I was reading the selected online archive of Dykes to Watch Out, as one does, and I
reached a strip called Sleep's Sister.
Some of you might already feel a tightness in your chest.
For the rest, content warning for dead pets.
It starts in the same way I've seen tens of other webcomics start, with a cat waking
up its owners too early in the morning.
I know this comic and I love it in all its endless, repetitive forms because my cat wakes
me up and there's a nice rush when I see something I recognize.
At the same time those comics cutify a situation that in the moment is actually pretty frustrating.
But Sleep's Sister isn't a post-2014 four-panel comic seen on social media.
It's a 2006 twelve panel comic posted on its own website.
So it really isn't what I knew and expected.
For starters the figures are less infantilized than usually, with recognizably adult bodies
and less exaggeration in their expression.
The place is better defined, rendered with just enough texture and depth to make it feel
like it's a specific house in which people actually live their day to day lives.
These aren't drawings of all people woken up by all cats, looking the way they feel.
These are particular people, particular cats looking the way they look.
The situation itself captures a lot more of what's happening, not just the instantly
recognizable frustration.
It has all the stuff that actually makes you feel petty and nasty.
The denying, hoping that the cat will leave you alone, then shifting to the partner, the
barely verbal and non-verbal negotiation of who's going to wake up and feed the tiny
carnivorous being that you decided to take into your home.
And then comes the kicker.
When Sydney goes into the kitchen she finds the other cat dead on the floor.
That's not nice.
That's not recognizable.
And if it is, then it's pretty traumatizing, evoking a moment you'd rather not relive.
At the same time it is something that happens.
Our little pets aren't cute cartoons.
They're creatures of flesh and fur and bone who tire, get sick and die.
Grief should be worthy of recognition and examination.
Sometimes crashing on the floor is the best you can muster.
There's no life-affirming, motivational message in it.
Just the need for peace and patience for enough time to pass so you can pick yourself up.
How did we get from these affecting, emotionally complex webcomics to the cute, energic, dopamine
boosting, but shallow and repetitive ones of today.
You might say, wait a minute, Alin.
Alison Bechdel is a genius and all these other people are not.
That's a sufficiently simple and satisfactory explanation, no?
To that, I present to you the dreaded Loss.
There was something in the air between 2005ish to 2012ish that made webcomics authors think
that they should and even must pursue serialized stories that sometimes tackle complex and
difficult subject matters.
So in order to understand what was happening, let's look at what webcomics were.
Comic strips were posted on the internet, shared through emails and Usenet groups, but
they couldn't really be called webcomics, which is to say comics hosted on their own
website, until the world wide web was actually invented (Tim Berners-Lee, 1990), there was
a browser that could display images (ViolaWWW, 1991) which had a large enough adoption rate
(Mosaic, 1993).
The earliest webcomics attracted both new cartoonists as well as some of those already
working in print who were thematically involved with the new medium and were, for the most
part, slice of life, workplace comics or gag cartoons filled with geekish imagery and references.
(http://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?chapter=1#1997-08-26, http://www.userfriendly.org/, Dilbert, Polymer
City Chronicles http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/comics/031395a.html).
A bit later the two genres, as subtly distinct as they could already be, would meld into
the gaming webcomic (PvP, Penny Arcade), following people whose job basically was to talk about
video games and other geeky stuff.
Many of the strips, while not devoid of humor or artistry, coasted on inside jokes and the
recognition of some arcane vocational specificity.
This is something that remains true to this day, with many webcomics specifically tailored
to some profession or hobby or kink.
The difference being that in the mid-90s the audience was self-selected to the people who
actually had access to internet; which meant mostly tech workers and people living on university
campuses.
Them being on the web affected the genre only in that the art could and actually had to
be cruder and simpler than in print.
There were exceptions, as is the case everywhere, but the available audience could be indifferent
to them and the base technology downright adversarial.
Argon Zark!, for example, was one of the few popular webcomics of the era that broke the
mold somewhat.
The themes remained entrenched in the geek space, but it was more of an adventure strip,
with detailed drawings and richly colored panels.
For the time it was impressive, but also had the downside that a comic could take whole
minutes to load.
Because of the small resolution of the screens at the time and since scrolling wasn't an
entrenched behaviour the story could sometimes move only a panel at a time.
And it wasn't quite as shareable as the humor strips.
You wouldn't email a random chapter to a friend, you wouldn't print it to display
it on your cubicle.
It would take the internet almost ten years to become accessible enough and fast enough
to accomodate similar adventure serials, such as Girl Genius (2005), Gunnerkrigg Court (2005)
or those published by Aaron Diaz on Dresden Codak.
