In your view/experience. is the rate of "incompleteness" among webcomics more or less the nature of online personal projects as a whole? Or is there something specific to webcomics like laboriousness, audience expectations, relative medium infancy or whatnot?
well for one thing webcomics has changed significantly in the last ten years. it used to have a much lower barrier for entry, just get a smackjeeves account or set up a website with a wordpress plugin. starting a webcomic when i started my webcomic vs starting a webcomic now are totally different experiences.
so i can only speak to people who started their webcomics roughly ten years ago. and roughly ten years ago a lot of us were a whole lot younger with a lot more time and energy to spend on a comic for free. this part is probably still somewhat true for new artists.
but then you get older. your ideas change. your skill develops and the old stuff isn't as good. or you don't have as much time, you got a day job. unless you're one of like five people on earth your webcomic is not paying your rent. you need to make money. your shoulder hurts. you're 30 now. you're struggling to make updates on time between whatever else makes you happy and what else you need to do to live. you wrote this story when you were 21, you don't relate to it anymore, you have different ideas, you've grown up, your audience has noticeably dropped off from the peak, social media managing is hard, you have to go to work, you're so tired, all the time.
it's a lot of things.
Taylor touched on it, but yeah webcomics are EXTREMELY not the scene they were when a lot of people our age got into it (people our age now being in the position of having enough work behind them to 'abandon' it meaningfully).
Almost everyone I know who used to run a webcomic back then still cares a lot about those stories. Some people have moved into different mediums, some have rebooted their work and repackaged it for places like patreon or aggregators, a lot of them still produce free work for their audiences in one form or another even if it's not a continuation of their original 'one big story'. And some of them ARE still plugging away at the same projects, the same way they always did. But the skills that got people into webcomics 10-15 years ago are not the skills you need to get any kind of attention in today's market.
I complain a lot about 'hustle culture' taking over artistic spaces online, and that grievance really roots from what happened to webcomics more than anything else. There is no reason that you should need to be a marketing guru to publish an free indie comic online. There is no reason that you should be expected to update daily, or three times a week, or even once a week if you don't want to. There was genuinely a time when some of the best examples of the genre (and best known among Webcomic Likers) were uncategorisable experiments published one page at a time every other phase of the moon on wordpress blogs or static html sites.
If you were excited by webcomics as a medium in 2010, you were probably excited by qualities of the scene that simply don't exist any more - or at least certainly don't exist in the same form, or to nearly the same extent. Project Wonderful and webrings meant tiny comics still had shared readerships, and an avenue for connecting with new audiences through peers with similar interests. Micro-forums and comment sections meant each comic had its own little mini community, often full of other artists who were excited to talk process. Maybe the defining artistic relationship of my whole career, which has opened up more job opportunities than my actual degree, was forged in a webcomic forum with about 8 regular users.
The biggest loss I felt, personally, was the disappearance of spaces for talking about art with amateurs who really cared about experimentation and expression. A lot of it was super goofy, but bouncing off other teenagers with messy over-ambitious ideas about infinite canvas and found-object comics and branching storylines really ignited my passion for trying things. There were always parallel conversations about how to find an audience, whether merch was worth it, which conventions made money, but they were just as questing and experimental. Today, creative spaces are (somewhat necessarily, by nature of the way the internet has changed around us) dominated by marketing talk. The question hanging over every creative question for webcomic artists today seems to be 'but will it drive engagement'. And that's fucking miserable.
Anyone who got into webcomics before the shift to algorithmic feeds, omnipresent adtech and the premeditated murder death of Project Wonderful has probably looked around at some point and thought 'where the fuck am I?' Some artists have adapted comfortably, but a huge proportion of those who were most invested ten years ago were just never going to be interested in the skills that drive the current webcomic market. Because it is a market now, not an art scene. People have always needed to make money, and webcomics have never been especially profitable, but there was a time when they were an outlet - something you did after your shift at the bar, because it came with broad possibilities and a vibrant social scene. Now they are a second job.
Here's my point: when you notice the great proportion of long-running comics that just faded away or stopped altogether at some point, it is worth recognising that this wasn't just burnout. It was an extinction event.
"you were probably excited by qualities of the scene that simply don't exist any more"
YUP
I feel like I HAVE found other things to be excited about as I went, and @spiderforestcomics has been awesome for that space to both experiment with weird stuff and have parallel conversations about cons and merch, and almost certainly why I'm still making my comic that I started 2010.
But I'll never stop being wistful that I didn't get a forum community, of fans of the work who just wanted to meet each other and talk, not necessarily to the creator, but to each other.
I don't usually blog much, but this had me thinking a lot when someone sent me it, and I'm hoping it'll be seen by webcomickers and by at least a few people who want that old sense of community you could get in webcomics from the aughts and early 10s.
I have a decently strong community of people who wanted to find others who were interested in the webcomic I was making, without the webcomic itself being super-popular. Weirdly enough, it's by taking the strangest possible approach to publishing my webcomic: By primarily publishing it and its supporting materials Discord-first, anyone who wanted to see the latest pieces would be suddenly aware of the discussion channels elsewhere, and then, by that process, be able to participate in them.
It takes some doing, and it's a little chaotic to publish that way. But if you have a good hook, it works, and by the end of it, you can have a fun little community that like to chat with each other purely on the merits of them all liking your work. If you want to bring back the sense of community from forums and such, I pretty strongly recommend that.
Besides that, though, the people in this thread are completely correct. The algorithm-driven, feed-focused ecosystem has destroyed that moment in time. Not just for webcomics, the internet at large was also affected, but it feels like it affected webcomics in an especially visible way. Feels as though by the time the current generation of webcomic creators reached mental and artistic maturity, the ecosystem that had shaped it had been annihilated by venture capitalism and cynical hustle-culture. It's unfair.
Maybe a market crash will clean this all up someday. Or maybe this era's algorithm-driven feeds of webcomics with names like "I (The Assassin) Was Reincarnated As The Noble And Also I Can Unlock Every Skill?!" and "Twenty Girlfriends Per Hour" is essentially equivalent to the older era of equally cynical gamer-couch webcomics and megaman-and-sonic-edit sprite comics. Maybe there's some hidden community to them I'm unfamiliar with, all hosted exclusively on apps with names like "Chatimo Fandoms".
I smell a lot of money involved, though. More than is needed for a webcomic creator to pay rent, and more than is good for any community to be influenced by. Yet I don't see many rich webcomic artists. More money, yet poorer artists? It can't be a better situation for a community.