Accessible

I remember reading somewhere that many, if not all, webtoons reach a far wider audience than any DC and Marvel periodical would do which would explain why they adopted the vertical scrolling cartoon format to keep up with their competitors. Even if not all webtoons are this commercially successful and accessible, they still get more of an audience than DC and Marvel magazines would. I could also say the same things about newspaper cartoons, now helped by that they’re just as online as the newspapers they come from. Websites like Vanguardngr, The Guardian.ng, Philippine Star and Philippine Inquirer all put their newspaper cartoons online for free, how cool is that?

It’s also been said elsewhere that normal people might be more comics literate than what they’re given credit for, though the only reason it doesn’t seem to be this way is because they read different kinds of comics. Or rather cartoons as these are commonly called, these could be Doonesbury, Cathy or Dilbert. Even then, they still have a wider audience than any one of the X-Men comics do even if they don’t have a blockbuster movie series. Yet they’re the kinds of comics, the kinds of cartoons more people commonly consume or encounter in some form or another. They’re far more accessible than any X-Men comic book and writer would’ve dreamt of, that speaks volumes about their ability to appeal to the masses.

To make matters worse, even with all the free pirated copies around online, DC and Marvel still struggle to appeal to outsiders and casual readers. It’s not just about the retcons and the reboots, but the fact that a good number of their later comics (save for the YA imprints) are heavily steeped in lore and fan pandering. You have people who think that Nightwing has a nice butt, so you have later DC writers catering to this fascination. The only problem is Nightwing’s only appealing to those who’re either Nightwing fans or dedicated DC fans, there are more women who get off to romance novels than they do with Nightwing comics.

Another problem, perhaps the biggest problem, would be priority and even with all the piracy and webcomics around not a lot of people prioritise DC and Marvel that much on their reading list. If they have any at all, they’d even read something else altogether. They may not even read comics at all at a given time, which says a lot about DC and Marvel’s struggles to make their comics actually accessible to nonfans. It’s really easier for them to preach to the choir than it is to gain a larger audience, let alone an audience who wouldn’t commit themselves to DC and Marvel lore that much.

While the advantage of lore involves playing around familiar things and motifs, the disadvantage’s that you have to know these first. I could say similar things about fan pandering where fans come up with ideas not found in the actual story, until these finally make their way to the latter and it puts off everybody else. I guess when it comes to what makes a comic book or cartoon accessible, these involve being actually and readily accessible, little to no fan pandering and very light on lore (or non-lore oriented really). Many newspaper cartoons fulfill this very criteria very well, many recent DC and Marvel magazines fail this.

Let’s not also forget they’re inaccessible if because it can be this hard to find stories featuring a character you like as Tigra is with me. As a casual comics reader, I feel DC and Marvel have so much difficulty getting more readers aren’t just a matter of accessibility and lore but because it can be this hard to find one’s favourite character at all. Especially if they don’t have their own cartoon strip or magazine for long, to the point where it’s really easy to give up on them. It gets worse if the world they come from is vast and heavy on lore that it makes it harder to find them if you wanted to at all though they do show up unexpectedly.

Even then, the way it’s set up makes it harder for casual readers like myself to keep up with them.

Big earners

You have a bunch of comics readers who think that comic book shops are the lifeblood of the comics industry, when in reality it’s anchored by bestsellers that take the form of things comics readers don’t expect: these are both children’s graphic novels and comic strip collections. It’s as stupid as thinking indie bands are the lifeblood of the music industry, when it’s anchored by successful musicians and bands such as Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift. Which makes one wonder whether these people really live under a rock, perhaps that’s why they’re so ignorant of what’s really successful in the comics industry.

It takes a special kind of stupid to be really ignorant of what actually sells in the current climate, it may not always be superheroes and may not even involve them at all to begin with. Some of the bestselling trade paperbacks are actually comic strip collections, Garfield TPBs were something of a New York Times Bestsellers’ list regular in the past. That’s far more than what DC and Marvel has ever done, which says a lot about what’s really successful and it’s not what fanboys think. If DC and Marvel don’t produce all the bestsellers, despite their brand recogntion, what else does?