This last one can point to us how intimidating it could be have been, even by 2007, for an
author to try out long-form serialized storytelling on the web, especially if it wasn't immediately
funny.
Because the first few pages of Hob, one of the long-running storylines on Dresden Codak,
are silent and somewhat enigmatic, Diaz keeps pointing out to readers that they need to
wait a bit patiently for the story to come along.
It's telling as well that the arrival of the story is conflated with the arrival of
the written word, which can point to us how deemphasised visual storytelling could have
been in webcomics.
But while more broadly used and better technology certainly did help webcomics develop beyond
the three or four-panel humor strip, there were a few pressures more instrumental to
the development of the medium.
During the late 90s and early aughts the comic book market was recovering after a crash razing
much of the independent efforts and making the established publishers more conservative,
while the newspaper strips had been suffering from constant contraction for decades.
Meaning that authors who would've pursued an original career in print now could find,
at best, work-for-hire jobs on established properties.
Something evidenced by the fact that after the comic book market recovered and diversified,
many webcomic creators found their ways into the stores.
Some of them, like Kazu Kibuishi or Raina Telgemeier even becoming some of the best
selling graphic novelists in the US and together with Hope Larson, Erin Hicks, Vera Brosgol
and Gene Luen Yang basically recreating the american young-adult graphic novel in no small
part because they could tap into that non-traditional audience, the awareness and the critical goodwill
they built up with their mostly free and easily available comics.
The more positive pressure came from the ability of webcomics to make money in a reasonable
way.
During the first half of the aughts webcomics portals like Keenspot, Modern Tales, Serializer.net
and Girlamatic took some of the burden of web hosting and raising the revenue employing
various combinations of subscriptions and advertising.
They were somewhat successful, acting as a sort of syndicalization for the webcomics
world, creating spaces for new genres and audiences.
For various reasons during the second half of the decade they weren't as appealing
to creators.
They didn't live up to the expectations of offering a living, CMSs like Wordpress
using themes such as Comicpress made it very easy for artists to set-up their own websites,
TapatoCo helped artists sell their own merchandise related to their webcomics.
And many other reasons specific the the paltforms in question and the different creators.
Being a webcomics author became as legitimate a way of being a comics creator as any other.
Probably moreso than any in the US, since the direct market was dominated by increasingly
violent superhero comics that kept rethreading bygone eras while the alternative scene was
overwhelmingly filled by memorialistic graphic novels about miserable men doing miserable
things and feeling miserable about it.
A lot of what was fun and fresh and progressive and boundary pushing in North American comics
was happening on the web.
A webcomic could be all of this, it could be even alienatingly weird and still be commercially
viable.
If the creator was invested with enough business sense and the comic was good
Take for example, Spike Trotman's Templar Arizona, a hysterical realist graphic novel
with a varied and multicultural cast set in a fictional city filled with strange subcultures.
The story can go in the same chapter from communist speeches about reclaiming business
centers and turning them into housing projects to presentations of state of the art adult
sex toys.
Juggling with multiple streams of income, from ads to direct donations and selling printed
copies of the comic Trotman managed to get comfortable enough to not need a traditional
publisher.
Eventually she'll have founded one.
This double legitimacy, both artistic and financial, meant that webcomics weren't
anymore "all about video games, gamernerds, webgeeks, dorknerds, gamewads, nerdgames,
webwebs, and elves" or fantasy photoshoped gradient comics made for gamernerd, webgeeks,
dorknerds, you get the idea.
Referential gag cartoons could be about history or literature and come from a less toxic,
consumer culture perspective (http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=65).
Humor strips could be depressing (https://girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws417) or sweet(https://girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws440)
or approach delicate subject matters without turning everything into a joke(http://girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws130).
The ur-two gamers on a couch comic, Penny Arcade, could have episodes about the joys
of fatherhood(https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/05/14), surreal short stories with Twisp And Catsby
(http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/08/02) or even branch out into straight sci-fi and
fantasy short stories like Automata (https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/story/automata) or Lookouts(https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/07/01/guest-lookouts-page-2).
More than that, established comic book authors started to create their own webcomics, with
various degrees of success.
Warren Ellis, always a web pioneer, started writing FreakAngels, drawn by Paul Duffield.
DC Comics created Zuda, its own imprint for webcomics and First Second published many
of its future graphic novels as serialized webcomics first.
A bit late to the game Rick Burchett and Greg Rucka started Lady Sabre and the Pirates of
the Ineffable Ether.
Mark Waid launched Thrillbent for his and Peter Krause's Insufferable, but opened
the site for many other creators.
