
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Right. Because I kind of ventured into that company as a product manager. And so I was learning about how do you, how do you build products for different audiences? And, um, you know, I, I'd had this meeting with folks in Japan in 2009, but we decided back then to like put all of our ideas on ice because, you know, social media hadn't grown, gig economy hadn't been proven, crowdsource hadn't been proven. Right. Like all these things.
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that were false back then suddenly became true. And I'm not the kind of person that tends to go out and spend a lot of time outdoors all the time. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm coming back from work and I'm spending my time watching stuff or reading things, but I want to do something productive and something fun, something that, you know, like, okay, what can I do and learn at the same time? And the VP Engineering at that company at Chip is a guy called Josh Levi.
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Today, he's the CTO of chess.com. He was so good at just looking at who I was and how I looked at engineering and software architecture and these types of things. He would mentor me. I taught myself engineering through the proxy of him giving me challenges.
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Then I spent a couple of years just learning how to write code and experimenting and building the progeny of global comics as something just as a project of learning code for itself. And I'd say I did that for maybe five years or so. And that spanned into another company that I was at, a company called ESE Games.
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where we were trying to make these really awesome multiplayer games that 40,000 people could play together while at a stadium just looking at Jumbotron with no app download kind of thing. Turns out having stadium games when COVID hit was... Put the kibosh on that, huh? As we were shutting this down, I...
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I remember there was a day where I walked into my boss as a CEO of ESC, as a guy named Robert Hoffer. And I'm like, all right, I feel like I can finally tell you about this thing that I've been hacking on in my side project. And so I told him about global comics as a concept. And I told him about, you know, like, I don't think comics has been transitioned properly from analog to digital yet.
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I believe that there's still a lot of opportunity, especially in the localization space of bringing content and making it available to people worldwide. I think that conversation took about 15 minutes and he said, all right, let me go home, take a look at this. I got a text message the next day and he said, okay, I'll write the first check for you. He became the first check writer to our company and I was able to bring Eric.
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There's another guy that I was working together with at ESC on board as the first employee. I didn't take any salary myself at that time. Took no income actually. It just kind of grew from there. Over the course of from 2020 to 2024, where we are now, eventually Robert joined as a founder of the company and Eric is now a founder of the company.
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raised significant now amounts of money, first initially 1.5 from Angels and then 6.5 last year from Institutional, from Point702 Ventures and William Mars and Debra and folks like that. Wow. There's a lot of belief in this and a lot of money to, I mean, they put their money where their mouth is, not just like saying, I believe in this, but they're putting money behind it as well. I would imagine
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You must have been a pretty big fan of comics at the time to want to not only invest your time but also money, not take a salary, things like that. What were you reading? What were some of your favorite comics at that point? I had no time to read anything. Look, like I said, I wrote all of it. This idea of how do you build a business and being an entrepreneur, it is all consuming.
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And especially in the early days, before you have funding, before you can hire people to do stuff. And so you're putting on every possible hat that you can put on. Now that's not to say that I wasn't reading stuff, but fractionally as part of my, let's call it weekly time consumption spent, it could be less than 1%. I was reading One Piece. Dr. Stone, I think, was coming out around that time and I was like, oh.
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Like this is really, really intelligent. I love that. What would you say makes global comics different from other digital comic platforms and apps? Like how does it stand out from other established platforms? Like let's say like Hoopla, which is free for anyone that has a library card or say like Comixology, which is I think safe to say, whether you like it or not, I think it's safe to say one of the industry's longest running digital comic platforms. Like how does global comics separate itself from those?
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I think that's actually a very clear thing and very easy thing to describe. These are platforms that are, their core premise is solely around, we have a book and you can read the book. Global Comics is about way more than that and it's about actually community and it's about building a global community of folks that are really interested in stuff that can connect with each other around things that they're interested around, fandom, passion around, collectibility.
