(That Time I Made Webcomics for DC)
In 2007 at the age of 26, I found myself living alone in a small apartment in Meadville, Pennsylvania. I had landed there a couple of years earlier, having accepted a job at the local newspaper, the Meadville Tribune, as a graphic designer/production artist. At the time in 2005, I was pretty happy with the $9.00 an hour I was earning ($2.00 more than my previous newspaper job out of college) as it allowed me to afford my basic bills and, to my delight, make payments on a new (to me) car. By 2007, though, the shine had worn off of Meadville.
Working second shift in an unfamiliar town made making new friends hard. So, with little social life to be had, I decided to channel my time and energy into my comics. Every night I’d clock out at 11:30, walk home in the dark through the quiet town, make some supper, and get to my real work. Soon, these efforts were going to pay off.
That fall, DC Comics launched an experimental new imprint they dubbed Zuda. Headed by an extremely small team of about a half-dozen, Zuda was a webcomics site designed to be the corporation’s foray into original web content. That meant no Superman or Batman. Zuda functioned outside the traditional superhero universe of DC, meaning it was open to any and all genres and, best of all in my eyes, anyone could submit.
The basic premise of Zuda were the monthly competitions. Ten webcomics, eight pages each, were selected from a pool of submitted content to duke it out. Whichever comic earned the most votes from readers received a contract for more comics worth $10,000. All other participants received a payment of $500 for the usage of their comic for the month. Though it could be thought of as a cheap gimmick to pressure creators to campaign for their comics, thus putting the onus on them of attracting readers and new accounts to the site, I liked the set-up. It meant that professionals and non-professionals alike from all over the world could intermingle on zuda.com and have their comics pitted against each other.
By the time of Zuda’s launch, I had already made a half-hearted attempt to start my own webcomic entitled Everyone Laughs at the Crocodile Man, an office place humor strip about a constantly confused anthropomorphic reptilian. I figured I had nothing to lose by entering Croc Man into the Zuda slush pile and hit “Submit.” A couple months later I got an email informing me I was in.
If I remember correctly, Everyone Laughs at the Crocodile Man placed seventh in the February 2008 competition. Undaunted (and hungry for another $500), I submitted my next comic soon thereafter. This one was about an arrogant nineteenth-century explorer named Colonel MacTaggart and his man-servant February. I made it in again (cha-ching!), though the poor Colonel ended up in last place that month. My third submission was Middle-Aged Monster, a melodramatic parody where a Godzilla stand-in finds out his wife has been cheating on him with another kaiju. Another $500 in the bank! Middle-Aged Monster ultimately placed third overall, my highest placing to date yet.
Even though I had yet to win the competition and earn the ultimate prize of a contract, I was becoming known on the site by other creators. This is when I was approached by a group of former Zuda competitors that had teamed up into an “all-star group” to be the colorist on their project, The Hammer, a violent crime comic about a giant pink bunny. This would ultimately be my ticket to being a bona fide DC freelancer. The Hammer won the February 2009 competition, bringing my Zuda story full circle. While I continued to submit more solo work and even a couple more collaborations to the Zuda higher-ups during my tour of coloring, I was never able to get back into the monthly competitions.
In June of 2010, I had finally had enough of Meadville. I picked up and moved to Columbus, hoping to get some more DC work to tide me over while finding a new job. It wasn’t meant to be. Zuda.com shut down a few months later, a scant three years since its launch. To my understanding, a change in leadership at DC shifted corporate priorities, ending the platform. Today, Zuda is nothing but a forgotten internet oddity. The comics and forum are gone, while the website auto-directs to dccomics.com. Years later, I eventually posted the full compliment of Everyone Laughs at the Crocodile Man episodes on Webtoon. You can check out those as well as some of my other webcomics at webtoons.com/en/creator/p9mot.