Also, what I had in mind (and this is very sketchy so far) was not to have a creator dependent on a patron, but to pay somebody to perform certain tasks for them. As DJ pointed out, creators should learn about the business end of the bid’ness … but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t take advantage of specialists with certain skills.

If you run a business, should should have a lawyer and an accountant; it’s not a stretch to have (perhaps part-time) a business-manager type if you don’t have the skill or time to handle that end of things.

It’s imperative that ALL cartoonists learn to be good businessmen and think outside of the boxes more. I’d like to suggest to anyone, reading minds like Seth Godin, Hugh Mcleod, start thinking like those guys and you’ll be well on your way.

I highly suggest “Small is the new Big” by Seth Godin.

That’s just not going to be a model for the vast majority of good webcomics (let’s just put aside not-good webcomics because no one’s going to make money at that) in that same way that most book authors are musicians/bands don’t do that. But most published authors and musicians do get agents who provide services to a stable of clients. That kind of approach could work for a lot of webcomic creators.

The services such a webcomics-agent would provide may not be all that different than things like Zuda but the perception (and probably the reality) would be different. There’s a trust issue with entities like Zuda (and other publisher-back arrangements) that wouldn’t be there with something like CAA for webcomics.

This is the most telling part of your observations to me. Not only because the publisher is fronting the money and therefore feels a need (and a reasonable one) that their money is being well spent, but because in this case the publisher is opting to keep ahold of said creation once the ties to the creator are severed. And DC does not exactly have a clean record where this kind of thing is concerned.

I think also what’s hardest here is that many art schools fail to teach anything about business either in promotion or pricing or really in any aspect and learning something about any of it when one is just happily making a web comic seems really daunting.