| Webcomics Suck |
In 1989, Bill Watterson gave a speech at Ohio State about the condition of the comic strip as an American institution. He spoke of the comics he grew up with, then went on to discuss the sorry state of comics in the ‘80s. Since then, newspaper comics have only gotten worse. Licensing has continued unabated; the space allotted each comic on the page has gotten smaller; the stale has gotten staler. Dagwood wakes up late every morning and runs into the mailman. Jon Arbuckle can’t get a date for the 10,000th night in a row. Cathy’s still fat. It sucks, and what’s worse, no one cares that it sucks. The comic strip is a medium of such possibility. It’s a truism at this point that limitations are often the greatest contributors to art; just as some of the most beautiful poetry comes as a result of conforming to established, ostensibly restrictive dictates of form and content, so do the size and storytelling constraints dictated by the medium of the comic strip sometimes lead to brilliance. What Watterson objected to, then, was not these constraints, but outside influences from syndicates; they ran—and continue to run—comics like a business, and as a result, creativity is all but quashed entirely. So it would seem that the freedoms allowed by the Internet are the greatest thing that could have happened to comics. Indeed, the Internet has the capacity to revolutionize the comic strip as a medium, and as such, there are a lot of great comics out there. But the ones that have seen the greatest success have been just as mediocre as whatever bullshit Funky Winkerbean or the king of Id are doing in the newspaper. So without further ado, what follows is my analysis of some of the most popular webcomics; with any luck, their creators will see that I am telling them that their comics are bad and no good at all and will proceed to fling themselves into the sea! Penny Arcade |
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In a courageous departure from the time-honored Penny Arcade formula of “xbox=lol,” the joke here is that “goat” and “anus” are funny words. Also, there is also a “swerve” in the last panel wherein we the readers learn that the fellow with the head shaped like a penny loafer enjoys violent, possibly illegal pornography. All in all, I give this strip three Dave Barrys out of five. Penny Arcade is notable for being the only webcomic whose art is comprised of discarded storyboards for Kim Possible. The main problem I have with it is that it gets its purported humor and, in turn, its audience, from a “can they say that?!” kind of faux-shockingness, but if the only people reading your strip are jaded dweebs whose favorite prank entails tricking others into looking at a photo of a gaping, distended rectum, no one’s being shocked. It’s totally boring. Also, the whole Jack Thompson ordeal (link if you have been living in something other than a house in a humorously remote location for the last several months) made Gabe and Tycho (real names Mike and Jerry) out to be the heroes of the gaming industry when in actuality, Jack Thompson is nothing but a walking, breathing straw man brought to life. Even his own organization disowned him because he’s so crazy and fringe-right-wing. Telling your readers that a jackass is a jackass isn’t interesting or productive, and to twist doing so into representing yourself as a bastion of truth and rationality just kind of sucks. VG Cats A standard VG Cats is roughly 600 x 400,000 pixels, so I have opted to instead present you with an artist’s depiction of a typical strip:
VG Cats combines the rock-solid premise of the chilling techno-thriller film Stay Tuned… with the ground-breaking artistic style of neopets.com. Taking an “irreverent” look at a medium through parody is especially irritating to me because it disguises lazy humor as clever observation. Anyone can slap a pair of cat ears on Mario and depict him having sex with a goombah or draw Solid Snake getting his dick cut off and saying, “worst…game…ever.” It’s like VG Cats is trying to trick the readers into thinking they’re seeing something funny, but a blurry background and a “naughty” premise do not a joke make. But I guess I should cut VG Cats some slack since, given the manga drawing style, fascination with cute animals, and lame humor, it’s clearly drawn by a pubescent girl, and…
Oh. I see. Ctrl+Alt+Del
Penny Arcade: now with 80% more “the X-Box is large” jokes! Alternately: no wonder Jeff Buckley let himself drown; you would too if your father was posthumously writing such a shitty comic! Incidentally, Tim Buckley draws his strips way tall, so I’ve taken the liberty of lopping off the bottom two panels of this one for ease of reading. Trust me, you’re not missing much. 8-Bit Theater