These are more likely to be both newer serials like Dog Man and old favourites like Cathy, Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts and Garfield. Even if they’re not always bestsellers, they’re still more successful than the average DC and Marvel comic books are. To put it this way, even if big name musicians aren’t always that commercially successful they’re still a bigger draw than most indie musicians. Not just in terms of brand recognition, but they are successful in a way indie musicians aren’t and will never be. Now that’s a better metric for success than what Comicsgaters have you believe.

Surely Cathy and Doonesbury may not produce that many toys, but they’re cartoons that resonate with a far wider audience. They’re not about the adventures and tribulations of superhumans, they’re about the trials and tribulations of ordinary people. Isn’t that more relatable as well? It only seems that way, if because DC and Marvel books tend to have an outspoken devoted following. Far more devoted than most fans of Cathy and Dilbert are, which’s saying when it comes to cult audiences. It’s these cult audiences who’re so vocal about their preferences and ideas that it seems so normal to refer to superhero movies as comic book movies when in reality this includes nonsuperhero stuff like American Splendor and Ghost World.

(Ghost World could also be Scarlett Johannessen’s first comic book movie, even if it had nothing to do with superheroes.)

If superhero comics don’t make up the bread and butter of comics sales, perhaps comic strip collections like any one of the Garfield books may qualify far better. I’m not even a Garfield fan, but I do have a feeling these outsell DC and Marvel by a mile or two. By the virtue of being published in newspapers and newspaper websites, newspaper cartoons have far more readers than DC and Marvel really wanted. Especially by chance, which’s not helped by that if you were to officially read a DC or Marvel comic online you have to subscribe and even then not everybody has the time to read pirated comics, not helped by annoying popups that deter one’s reading experience as it is with me.

I don’t think most people, well most people I know, really care that much about DC and Marvel that the other reason why DC and Marvel struggle to find new readers might be a matter of indifference. Though that would mean DC and Marvel aren’t competitive enough at times, which means they’ll often struggle to catch the attention of those who’ll get distracted by whatever newspaper cartoon is up. They have made strides to catch their attention, but when it’s compounded by how inaccessible these stories are then it would be a Sisyphean situation to get as much readers as they wanted to. So the more accessible cartoons win over people’s hearts and attention spans.

Even if they’re not always more interesting, they’re easier to get into as they’re actually free (unless if you buy the book editions). Not just free online, free from subscription but also free from popup ads that plague websites like ReadComicsOnline, which’s something DC and Marvel need to take heed of if they want more people reading their comics the way they wanted. This still says a lot about how competitive it is to catch readers’ attention when it comes to anything, well cartoons in this case but it still applies very well. Newspapers like The Guardian.ng, Philippine Inquirer and Philippine Star are competing with Webtoon and Tapas.

The format may not always be identical, but they are all vying for the attention of anybody who reads cartoon strips. Both DC and Marvel have gotten into this, to some extent since the rest of their other stuff isn’t for free online. In fact, you need to subscribe to actually read those comics at all. For anybody who’s cash-strapped, it’s not that attractive and appealing. Especially if the budget gets spent on something else, to the point where DC and Marvel might be losing the very audience they’re trying to capture. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible either. But that goes to show you how competitive publishing cartoons really is.

Why some cartoon strips like Garfield and Cathy are more successful than their DC and Marvel counterparts are and will ever be.

Moving away from that school

While there are some superhero cartoonists that still work in the buxom superheroine school of drawing, there are those who move away from that. Pere Perez doesn’t do a lot of ridiculously buxom women, his Spider-Woman (one of the earliest Spider-themed women, the first being some black woman whose name that I forgot) is reasonably fit though she looks like Jennifer Connelly. Though if these superhero cartoonists do move away from the buxom superheroine school, they’ll risk being disowned by certain superhero readers who expect superheroines to be sexually arousing even though it doesn’t serve the plot or stories they inhabit. Especially if these stories have nothing to do with sex at all.

Other times, they have sexist ideas of what women should look like even though those kinds of body types wouldn’t make sense for all the other superheroines. The only naturally buxom muscular woman that I could ever think of is Rasa van Werder, also known as Kellie Everts back in the day. Most other muscular women aren’t that buxom and some tend to have very well-developed pecs, especially if they lift weights a lot and have sufficiently low body fat (since breasts are made of fat). Their physiques take on a really androgynous character, though that’s because of what we expect women to look like.

