Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

It's remarkable that this system requires this many intermediaries. In the old days, First Virtual Corporation tried this model, but they charged via credit cards and the cc companies apparently didn't like this model of "charge a lump then dole out." FVC couldn't make it stick.

This model is interesting because PayPal often takes money from your checking account, and, in any case, you're transferring cash to PayPal, not to someone else. The cc companies buy into this.

So with FVC, Scott McCloud would have charged via them and they would have occasionally pulled $5.00 from your card and divvied it up. With PayPal, you prepay into BitPass as the start of the deal and then BitPass handles the payout.

Clever.

I'm a long-time (ok, only three years) Scott McCloud fan, and I've just earned enough cash to start Paypalling web-comic artists like McCloud and Todd Webb (www.toddbot.com, it's daily, it's cute). I don't want all my grassroots comics funding to pay an intermediary. Say I set up an account with Paypal and donate about 20 bucks to 2 or 3 sets over the course of a year. How much, in the long run, would go to Paypal and such if I made these donations in $2 increments? If anyone can give me a full answer (yeah, for free, you bastards), an e-mail would be awesome.

By the way, Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" introduced me to the concept of comics as art form, and I lend my copy to everyone I know.

Mr. Wein...ber...ger...er...damn...David, I'm halfway through your book (library), and though my curmudgeonly mind filter tells me that you've repackaged a few concepts to sound more exciting, I appreciate your deep appreciation for the nature of the Web. Today, I called a bank 800 number to ask about branches in PA and NY. After 10 seconds on hold, I hung up and jotted down their URL, along with 10 others from the phone book. I'll peruse them tonight. No stupid phone menus.

So, yeah, props to you.

I learned awesome amounts of fun stuff from Scott McCloud's _Understanding Comics_. A lot of it is stuff our eyes already know but our brains don't yet, like the ways comic artists translate space into time. Or that the mismatch between a flat cartoony characters like TinTin and the realistic landscapes he inhabits is no mistake--it's a technique to help readers "inhabit" TinTin's adventure themselves. Brilliantly sharp, surprising, eye-opening--I recommend it!