Superhero writer Jeff Parker teamed with webcomics artist Erika Meon on Bucko, a humorous mystery
graphic novel.
By the end of the aughts webcomics were serious business and they were showing this by making
money, doing serialized storylines and being adult.
Surprisingly, being adult meant first and foremost being sex-positive, progressive and
candidly inspired by real life, instead of being violent and titillating.
This is and it isn't how you get Loss.
Loss the comic is a tone deaf, lazyly drawn strip whose author greatly overextended himself
by tackling a subject matter he wasn't equipped for, nor had any reason to, other than being
edgy and non-committal to the longer story he set-up.
There's a much better video essay about it you might have seen.
Loss the phenomena, Loss the meme, happens when you rip that comic out of the context
of its own website, of its own history and you spread it everywhere, turning it absurd
through repetition on image boards, forums, social media and even video games.
When you take its basic visual language and abstract it to a series of signs that amuse
you through sheer recognition.
You could do that with any moment of heightened drama from most webcomics.
I guess you could do it with Sleep's Sister.
Please don't.
This was the very thing a new crop of webcomics evolved to avoid.
Not necessarily through conscious decisions on the part of most of the authors, of course.
But Loss was the shape of things to come during the next decade.
As the 2010s came around, ad revenue fell and became less predictable.
Social media started to monopolize more and more of the web, with sites like Facebook
and Twitter acting as gateways for content.
So maintaining a personal website offered fewer and fewer advantages, especially for
smaller cartoonists.
Not much later Patreon would come to the scene, making a personal website even less important.
In order to have a career, a cartoonist could either spread themselves incredibly thin,
on all social media websites for as wide an audience as possible or burrow deep into a
passionate fanbase that simply wasn't served anywhere else.
It would be easy to say that in the age of the social media readers simply don't have
the attention span for serialized stories.
But out of the top ten comics on Patreon, seven of them are either character driven
or story driven long-form comics.
Yet even the newest ones are from 2013.
If readers cannot contribute simply by reading, then there's a limited number of works that
they can support.
And of course they'll help those that they've invested the most in, those that they care
the most about.
At the same time, as I hinted earlier, the comic book market diversified, in no small
part thanks to the success of the webcomic authors from the 2000s.
Companies including, but hardly limited to Image, Oni, Boom!, Action Lab would publish
more and more creator owned comics and even the licensed properties became a bit more
daring, sometimes even with the help of webcomics authors.
Self-publishing digitally became an alternative as well, through platforms like Comixology
and Gumroad.
These two aspects dried the pool of artists willing to start their own long-form webcomic
and drove the rest to simply use social media platforms for content delivery, to build a
presence and a portfolio, accepting that they won't make money through the webcomic.
For a while, creatively at least, it worked out well, especially on Tumblr.
As opposed to Facebook or Twitter, Tumblr allowed for rich graphical content and kept
the posts as long they needed to be, encouraging the endless scroll.
Quite a few of the comics made for Tumblr were employing variations on the infinite
canvas technique Scott McCloud imagined in his 1999 book Reinventing Comics.
The ease of use, accessibility and flexibility of the platform are some of the reasons it
actually was the place where some of the best comics of the decade have been posted.
Simon Hanselmann's Megg Mogg and Owl, the shorts of Sam Alden (http://samaldencomics.tumblr.com/post/86542572334/hollow-part-i)among
with other really great creations and experiments from Andrew White, Jake Wyatt, Connor Willumsen,
Jillian Tamaki (http://mutantmagic.com/) and Lisa Hanawalt as well as being the place where
future geniuses, such as Neolle Stevenson, would edulcorate.
(https://io9.gizmodo.com/hipster-lord-of-the-rings-where-the-nazgul-ride-fixies-5816257).
But the real breakout hits from Tumblr were the short, usually square shaped four panel-comcs
comics that mixed musings with observations with diary entries.
Comics such as Sarah Anderson's (http://sarahcandersen.com/page/107), Gemma Correll's (http://gemmacorrell.tumblr.com/post/53941674490/for-those-who-were-asking-about-my-process-its),
Cassandra Călin's (http://c-cassandra.tumblr.com/post/175548182150/its-so-damn-hot) or Seo Kim's (http://seokim.tumblr.com/post/29550756393/sheddy-cat).
They challenge gender norms, but not too much.
They raise awareness for mental health issues, but only up to a point, never going to the
extent to which something like Depression Comics would go.
They sometimes feature pets and kids with all their incredible cuteness.
They are somewhat insightful, funny and charming, but most of all, they are relatable.
This format and this approach wasn't really new.
Their closest ancestor probably being James Kochalka's American Elf, first serialized
online during the aughts through Modern Tale's subscription model.