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And, you know, it kind of that is, if that is the core underpinning, then like the second layer is also what is the motivation that we have in terms of how do we think about building our business? What is our business model? Right? Like Comixology is an interesting platform that primarily is built around paper book. There's some, you know, unlimited type thing.
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I'm not too familiar with HoopLabs, so I can't really speak to it, but I would presume because it's a library system that is based on, you know, ISBNs and SKUs and like renting and then take out and such. And the thing that separates us from both of those is our focus and embrace on allowing the long tail of indie creators or solo creators or web comic creators.
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or manga creators or doujinshi creators to have a place to publish and self-publish. And they can be up and live within minutes with their own content. And then just kind of baking that into the chromium of how do you discover stories that are similar to each other. So you can have someone that's really interested in stories from major publishers and something that comes out of these indie creators that aligns very well with passions and we're able to make recommendations and say,
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Oh, well, you like this kind of story. Maybe you might want to try out this other thing from this undiscovered person. And so we're really trying to build this ecosystem that enables creators and publishers, no matter where they are, where they're from, to be successful and to find an audience. Yeah, I was, I was poking around on the website and I was going through some of the creator tools that you guys have. No, granted, you know, I'm not a comic creator myself. I know a lot of, you know, indie comic creators, self publishers themselves.
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And it looks promising, man. I mean, you guys have a whole page dedicated to resources and tools for indie comic creators, how to monetize, tips on marketing. I guess, do you mind talking a little more about some of the tools and features that you guys have available for aspiring comic creators or people that want to post and host their comics on Global Comics? Sure. So all of it kind of starts with this idea that, well, right now, it starts with this idea that you have a book that you want to put online somehow.
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And so you go to global comics, you hit the publish button, and you can be live with your book or your series of multiple books within a couple of minutes. And in that process, you get to categorize and tag with metadata and what genre and what themes and what audience and this type of thing. You also get to choose, is this something that requires a paywall or does not require a paywall? Do I, in addition to...
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the read online payable, do I want to sell a downloadable PDF person or not? Right? Like, and so we're giving a lot of optionality for creators to just kind of come online and figure out how do you want to start monetize? How do you not want to start monetizing, but building an audience? Um, and, and in that umbrella is the automatic, um, downstream is that all of these folks get access to a lot of analytics about how people are accessing, where they're finding it. And so on.
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how they're consuming each individual book, how much time is being spent on each page on each panel, et cetera. So if we look at that as the first layer of the onion, beyond that is kind of, okay, well, there's education. How do you think about your comic publishing for yourself as an identity? Are you doing this because you're looking to make money? Are you trying to make it business? Are you...
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And so then there's these educational pieces around, okay, well, building a business means you need to think about building a business in these ways. Now this isn't an MBA course by any means, but it's like simplified into comic terms that is accessible to creators, right? Beyond that, like the tooling that we think about, you can kind of put it in three different buckets. One is we provide real-time analytics with a...
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pardon my French, shitload of metrics that you can kind of slice and dice in whatever way that you want to, that will help you understand how do people consume your stories and why do they like it and where do they drop off. The second piece is around, okay, well, as a comic creator that might be trying to build a business or might be trying to build an audience around, there's a suite of features that we have that help them do that, right?
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An example of that might be, so you're running a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo or something like that, and you need digital fulfillment. Well, we, like creators, create digital fulfillment packages through our platform so that that will just plug directly into these crowd sourcing or crowdfunding platforms. A different example might be that maybe you're doing a book that's a collaboration between you and another creator in the comics.
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Well, you can do revenue splitting in between like you and this other person so that the platform will handle it equally. And there's just so many more things like that that we've just really just looked at, well, what are the needs that these people have and how do we solve them? And the third bucket there, I think, and this is where it starts to get a little bit more esoteric. But third bucket there is around how do you do your audience building?
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Right? Like how do you tell a story, not through your comic book, but through how do you engage with people? Where do you post? What's your like social media strategy that is all like secondary layer around this idea of how do you get people into the funnel, they get interested in comic, they get interested in series, they become collectors or fans that pay money for things. That's right now. There's more coming in the future.
