Comics Looking to Spread A Little Laughter on the Web

"Webcomicsnation is a completely different model," he said. "I am no longer the publisher. I am the service provider." That is similar to Keenspot.com, a free comic site whose owners, like Manley, fled California to lower their costs.

Chris Crosby, the 27-year-old co-chief executive officer of Keenspot Entertainment, said his family paid $36,000 to purchase a 40,000-square-foot school from the town of Cresbard, S.D., last summer. It now serves as home to both the Crosby family (his mother is the company's chief financial officer) and their quirky comic business.

In an e-mail interview, Crosby said his goal since launching the site five years ago has been to attract enough advertisers to pay a living wage to his cartoonists. His tiny company runs two sites, one at Keenspot.com displaying about 50 high-quality comic strips by invitation only, and another open to any artist at Keenspace.com, where 6,000 cartoonists publish their work.

His firm grossed more than $285,000 last year, Crosby said, up from $188,475 in 2003. More than half came from advertising last year and the rest from merchandise, print comic sales and an ad-free premium version of the site. The company shares half its net revenue with artists, allocating it based on how many readers viewed their work. Crosby said the company has been profitable for several years, though it is not yet paying its four co-owners what he called a "livable wage."

Keenspot draws about 125,000 readers a day, considerably less than the Web's top standalone comic, Penny-Arcade.com.

Robert Khoo, Penny-Arcade's business director, said the three-day-a-week strip about video game culture draws about 800,000 readers a day. The Seattle-based company has grown from just a comics site to a media company that employs five people and turns a profit, Khoo said.

The companies that traditionally have controlled the comics industry have not been idly sitting by. Comics.com, a site owned by newspaper syndicate United Feature Syndicate, offers two paid subscription plans for access to Web versions of its more than 70 print comics. Prices are $12 and $25 a year, depending on how many extra features people want.

Last November, King Features Syndicate rolled out its own Web subscription service called Daily Ink ( http://www.dailyink.com/ ) for $15 a year, providing access to all 70 of the company's syndicated comics and six months worth of archived strips. King Syndicate editor in chief Jay Kennedy said it is too early to tell how well comic subscriptions will fare online.

Eventually, though, he said King Features plans to sign up cartoons born on the Web and find ways to distribute them both online and in print.

"The online market for comics is still very much in its formative stages," Kennedy said. "We know when large numbers of people enjoy something there should be ways to derive revenue from it so the art form can be sustained. The trick is figuring out what those mechanisms will be."

Leslie Walker's e-mail address iswalkerl@washpost.com.