Dinosaur Comics

For some webcomic authors, some stories just fit better on print. Ryan North, author of the popular webcomic Dinosaur Comics, releases books that are largely unrelated to his webcomic. Some of his books come from ideas he generates while creating strips, but there is no narrative connection [1]. This article will discuss what drove North to write books largely unprompted by his audience, and how he managed to rally his audience behind a work unrelated to what he is famous for.

Much like why he made Dinosaur Comics, North testified that he wrote his books because their premises amused him. Such is the case for his book To Be or Not to Be, an interactive fiction parody of Shakespeare’s Hamlet [1]. This suggests that North decides on premises first, and then decides the context that best suits them. Thus, despite being famous for webcomics, North transitions to the print medium easily because he is not particularly attached to the webcomic format; he simply happened to become famous through it.

North succeeds in rallying his audience behind his new works by maintaining a degree of familiarity. There is evidence that an author’s previous success predicts future success as long as the later works are of a similar genre [2]. Indeed, Dinosaur Comics and To Be or Not to Be both carry a sense of absurdity that fans of North would enjoy, whether that absurdity comes from philosophical dinosaurs or from alternate timelines of Hamlet.

Still, the success of North’s books cannot be solely attributed to his webcomic fans. Over 25% of donors to the Kickstarter for To Be or Not to Be came from outside the Dinosaur Comics community, which North attributes to the fact that Dinosaur Comics has allowed him to build a rapport with the public [1]. That is, Dinosaur Comics has proven North worthy of attention, considered by many the primary resource of this modern age [3]. This attention, in turn, has attracted the donors necessary to fund the book and the customers who are assured that their money and their time will be well spent on his work. North’s success story represents the idea that the webcomic medium is a tool for relatively unknown content creators to build fame, and thus can serve as a launchpad into other styles of works.

1. Adams, John Joseph. “Interview: Ryan North.” lightspeedmagazine.com. http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-ryan-north/ (accessed February 27, 2019).

2. Yucesoy, Burcu, Xindi Wang, Junming Huang, and Albert-László Barabási. "Success in Books: A Big Data Approach to Bestsellers." EPJ Data Science 7, no. 1 (04, 2018): 1-25. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0135-y. http://prx.library.gatech.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/2022084927?accountid=11107.

3. Lanham, Richard A. “Stuff and Fluff,” in The economics of attention: Style and substance in the age of information. University of Chicago Press, 2006.