Webcomics

This week I read a little bit of a lot of webcomics. Prior to this week, I'd never read a whole lot of webcomics and the only ones I did read were fairly popular and not very serious like Cyanide and Happiness. After reading a little bit of everything (like Octopus Pie, Oglaf, and Riceboy) I realized why webcomics were so powerful. Although they are expensive to maintain alive, it seems like webcomics give the artists ultimate freedom to tell the stories they want to tell and how they want to tell it. It's also great because anyone with a phone or laptop can have access to this material and it's not something that you have to collect in paperback.

With some of these stories, I felt like they also moved forwards very quickly because it seemed more about telling the story than about selling issues (like some of the published comics we read in class). A lot of them reminded me of the newspaper strips we read towards the beginning of the semester, in the sense that they were short and concise and, in the case of Oglaf, it interjected different stories into it.

I definitely see a clear future for comics in this web form. It's accessible and there's so much room for collaboration and conversation between artists. There's something very special about being able to reach out to artists as easily as shooting them a tweet or an email. Artists having a big internet presence just makes this world feel more collaborative as a whole!