EVERYTHING BUT IMAGINARY #176: WORLD OF WEBCOMICS

[Blake Petit]

When I was younger, I used to snatch the newspaper every morning, rifling past the boring stuff like the stock market listings, sports and world events to get to the Living section. Once I had that section in my hands, I would zip right to the last two pages, where – unless some jerk had moved it to a different section that day – I found the only thing in the paper I really cared about, the comics. I loved comic strips as much as I did comic books, and always wondered why the weekday strips didn’t get the color and attention they did on Sunday.

I know now that even in my formative years of the 80s and 90s, comic strips were on their decline. The strips were getting shrunk down more and more, shuffled around and generally disregarded. Strips that were once classics had become so homogenized as to be pretty much dull shadows of their former selves. Then things got even worse – Gary Larson shut down The Far Side and Bill Watterson put a far too premature ending to Calvin and Hobbes. When Charles Schulz finally put the finishing touches on Peanuts, the comics page became a real wasteland. Looking at the local newspaper today, I can count the number of strips I still find consistently entertaining on one hand.

But I can still spend a good fifteen to twenty minutes a day just reading new comic strips. And I’m no longer touching a newspaper to do it. Thank goodness, friends, for the new age of the Webcomic.

I’m not about to attempt any sort of history lesson on the Webcomic – telling you what the first one was or how the medium evolved, because I really haven’t the foggiest notion. All I know is that even as the web is making traditional news outlets obsolete, Webcomics are changing the way we view comic strips. In the past, if someone had a dream of making their own comic strip, they had to create a draft of samples and shop it around to syndicates. On the off-chance they managed to sell a strip to a syndicate, they then had to convince enough newspaper editors to put the strip on their rapidly-shrinking comic pages to make it profitable. And even if they managed to do that, they’d have to spend the rest of their career constrained by the editorial demands both on content and format. Now to be fair, some creators have managed to make some amazingly entertaining strips in that format (Bill Amend’s FoxTrot, to me, is one of the last truly great “traditional” comic strips), but the vast majority of the strips on the newspaper page have become imitations of the classics, each other, or even themselves.

On the web, though, all you need to make your own comic strip is a domain name and some server space. If you want to make a living at it, you need to sell ad space and/or merchandize, and even that will only support you if you make one of those few strips that become significantly popular, but at least that challenge is no longer constrained by the whims of some editor for the Midwest Kansas Post-Gazette-Shopper-Telegram who doesn’t want to put out a paper with a doody joke in it.

I’ve got a folder in my favorite places now with my favorite comic strips, and I go through it every day. Even the traditional newspaper strips have a web presence now, and that’s where I get my FoxTrot fix. I’ve also managed to find some other really good newspaper strips that my local paper doesn’t run, because apparently they find the same jokes about Cathy trying on a bathing suit for 25 years to be more entertaining. Without the web, I may never have discovered strips like Retail, Over the Hedge or the spiritual successor to Calvin and Hobbes, Frazz.

But still, this is about Webcomics, not newspaper comics on the web. Anyone who’s read Webcomics for any period of time has doubtlessly run across some of the early success stories – Penny Arcade, for example, or PVP or Dork Tower. It’s easy to dismiss these as “geek” strips, as they all have to deal with roleplaying games, video games and the people who play them. A lot of Webcomics are, in fact, pretty incestuous, dealing with geek culture like comics, games, movies or cartoons. David Willis’ Shortpacked is a whole comic strip centered around toys and the kind of adults who still collect (and play with) them.

You’d think that strips with such a narrow focus would appeal to a very narrow audience, but some of these strips garner enormous followings. Why? Let’s look at John Kovalic’s Dork Tower. Yes, the strip is about a group of friends who get together for roleplaying games, but the stories Kovalic tells are about much more than just games. In his main character, Matt, we’ve gotten stories about unrequited love, dating and struggling to build a career. Igor is the goofy sidekick, but we see some pretty touching stories about how far he’ll go for friendship. Carson is a muskrat.

PVP is about as niche as a topic can get – a story of a group of people (and one mythical troll) working at a videogame magazine, but Scott Kurtz uses a very traditional sitcom format to poke fun not just at games, but pop culture, comics and office politics. A recent storyline that introduced a second troll into the strip even brought Kurtz the true hallmark of fame – controversy. A portion of the fanbase turned on him quickly, complaining about the character virtually before the storyline had even begun. To be fair, Kurtz stoked their fires a bit by getting overdefensive on his blog and message boards, but he stuck with the story and, lo and behold, the world didn’t end.

