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If you are a photographer and you don’t know about What the Duck, you have been living under a rock. If you are a photographer who is web savvy enough to be reading this article and you don’t know about What the Duck, that rock you are living under has done enough damage to your brain that you should seek medical help.
The short version:
Looking for a good photographic related gift for the holidays (or any other day)? Go buy Aaron’s new What the Duck book at Amazon:
It is 100% guaranteed to make you laugh harder than any other photographic related comic strip based around the life of a duck or your money back.
The real article
Aaron Johnson’s comic strip is, at it’s most basic, about a duck who works as a commercial photographer. Sure, there’s plenty of hilarious subject matter there for those of us who have fought our way through the gauntlet of art directors, ad agencies, picky clients, and revision after revision after revision. But if that were all What the Duck had to say, it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable as it is. The fact that Aaron understood that there was humor to be found all through the photographic world. Gear hounds (and their angry spouses), ‘art’ photographers, assistants, photoshop, the internet (though not photo.net specifically as of yet), photographic critique process, the slow march of technology, and even the frustration of complicated cameras are all topics the intrepid W.T. Duck and his merry band of regulars address. The humor is sarcastic and blunt (or subtle and dry) and the jokes are all sort of “inside” jokes except that it’s an inside joke we can all be let in on.
Perhaps I love WTD because I did my time as an assistant, a commercial photographer, a wedding photographer, an editorial photographer, and now as someone who runs a place like photo.net. Or perhaps it’s because I’m overly obsessed with comic strips (seriously, my family frequently had dinner table conversations about the current day’s funny pages). Or perhaps it just because at the end of the day, I’m just a guy trying to make a good image and have someone say “I sure do like that” (or at least write me a check). But whatever the reason, I can’t recommend WTD highly enough. If you are a photographer with even half a working sense of humor, you are going to enjoy reading it.
Aaron Johnson also should be complimented for the creative and innovative way that he promoted What the Duck from almost day one. Knowing that he was speaking to a specific community out in the world, he embraced that community concept. If you want to post WTD comics on your blog, Aaron says go for it. You want to post a WTD strip in the Photo.net forums, Aaron says that’s fine too. How about helping Aaron name each daily strip, just head to the What the Duck website and join in with everyone else. Guest writers, contests, and so on, the list goes on and on. He knew that the fastest way to become a cornerstone of the web photography world was to make sure everyone who might be interested in his comic knew of its existence and was given every chance to say “hey, I find this funny. I’m going to read the strip every day. Heck, I’ll buy a shirt and a stuffed W.T. Duck figure while I’m at it.” It’s an interesting lesson that photographers would do well to consider in this day and age. What serves an artist better, holding so tightly to usage of their art that nobody ever sees it or allowing the public to use that art and to hope that usage promotes returns in the form of profit? In the past, the obvious answer would have been “free usage takes money out of my pocket” particularly for photographers. But Aaron’s business model gives us all something to think about. He took a different path and it worked very well for him. In fact, given the minuscule chance that a comic artist has of presenting an idea to a press syndicate and making a career of it, one can say with almost complete certainty that WTD would never have made it anywhere if Aaron hadn’t taken the path that he did. Does that mean it will work for everyone? Of course not, for one thing, comic strips are not photographs. But given the topic of the strip and its path to success, photographers would be foolish to not at least consider the way that the world of the artist or creative-type is changing in the digital/web age.
The What the Duck strips from 2007 to the beginning of 2009 have been collected and published in “What the duck (a W. T. Duck Collection)” from Andrews Mcneel Publishing. Sure, you could dig back through all the past strips on Aaron’s WTD website (and you should) but the book is a great way to get the same laughs and save the wear and tear on your mouse-clicking finger. A good sampling of my favorite strips can be found in the book. But there are still enough gems hidden on the WTD website to make it worth your while to kill a boring 30 minute teleconference digging through the past strips there as well. Everyone wins!
It’s good to repeat things, repeat things, repeat things…
Looking for a good photographic related gift for the holidays (or any other day)? Go buy Aaron’s new What the Duck book at Amazon:
, December 04, 2009; 06:24 A.M. 