Each strip of 8-Bit Theater is seriously like 1000+ pixels tall, and I already used my fake strip joke on VG Cats, so here’s the bottom fifth of one of the early strips. The punchline of “is there a doctor in the house” would be unacceptable to anyone not working for Sick Magazine under any other circumstances, but here, it is very cleverly updated to “white mage” because of video games! Similar jokes include “Who’s on my hovercraft?” as delivered by Abbott-tron and Costello 2000 and “Take my wife…please, robots!” The humor of 8-Bit Theater is the same sort of anti-wit sarcasm that induces overweight ten-year-olds to make comments like “yeah, right!” or “in yer dreams!” or “that’s just wrong!” You can almost see the characters’ half-cocked eyelids—à la the Born Loser’s boss—if only creator Brian Clevinger cared enough about his craft to actually bother to draw his characters. Sprite comics are part of a grander trend in webcomics: adding speech bubbles to shit you didn’t draw. I actually rather enjoy a strip called Dinosaur Comics that falls under this category, but I feel horrible about it, like a war profiteer or Oskar Schindler pre-crisis of conscience; the benefit (chuckles) I get from it pales in comparison to the evil forces its existence demands. It requires no effort to take pictures of action figures you should have thrown away ten years ago or hit Ctrl+c on some clip-art and then arrange it in panels and toss in some speech bubbles. It’s like being Andy Warhol, only not self-aware. Don’t do it. Questionable Content When Questionable Content remembers to make a joke, I’ll remember to write about it. Scary-Go-Round
If you can find me one significant difference between Questionable Content and Scary-Go-Round, I’ll give you one million e-dollars. Remember to show your work. PvP |
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This strip boldly makes the cold medicine=hallucinogenic joke that FoxTrot got tired of eight years ago. It also suggests that perhaps the entire comic has been a hallucination, for as we all know, a dude with a ponytail and little round glasses has never come close enough to a girl to ask her where the nearest Sanrio store is, let alone dated a living female. Drawn in the style of Pedro the Boy’s Life burro, PvP takes on the task of providing comedy for those who feel alienated by how hip and un-nerdy Penny Arcade is. I don’t really have much to say about PvP, which is precisely the problem; like dozens of other strips out there (probably hundreds if you include the countless autistic piles of shit hosted on Keenspace), it’s the same stupid nerd culture jokes and irritating drawing style that Penny Arcade brought to the fore. Guess what, potential webcomic artists! Not every comic strip has to look like the Clerks cartoon show. This Comic Sucks |
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It sure does! My objections are not to the strips’ humor, per se; nerds need to laugh as much as the rest of us. What I take issue with is the cynicism with which most webcomics are approached by their creators. Minimal time and effort are spent on comics; the simplified line drawings and middling “golf=lol” jokes that so typify printed comic strips are replaced with simplified thick-contour line drawings and middling “computers=lol” jokes. The strips might make an EB Games employee chuckle for a few seconds before he goes to work, but they do so at the cost of the very medium they seek to exploit. Rather than making bland, uninspired comics in the name of syndicate demands or potential licensing, webcomic artists make bland, uninspired comics in the name of being linked on Fark or riding other webcomics’ coattails to some level of Internet celebrity. The Internet’s lack of syndicates and the like should give people the creative freedom to push the comic strip as a medium to new heights never imagined by the likes of Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz. But instead, it’s just served as a conduit for people to peddle their corny/pseudo-shocking jokes and utterly uninspired drawings to an audience in the hopes of the kind of name recognition afforded to some of the webcomic “stars.” Calvin and Hobbes is an impossible standard to try to live up to. But it would be nice if more than a handful of people would recognize that Bill Watterson’s dream of a place for comics uninhibited by syndicate greed, traditions, and middling consumer demands is fully realizable with the Internet. Everything familiar has disappeared. It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on. It’s a magical world… I guess the X-Box is pretty big though, isn’t it? |
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