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I think just to wrap all of that up is we're not just creating a platform. We're trying to make an ecosystem and we want all of the constituents of our ecosystem to be successful. That sounds promising. I mean, and it makes sense, right? If people are hosting, if creators are hosting their comics on the platform and just being obvious, I mean, it's on the website and you guys are making a small cut of that, it behooves you to empower them with these tools to help them grow their audience and bring more eyes.
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to the app. So it's one hand washing the other, which I totally respect. You said something, though, that piqued my interest. You mentioned being able to collect insights and analytics, which I never thought about that as a significant, I guess, point for digital comics, especially for the creator side. That's information that you can't really get from print. I mean, yeah, you could always look at how much did my comic book sold and my sold out. That's at the end of the day what you want. You want your comic books to sell.
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But you mentioned being able to provide insights and analytics into how far did someone read? Did they stay on a page particularly long? And I'm sure like a whole other bunch of metrics. Based on like some, I guess some of the key analytics and things that you guys have measured and considering that there might be an aspiring or Indie Comic Creator listening right now, is there any like common mistakes or are you seeing any trends among readers that would be like helpful?
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for an indie comic creator or a small press person to know when it comes to digital comics and how they're consumed? I mean, yes. And when I answer this, it becomes incredibly obvious to anyone that really thinks about it. Don't overload with information density in a small amount of space visually. Because it what? It leads to people dropping off the book? Yeah, I'll use this example. There's a publisher that we're working with.
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that they had this book that came out and on page 18, there was a lot of like really high jumping that time spent, but really high jumping people that just didn't read the next page. Oh, wow. And so we're like, okay. And you guys are able to measure that and see that because I mean, it's digital. Yeah. Wow, that's impressive. Well, not just us, but we give that visualized to folks. And so we look at it together and then we look at the page and I think like this page was, if you imagine kind of like this, right? It's like seven panels,
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this just stacked on top and there was a lot of dialogue back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between two different characters. But the panels actually liked that the art didn't change. It was just the text that changed. And so the theory became, like we looked at this and we're like, okay, well, that looks really hard to consume. The theory became, okay, well,
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What if we simplify, what if we break up this page into two or three more and we like change a little bit of panels of the pacing and the digestiveness of the page becomes simpler. And so they went from, I think like an 80% abandon rate on that page to something like 40% just by like smoothing it out. Right. And this is the type of thing that you're just not going to get in a non-digital world.
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Yeah, for sure. I work in marketing for my day job. And metrics like that to us is like pure gold. I know I sound like slimy corporate guy, but with my marketing hat on and my digital hat on, that is like, you know, that's gold. Because trying to get feedback, customer feedback, via, you know, surveys or relying on them to tell you why they stopped buying or something, it can be like pulling teeth, you know. It can be difficult for people to find time to
39:51
put their feelings and opinions out there. But you're collecting, you know, it's like automatic metrics and data for you in real time. The example you gave is really cool that they were able to, the creators were able to make a informative creative decision where, you know, it's using digital metrics to make a informed creative decision to better enhance the reading experience. That might have not gotten the feedback, you know, any other way. That's exactly right. To my knowledge.
40:20
You're wrong, but to my knowledge, I don't think that there is any other platform out there that gives the amount of data that we do and the amount of granularity in slicing and dicing and filters that we do. That is both good and bad. There's also a large audience out there that has not been trained to think about publishing in this way. So, there's a chicken and egg on how do you help people become successful with the power of the data that we're giving them.
40:49
So it's safe to say, I mean, you said it earlier, it's in the name Global Comics. It's safe to say that you guys are hosting comic books from all over the world. Is there any like interesting places or maybe hubs that are really passionate about uploading comics or I don't know, maybe any interesting publisher that you've come across on a global scale? I mean, yes, every day. For example, like are you seeing a lot of publishers, indie publishers coming out of...
