Bybloemen

Some of you have likely been wondering what was going on with Bybloemen given the comic's sudden departure from Hiveworks. My wonderful ex-Hiveworks colleagues and a few remaining HW staff members spent over a year extricating artists from what had evolved from your run-of-the-mill, crummy workplace environment to a full-blown shit-show, including me, for which I'm incredibly grateful. If Krispy -- genuinely one of the most principled people working in the industry -- hadn’t reached out to me when she did I would have likely remained entangled in this mess for months beyond my exit date. The Hiveworks guild, which represents many former HW artists, drafted what I think is an extraordinarily fair and restrained account of the events leading up to the mass exodus of artists last year, which I'll link here: https://cartoonist.coop/hiveworks-guild-statement/.

The guild letter does a great job outlining the primary problems facing artists: inadequate support, internal favoritism, unprofessional behavior from specific staff members, failure to pay ad revenues, and kickstarter campaigns that can charitably be described as nightmarishly incompetent junior ponzi schemes. I was one of the more fortunate artists, in that the financial impact to me was minimal and I was able to walk away with no strings attached. That said, I'm still going to provide some highlights from my time at HW to validate other artists’ accounts.

I was on-boarded in 2017 with the promise that Hiveworks wanted to expand its B&W offerings and establish itself as a place where niche genre comics could thrive. The editorial team (including Isa, the former COO) seemed enthusiastic about Bybloemen at the time and convinced me that they could help the comic find an audience. This was encouraging to me because this comic is an odd duck. It's a story about a historical incident from the 1630s with a main character who would qualify for AARP benefits. It had already been rejected from several other publishers and was also rejected by Hiveworks the first time I pitched it in 2016. Hiveworks presented itself as having expertise in the "non art" parts of establishing a successful webcomic, like web design and marketing, and this was appealing to me as a person who works a 9-5 and lacks a killer sales instinct.

During the first six months Bybloemen was with Hiveworks, it was regularly promoted in the official social media feed. Someone in-house also put it in for an Eisner nomination during this period, which was kind but struck me as a bit odd and poorly timed because there was barely enough material on the site to qualify let alone contend (and the art and lettering were janky as hell! I hadn't found my feet yet!). All of this felt great at first, but then the comic didn't immediately take off. I wasn't surprised at this. I didn't have a significant social media presence, the comic was intended to be a long-form, character focused story, and the first few years of working on a webcomic are all about building an audience. The work was progressing, the art was improving, the reviews were generally positive. There was some pressure to increase my output to 2-3 updates a week (genuinely impossible, given the time needed to ink each page) but this wasn't my first job and I was comfortable pushing back. In general, all of the above seemed a-okay in my book.

But eventually, Bybloemen stopped showing up in promotional material and stopped getting features on the website (outside of the yearly Halloween post haha). The marketing team at Hiveworks never created ads for me - all of the art assets were developed by yours truly based on in-house specifications, and I was even responsible for slapping on the logo in most cases. To this day, I'm not sure where and how often some of these ads were run. Even my own update posts made their way to HW's official social media on an irregular basis. Additionally, the staff never ran ad copy by me before posting it, and it was increasingly clear that the marketing team wasn’t remotely familiar with the comic's themes or genre. I was willing to write my own copy and I think the comic benefited when the ads took a more irreverent tone similar to the actual writing, but I just was not a part of the conversation. Near the end of my tenure, the marketing team made requests for ship art or fight scenes to promote the comic, and seemed unable to process the idea that I didn't have any romantic elements or significant action sequences to draw on. In general, Hiveworks never knew quite what to do with Bybloemen from a promotional standpoint and eventually stopped trying. I don't think the tonal dissonance between the way it was marketed, when it was marketed, helped. To be frank, I never expected Bybloemen to be anything other than a niche product (an artisanal wheel of cheese with a slightly suspect look, with a flavor that grows on you), but once acquired HW didn't seem interested in developing any strategies for marketing it that differed from their standard approach. 

I don't want to speculate re: intentions, but I think the CEO fostered an environment in which IP was collected like knick knacks to line a shelf, with most collecting dust after a few months. If you have 100+ artists in your stable, at least that many projects, and don't have the internal staff to match this number (and are also mistreating said staff), you can't give each of them the time and attention they need to thrive. Initial enthusiasm quickly gave way to benign neglect. My decision to self-edit certainly explains my limited contact with the editorial team, but I was also repeatedly dropped from the artist listserv. For the last two years of my time with HW, I often didn't receive update emails from the company. I learned about major breaking news (like the decision to stop being a publisher lol) via social media posts, or more galling, from comics news websites or social media accounts. A number of ex-Hiveworks artists have described difficulties in communicating with staff and I can certainly say that my own experience supports this. 

All of this sucks, but I likely would have continued plugging away at Bybloemen, my freakish little passion project, if I had continued to break even. I'm "lucky" in that HW never paid my bills, but for a lot of the artists on contract, ad revenue and kickstarter profits were essential income. And HW eventually stopped paying out ad revenues on a regular basis (and unbeknownst to me at the time, pocketing my co-workers' kickstarter funds). I eventually went from making 100 bucks a month on ads to 50, with no explanation from staff. They never provided analytics for individual comics during most of my run, but my own research indicated relatively steady reader numbers prior to my first hiatus. Between 2023 - 2025, HW stopped paying out my ad revenue on time, providing it days to weeks after deadline and occasionally skipping payments outright. Soon enough, they stopped altogether.

After the 340k debt reveal + doomed kickstarter pitch to reckon with said debt, I bailed out like a rat from a burning oil tanker. The sketchy bookkeeping, missed payments, and continual disrespect shown to artists simply made maintaining a business relationship with Hiveworks impossible. Migrating and hosting Bybloemen at my own expense sucks but it's my penance for signing a contract with a company once headed by a CEO whose place on the Forbes' 30-under-30 list would have had the Beelzeboys acting foolish.

On the bright side, some positive things have emerged from this mess: Chimera Comics Collective, for starters (see below), greater engagement with the cartoonist cooperative (who have been amazing), and for me, the satisfaction of having full control over my work and how it’s presented.  This whole debacle knocked the wind out of my sails but I’m planning to pick up my comic again once I have a better handle on things in 2026. Here’s hoping!

Chimera Comics Collective: https://chimeracomics.org/