One of the most striking things about the internet has been the way it fosters independent media — the growing influence of blogs on politics and the newsmedia has been widely remarked upon. Similarly, musicians have seized upon the internet as a publicity tool outside the control of the Old Media. It has even been a tool of organization among radical groups, most famously during the antiglobalization protests that overshadowed the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle.

But vastly more important than all of those things put together has been the internet's impact on the humble comic strip. The web has provided the opportunity for thousands of artists to disseminate comics outside of the newspaper comics page, permitting an explosion in the amount and the variety of comic strips. Sturgeon's Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap — and there is no doubt that this is as true of webcomics as it is of everything else, but with thousands of cartoonists drawing comics for internet audiences, the ten percent that isn't crap constitutes an enormous amount of innovative, interesting work. What a striking contrast these comics are to the steaming mound of crap you'll find on the newspaper comics page (though, admittedly, it does have a couple bright spots.) This is part two of my essay on the modern comic strip; take a look at part one if you want to see my take on newspaper comics, though I believe the content of this page stands alone.

Internet publication

The internet is a pretty natural fit for self-expression; unlike virtually any other medium, publication on the internet is so cheap that anyone can do it, and people leapt to do so from the earliest days of public access to the net. This here collaborative database is an excellent example; works you and I write are available all over the world for anyone who chooses to look for them. The ability of anyone to get published is a new and completely unprecedented phenomenon, and one that I think is more important than anyone realizes as yet, even if it means we all get exposed to emo poetry in the process.

With comic strips, the difference between print media and the internet is even more stark. The comic book industry is dominated by a few large publishers, but there's no barrier to someone outside of the industry from finding a smaller publishing house and attempting to sell their work anyway. With newspaper-style comic strips, however, that's not really possible. Newspapers buy comic strips from print syndicates like King Features and Universal Press Syndicate, which also deliver newspaper columns, crosswords, and similar items. The syndicates receive an enormous number of comic submissions each year, and choose only a few of them, so an aspiring artist has to impress a syndicate enough to choose it from amongst thousands of competitors. From there, they have to convince newspaper editors to carry it — not an easy task in the rather static world of the comic pages.

And thus, the internet comes to the rescue by giving comic strip artists a place outside the bureaucracy and stasis of the newspaper. You can publish on the internet at little cost other than your time; free web hosting is widely available, and prices for more professional hosting have become low enough that a fairly minimal investment is enough to start a comic. For people who don't wish to go to the trouble themselves, free services like Comic Genesis (formerly KeenSpace) allow artists to post their comics and handle the rest, earning their money by serving ads to viewers.

Without the enormous barriers to entry that exist in print media, thousands of people are creating their own comics. Comic Genesis alone hosts over 6,000 comics, which means a great deal more comic content is released online than in newspapers. A lot of it is steaming crap, as I mentioned earlier — but with that much content, some of it has to be good.

How the medium has changed

The democratization of the comic medium has meant that artists are free to experiment in ways that would be prohibited or even impossible in newspapers. And these artists have capitalized on that freedom to do work entirely unlike anything you'll see in the paper.

Theme

It's no surprise that webcomics push far beyond the themes permitted in the newspaper. While newspaper comics have to be "family friendly", there's no such restrictions in place on the web, which means that the lots of webcomics have rather adult topics. The first episode of Lore Brand Comics is entitled "About Drinking." The titular main character is reading from a book: "How to talk to your children about drinking. Chapter one: Vodka". Imagine that in a mainstream newspaper. Of course, that's the tip of the iceberg — the late, lamented Sexy Losers was crafted around not just explicit sexuality but also deviancy, with storylines revolving around necrophilia, mother-son incest, scat, bukkake, and sex toys magically given life. All drawn in explicit detail.

Webcomics are distinct not only for often covering adult themes but simply for generally featuring adult characters. Most of the comics in the newspaper center on children or families; in contrast, few webcomics I'm familiar with have any major child characters at all. A great majority of the webcomics I've run into feature kids in college or just past it, and the trials and tribulations of working shitty jobs and striking out with members of the appropriate sex (although, by pure coincidence, the female characters always seem to be extremely attractive.) Webcomics have been criticized for their sameness — no doubt the result of a lot of artists writing what they know, although certainly many webcomics break out of this mold. And even the ones that don't are a welcome relief for the typical internet audience, as most of us are not part of the family entertainment demographic. I would argue, at any rate, that webcomics are a lot less similar to one another than the comics you can find in the newspaper.

Storylines

One major difference between webcomics and newspaper comics is that the archive of previous comics is always available when you're reading a comic on the web. With newspaper comics, if you wish to read back comics, you have to wait until they're available in a collection — otherwise, all you have is the current day's comic, or the past few weeks' worth if they're available online. Human memories are fallible, and a lot of readers no doubt don't check Dilbert every day. Thus, storylines are limited to what readers can remember from the last few days and each strip has to give the context that occasional readers might have missed. It's rare that a continuing storyline in a newspaper comic lasts longer than a couple weeks, while much longer narratives are possible with webcomics. Sluggy Freelance often features epic stories lasting months. A recent chapter, "Oceans Unmoving", lasted over a year. With long chapters, a webcomic can feature more complex stories in different settings with lots of exposition, and readers who get confused can easily see the previous comics to refresh their memories.