41:15
you know, just toss a name out like Brazil or something, anything that has piqued your interest that you're like, oh, wow, okay, they got a thriving comic community. Really interesting stuff coming out of both creators and kind of publisher side from Africa actually. Oh, wow, okay. And the reason why I flagged that specifically is because when you speak about comics in general, it might not be the first place your mind might go from sequential art storytelling like, oh, but.
41:43
No, like there's a lot of like really capable creators coming from these places of the world that you might not even think about. That to me, like the fact that we're able to give a platform to folks and especially in this world where because of how we're constructed, if their stuff is performing well with an audience, their book can be right side by side with some of the bigger publishers worldwide.
42:10
And I've noticed that too, kind of scroll. I've got the homepage pulled up and the segmentation of the website, there's a lot of different segments and carousels that do a good job of categorizing certain books. Like I'm scrolling right now, you've got like a Hero Week segment and it's got Transformers, Hellboy, Berserker, Invincible. And then you've got a segment for comic books that are like leaving soon, most popular on global comics. And it is a good mix of...
42:37
obvious ones and identifiable ones that I'm familiar with, in addition with some smaller publishers, like some manga sprinkled in there. It reminds me of why I like the Shonen Jump app. The Shonen Jump app does a really good job of being like, okay, maybe you want to read something horror, something horror manga or superhero manga or romance. They do a really good job of taking the Netflix model of just approaching it from genre and category versus...
43:05
you know, just publisher and whatnot. The way that this experience kind of boils down is, um, we look at, like we, we think about discovery as three different ventures, right? And, and, um, the home experience is two of them. And each of these, we call them sections. Uh, as you think about, you know, like a gold picks or an update from creators and new releases and so on and so forth. Um, they can either be curated.
43:34
by staff or by friendlies or by partners or this, that, and the other. Or they can be dynamically driven by popularity or readership or trending. Or they can be personalized recommendations for people. Right? Like, so each of these sections can be all of those things. Um, and, and so the, the three buckets is really kind of like personalized for you, curated by us and choose your own adventure.
44:03
And the choose your own adventure part is in the explore section of our website and on the app where, you know, we have so many filters that people really narrow down. Oh, I want, you know, like, I want time travel, science, medical stories, but with anthropomorphic characters take place in the 1500s in the manga art style and vertical scroll. And you can find that.
44:30
I'm actually curious what would pop up if I applied all those filters. That'd be crazy. And that's the beauty of it because we don't... As much as we understand that there's a lot of power in having really good recommendation engines and we continue to invest in this, there's still a segment of folks or even just moments in their day-to-day where they're like, I want to go find something like that.
44:58
And it's going to be so far out from what any recommendation engine might be compared to what their normal habits are. And just enabling folks to discover that way, I think that there's a huge amount of power in that and there's a huge amount of value. Yeah. I mean, if you think about how, I mean, if you think about like comic shop culture or just being friends with other, you know, comic book fans.
45:22
Word of mouth goes a long way, right? Like, yeah, I get so many press releases and preview comics, but there's nothing like a good word of mouth. Hearing from another friend, hey, you got to check this book out, or hey, images drop this, you got to check it out. So I do appreciate that you guys have so many different ways of recommending books. Matter of fact, last night, I forgot what section I found this in. I think I was just scrolling image. I was like, what do they have for image comics?
45:51
Reading this blood-writ comic from Image Comics and I damn near devoured it I mean just like a 150 page comic. It's almost like Conan meets Wolverine meets like a Hanna Barbera cartoon It is excellent and I was really happy that you guys had like volume one on here I guess you guys advertise yourself as a free as a free digital comic platform But you guys also have a membership What does it call like the?
46:19
Global Comics Gold membership. I guess could you talk a little bit about the difference between the free comics on there versus what you get as part of the membership? Sure. So anyone can publish their books on Global Comics. And they can choose whether or not do I want to pay well in my book at all, ever, or not. Then a truly free series will never have a pay well anywhere.