But while American Elf was adored and a few cartoonists tried doing their similar diary
comics its success wouldn't or couldn't be replicated.
One reason being that some of those cartoonists actually had more lucrative options at the
time.
Another being that for a long while, being relatable wasn't the currency it grew to
be in the era of the social network.
These are comics that we reblog, share, retweet commenting something like "same", "mood"
or "me irl" because they portray something we do, something we think, something we wish
people knew about us, but cleaned off, polished, without all the parts that make us feel petty
or nasty.
They help us express ourselves, without making ourselves vulnerable.
When we click share, we don't actually share anything personal.
We just distribute content.
Then, we have their similarly formatted cousins.
The absurd gag-strips.
Your Eat More Bikes, your Extra Fabulous Comics, your Twitter: The Comic.
Not as edgy as Cyanide and Happiness, thank God, not as inventive and emotionally draining
as Perry Bible Fellowship or Gunshow, maybe slightly nerdy but not as ezoteric as XKCD
or the early Dresden Codak, rarely are they even as political as SMBC.
They can't usually deliver more than a sort of ironic wholesome internet weirdness mostly
because the format won't allow much more than that.
Finally, we have the unholy wedding of these two tendencies in Owlturd, the most powerful
comic of them all.
So strong it is, that it breaks its author regularly only to make him come back ever-enhanced
and filled with motivational fervor.
From the point of view of an author, these comics are a sort of millennial hussle.
They are relatively easy to make, they require little planning, they can be drawn after class
or once work is over.
They can break big on Patreon, they can get a book deal, but the vast majority of cartoonists
won't go beyond a few hundred dollars a month.
Which is ok, they don't need to.
These aren't just comics immune to lossification.
These are comics than in their stanza-like structure hold embedded all the drama required
for their consumption.
They can be read in a glance and need no familiarity with their premise, with their characters,
with any prior storyline or even with the world outside.
They are readable on every platform and every device without really needing special formatting.
They not only feel at home on social media feeds, they're also an inexhaustible source
of content for websites such as 9gag or BuzzFeed feeding off our shared anxiety about our bodies,
habits, mental health, financial stability and confusion towards the world without offering
anything more than the recognition that other people feel the way we do.
These are the comics that the new landscape of the internet picked as winners.
The landscape made of social media, of mobile apps, of monolithic media conglomerates.
I don't want to sound ignorant.
I know that these don't form the totality of webcomics.
In fact we're suffering a sort-of flattening of webcomics history with all its major trends
co-existing on the backtail, somewhere beneath the surface.
We still have vocational comics(http://www.commitstrip.com/en/?), we still have webcomics portals(https://tapas.io/,
https://www.webtoons.com/en/), and we still have serialized graphic novels that aim to
support themselves just enough through Patreon until they produce sufficient pages to put
out a book, either through a publisher or, most likely, through crowdfunding(https://bashers.kerstin-lacross.com/comic/page-001/).
But none of them are the driving force of the medium, they don't take advantage of
the way the web is used and structured, in fact many go against it, and don't shape
it's further evolution.
That said, is it possible that we might break out of this flatness?
Ironically, Instagram, the social network that would seem the most restrictive, with
square images and its focus on mobile devices, with a culture that encourages this projection
of a false, perfect identity, might allow comics to break out of this eternal ironic
now.
Instagram allows artsy self-seriousness in a way that Facebook and Twitter don't.
It discourages discourse and it builds a visual language.
I've seen cartoonists such as Tillie Walden or Lucy Kinsley using the slideshow feature
to create interesting sequences, either through montage or through something like the infinite
canvas.
There are even serialized sci-fi series such Kathryn and Stuart Immonen's Grass of Parnassus.
They all are a bit familiar, but also new and interesting and innovative in a way.
Still, it's too soon to call it a Renaissance and it could be very easy for Facebook to
change things just enough to drive the audience or the authors away.
Now, I don't think that the medium lost any masterpieces because the audience and
the money just weren't there to meet the creators.
Those masterpieces will have been made one way or another, maybe even as print comics.
And hopefully their authors will have been sufficiently well rewarded that they'll
continue to make many more.
If comics as an art-form lost great authors they'll have lost them the way they always
did, to animation, to film, to product design and it's a much broader problem.
Nor do I think that the epitome of what a comic should be is a serialized, character
driven strip about dead cats.
Comics can be great in a myriad of ways.
Even in the four-panel absurd gag cartoon way.
Just look at John Cullen's NHOJ.
The point is not to imagine how else it could've been.
Rather to understand why it couldn't have been any other way.
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Trả lờiXóaThanks and look forward to your prompt reply.
Regards,
Muqse