L is for Loser

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SPORTS WEB-MANGA ROOKIE LEVEL Chapter 2: It’s A Metaphor

Due to some untimely issues, chapter 2 starting date will be pushed to Mid-Late January 2018!

To all my current readers, thank you for being patient and I hope you all still stick around until the new chapter begins! To new readers/ any passerby, please feel free to check out my ROOKIE LEVEL ART TAG ON MY MAIN PAGE or my TWITTER PAGE for any new art (Rookie Level related and not!) that comes up!

re: me and hurricane harvey

for those that (somehow) don’t know, i live in houston, texas, a major city in the path of hurricane harvey (more or less). houston is more on the back end of the storm, and is at a high risk for flooding in certain areas (mostly on the southern sides, especially on the southwest side). i live on the NE side of houston and while my family and i are planning to hunker down for the next few days, we don’t anticipate any flooding or high water in our neighborhood. being on the back end of the storm, we’re not expecting any hurricane force winds, either.

harvey is set to make landfall about 4 hours south, near the corpus christi area. communities around that area are under mandatory evacuation orders because of the high wind and certainty that there will be flooding. there will almost certainly be people who lose their homes, businesses, belongings, or worse.

over the next few days and weeks, im going to do my best to blog about charities to help victims of the storm throughout texas, because make no mistake, Texas has shit infrastructure to protect people from flooding. the parts of Houston that are at greatest risk of disastrous flooding are largely populated by poor people of color, especially black and latinx people.

shit’s bad y'all.

p much all of SE Texas is being beaten by feeder bands, tornadoes are popping up in Fort Bend County, Montgomery County, and Walker County, bayous and creeks are rising to dangerous levels, and this is just Houston. This is set to go on until the middle of next week, there’s no doubt that bayous will break their banks and flood multiple areas of town (bayous, creeks, reservoirs, lakes run all throughout Houston, the whole city is a watershed for one body of water or another). I could go into a list of how bad this storm is, but it would go on for pages, so let’s cut to the chase:

If you got some cash to spare, you can give it to these charities.

Central Texas Red Cross (their website also has a lot of information on how to volunteer, donate blood, and where you can find a shelter)

Save The Children (helps families and children evacuate, creates “child friendly spaces” in shelters)

Austin Pets Alive! (helping to evacuate pets and shelter animals, they’re asking for foster homes and monetary donations and donations in-kind, more info at the link) 

Texas Diaper Bank (helps provide diapers to people who need them, not just babies but disabled individuals and seniors)

Driscoll Children’s Hospital (children’s hospital in Corpus Christi, they care for critically ill children and babies in the area, all patients were evacuated before the storm hit)

Food Banks that will need donations:

Houston Food Bank

Galveston County Food Bank

Food Bank of the Golden Crescent

Corpus Christi Food Bank

Southeast Texas Food Bank

Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley

Brazos Valley Food Bank

Central Texas Food Bank

San Antonio Food Bank

AirBnB activated their Disaster Response Program to connect evacuees with rental homes/rooms, free of charge. This will be active until September 1st in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. If you’re a host in one of these areas, you can volunteer to open your home to evacuees.

if you are in Texas and able, please donate blood. Blood banks in the South Texas and Gulf Coast area are in dire need of donations, especially O Negative blood.

People are literally going up into their attics because the water rising into their homes. Friendswood is being evacuated, Brazoria County is under a mandatory evacuation order. Tornado warnings have been issued for the Med Center, University of Houston and Texas Southern University, and the Downtown areas. People have lost their homes, and their entire neighborhoods are underwater. People in the Cy-Fair area, an area that does not flood, are taking boats out to rescue neighbors who are stranded in their area. Houston ISD has cancelled class until next Tuesday, so many kids might not be able to get a regular source of food.