46:45
depending on like if it's book one or 70 or 150 or whatever. There's some amount of free series that come out from publishers because they want to make their universe available to folks. They want awareness and get the name out there. And then there is content that is paywalled. Now, in the paywalled bucket, again, we give a lot of customizability and we empower the creators and publishers.
47:12
to choose where in each book do they set a paywall. And that kind of, it might be that for a particular series, let's say it's a series of single issues that has, I don't know, I'm making this up with like 70 single issues. Maybe they might make the first 13 single issues free, but then the paywall kicks in somewhere on issue 14. That would be considered a paid series, even though there's like books that are free in the series.
47:41
And we just internally call it our free preview. How long is a free preview? Well, it can be a book, it can be a couple of pages, it can be whatever. And this gold membership is basically, it's the single payer monthly that you pay that unlocks access to anything that is behind a paywall today. So one price membership for the whole site. Yes. Oh wow. For everything that's here today. And that means that
48:11
anything that right now is paywalled, that if you pay your $7.99 on the web or $9.99 in the app, it depends on where you come in. Once you have a subscription, you can read all of that stuff. How big was it to get DC on board as a publisher? Because I find that for a lot of comic fans, especially digital comic fans, that's usually the make or break it. It's one thing to have
48:39
big deal in my opinion to have publishers like Image and Boom and a lot of these other direct market publishers. But for a lot of fans, the make or break it is does it have Marvel or DC? How big was it for you guys to get DC on board? Well, I mean, for me on a personal level, you know, like I grew up, I was a huge Batman fan when I was five. Not necessarily from the comics, like this was Adam West's adaptation and human, you know. And so for me, just this idea that holy shit.
49:09
going to have Batman on the platform was like, you know, Holy shit, this is so cool. But but to answer your question, you know, like, I think the way that the team felt about it is that it, it's certainly a stamp of recognition, right? Like that, that we have been doing something that not just the community, but that the industry is recognizing as a beneficial force.
49:39
to both the industry and the ecosystem. And I think I can speak on behalf of everyone on the team that we were incredibly humbled by this idea that these bigger players were like, okay, well, Cool Comics is doing something right, right? And for us, that was, like internally, that was one of those big moments where I got to go back to the team and say, we signed the contracts. Hell yeah.
50:09
Balloons came out of nowhere, streamers... Confetti's like raining down on this guy. I think we've seen just when we look at consumer behavior, whenever we bring on, and this isn't true just for DC, this is true for any new publisher that we bring in.
50:36
is that as we bring more stuff that people have a pre-existing idea that they're interested in reading before they come into global comics, whether or not they stay or they delete their account or they bounce or something, something. That ratio goes down. In aggregate, the more stuff that we have that people are looking for when they come into the platform. Certainly, DC had a larger impact.
51:07
because there's a lot of people who come in and be like, we're Batman, we're Superman, we're looking for the other. And so just kind of even from the metrics side, all the way through to the way that we felt and the pride that we felt and the way that the staff felt and the way that we've seen people speak about us as a brand and as a platform, you know, big impact. It sounds like you guys are doing a lot of things, right? I mean, from the offerings, the publisher offerings,
51:37
the emphasis on empowering creators and small press publishers and getting their comics out on here and to a global audience, excuse the pun. While we're on the topic of readers and users of the app that are using it to read the comics, I've got a question from a mutual friend of ours. He's also an avid digital comic reader himself and a fellow user of the app. I'm talking about my friend, Chris Hacker from the Oblivion Bar Podcast.
52:03
I told him that I was having you on the show. Me and him kind of chopped it up about what we like about Global Comics, what we want to see. And he submitted a question for this interview. He wants to know, are there any plans to create a new this week carousel slash section for the books that are brand new at your local comic shops that week? And I want to piggyback off that because I'm curious to hear what are some of the future releases that we can look forward to coming to Global Comics? Which ones have been the most requested? I guess anything that you could tell us.