If a woman were to gain fat at all, it has to be in the right places. These are the breasts and buttocks, though the problem is not every woman can be buxom with a big butt. Here lies the rub of this ideal: not every woman can fulfill it all the way, you could have a woman with shapely big buttocks but medium sized breasts. You could also have a buxom woman whose buttocks aren’t that big, sometimes it might not be that shapely at all if she doesn’t exercise that often. I guess if people really want women to look soft, then they ought to have more body fat though not many will admit this.

So such an ideal would be hard to achieve in real life, especially if it goes against the way you’re built that it becomes nearly impossible. The only ways to retain visible breasts is to either have more body fat or to have bigger breasts, that’s a hard fact either way anyways and something other people need to take note of and care about. It’s not that buxom women can’t exist at all, but it’s a fact that breasts contain fat. If you want visible breasts, you have to have either more body fat or have bigger breasts, which contain more fat, if only more cartoonists cared about this. But at other times, it’s just easier to fall back on something familiar than to do something new.

For every cartoonist who bothers heeding to some people’s criticisms, there are those who remain stuck in their ways when it comes to the way others are portrayed. It’s true not all superhero cartoonists portray women with really big breasts, ridiculously skintight outfits or small waists. In fact, there are others who give them less exaggerated waistlines. They look like normal women or even actually athletic women rather than caricatures of femininity, though not everybody’s onboard with this school of depicting women. Even if not all superhero cartoonists portray women as buxom as it was before, it’s a good thing they’re moving away from this school of depicting women at all.

Maybe that’s not a good idea

When it comes to American comic book artists not getting paid much in comics, especially in superhero comics where these are done under work for hire, that they don’t get paid as much as they wished for. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to want to pursue a career in comics, be it comic books or comic strips but it gets complicated by many other things. When it comes to comic strips here in the Philippines, cartoonists own almost all the rights to their own creations so they have the freedom to move them to other papers. There’s no comics syndicate, so cartoonists get a good share of what they earn and do.

If an American dollar is somewhere between 50-60 Philippine pesos, expect a Philippine cartoonist working for DC to be able to live the life their colleagues dreamt of. But even then, they still don’t get royalties from the stories they work on. So working on their own stories is a riskier but worthier bet, these stories may not have the brand recognition that DC and Marvel have and some of them will not (and probably will never) become as popular as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are but at least they get royalties from their stories and creations if it’s enough to support their career. This is pretty much why some of them have day jobs.

It’s not enough to earn from doing comics, if you’re American or Canadian. To make it up for it, you have to have a day job. That’s why Riley Rossmo works as an art teacher, one would have to guess where he gets all that extra cash from if doing comics doesn’t earn him that much to live comfortably. Another problem, perhaps the biggest problem, is that outside of children’s graphic novels and cartoon strips most comic books (as in those flimsy magazines) aren’t popular with a lot of people. While popularity translates to a higher payrate, most comic book cartoonists aren’t that popular with that many people. Only to a cult audience that is.

No matter how popular they are with a cult audience, they’ll never reach the heights and recognition the likes of Charles Schulz, Jim Davis, Cathy Guisewite and Scott Adams get. I even remember an article on how strangely underground superhero comics have gotten, especially those at DC and Marvel of all things, that I think the average DC or Marvel comic franchise at this point’s like a musician who not only peaked too early but also currently way past their glory years to bother attracting new audiences. That’s not true for everybody else, but when Garfield has repeatedly outsold DC and Marvel at the New York Times Bestseller list that’s saying.

(In all fairness, Jim Davis took control over Garfield for a long time that he’s able to make an obscene amount of money off of it.)

Whilst it’s not necessarily wrong to become a comics artist well in theory, in practice when a good number of comics companies are built around work for hire it’s going to be hard earning that much money from your creations when the entire company owns them. If they ever continue working for such publishers, to the point where they either rely on richer relatives, richer spouses/peers or a day job to get away with whatever they’re doing. If because it’s really not enough to cover their expenses in whatever way they desire, for every Charles Schulz and Jim Davis there’s a Jack Kirby. Somebody who’s talented, but doesn’t get royalties from their creations over time.