If you have the ability, please donate to one of the charities above. After the storm, the affected areas will need help recovering. The various charities above will undoubtedly be calling for food donations, clothing donations, blood donations and other donations in-kind.

control this child

they’re a pretty shady business overall. there’s the old TOS fiasco where they modified their TOS to affect your IP rights without your knowledge, and you auto-consented to it just by having your work there. source (yeah, i know, bleedingcool, big deal - but pay close attention to ironspike and george rohac’s tweets)

yeah, they mopped that up but after a public outcry. that’s old hat.

but here’s some new hat: the tapas creator incubator

tl;dr: the tapas creator incubator is an IP mill they will use to pitch to movie and tv companies, compensating you with scraps and taking full control of your own IP - your own work, YOUR BABY - out of your hands.

more details…

“wowwie, i get to work AT TAPAS HQ! with an editorial team and other creators in a big art house studio!!! i get to bump elbows with TV / original series big wigs! this might be my BIG BREAK!”

slow down there friendo! if it sounds too good to be true, then it is too good to be true. let’s take a closer look at what they want.

translation: tapastic wants you to produce 200 pages of comic work in 3-6 months. that’s 1.6 INKED, COLORED, AND LETTERED pages PER DAY, no days off! just an FYI, a “fast pace” for full-time webcomic artists is 4 pages a WEEK. scratch that - that’s breakneck speed for layouts, sketching, inking, flatting, coloring, and lettering comics pages. most comic creators produce a page every one or two weeks.

that is close to mangaka levels of workload, except mangakas have assistants to keep up with their outrageous level of production, and the other creators you’ll be working with are also busy with their own workloads. no help for you!

if you haven’t seen any red flags yet, let me drop some for you:

🚩 🚩 🚩 🚩  STIPEND  🚩 🚩 🚩 🚩

what is a stipend? wikipedia defines it thus:

A stipend is a form of salary, such as for an internship or apprenticeship.[1] It is often distinct from an income or a salary because it does not necessarily represent payment for work performed; instead it represents a payment that enables somebody to be exempt partly or wholly from waged or salaried employment in order to undertake a role that is normally unpaid (e.g. a magistrate in the United Kingdom) or voluntary, or which cannot be measured in terms of a task (e.g. members of the clergy).

a stipend does NOT have to meet minimum wage requirements, a stipend does NOT mean you are employed [by Tapas], a stipend does NOT mean you are entitled to benefits such as PTO, vacation, medical, dental, vision, or any of that. a stipend is COMPENSATION which has no MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS.

this means tapas is allowed to pay you LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE for your work. and before people jump onboard with “YEAH STIPENDS HAVE TO MEET MINIMUM WAGE”, friends, pals, listen: stipends only have to meet minimum wage requirements if you are an employee-intern with the company.

it’s interesting to note that when users have questioned tapas staff about this, staff responded with:

seriously. there’s a lot of “we work out payments on an individual basis” responses in there.

why all the secrecy? marvel, dc, image and the others are VERY UP FRONT about how they pay their creators. when i go looking for comic work, the pay is discussed right from the get go. the fact that tapas is unwilling to discuss pay is another 🚩.

just fyi, san francisco’s bay area is the most expensive area to live in ($3800/mo for studio, anyone?), and if they wont cover your travel, relocation, living, accomodations cost, then you bet your ass that stipend they offer won’t cover it either. keep that in mind, even if you won’t be relocating.

also keep this in mind: since this will be more than a full-time job, will that stipend pay as much as a full-time job if it doesn’t have to meet minimum wage requirements?

X, X, X, X, X, X

undisclosed pay? dividing up your control over YOUR IP? no clear outline on how much of your IP you still own? no termination clause? no info on royalties?

typically, comic publishers and hosts will tell you right off the bat who owns your IP and how profits will be split. this is standard and common practice. tapas has revealed none of these.

if you look at their TOS change and this “incubator”, this is a very clear trend that tapas is an IP mill out to exploit creators.

i can’t stop ya’ll from uploading your work there, i can only make you aware of the the trend and the things they are up to. i personally will never upload my work there and support their system.

Re-posting from our Twitter!