So many stories start that way for me. Every event triggers some long stored echo of laughs shared, thoughts developed, and love long vanished. I’m sitting there, in warmth and laughter, with folks that I care about, and suddenly this long vanished echo reverberates through me.
For a moment they are with me again. Maybe it’s a version of them that no longer exists, maybe its only lie is the younger face, but I don’t know because we haven’t talked. In my head, there’s another seat at the table, just for the version of this precious person that I will never forget.
The heartache is as sharp and cold as ever, but somehow if I find a neat little story about them, some small little account of some of the fun we had, some of the love we shared before it either faded or shattered, then maybe for second, an agonizing, eternal tick, they’ll be with me again.
I read the temperature of the room, and sometimes, with a moment to glance internally at the memory of their smiling face, I start my story:
That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I'd known then what I know now"? But when you got older you found out that you *now* wasn't *you* then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
At some point in your life, you were taught that being slightly annoying is an unforgivable sin. Maybe it was by your parents or a teacher or a friend or a bully or an older sibling. But someone taught you that being slightly annoying is a crime punishable by death.
You must unlearn this.
You must accept that all people will be annoying at some point or another in their lives, maybe all of their lives, and that this is okay. It is okay for strangers on the bus, it is okay for children in the grocery store, it is okay for people on social media, and it is okay for you.
If you ever want to truly love your fellow humans, if you ever want to truly love yourself, you must have forgiveness for being annoying.
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.
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.
JOIN. COMIC. FURY.
https://comicfury.com/index.php
There's still a thriving social scene full of crazy experimentation if you know where to look. It's true that a lot of the 'pop culture' view of webcomics has shifted to trying to 'make it big' on webtoon, but there are alternatives. If anyone's interested in making comics and feels overwhelmed, don't let social media expectations kill your love of the craft. I've been making comics and posting them online for 10 yrs with very little social media presence, and have a small group of readers who I love and value + have formed some incredible frienships through shared interest. It can be done! You dont have to turn something into a career for it to be worth doing
This got long, sorry, but I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately and I have a lot to say.
I was incredibly lucky to join that 2010s wave of comics… and it was just dumb luck. Right place, right time. Webcomics back then was a small but supportive community of scrappy DIY-ers. Putting out a comic every week (let alone 3x a week, or daily) was NO small feat on its own and success was never guaranteed. It was hard!! JUST making a comic is hard. We had to rely on each other to navigate setting up our own websites, learning how to make and sell merch, learning how to table at conventions. We had to take our own preorders and update a stupid little thermometer jpg on our website. We linked to each other and helped each other, and (some drama aside) we had each other’s backs.
And it worked! For a time. Nobody was living large then, but some of us could make enough that way to get by. Our communities of readers were (and still are) amazing. Even for a smaller comic like mine, I could get enough reader support to print gorgeous high-quality books and get them in people’s hands. That’s something I’m still incredibly proud of.
When social media came, reader habits changed dramatically. Very few readers would leave their feed. Most readers stopped clicking through to the url (so ad sales imploded), and sometimes the ones that did would just screenshot the punchline and repost it to their own social page without credit. As time went on, fewer and fewer people would share a comic, let alone follow…now most just (maybe) click like and scroll along.
As the barrier to getting your comic on the web got lower, the quality of art got higher - and readers started demanding a much higher standard for an indie webcomic. In addition to this, some artists who gained traction at this time were subject to high levels of writer scrutiny, and that was tough to navigate.
In recent years the costs of shipping merch has gone through the roof (especially outside the US) and even if we could convince someone to buy, they started expecting rock-bottom next-day shipping like you’d get with Amazon. Every single micro service you need to keep a modern webcomic machine running demands its piece of flesh (hosting/domains, shop/payments, newsletters, post scheduling, premium accounts or plugins or whatever blablabla), and there’s less and less flesh to go around these days. You basically need to give it full time hours for the chance of it maybe becoming a part time money. A few new webcomics have found their feet and thrived in the modern era, but no, it’s not the same scene as it was back then. And every service that pops up to help you out has its own rules… rules that are subject to change without notice.