Penny Arcade… well… those guys are just insane.

Webcomics also open up avenues for things that couldn’t make it into a regular newspaper even if it weren’t for the content restrictions, such as David Morgan-Mar’s Irregular Webcomic. Morgan-Mar does a number of really bizarre things with this strip, beginning with the fact that it’s (usually) not drawn, but photographed. He tells his stories through pictures of himself and a legion of characters made up of toys, mostly LEGO® figures and painted roleplaying game miniatures.

What’s more, this daily strip doesn’t feature just one cast of characters, but over a dozen different “themes,” each with its own cast and plotline, that he bounces between and crosses over at whim. Real-life roleplaying adventures inspire his “Space” and “Fantasy” themes, and he has themes that are full-out parodies of Star Wars, Harry Potter and even the Mythbusters (which, incidentally, is one of the best things on telelvision if you’re not watching it). Other parodies are still blatant, but more independent, such as his “Steve and Terry” theme -- a spoof of the Crocodile Hunter -- “Cliffhangers,” an Indiana Jones pastiche about Montana Jones, his father North Dakota and grandfather Minnesota trying to save the world from Nazi LEGO® men commanded by Hitler’s brain in a jar,and the “Espionage” storyline, about secret agent James Stud, which has the self-contained challenge of parodying every James Bond movie – in order. There are a few more generic themes like “Pirates,” “Imperial Rome” and “Martians,” and then some truly bizarre themes such as “Shakespeare” – about William Shakespeare, technical writer and creator of Harry Potter fanfic – and “Nigerian Finance Minister,” which actually gets a few storylines out of that old e-mail scam. Plus the “Death” characters can visit any and all of these themes. With so many stories running concurrently, plus the fact that Morgan-Mar keeps finding new, clever ways to link the various stories together, even briefly, an Irregular Webcomic reader never knows what he’s going to get when he loads the page.

Then there are a few Webcomics that probably could have made it into ordinary newspaper syndication, but that eschewed it nonetheless, probably because they’re better than most of the stuff on the page these days. Derrick Fish’s Dandy and Company is a strip about a cynical, wisecracking dog and his naïve, good-hearted “owner.” Fish recently brought the strip back after a hiatus (something else that is difficult to do with traditional newspaper strips) and is in the process of reintroducing his cast, so if you don’t feel like spending a weekend going through the archives, you can get into the strip pretty easily right now.

Tyler Martin’s Wally and Osborne is another strip that probably could have survived traditional means. Formerly titled On the Rocks, this strip is about a goofy polar bear (Wally) who winds up living in Antarctica (polar bears are native to the North Pole, if you don’t get why that’s off) and striking up a friendship with a penguin named Osborne. Wally’s blind enthusiasm and Osborne’s dry wit make this strip a favorite of mine whenever it gets updated – which isn’t often enough.

Webcomics are a great new avenue for cartoonists to take a chance at getting noticed, and I’ve only scratched the surface here. Heck, even I’ve taken a shot at a webcomic – my friend Ronée and I used to do a strip called Work in Progress, which we’ve talked about resurrecting, but haven’t gotten around to yet. I’ve also got another idea bubbling around in my head, but I need to find a partner with great art skills and much more internet-savvy than I have before I take a crack at it. In the meantime, there are no shortage of strips out there worth reading, and I invite all of you to share any strips I haven’t mentioned that you think are worth the read – although this is a family site, so if the strip you’re recommending would pop the PG-13 rating, give us a warning beforehand. I love new comics, anytime and anywhere I can find them, and this new medium is a great place to share them.

Favorite of the Week, August 2, 2006

After some deliberation, last week’s Fantastic Four #539 took my Favorite of the Week prize. The spotlight on Ben Grimm, the Thing, in the midst of Civil War pushed it over the top, and for two reasons. First – as I’ve often said – Ben is my favorite Marvel character. Second, while Civil War has been a better story than I expected, there’s still one aspect in which I’ve been tremendously disappointed in the story: balance. Joe Quesada, in all the build-up, has talked about a story that would divide the characters and fans alike, but from the beginning the Anti-Registration heroes have been painted as oppressed innocents, while the Pro-Registration characters have been made into unlikable, unrepentant heavies. There’s no balance to the story at all. Fantastic Four #539 doesn’t do anything to balance out the Pro-Reg characters, but for the first time it dares to say that maybe the Anti-Reg characters are wrong too, and it’s told against a very strong character backdrop for Ben, so the Thing wins the prize.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People's Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the weekly “Think About It” humor column at Think About It Central. His new comic, Evertime, is coming soon from Tightlip Entertainment. E-mail him at Blake@comixtreme.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms.