Many webcomics feature continuing storylines. While a few newspaper comics have characters that age and change over time — Doonesbury, For Better or for Worse, Jump Start — those still tend to be episodic in nature, with each individual plotline relatively short (and note, of course, that they are the exception on the comics page.) Some webcomics, on the other hand, don't really divide into separate stories. Questionable Content and Something Positive both follow years in the lives of their characters, without obvious separation between different plotlines. Characters that evolve over the years are an exception in the newspaper, but they're very much the norm in webcomics.

Artwork

This is where the difference is really obvious. There are dozens of webcomics out there which cast aside the norms of the comic medium in order to do innovative, fascinating things with their artwork that wouldn't fly or even be possible in newspapers. Some webcomics are minimalist — Savage Chickens is a single-panel comic, with each panel drawn quickly on a yellow Post-It note. Spamusement is drawn in a clumsy, amateurish style (and its theme is unique, as well: each comic is inspired by the subject line of a spam email.) Toothpaste for Dinner takes that style to its extreme; the characters in the comic are blobby and crooked and you might think it was drawn by a particularly talentless child, right up until you notice the little details, like that the eyes are always crooked in exactly the same way, and you realize that its artwork is the precise result of the author's intentions.

Other comics remove drawing from the equation. Whispered Apologies, for instance, offloads the artwork to others. The authors write each strip's dialogue using art sent in by readers (fans of webcomics will often notice artwork that looks familiar, as many of the guest artists draw other well-known comics.) A Softer World uses softly-focused photos instead of drawings, and the relation between the photos and the text varies from obvious to oblique. Dinosaur Comics (which is, scientifically speaking, the funniest thing ever), uses precisely the same artwork in each comic, depicting its main character, T-Rex stomping on the same house and talking with his pals Dromiceiomimus and Utahraptor every day. Irregular Webcomic is illustrated in a novel way — it uses photos of Lego figures acting out the narrative.

Still other comics work by recontextualizing existing images. Wondermark uses images taken from nineteenth century books as artwork, juxtaposing these old drawings with incongruous (often modern-sounding) dialogue to create a jocular result. Partially Clips uses clip art, and repeats the same image in each frame of an individual strip, which requires the dialogue to carry the entire narrative. Get Your War On, a political comic, also uses clip art, generally images of office workers talking to one another on the phone.

And of course on the other hand are comics that use a more conventional drawing-plus-text style, but work to stretch it. The aforementioned Sluggy Freelance, for instance, normally looks much like any other comic but often uses experimental drawing styles when they fit with the storyline. Sluggy has also taken advantage of the looser rules of the web medium by occasionally publishing longer comics than normal, or inserting color into his (usually black and white) daily strips when the story calls for it. Other comics, like the abovementioned Questionable Content (at least in its latter years), simply use much lusher artwork than you'll see in the newspaper, blurring the line between comic strips and graphic novels — something possible because the confining size limits of newspaper comics don't exist on the web.

The effects of all this

What we're seeing in webcomics, then, is the effect of opening up a medium to anyone who wishes to contribute. Artists working on the web are able to do work in ways fundamentally incompatible with the goals of a newspaper; a comic has no need to be all things to all people, or even be inoffensive to most people, in order to succeed on the web, as the internet enables a fundamentally democratic system to blossom. Whatever ethos an artist works under, the audience who digs it can find it and enjoy it, and those who don't like it never need run into it again. What you find hysterically funny, I might not even crack a smile at — and that's okay, because you can follow the comics you like and I'll read the ones I like.

With artists able to pursue whatever goals they like, they can push the boundaries of the medium to accomplish their own particular purposes. As I mentioned above, Dinosaur Comics is, on a purely factual basis, the funniest thing in the world. But what percentage of the newspaper-reading audience would put up with the appearance of a comic strip in which the art was the same every day? I'm not even sure what percentage of the web audience appreciates it — but for those of us who do, we can enjoy the comic, as it simply doesn't matter how many people hate it. That's the difference between the mainstream media and the web.

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Webcomics discussed in this essay

Lore Brand Comics  -  http://www.lorebrandcomics.com/
Sexy Losers  -  http://www.sexylosers.com/
Sluggy Freelance  -  http://www.sluggy.com/
Questionable Content  -  http://www.questionablecontent.net/
Something Positive  -  http://www.somethingpositive.net/
Savage Chickens  -  http://www.savagechickens.com/
Spamusement  -  http://www.spamusement.com/
Toothpaste for Dinner  -  http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/
Whispered Apologies  -  http://www.qwantz.com/apologies/
A Softer World  -  http://www.asofterworld.com/
Dinosaur Comics  -  http://www.qwantz.com/
Irregular Webcomic  -  http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/
Wondermark  -  http://www.wondermark.com/
Partially Clips  -  http://www.partiallyclips.com/
Get Your War On  -  http://www.mnftiu.cc/