Commentary on webcomics and the future of comics

This was a dangerous week for me. Webcomics have long been a passion of mine, and being encouraged to read webcomics for class led to a lot of ‘class reading’ that more or less amounted to scouring the archives of comics I’d always intended to read instead of doing other (more pressing!) assignments. That said, I am always happy to discuss the bright future of comics and the ways that the media can continue to expand.

I mentioned in a much earlier blog post that Homestuck is a bit of an oddball comic, in fact being less of a ‘comic’ in some ways than a combination of full-color storyboards and animations that primarily serve the text. It’s not something that’s recognizable as a “graphic novel” and yet it’s undoubtedly some sort of novel— it has a couple hundred thousand extra words on War and Peace. If something this idiosyncratic can be considered a comic at all, I find it doubtful that the medium will stay restrained purely to classic strips or pages of boxes varying in size.

I will say that the style of webcomics I tend to come back to most often is those in the more classic ‘strip’ style, with something resembling a punchline at the end of each one. One of the many mistakes I made this past weekend was reading Sakana twice over, but I couldn’t help myself! There’s something incredibly compelling about the ‘punch’ at the end of each strip that keeps you reading in the same way that printed comics try to maintain reader interest at the end of a spread so they feel the urge to turn the page and continue the story. I love how approachable Sakana’s classic strip formula is, and I love how the author has used this structure to create a story with real emotional depth as well as impressive character development. This structure also emphasizes the humor in the story and lends itself well to the rom-com genre of the comic. (As someone who has been on the record hating rom-coms with a passion, it amazes me that all you have to do is turn it into a webcomic and add a couple of gay characters to get me fully invested.)

Also, may I just say how delighted I am that Failing Sky was on your list of recent comics you’ve enjoyed reading! I’ve met with Scout at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo a couple times and her work has been incredibly inspirational and cathartic for me, especially since the election last year. If you haven’t read her Villainette comics I highly recommend them as well. They’re much more traditional comic strips, totally different from the innovative non-linear (both chronologically and spatially) work in Falling Sky, but I think the lighthearted and simplistic visuals help make the often-painful subject matter easier to swallow.

Though I’m not optimistic about the future of comics artists being able to support themselves, I am very excited to see how the medium continues to evolve. I have no concept of how it might be applied to some developing technologies, but I have no doubt that it will, and would love nothing more than to continue watching to see how the medium grows past anything we thought it could be.