52:32
in terms of future updates coming soon? I love that question because it is so easy to answer that one specifically. Yes. There you go, Chris. Everything that you see on the home experience or on the channel's experience, we built an entire custom CMS for it. And so I can add that section right now if I wanted to. Oh, you've got the red, you've got the red button on your desk.
53:01
I can create it and I can make it live and I can just populate it for everyone without the new app build, without any code ship. The real question here is, what do people want? This is such a good request and I love the fact that you're bringing that to our attention. I think the more that people do this. Maybe perhaps...
53:30
A lot of folks are not used to having a company be able to be nimble and respond to requests like this. But for us, we'll eat this up. If you have a good request, tweet at us or message us or send us an email and say, like, hey, I'm really looking for this, that, and the other. And so to that regard, I happen to know for a fact that some other features that are also coming very soon.
53:58
compound the benefits of having something like that, makes it so that, yes, whatever's up. It feels like Global Comics, you guys popped on my radar almost at the right time. Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to have Travis from Omnibus on the pod. They had just started, they were a digital comic platform. I was really excited about Omnibus and Travis and his team were great.
54:26
And they just ran into a lot of challenges and funding and dealing with publishers. Unfortunately, they closed Omnibus actually this year. So it was heartbreaking because I saw the potential. I saw their heart was in it. And they had all these great things lined up. And I'll be honest, it kind of dealt a blow in terms of how, if Omnibus can't get off the ground, then is there any really hope for digital comics? Am I stuck with the options I currently have?
54:56
which I'm not too mad about, but you know, you're like, ah, there's so much to be desired with our current digital comic offering. At this point, longevity to me is one of the most important, I think, aspects I look at when it comes to digital comic platforms. And I guess I wanna hear from you, Chris, what is Global Comics doing to ensure its longevity? What do you guys have in place? Chris, I can't take another heartbreak, man. I need a good digital comic reader.
55:26
I'll tell you this, right? Like, look, we started our operations in 2020. We didn't launch our consumer app until 2023. We didn't take institutional funding from VCs until 2023. And the reason for that was exactly the thing that you just described. There are so many platforms that came and went. The comics industry, the comics platform industry, the digital industry of comics,
55:55
that's being fraught with folks that show up, raise a bunch of money, and then disappear 18 months later because they run out of cash and they can't raise again. The reason they can't raise again is because they don't have any of the metrics that are required after an initial fundraise to justify a second investment. So what do we do differently? Well, we didn't go to venture capitals. I'm sorry. We trickle funded through angels for three years.
56:24
And we spent a lot of time aggregating a lot of content and building a relationship and showing staying power from 2020 to 2021 to 2022 to 2023. And we showed folks that we were here and that we weren't going away and that we weren't trying to initially just make a big splash in launching an app with not enough content for anyone to read. And so...
56:52
When we finally went to market in October of last year with our mobile app, that was because at that point we'd hit 55,000 titles. 50,000 titles after let's call it three and a half years of building a content library and building relationships and showing that we had staying pack. Between October of last year and now, so now we're at almost 79,000 titles. So...
57:21
We've grown by 60% in just the years since the point where we said that we had enough titles, right? And really, what indicates staying power is that we have the stories that both people already know, but also the things that they don't know, but they will like. And you need both of those things. And you need a really wide and deep ocean of comics for the long tail of folks that have...
57:50
wildly different interests and wildly different focus areas to be able to come in and say, there's something here for me. And I think as long as we as a business, as a company operate in this way, where we try to make sure that what we do makes sense for living into reader expectations and we help the publishing side, whether it be creators or publishers.
58:20
understand what that is and live into it also. I think we're gonna be here for a very long time. Chris, I like hearing that. Look, I will remain optimistic and I will be watching and rooting for you as well as using the app because I've been enjoying it so far. If you could give a piece of advice for any aspiring comic creators that want to, you know, get their stories out there and sell their books based on what you know and what you've done with global comics, what would be your main piece of advice to aspiring comic creators?
