Taking a look at The Webcomics Examiner
A week ago, I wrote about dead webcomics and fan attempts to keep them available for future generations. I mentioned in that post that all web content run the danger of becoming unavailable. The entirety of webcomic culture exists on the internet, safe for a few books that don’t nearly represents all that is out there. This week, I wanted to take a look at one webcomics review website that had been around for a long time and got quite a good reputation, but has since been taken offline. The Webcomics Examiner, founded by Joe Zabel in 2004, is now only available through The Internet Archive… well, most of it.
Let’s first quickly go into why The Webcomics Examiner is important. To do this, you only really need to look at its list of contributors: it includes names like journalist Eric Burns, webcartoonists Ryan Estrada, Shaenon Garrity, Cat Garza, David Hellman, Jamar Nicholas… just a lot of big names. Joe Zabel himself was also a successful cartoonist when he founded the website. The Webcomics Examiner was a place of “frank, sophisticated discussions of webcomics as a fine art,” according to the website. “The Examiner also engages webcomics’ finest artists, with interviews and roundtable discussions exploring their work and the medium at large.” The website even got praised by Penny Arcade. In short, it was an influential website in a time where webcomics still seemed like the future of comics as a whole.
Booting up the list of all 111 articles the website has, it seems their last article was an interview with Scott McCloud in 2006. Seems like we’re off to a good start! The article is a prime example of why I like this website. Zabel, as the interviewer, immediately sets the scene. “Every topic is extremely broad once you start to unpack it,” McCloud says, something every diligent webcomic fan can probably relate to. The two really get to the essence of what McCloud’s 2006 book is about in this article, but let’s move on to something a bit more webcomic-related, shall we?
In an article titled “The Best Artists Rarely Keep to a Schedule”, Zabel talks about Derek Kirk Kim, who apparently was a prolific webcartoonist in the early 2000s, having published a best-selling graphic novel. The review of his 2006 webcomic Healing Hands sounds really good. I’d love to be able to read it, though seeing as I can’t seem to find it online, I would probably have to buy it.
To grab another random article of the list, Michael Payne’s “More Than Cute”, a review of Count Your Sheep (which is still available!), starts off in a nicely romantic fashion. Payne lists off some well-known webcomics that didn’t manage to grab him right away, like Narbonic, College Roomies From Hell, and Clan of the Cats, after which he describes the background of Count Your Sheep and his experiences with it. What I like about this article from a historian’s perspective is how it captures the time it was written in. Payne talks about Count Your Sheep moving from Keenspace to Keenspot, winning Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, and how its author also created a webcomic for Girlamatic. This website is a goldmine for if you want to know what webcomics were like during this time.
The staff of The Examiner wrote some interesting original thoughts. Ever heard about the dichotomy of introverted and extroverted webcomics? I hadn’t. This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone write an actual article about music in webcomics, a topic that is pretty important to me. The website featured a few lists of best webcomics by year, which are pretty cool to look back on, especially because many of the listed works have since been forgotten.
Over the website’s two year history, its staff have conducted a few “Roundtables”, where each person weighed in on a certain topic, like, say, the future of the medium (you know, today). The variation of opinions is interesting. A discussion like this one on conceptual webcomics is great because all of the debaters get ample space to lay out their thoughts. Because they all have different backgrounds and different expertise, there’s a lot of interesting ideas presented in the article and everything is explained in a way that it should be understandable for a large audience. A two-part roundtable about the artistic history of webcomics featuring major names in the industry is a must read for any webcomic fan, in my eyes.
Of course, I haven’t even mentioned how historically valuable the comment section of each of these articles is. Alas, it is also a wave of information and I don’t have the time to wade through it all. I probably should if I’d ever want to write a book about this period of webcomics. I suppose this only proves further how broad a topic can be when you start to unpack it…
If you’re interested in the historic or artistic aspects of webcomics like I am, I hope I have given you something to read. If you just want me to talk about actual webcomics, I’ll be sure to write another review or something next week. Now, if you excuse me, I have a huge interview with Ryan North to read.