three small slices of my theses I’m kicking around for this project:
1. you and me and everyone we know all recognize there’s a Kind of Way webcomics were from around the late 90s to sometime around ‘08, maybe ‘09. There are comics that are That Way now but I don’t think there’s been a new one since that point. You know what I’m talking about, I think. TVTropes had a phrase for the lifecycle and that should be explanation enough.
2. This phenomenon started because the successful webcomics people of the early days of the medium all had ties to the tabletop gaming small press comics circles and were subject to both that industry’s economic pressures and a particular kind of emergent narrative about and within the subculture that The Geeks Had Grown Up/Were Growing Up and The Kids Are All Right. The phenomenon ended because of smartphones and Homestuck.
3. TF comics were simultaneously both a distinct genre all their own during the Dark Ages but also inseparable from the genre I’m talking about in a way that no other kind of kink comics except furry stuff, which I’m hesitant to strictly call kink, ever were, and that’s probably deeply ingrained in the underlying politics of TF. Also, looking at his early career, it’s pretty obvious that Phil Foglio is partially to blame for the way El Goonish Shive is/was wrt being simultaneously obvious kink material and written with the most bizarrely family-friendly intentions.
and as a side note, if I somehow manage to write this up without some kind of breakdown of how Jason Thompson Keeps Fucking Up I’ve failed.