Comic Book Career

I wanted one before, but it’s only now that I made a couple of comic strips featuring my own characters. To be really fair, the division of labour isn’t so evenly divided among all cartoonists as there are those who do all the pencils, inks and writing on their own. Others leaving just the writing to one person, which’s the case for some comic strips like Baldo. In the case with American comic books, there are instances where the cartoonists do almost all things on their own. Most notably Carl Barks whenever he did Disney comics, as well as those involved in alternative comics.

There are those who are part of an assembly line, as first formulated by Will Eisner. This involves somebody who does the pencils, somebody who does the inks, somebody who colours and somebody who writes. This is the standard for many superhero comics and the like in America, though I’m always of the opinion that cartoonists should ink their own cartoons. However, if they can’t write that well they can always rely on a good writer. Well, the latter two are commonly found in Japanese manga though they also have assistants.

Gerry Alanguilan has inked other people’s comics before, he has inked his own comics before as well. If I’m not mistaken, I started inking in May-June 2021. It wasn’t easy at first, but I got used to it the more I inked my own comics. Not to mention, I have to have a regular schedule if I were to get employed to do comics for a living. So I have to brush up on my own work ethic to get there, if it were to happen to me at all. Even then, this would earn me a lot to support myself and others if it were to happen at all.

I considered working for DC before, but lately I feel tempted to work on my own characters and stories. Whereas much of DC’s owned by a corporate owner in its totality, working on my own comic strip makes me own my own comics well at least here in the Philippines where there’s no comics syndicate overlooking cartoons. At least that’s one of the upshots of working in the Philippines, these days cartoonists own their own cartoons and creations not others.

Things I want for my careers

I say careers because I want to work both as a seamstress and a cartoonist, the former to supplement the latter in case if it doesn’t pay that well. It could end up reversed, if I ever earn so well in cartooning. Even then, I really need an income to support myself and others. For cartooning, I’d need a lot of materials to do a whole year or more of cartoons if I were to do a career in that field. For paper, I’ll choose legal-sized or long paper because it’s long enough to do four panel cartoons with though letter sized and A4 sized papers are perfect for doing illustrations for book covers and stationeries. (As for acrylic ink illustrations, you’d need watercolour paper for this.)

When it comes to pencils and ink, for the former I’ll be using a combination of regular writing or graphite pencils (both from Mongol and Faber-Castell, 2 as well) and colour pencils, the latter being Faber-Castell (either 48 or 60), Crayola (50 or 100) and Lil Hands (24). Since I don’t want to cut up something and I don’t know how, I’ll just be colouring or shading the greys using both pencils (well the greys from colour pencils). As for specially coloured inks, such as white gel ink pens from Arteza and silver Dong-A gel pens both are needed for cartooning and doing patterns on a darker fabric.

But I’ll get to the fabric part later, bear with me in here. When it comes to the darker inks, I’ll be using a lot of gel pens (Faber-Castell 0.5 black ballpens, both Panda Classique and Crystal Tech black, Dong-A black and Flexoffice Flexstick black 0.5) and calligraphy inks (from Daiso). For lighter inks, I’d resort to Pilot and Uniball black ballpens and regular inks a lot. The latter for doing darker greys, with the lighter greys supplied by pencils. As for acrylic ink, it would be a combination of the Arteza 100 12ml acrylic paint tubes, Acrylic Gouache 24 and the Boysen clear acrylic emulsion resin.

But you’ll also need a brush and special paper for that, since it would be just limited to colour illustrations. In all honesty, I got into acrylic inks because of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s author Hirohiko Araki since he uses acrylic inks for his colour illustrations. What I’ll be using isn’t exactly what he does, but it’s close to it for as long as you combine acrylic inks with acrylic resin to get something similar. Well, it would be neat to alternate between media but in the sense of alternating between artistic media, between colour pencils and acrylic inks in here.

Carl Barks is no stranger to trying out different artistic media, he’s no stranger to using crayons and watercolours himself. For the fabrics, I’ll be using cotton and linen for garments and canvas and burlap for bags and hats. The garments will consist of trousers, skirts, blouses, ternos, dusters and shorts. For the shorter fabrics, they’ll be made into blouses and shorts. The longer ones will be made into skirts, ternos and dusters and they will be priced accordingly. The prices of the imported linens vary, but they will be expensive if taken into consideration.

