Launched as a website specializing in “personal passionate storytelling,” the online magazine Smith has managed to become a platform for a series of webcomics based on eccentric and personal narratives. In fact, Smith has become something of online comics laboratory, bringing together an impressive group of young and veteran creators to produce a series of imaginative webcomics that have also been transformed into print books.

Started by Larry Smith and Tim Barkow in 2006, Smith operates on the philosophy that good stories can be told in any form. “Although not [exclusively] a comics site, Smith offers a platform for comics,” said Smith comics editor Jeff Newelt. “Comics are given a place of honor and treated as equal with Smith’s other big projects.”

Both Larry Smith and Newelt stressed that they only pursue one or two comic projects at a time, to ensure they can fully develop and promote that project. While Smith uses audio, video, and other multimedia links, the ultimate goal of each project is to reach print. “I want to see an afterlife for everything on Smith, and make Smith into a platform where stories start and don’t end, ” said Smith.

“Smith is known for high quality work and for getting the work published,” said Smith literary agent ICM's Kate Lee, “and publishers that do graphics know this.” Shooting War, the first webcomic published on Smith, was published by Grand Central Publishing in November 2007 and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld will be released by Pantheon on August 18th. Current projects being serialized on Smith are Next Door Neighbor, an anthology of next-door neighbor stories edited by Dean Haspiel, and Graphic Therapy, an autobiographical graphic series by Emily Steinberg.

Lee, who represented A.D. and Smith’s Six Word Memoir project to the book industry, said it’s important “to show what works on the web, how the web will support the book, and how it translates to print,” emphasizing that the work will “need to be transformed for print.” And while traditional book publishers have become much savvier about using the web to support and market print books, they remain wary of having a competing version of a book online for free “Publishers want to know how much of the original book is available online,” Lee said, and “how much will be new [original print material.]”

The ‘Shooting War’ Heard Round the Web

Shooting War began online serialization on Smith in May 2006. Even though is was a fictional story about a Brooklyn-based hipster-blogger, Jimmy Burns, in a future Iraq, Shooting War fit in with Smith’s storytelling philosophy. Despite being fiction, Newelt said Shooting War is about “the power of personal story telling.” (See "Shooting War Aims for Print Success,"PWCW 11/5/07.)

After writer Anthony Lappe returned from making a documentary in Iraq, Newelt suggested the Shooting War story would work well as a comic and that an old friend of his, Smith, had recently started on online storytelling site. Publishing the story on the Smith website appealed to Lappe because he could “launch the story, characters and their world outside of the publishing world, and do it on our own terms.” Lappe found Shooting War artist Dan Goldman using Craigslist. “I really wanted someone who incorporated real photos,” said Lappe. Goldman fit that criteria, using, as Goldman described it, “digital collage and graphic design all mashed up.”

After a write-up by the Village Voice, media exposure took off, and in the fall of 2006, Grand Central Publishing acquired the rights. Originally written as a serial, Lappe rewrote the story as a “three act narrative,” under the guidance of acquiring GCP editor Jaime Levine, while Goldman reworked and adjusted the artwork in the early chapters. “By the time I got to the end,” Goldman said, “I had found a new style.”

Despite its critical acclaim the book did not sell as well as expected. “The Shooting War webcomic was the first graphic novel some people ever saw,” said Newelt, “just because they didn’t buy it is not a failure, it introduced an entire generation to the medium.” “Graphic novels don’t sell to the level Grand Central [books] usually do,” Levine acknowledged. GCP released 20,000 copies of the book and Lappe said it sold well in France. In addition the book is being turned into a TV mini-series in the UK, according to Lappe.

“Many more people read it online and didn’t know it was in print; people all over the world read it,” emphasized Goldman, “it changed my approach to my career.” Goldman said he wants to continue to explore the possibilities of using webcomics to do more than just “hold up the print paradigm.”

K atrina, Comics and ‘A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge”

After Shooting War ended, Smith said he wanted to do a story on either the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans or something on the environment. Newelt introduced Smith to Josh Neufeld, who had self-published a small book, Katrina Came Calling, a collection of his blog entries made during a stint he spent volunteering with the Red Cross in Biloxi, Mississippi. “I can’t send 20 reporters to New Orleans,” said Smith, “but I want to tell a great personal story. So how can we tell it differently?”

At first Neufeld wanted to do the story as an autobiography but eventually decided against it, “embracing the idea of doing a story about real New Orleanians.” The resulting comic is really a nonfiction account of the experiences of 6 Katrina survivors as told to Neufeld, translated into a multiple-storyline webcomic supported by an inventive array of embedded online multimedia, such as audio and video of the characters and links to related content. Neufeld and Smith set out to find people to tell their stories, finding one, Denise, through an NPR interview, and another, Leo, via Neufeld’s blog. Together they did preliminary interviews and in January 2007 the two flew down to New Orleans to meet the six characters and get reference materials. “Larry’s input was very important,” said Neufeld, in figuring out “how to weave it all together.” Neufeld emphasized that A.D.: New Orleans is not just about Katrina, but also “the continuation of lives before during and after the storm.” Neufeld said, “Larry was very adamant about remembering what links the characters together is loss.”

