Hey, Eeebenz!
In your latest column, you ask about websurfing habits for suggestions on advertising Bruno. Can I take this to mean that I will soon be seeing your banners on http://www.juicyboobs.com?
Seriously, though...let me offer some half-assed advice (I'm at work, so they own the other half of my ass right now). These days, a lot of the web is moving to RSS and blogs seem to be, more and more, the new style of webpage. I may be premature (just ask my wife!), but I think the days of the static webpage will soon be behind us, with the standard for the web being open RSS and wiki. The new standards seem to be more flexible and user-friendly. Bloglines alone has cut my daily surfing time in half.
How does any of this help Bruno? Well, I don't have a lot, but I do have a couple of ideas:
1) Hit the blogosphere for real...none of this Rothland Tribune nonsense. Get a real roll your own with an RSS feed and give us sketches and the occasional rant about why Mr. So-and-So is not running this country the right way.
2) Give me an RSS feed so that I can read Bruno as part of my Bloglines subscriptions, instead of having to get it through the Darkgate Comic Slurper. I know it's possible to get ads built into these things...I see them every day. I just don't know how it's done.
3) Get yourself noticed by bloggers and let them link the bejeezus out of you. Comment on blogs the way you used to post to alt.rec.comics and leave a link to your site on every one you hit. Rubes like me actually read those comments, and often follow the links. It's hubris. Pimp yourself to the art blogs like Drawn and Flightblog and who knows what. Send 'em links to specific strips of yours that tie in to their blog subjects and let them run that strip in their blog in return for a link back.
Notice that none of this yet has cost you a penny of that cool thou'? Forget advertising online....the smart money knows that chumps like me are out there using custom-rolled RSS feeds, adblockers and "Nuke Anything" for Firefox, and we'll never see the stuff even if you have it in three-foot high dayglo letters with nude animated gifs of Donald Trump and Condi Rice. Save the money for booze and whores.
However, if you're determined to spend your hard earned cash on advertising, do it offline, in a magazine...someplace where your ad won't disappear in two days time to be replaced by yet another shill for derpdrugs or a flash-based game of Catch the Monkey. A magazine is browsed in stores, read on the bus, sits in the bathroom for a month for those precious quiet moments, then gets sold at a flea market or yard sale to some kid who takes it home to slobber over year-old pictures of Keira Knightley or the elf-babe from Everquest. In all that time, every copy of that mag passes through several pairs of hands, and your ad is always there, shining out at them from the back pages, sandwiched in between full-page ads for Tiger Direct and cheap box ads for tri-packs of multicolored Trojans.
Some suggestions for possible magazine ads (think high circulation):
-Computer Gaming World
-PC Gamer
-Dragon
-Scrye
-F&SF
-Realms of Fantasy
-Oriental Wet Snatch Illustrated (well...not really. But if you did, then at least I'd have an excuse for bringing it home and not have to hide it under a pile of old Scientific Americans)
Anyway...you get the idea.
One other suggestion that I think I should make, that is not really related to the previous items:
You need more of a presence in the "Webcomics community"...whatever that is. By this I mean: The fact that you stay loyal to Keen is admirable, and that you seem to hang with mostly Keeners is all well and good, but you seem to be missing from the webcomics world at large. Scott McCloud has never linked to you from The Morning Improv. The Webcomics Examiner has never run an artsy critique of your work. Scott Kurtz does not know you from Adam. Hell...you've never even been BoingBoing'ed! There is a lot of webcomics discussion going on right now, and although I constantly look for mention of your name, I rarely see it. It's not that you don't deserve it, it's just that you seem to be flying below the radar to these people. You need to let them know you're here and smack them repeatedly around the head and neck with Bruno until they pay attention. There's so many webomics on the net right now (and so VERY many bad ones...but that's another discussion) that it seems you really have to fight to get noticed, and you're not doing that if you're sitting at your website waiting for people to come make suggestions. And hanging around with the same people all the time may be fun and give you a sense of community, but in the real world it would be like drawing a comic book series that you only show to the guys who hang out at the comic shop.
Of course, I'm just one reader. Not only that, but I'm the guy that recently hung up his pens on his own webcomic, so what the hell do I know? As a man to whose bitterness with the world I can only aspire once said..."That's just my opinion...I could be wrong."
