Adult webcomics and the platform era

Adult webcomics history is short and it splits cleanly in two. First the web removed the distributor, which was the largest change the medium had ever had. Then money came back online, and the companies that move money took the distributor position over. Roughly fifteen good years in between.

The open web removed the middleman

By the mid 1990s a cartoonist with a scanner, a dial up connection and a few megabytes of hosting could publish a page and have readers the same afternoon. No wholesaler, no catalogue, no retailer, no print run, no minimum order and no permission.

Nothing like that had existed before. Every earlier channel in this history had a party in the middle who could say no, and each of those parties had been the reason adult comics were hard to find. The web deleted the role.

The results showed up fast. Serial strips updating on a schedule, long form stories running for years, archives that never went out of print, and readerships assembled from a few hundred people in each of forty countries rather than from a town. Adult work in particular benefited, because the audience for any specific interest is thin on the ground locally and perfectly viable globally.

Advertising paid badly

The first business model was banner advertising, and it was never good. Rates fell through the 2000s, ad networks applied their own content restrictions, and adult material was worth a fraction of general traffic to the people buying inventory. A comic with real readership could still make close to nothing.

So cartoonists went around it. Books, prints and shirts turned readers into customers, and the web became a shop window for objects. Crowdfunding arrived next, with campaign platforms from around 2009 letting an audience pay for a print run in advance, which is the old direct market logic rebuilt with the readers themselves as the distributor.

Then subscription. Recurring membership platforms from the early 2010s, and self hosted equivalents, let a small share of an audience pay every month for early pages, extra work or nothing at all beyond keeping it going. For adult comics this was transformative, because a few hundred paying readers is a living and no shop had to stock anything.

Money brought the processors

Here is the turn. Publishing on the open web is nearly unregulated. Getting paid is not.

Every subscription runs over card networks, banks and processors, and every one of those has rules about what it will handle. Adult material sits in a high risk category for reasons that predate the internet. A platform can be perfectly willing to host a comic and still be unable to keep it, because the platform is one letter away from losing card acceptance for its entire business.

That is why the pressure never arrives as an argument about the comic. It arrives as a service change. A 2018 United States law aimed at online sex trafficking made platforms newly wary of anything sexual, and the documented response across the industry was to remove or restrict broad categories of content rather than to assess anything case by case. In late 2020 the two large card networks stopped processing for a major adult site after public criticism, and that site removed the majority of its content within days. In 2021 a large subscription platform announced it would stop hosting sexually explicit work, citing its banking partners, then reversed the decision within a week after objections from its own creators.

Nobody in any of those stories was convicted of anything. The mechanism is identical to the one the wholesalers ran in 1954, and the case for it is the same case: the intermediary is cautious because caution is cheap for the intermediary. What replaced the Code sets out the whole chain as it stands.

Deplatforming is an archive problem

The part that gets underestimated is what removal does to work that already exists.

When a large blogging platform banned adult content in 2018, it did not only stop new posts. Years of archives went dark or became unreachable, tags and reblogs broke, and comment history went with them. A great deal of that material had no other copy, because the platform had been the publishing tool as well as the host.

A comic is a serial. Its value compounds over years of accumulated pages, an index, inbound links and a readership that arrived gradually. All of that is address dependent. When the address stops resolving, a decade of work becomes a folder on a hard drive that nobody can find, and search engines keep pointing at the hole for months.

The lesson every generation of cartoonists relearns is the same. Publish where you hold the keys, mirror everything, keep the print files, and treat any platform as distribution rather than as home. That argument, in practical form, is where adult comics can live.

What the era actually settled

Two things, and they pull against each other.

Making and publishing an adult comic has never been easier or cheaper, and the reach available to one person with a website is larger than anything the underground had. Getting paid for one runs through a handful of private companies whose rules can change on a Tuesday, apply retroactively, and come with no appeal.

That is not a new situation. It is the oldest situation in the medium, with a new party standing in the doorway.