Pantheon Books editor Lisa Weinert acquired the book in May 2008 and the print book was just beginning. “It was a huge challenge transferring these stories from the web to print,” said Neufeld. “I wanted to break out of the panel structure imposed by the web,” he said. Neufeld also redid the book’s color, which is an integral part of the comic. “The color is the visual soundtrack for the comic and I had to figure out what is the particular mood of a chapter,” Neufeld said. While the multimedia experience is lost in the transition from web to print, the original webcomic remains online. “The web experience is broader, while the print experience is deeper,” Newelt said. “The book is the ultimate version but it’s useful to read both," Neufeld said.

Newelt, who is also an online publicist and marketer specializing in using social media, has “teamed up with Pantheon to promote A.D.” He’ll be spreading links to the A.D.:New Orleans website as well as a "making of the A.D.: New Orleans" video made by Pulp Secret, a site with shows about comics.

Stories about the ‘Next Door Neighbor’

Since “A.D. was a long undertaking,” Newelt explained, they wanted the next webcomics project to be something, “light yet serious.” Dean Haspiel, a pioneer of webcomics and a cofounder along with Dan Goldman and Josh Neufeld of the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate, proposed an anthology of stories about next door neighbors. As a collection of personal stories “Next Door Neighbor is very much on mission,” explained Smith, “everyone has a next door neighbor story.”

Haspiel worked with the artists and writers to put together about seven stories before the series was launched early last year with “Next Door Neighborless” by novelist/performer Jonathan Ames and cartoonist Nick Bertozzi. The series also boasts “two indie powerhouses,” said Newelt—star comics creators Harvey Pekar and Rick Veitch, who worked together on “The Next Door Neighbor I Don’t Know.” Also, the installment "Vs" by Joe Infurnari and Alexis Sottie received an Eisner nomination for Best Digital Comic.

Larry Smith also launched a contest, What’s your next-door neighbor story? Smith explained that “Comics making is very top down,” and the contest gave readers the chance to see their story transformed into a comic. Contestants submitted a 500-word essay and Harvey Pekar chose the eventual winner, Michelle Carlos’s story “Night of the Black Chrysanthemum, ” illustrated by Rick Parker.

Like Shooting War and A.D.: New Orleans, the series is intended to be published in book form. With twenty-eight stories in all, Haspiel said he “intended [Next Door Neighbor] for print when we started. To me it’s not real until it’s in print.”

Self-healing through ‘Graphic Therapy’

“Graphic Therapy is a different deal than A.D. or Shooting War, which is a little more male,” claimed Smith, “It fits in with the female storyteller community, not comics.” Writer Emily Steinberg sees her work “more as illustrated stories than comics.” Graphic Therapy began as a writing project in 1996 when Steinberg, a painter, became blocked. Years later, after she started working as a middle school art teacher, she assigned her students to do an autobiographical comic. When she made an example of the kind of comic she wanted, she thought to herself, “this is something.”

At a Vermont artist retreat in the summer of 2005, she made drawings of people at the retreat with the intention of using them to illustrate her old autobiographical writings. The “Sessions,” as the installments to her story are titled, involve her anxieties about being single, her weight, being Jewish and the mice infestations in her Philadelphia apartment, all framed within the context of her psycho-therapy sessions. “The obsessed quality in the writing and drawings match each other,” said Steinberg. “Therapy as well, is kind of obsessive, digging down to get to a place, even though you don’t know what’s down there.”

After showing the work to friends, Steinberg approached Smith with the work, who proclaimed it a “cool story, absolutely on-mission.” Steinberg said she “wants to do a continuation of Graphic Therapy, basically more of what’s going on lately, contemporary themes, and my teaching experience,” to be told in about another twenty Sessions.

“I want to put her on the map,” said Smith, “and try to get her a new audience.”

Celebrating The Smith Community

The Smith site has attracted a unique community of storytellers and readers that provide both an audience and a creative sounding board for the artists. “Half the fun is the community,” said Haspiel.

As editor-in-chief, Smith said, “The community has always been there [with print], but you can hear the community so much better now online.” All the Smith webcomic creators pointed to the significant impact the community had on the final project.

“Shooting War had a lot of comments and interaction, guys [that were]soldiers, imbedded journalists, offended Muslims, telling us if we’re dead-on or way off base,” said Goldman, “and we factored comments into what the novel became.” Neufeld echoed this sentiment noting that New Orleanians who commented on the comic influenced “changes in the book version. It was like having a whole community of fact checkers.”

“It’s not just fans,” Newelt said about the Smith online community, “but fellow creators commenting and acting as pre-editors on the book.” The expectation, Newelt said, is that the people making comments are likely to buy the book when it is published. “It’s about creating advocates, not just about creating fans,” he stressed, claiming online readers act as the series’ “marketing department,” spreading the comic via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“We have the passion and tools, and we’re learning how to use them,” said Smith of their foray into webcomics. And Smith mentioned that he’s got plans for new webcomics and wants to do a comics project on Barack Obama’s new Presidency, as well as what he called a “secret Harvey Pekar project.”

Smithis a place “people can do groundbreaking work and people like me notice it and we create something more substantial,” said Grand Central Publishing editor Jaime Levine. “Smith is forming a content bridge between classic graphic novel readers and more mainstream interest subject matter.”