I was recently browsing online when I came across an essay entitled “Webcomics Suck” on a blog collective called Progressive Boink. I’ve recently become a rather avid reader of webcomics, and so I was interested. The article said several rather interesting things, some of which I can agree with, but there was a lot here that was quite out of line.
Obviously, the author holds Bill Watterson up as a very high ideal for the model cartoonist, which is a sentiment that I can wholeheartedly agree with. His art and social commentary are still cutting-edge even though Calvin and Hobbes has been out of the funny pages for over a decade. The creativity of that strip is probably the most pure and organic work ever committed to wood pulp.
But Watterson took a very narrow view of a lot of the customs that syndicates would use to make money. For example, he never allowed the licensing of his characters to be used for promotional purposes. That’s why, unlike Davis’s Garfield, you’ll never see a Calvin and Hobbes TV series or movie. Every T-shirt or car decal you see with Calvin on it is the theft of intellectual property, i.e., a felony.
This view is not widely held by many cartoonists. Most professionals want their work to be out in the marketing wild, so to speak. Working for a syndicate is a brutally difficult business, and there isn’t that much money for the cartoonist being generated by (declining) newspaper sales. Scott Adams is a perfect example of this. You can’t walk through a cubicle corral without coming across some pull-out from a Dilbert calendar. You can watch Dilbert cartoons at Hulu.com. And all of that is generating money for Adams. Sure, Dilbert was a hit in the newspapers, but the commercial culture that sprang up around it is the gold mine.
Peanuts is another great example. I cut my teeth on watching Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the whole gang interacting with George Washington, fixing a space station, and singing around a Christmas tree. Those TV specials were a cornerstone of my childhood, and my younger siblings still enjoy them on a regular basis. And Snoopy is dancing all the way to the bank. Peanuts in its strip form was popular, but it was the subsidiaries that made Schulz a millionaire.
Watterson’s artistic perspective is admirable, but it is idealistic to a fault. If an artist is originally going to commit art to a medium that is only current for a short period of time, that artist must be willing to move into other areas in order to thrive. From a business perspective, it’s almost as if a cartoonist has to deify Dagny Taggart. That’s a stance Watterson would most certainly repudiate.
Enter the internet. It is the every-man’s syndicate. Anyone can generate their own comics/cartoons, register a domain, and hang up their virtual shingle, using something like ComicPress. It cuts out the middle man and puts the creator in direct contact with the audience. It’s created a new patronage system for the serious cartoonists where, through product sales and advertising dollars, the populace can support who they want directly. In the print model, the readers are paying to support a plethora of strips in which they have no real interest (This of course implies that people are only purchasing newspapers for the comics page, an argument I hope is specious at best). If an artist only wants to be a hobbyist, there’s room on the internet for them as well.
But for a webcomic to succeed, just like any form of media for profit (after all, even amateurs can turn a buck in this field), the creator has to consciously choose a target audience. The target audiences of traditional newspaper comics had to be broad. For example, a lot of people can identify with Dilbert because it’s extensively about the drudgery of working in a cubicle. The same with Calvin and Hobbes, to an extent. On a certain level, Watterson wrote about a stereotypical little boy — overactive imagination, picky eater, violence lover, even potty humor. Almost anyone coming from a Western mind frame could identify with something in Calvin and Hobbes because it cast a wide net.
This brings up a wider point — there is no such thing as art without a target audience. The Mona Lisa was not painted for the sake of artistic expression — Leonardo Da Vinci needed to earn a buck and Giaconda was willing to pay. Egyptian tombs weren’t decorated for the mourners, they were for the benefit of the ka. We are seeing now with webcomics a phenomenon that has existed as far back as the shamanistic cave paintings in southern France — personal gain.
The bulk of “Webcomics Suck” focuses on pointing out areas of negativity that the author has with a wide variety of strips, insulting everything from the originality of the writing to the artistic composition of the characters. There is no real complaint of substance to be made about many of these strips because they have to deal with the authors personal sense of aesthetics. He finds strips like PvP to blandly written. He finds Penny Arcade crass. He finds sprite comics to be derivative drivel. And to an extent, some of this is true. But the target audience drives what is being written in the webcomics. Brad Guigar has explicitly said that he stopped Greystone Inn and began Evil Inc. directly because he saw that he wasn’t reaching a large enough target audience to be financially viable. The artist has to work within the constraints set up by the audience or risk losing income.
The complaint that webcomics are too similar to their print siblings is a bit specious for a second reason as well. Webcomics are in their infancy. The internet has only been around in a suitable format for webcomics for about a decade at the earliest. Outside of the younger, more web savvy age group, very few early adopters are out there. And those who are would most likely not be within the target audience of most web cartoonists. Maybe in fort or so years, we’ll be seeing more strips aimed at the same demographic as Pickles is now. Except, they’ll be senior citizens with tattoos playing video games.
Now, the article itself has several very decisive flaws. First of all, it has a very narrow target audience that it really is looking at — the gamer. 5 out of 8 of these strips are exclusively focused on gamers, where as there are webcomics out there that focus on almost every genre. Kevin and Kell looks at the ramifications of interracial marriage. Starslip Crisis is a daily gag strip that has an underpinning space opera story line. And that’s not even touching on strips like Imagine This, Girl Genius, Marooned, The Dork Tower, Girls With Slingshots, or Achewood. By narrowing the article’s focus on strips about gaming, the author casts a very narrow, almost myopic view of what webcomics are.
Finally, the gravitas of the article is severely undercut by a legal issue. The site uses a explicitly lifted image from Calvin and Hobbes as its banner and takes its title from a title of a Calvin and Hobbes collection — Scientific Process Goes Boink. Under these is a set of Google advertisements. Therefore the author of this site is commercially profiting from the work of Bill Watterson, in direct violation both international copyright law and Watterson’s personal ethics.
So, if one wants to knock a particular art form that is still in its infancy, be careful how you couch your argument. If it’s particularly shoddy like this article, your going to lose. I personally am very hopeful in the medium’s future. It just needs time to evolve.
Later.
