I’ve read Big Nate for a few years now and always enjoyed the strip, when I heard recently of his releasing a new Big Nate collection; “I Smell a Pop Quiz!” an also sitting on the Panel at the Maine Comics Arts Festival, I decided to contact him with a few questions around both subjects:

I’m interested to know more about the direct impact the internet has had on the popularity of Big Nate, and the monetary side of being a cartoonist. Have the opportunities created by the internet ‘compensated’ for the decline in the the traditional, print side of the business? Clearly print syndication is still where the money is for a strip cartoonist, but the internet provides new business opportunities for cartoonists which they may not have had before – like licensing characters for an online game like you recently did for Poptropica. Where once only the biggest comic strips had the mass appeal for licensing opportunities, it’s now totally viable for licensed products to be created on demand regardless of the market size. But I guess the question still is – as good as that sounds for an outsider like me, what’s the reality for cartoonists like yourself today?

You’d probably get a pretty wide range of responses to your question about the impact of the internet, depending on which cartoonist you ask.  For me, it has had what I’d characterize as a modest impact on the popularity of the strip, and a correspondingly modest impact on my income.  One issue I’ve always had is that Big Nate is widely thought of as a kids’ strip; and kids aren’t necessarily the ones visiting comics  websites or clamoring for comic strip merchandise.   But if you’re lucky,  you find the right niche.  A site like Poptropica was a great fit for a strip like Big Nate, because there was a pre-existing captive audience of kids age 6 – 15 who might not have seen Big Nate before, either online or in their local newspapers.  We archived a lot of strips on Poptropica, so kids got to familiarize themselves with the strip’s characters while playing the game.  And sometimes that does translate into other opportunites:  As soon as Big Nate Island debuted on Poptropica, there was an immediate jump in book saIes; it was the sort of cause & effect dynamic you hope for when you’re trying to get your work in front of more eyeballs.  Also, I’ve since agreed to write novelized Big Nate books aimed at young readers — which will include comics — for Harper Collins.  So that’s an example of the internet doing something for Big Nate that I certainly wouldn’t have been capable of doing myself.

But in large part, I think the internet reinforces the pecking order that has already been established by syndication.  In other words, the potential impact of the internet is largely dependent upon a strip’s pre-existing popularity.  Strips that are well-known because people read them in newspapers or compilation books are the ones that sites like comics.com or gocomics are going to feature more prominently.  Those are the strips that more people blog about, those are the strips that are linked to more frequently, and so on.  For those of us whose strips AREN’T among the 10 or 12 most popular, the challenge is finding ways to make people aware of your creation, devising methods of driving people to sites that feature your work.

Could you tell us more about your new collection, "I smell a Pop Quiz"? I was surprised to discover there has only been one Big Nate comic collection prior to this, but in your interview with the Washington Post back in 2004 you mentioned that your editor was working hard on getting a new collection published, and also that you hoped a publisher would express interest in publishing it. Did that eventuate, or is it true that you published the book through Lulu? If so, I guess that goes back  to the ideas discussed in the previous questions about taking advantage of internet distribution and opportunities. Has the collection been the success you hoped for?

I guess compilation books represent the catch-22 of newspaper syndication; it’s very difficult to get compilations published if your strip isn’t in hundreds and hundreds of papers, but it’s just as tough to sell your strip into more newspapers if people haven’t seen any compilation books.  In my case, Big Nate is in a lot of small-market and medium-market papers, but isn’t in many major markets.  I just couldn’t get publishers to take a risk on a Big Nate compilation, even though they were always very complimentary about the strip.  Eventually, my syndicate, United Media, struck a deal with lulu.com for the print-on-demand compilation you mentioned, “I Smell A Pop Quiz.”  And again, the problem was getting people — people who had no idea that there was a Big Nate book available — to visit lulu.com.  We ended up switching over to booksurge after the lulu deal expired, because that way the book could be offered on amazon.  A lot more people are going to find it on amazon than bought it via lulu.  And, as I mentioned earlier, the Poptropica project created a lot of sales.  I really didn’t know what to expect or hope for in terms of a print-on-demand book, but in answer to your question:  yes, I would consider the collection a success.

You’ve mentioned several times that you have worked, and still work in animation. Do you have plans for any animation project concerning Big Nate himself?

At the moment I’m not doing any animation projects because the books I mentioned earlier are taking up a lot of time.  A Big Nate animation project would be great; I’ve always thought the strip would translate really well to tv animation.  If we’re approached about it, I’d be all ears and would welcome the opportunity.

One notable element in early Big Nate strips was the ‘aspiring cartoonist’ aspect of Nate himself. That’s been steadily phased out over the years, although you allude to it in the opening panels of the Sunday strips. I was just curious about this, did you eventually feel you’d exhausted the potential of connected with that idea?

Thanks for mentioning those early strips.  I really enjoyed creating Nate’s “notebook comics.”  They were fun to draw and enabled me to write the kinds of stories and gags that wouldn’t necessarily appear in the “real” strip.  A number of factors contributed to my discontinuing those strips.  The first, frankly, was that I didn’t think my readers enjoyed them as much as I did!  Sometimes I’d get email from readers asking why the strip looked so different on a particular day, and it dawned on me that there were probably a lot of readers out there who didn’t understand or appreciate the fact that, on certain days, the strip acted as a platform for the comics of Nate himself.  Then, as you referenced, I started to feel as if I were reaching the end of the road with those sorts of strips.  I didn’t want it to seem like a crutch or a gimmick, and I didn’t want to repeat myself.  And finally, there was a very practical consideration:  as newspaper comics continued to shrink, those “notebook comics” became more and more difficult to read.  At one point I was travelling, and I found a small paper somewhere in Indiana or Illinois that ran Big Nate.  I was surprised to see how small the strip was on the page, and how illegible it had become.

And lastly, what would you pick as the best comic strip launched within the last decade?

“Cul de Sac.”  Hands down.

Amen to that.

Images © Newspaper Enterprise Association, Inc.