![]() Suffice to say that at least for David Revoy, his choice seems to be working out well. I do not want to reopen this controversy, not least because the artist himself is clearly tired of it by now. ![]() Some declared the new model to be very unfavorable for the artist, while others stated that a monthly patronage by a comic publisher in an environment of diminishing advances and payments might actually be preferable for an artist. Had David been right in his choice of putting Pepper&Carrot under the creative commons attribution license? Was his new model of comic publishing a success, or had he opened himself up to exploitation by comic publishers, giving them something for nothing? The financial side of the Glénat deal was compared with advances and payments in “traditional” arrangements. This started a bit of a controversy on several French blogs concerned with comics. David also pointed out that Glénat would publish the book for 10€ rather than the price of 14,50€ or so for comparable comic books. In the post, he revealed that he does not benefit financially from the comic book, but that Glénat had voluntarily become a patron in a newly created $350 Patreon category for publishers, pledging this amount for each future episode of the comic. In a blog post, David excitedly told his readers and patrons about the upcoming comic book to be produced by Glénat. This summer, David achieved what every comic author surely aspires to: Glénat, a well known publisher, announced that they would publish a Pepper&Carrot comic book. ![]() David is following a very clearly defined philosophy of comic publishing, as illustrated by another image from David’s philosophy page: Image by David Revoy So, how does David make a living? Well, Pepper&Carrot is financed via Patreon. So all I had to do was to access the Krita source file of the comic page, erase a bit of the coloring layer, and paste in the image of a brush (the latter taken from Pixabay, a great resource for graphics in the public domain). This was a matter of seconds, because David uses Krita‘s layering feature to separate line art and coloring. I modified it for GeekDad with a coloring (or, rather, de-coloring) effect on the right-hand side of the picture. Take the picture at the beginning of this article as an example. Thus, building upon David’s work becomes a lot easier. He publishes the high-resolution graphic files for the comics as well as tools and templates with which the comics have been produced: the artist’s digital brush collection for Krita, template files for comic pages and speech bubbles, etc. On his page about the philosophy behind his approach, David illustrates the idea like this: Image by David Revoyĭavid makes building upon his work truly easy through the open-source aspect of his work. Of course, most of us probably do not want to start a commercial venture… but for which other comic can you have T-shirts printed for your kids (your kids will love Pepper&Carrot) without infringing somebody’s copyright? You want to make a computer game based on Pepper&Carrot, a role playing game, or a board game, and maybe even sell it? Be sure to credit David Revoy properly for his creation, and you are good to go. That is pretty much as open as you can get, short of dedicating your work into the public domain. CC BY allows you to use the artwork for anything (also commercial usage) as long as the original artist is properly credited and modifications to the work are indicated. When David started with Pepper&Carrot, he decided to publish the comic under one of the most liberal open licenses there is, the creative commons CC BY license. Krita advertises itself as “made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone,” and David is one of them. Pepper&Carrot is created by David Revoy, a freelance artist, who for many years has been a strong proponent of the open-source movement (with respect to program code, that is), using exclusively open tools such as the Linux operating system and the excellent Krita painting program. ![]() An increasingly popular web comic about a young witch called Pepper and her tomcat Carrot is developed as “open-source comic.” Open source in the arts? !? Open source has become the programmers’ daily bread: Hardly a project that does not build upon publicly available code from open source projects, licensed such that use of the code (as is or modified) is permissible even for commercial endeavors. Image based on original artwork by David Revoy
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