For the patterns, they’ll be made from Manila paper and from one existing in-tact blouse that I have that was given to me by my grandmother. The pens used are red, silver, gold, white and blue pens from any brand (Dong-A, Panda, Faber-Castell, Arteza and Pilot) since the black pens are reserved for cartoons. I’ll also be needing a big pair of scissors to cut fabric and patterns with, since there are newspapers that don’t do cartoons every Sunday so Sunday will be the time I sell and make clothes.

Maybe days earlier but still. For both dressmaking and cartooning, I’ll be needing metal rulers to make nice straight lines with. That’s the one area where they overlap, but even I need to be careful in here as to avoid making mistakes. Should I go out, I’ll be needing a portable scanner to scan my cartoons with anywhere I go. These will be expensive, but worth it if I were to consider doing both because I need some regular income real badly.

Inking

I think I tried inking my pencil drawings before, but I’m getting better at this. I tried doing this last year, I wasn’t that good at it yet and I didn’t have whiteout markers then. But I’m getting better at this, so practice really does make perfect. When it comes to the kinds of ink that make a very dark black, there’s one in the form of Blink but I think gel pens like the ones from Panda tend to be darker because the material holds more pigment so you get a dark black this way. The sign pens from Artskills are dark enough to be legible, but look pretty grey compared to the Panda pens.

To be fair there are Philippine pen brands that have ink just as grey as these, if only I made somebody buy those it would be fun to check which ink is darker. But a really black ink would be fun as it contrasts with white better and it still looks pretty black compared to the black inks of other pens, which looks rather grey and I could get that’s how people feel around Blink. It’s really dark, so dark it makes all other black inks look grey. Looks like the efforts to make a black ink have really paid off, that’s something that I like.

For a regular (read greyish) black ink, almost any pen would do but for a darker black go for gel pens like those from Panda for instance if you can’t afford Blink. It’s not the same thing, but it’s as close as one gets within one’s budget and logistics.

CRAMP

This isn’t the case for all American comic books and comic strips, there are moments of wordlessness and then there are truly wordless stories like Frank by Jim Woodring but a good number of superhero comics tend to have rather cramped writing. In the sense that you have multiple word balloons in a single panel, at times the word balloons become full of text in just a few panels when I feel there needs more panels laid out to time the dialogue with. I know this from writing comics scripts and doing well one comic story myself.

It’s actually been pointed out that with superhero comics, especially those from DC and Marvel, this bad habit started out when pulp writers started writing comic books. So you have a lot of captions and dialogue happening in a single or a few panels. To be honest, two word balloons in a handful of panels is enough. But making three or more is too much, especially if it doesn’t allow space for the character’s dialogue to be timed. At other times, I feel if pictures are a thousand words then the character’s actions, movements and body language can sometimes be enough.

There needn’t more words in the panel to convey what the character’s actually doing, well it does feel telepathic to literally read the character’s thoughts on paper but even then sometimes it betrays the character’s body language. I even think this conditions some cartoonists to not trust the character’s body language when captions are being used to tell you what the character’s doing and thinking.

There are others who do a good job at the characters’ body language despite the wordiness, but I think more panels are needed to time the dialogue with. It’s something that wouldn’t be easily pulled off at first, but also necessary when it comes to timing the characters’ dialogues and speeches. It’s always possible to be creative around limitations, but even then you’d still have to figure out a way to McGuyver things when it comes to timing the characters’ speeches and dialogues with one another.

I knew this myself when I tried doing 3 or 4 panel cartoons, it’s not easy at first but it takes some time getting used to this. It’s actually been said that the habit of writing a lot of dialogue in just a few panels is a bad habit taken from pulp fiction, since some of the earliest comic book writers (not comic strip) were pulp writers themselves. Since they’re not used to the way comic strips are written and drawn, they added what they knew best. But sometimes it doesn’t go so smoothly, so the panels become really cramped.

Not all American comic books do this, some like Owly and Frank eschew words altogether to focus more on the characters’ movements and body languages more. Likewise, newspaper comic strips aren’t this wordy either but it seems this bad habit has been passed down to future writers. The other problem is that such stories are constrained by other limitations, especially if it’s just either 32 pages per periodical (in the case of American comic books) or 3 or 4 panels per cartoon (newspaper comic strips). Nonetheless I won’t be surprised if some McGuyvered their way into those venues.