58:48
Hmm, that's a really good question. Let me let me think about that for a moment.
58:54
I think he boils down to three things. If you're someone that has a story or has a passion, you're trying to create something and bring it into the world.
59:05
And this is not dissimilar to what I've been doing with GC. You need to have a level of passion for doing the thing that you are trying to do, like telling that story and spreading it out into the world in a way that that flame can't be extinguished. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in the thing that you're trying to do. And you need to blinders on for a lot of folks that.
59:35
often will give negative input or negative feedback, negative comments for no other reason than that. They can't do it themselves. I think that the second piece of it is that you need to kind of understand that this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. And that you are going to go through this journey and you're going to be doing things that you're going to be better at in five years than you are right now.
01:00:06
And that's okay, that's the whole point. And you can't judge what you have right now by the idea of what you might be in the future as a reason to not do what you're gonna do right now. That just becomes instant failure. The third and almost equally important piece of advice here is that if you're a solo creator and you're trying to create this universe and you're trying to create these stories, you're trying to tell the story.
01:00:35
Creating it doesn't mean that people will find it. You have to spend and budget off at least 20% of your time and actually promoting yourself, marketing yourself, making sure that your stuff is in front of people that are interested. And that doesn't necessarily mean spam 50 links on Twitter every day. It means like, think about who are the people that are interested in the kind of story that you're creating. Where are those people?
01:01:03
How do you pattern match for finding larger groups of those people? What kind of communities are they in? And finding ways to be an authentic participant in those locations and sharing your stories and putting your stories in front of people that will appreciate it. I think if you can do those three things well, you can have the drive and the grit to push through even when things get really hard.
01:01:32
That's what really becomes the underpinning of success, I think. Well said, Chris. I appreciate you sharing that. With that said, ladies and gents, this is the Short Box Podcast, and we just finished talking with Chris Carter about the future of digital comics and how global comics fits into that picture. Check out the platform for yourself at globalcomics.com. You can download the app on iOS devices, on Google devices, and make sure to give Chris and Global Comics a follow on Instagram and X.
01:01:59
I'll have some links to that and some additional links in the show notes. So check those out. Chris, any parting words or shameless plugs before we officially wrap up? The shameless plug is everyone should be on Google comics reading cool stories, but the parting words is more important, I think. Look, if you are interested in comics, the reason why you should try Google comics is because there's so many creators that are creating stories that deserve eyeballs.
01:02:28
I guarantee you that no matter what you are interested in, we have something for you of high quality that really fits your interest. And usually that comes from a long tail of folks that are like, I have a story to tell that aren't just part of just a bigger publisher that has the reach and the means and the finances to just market to a large audience. But these are folks that are putting all of their heart and their passion and their desire into creating these stories. So if you come into GC...
01:02:58
Try and spend some of your time to explore the edges of creator-owned and creator-published. And if you like the stories, give those folks a compliment. Like, add a little comment and say thank you. That goes a really long way. We could wrap up on that. I'm going to go check out some of these creators from Africa. That has really piqued my interest. I'm going to see if there's any comic creators from my home country, Morocco, all right? I want to see what's popping in comic books in Morocco. But Chris, this was fantastic. I really appreciate it.
01:03:25
Feel free to come back anytime if you want to talk more about global comics and what you guys got going on. This is great. Butter, thank you so much for having me. This has been fantastic. There you have it, ShortBikes Nation. That's the end of the show. Thank you for hanging out. Thanks for being here. And a special shout out if you made it this far. If you enjoyed this episode and you have some thoughts or comments that you want to share with us, write us at theshortbikesjaxx at gmail.com. And if you really liked this episode,
01:03:55
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01:04:24
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01:05:21
Thanks again to everyone that listens and supports this show. Be sure to come back next week for a new episode. And most importantly, take care of yourselves, read a good comic, and continue to make mine and yours short box. I'll catch you soon.