[EdAveryNatale]

Definitely check out Questionable Content. It's my personal favorite, as far as webcomics go. It deals with a bunch of indie kids, a few of which work in a coffee shop owned by one of them, and their daily activities. It's hilarious almost all the time, sad on rare occasion, saracastic all the time, and completely witty. It also takes on some very serious issues at times, that I won't disclose here so that I don't ruin it if anyone chooses to read it.

It's definitely a comic that you'd benefit from reading from, more or less, the beginning. That'll take a lot of time (it's updated 5 days a week!) but will be 100% worth it!

[Jason Kanno]

No 8-Bit Theatre!? Probably the best sprite based webcomic out there! I love sprite webcomics. Its an interesting use of pixels, I think.

[Blake Petit]

Originally Posted by WMdude46

No 8-Bit Theatre!? Probably the best sprite based webcomic out there! I love sprite webcomics. Its an interesting use of pixels, I think.

Hey, give us a link. I'd be happy to look at it.

[Andrea Speed]

Oh Blake, you left out some of my favorites!!!


The Unfeasible Adventures of Beaver and Steve - It's a beaver and his irresponsible mini-dinosaur friend. It's weird, and wonderfully endearing. http://www.beaverandsteve.com/

Yirmumah - Currently working on a serious somewhat autobiographical "origin" story for Drew and his dad. Still great. http://www.yirmumah.com/

Medium Large - That clown funeral cartoon was one of the best comic strips I've seen in forever. I want it on a t-shirt. (Scroll down the page to see it for yourself.) http://www.drinkatwork.com/mediumlarge.html

Rob & Elliot - Two pop culture happy guys, who are a kind of new generation Odd Couple. http://www.robandelliot.cycomics.com/

And hey Blake, you forgot Alien Loves Predator!

Also, for those who'd like to get a laugh out of newspaper comic strips, you have to go to the Comic Curmudgeon: http://www.joshreads.com/ He makes them funny, even when they're not.

[Blake Petit]

Heck, I can't fit EVERYTHING into one column! The only one of those I read on a regular basis is Alien Loves Predator, and it IS a hoot.

I'll check out the others, though.

[demon]

Blake, I have to thank you for introducing me to these webcomics. Wally and Osbourne are hysterical!

[Blake Petit]

Glad to be of service! I love those guys too. (The water balloon strips are my favorite.)

[demon]

Originally Posted by Blake Petit

Glad to be of service! I love those guys too. (The water balloon strips are my favorite.)

Agreed. It's too bad that the giant penguin left the strip. There was so much potential for Wally being a mother.

[JX141]

Originally Posted by EdAveryNatale

Definitely check out Questionable Content. It's my personal favorite, as far as webcomics go. It deals with a bunch of indie kids, a few of which work in a coffee shop owned by one of them, and their daily activities. It's hilarious almost all the time, sad on rare occasion, saracastic all the time, and completely witty. It also takes on some very serious issues at times, that I won't disclose here so that I don't ruin it if anyone chooses to read it.

It's definitely a comic that you'd benefit from reading from, more or less, the beginning. That'll take a lot of time (it's updated 5 days a week!) but will be 100% worth it!

Great find man thanks

[B. Schatz]

Hmmm, let's see...

A Softer World is a great bit of fun (though very strange).

Scary-Go-Round always makes me laugh, mainly due to sheer creativity.

Starslip Crisis has got to be the best use of black out of any strip... and is also very funny.

And uh...

Huh. I know I'm forgetting about something... just can't think about what it is...

[Jason Kanno]

Here is the link to 8-Bit Theatre, one of my faves. It links straight to the first strip, and its friggin hilarious.

[Blake Petit]

Originally Posted by B. Schatz

Huh. I know I'm forgetting about something... just can't think about what it is...

I have always admired your gift for subtlety, Brandon.

[Goorudoguntai]

I want to make a few additions

Schlock Mercenary a space opera about the adventures of a group of galactic mercenaries.

Evil INC. adventures in a company of supervillains who follow the motto "you can do more evil legally".

I don't know, I kind of like Real Life Comics.