Even then, there needs a stronger emphasis on timing the dialogue per panel as to allow breathing space.

The King of Superhero Comics

There was somebody at Illustration Art who said that the cartoonist Jack Kirby has a shaky grasp of anatomy, but why he was never that heavily scrutinised for it makes you wonder whether if he does have a quality that other superhero cartoonists can’t get away with. Honestly, his figures are rather blocky and I feel others are more deserving of such a title. But I also feel Jack Kirby’s art and techniques are very flashy, flashy enough to attract an audience to influence them. The biggest sign of this would be Kirby crackle or using black dots to represent rays of light, lightning/energy or blasts.

This is something many later superhero cartoonists do a lot, this would’ve looked rather cool to any aspiring and developing artist upon encountering his illustrations. Personally speaking, the Kirby crackle dots are way too busy for me to pull off so when I do energy powers (well according to the scientific definition) they’d just be rays and sparks. But the fact that this is a very flashy way to portray energy powers in a way that hasn’t been done before, even if not all artists do this, says a lot about people’s attempts at imitating one of Kirby’s tics.

Sort of like how pulp writers exerted a big influence on superhero comics when it comes to using a lot of narration (ironically at the expense of emphasising the characters’ body language), which in turn influenced the way superhero fans write non-superhero comics. While Jack Kirby may not have influenced everybody in American comics, whether if it’s the more mainstream newspaper cartoons or the fact that Don Rosa was influenced by Carl Barks he has left his mark on superhero comics.

Can’t get casual readers

When it comes to outcries about the American comics industry not doing as well as the Japanese one, it actually does well if you were to bring up not only graphic novels aimed at younger readers but also comic strip compilations. Garfield has frequented the New York Times Bestseller list several times over, probably far more than any Marvel graphic novel has done. Newspaper comic strips, by default, tend to have more casual readers than Marvel does.

I think this was brought up in an article about Webtoon having more readers than Marvel does, which says a lot about which kinds of comics more people actually read. That’s not to say Marvel and DC lack casual readers, they do to some extent and I’m one of them. But the problems lie with not only inaccessibility but the fact that Marvel and DC (until recently) have come to pander to hardcore readers a lot so it’s inevitable they’ll struggle to grab casual readers.

By hardcore readers, you have constant references to things that will be missed out by others and in-jokes. In-jokes like whether or not Captain America will date Bucky, these are things those who like them will ever get. There will always be people who will not be beholden to those things, just as I’m not beholden to Nightwing. He’s generally touted as DC’s male sex symbol, never mind those who may be more attracted to others.

It still feels like pandering if they pander to a certain audience in-canon, so that’s partly one of the reasons why DC and Marvel have a hard time getting casual readers at all. Although newspaper comics aren’t any better, because they don’t pander hard to certain readers so they don’t have much difficulty getting casual readers.

Even if they gravitate to certain cartoons, they’re not in danger of losing more readers the way DC and Marvel have until recently. I have yet to read the Marvel Infinity webcomics, but I do get the impression that Marvel and DC struggle to get new readers. This isn’t helped by the fact that some of those who would’ve been fans of Flash through the television gravitate more to the television series.

Worsened by that the comics themselves don’t resemble the television series, in which their version of Wally West is white and has Linda Park as his wife. She also never became a superhero, which says a lot about the liberties taken with the adaptation. (This would worsen if Caitlin does become a werewolf.) While many anime adaptations aren’t any better, some do take liberties with the source material through fillers.

But it’s easier to get into the manga source material in the sense of having greater fidelity to the original medium than you do with DC and Marvel so it seems like the manga industry is doing better. Some anime character designers try to faithfully replicate the mangaka’s art style, sometimes so well that nobody can tell the difference enough to easily get into the source material.

Fidelity to the source material can help more people get into it, which may be anime’s advantage over DC and Marvel. It also helps even more if such material’s more readily available and cheaper, which’s what I got with comic strips as opposed to superhero comics. You could even find comic strips in some official newspaper websites for free, you can find comic strip books in grocery stores.

But these are things I encountered before, so I could be projecting my experiences here. Marvel and DC still have casual readers, but there are things complicating their efforts. It could be continuity, lack of fidelity to the source material or fan-pandering that keeps people from getting into comics at all.