Google Reader was killed in 2013. Then non-chronological algorithms stopped showing us each other’s posts, even if we were following, circa 2015-2016. Then the various social sites stopped being viable at all. These days the mantra is “pivot (to video) or perish”. Or sometimes… just perish.
I’m not blaming the readers for these changes. These behaviours were designed. Webcomics was just one victim, but it’s also happened to a lot of other scenes (music, journalism, blogging...). I’m still learning how to fit into this new paradigm.
***
Yes, in light of these conditions many webcomickers are pushed to quit. But not all. Many of my contemporaries are putting out the best comics of their careers today.
There’s tons of incredible new work that even I’m struggling to keep up with because there are so many amazing comics now.
Some OG webcomickers pivoted into the publishing market which comes with its own challenges: a gruelling schedule, limitations on the stories you can tell, paltry advances and then you still have to do all your own marketing. But they’re still putting out incredible comics, or writing them, or helping them get made. Or hell, printing them. I’m so proud to be part of a community where creatives like these got their start.
Some went into Animation where you live under NDA and big studios can cancel your project on a whim, but they’re still making amazing art.
A couple went to Indie Games, which has to be at least 10x as difficult as webcomics, and they’re making their mark. Others went to a “merch-first” kind of creative practice, and others still got art-related corporate jobs.
And to those of us who have had to tap out or step back, or if you haven’t been able to make it click for whatever combination of reasons… you’re still a part of the community and I’m honoured to have shared a time on the internet with you. There is NO shame in quitting something that no longer resonates with your creative goals, or needing to take different measures to meet your human needs or build the kind of life you want. Stopping under those conditions is not failure. Every single page you put down is a victory.
***
Webcomics is far from a dead scene, it’s just a bit more underground again. You like webcomics? Welcome to the Resistance to the attention-economy. It’s a bit punk to do webcomics again.
We have lots of reasons to be optimistic about the scene:
All the technology we used to make that happen in the 2010s still exists today. RSS still exists. You can still type in a url, or keep a comic links folder on your browser, or use comic rocket to hold your place.
If you wanna make a comic, ComicFury is free. Neocities is free and rarebit is free. Or just put it on social for now! Who cares, just draw comics. Worry about the rest later.
If you really want to you can still get a domain and fairly cheap hosting (though it’s a bit dicier now, and idk who is doing the best WP comics plugin now) but then FileZilla is free, VsCode is free. All in it's probably ~$300 to self-host, unless you got a friend who can hook you up.
Software for making comics has never been more powerful or accessible than it is today. Tablets and scanners are cheaper than ever. Clip’s affordable, Krita is free.
Information on how to set this all up is easier to access than it ever has been
It’s never been easier to access vendors for low-minimum-quantity but high-quality custom products.
Shop services aren’t perfect, but the barrier to entry of selling something to someone online has never been lower, except for maybe when people were willing to use a Paypal html Buy Now button
And I can’t emphasize this enough – there are so so many diverse and unique creatives making their most incredible work RIGHT NOW.
If you want to make comics… if you have a song still in you… don’t give up! Do what you must to stay safe and well. Do what you can to make your best work and share it. You don't "have" to do anything that doesn't feel right to you.
Go make a zine and give it to your friends. Go to a convention and meet a local artist. Go join a local collective, or start one. Print a sticker at home and sell it for a few bucks. Join the cooperative, or a webring or two, or hell just tell another artist you think their work is neat.
Dear reader, if you want to see more webcomics that get to their conclusion? The only thing missing is YOUR. CHOICE. Choose to read webcomics. Most of us put them up for free, we're just delighted for you to read them. Go click around a few links and find something weird and cool. Choose to use RSS, and share the comics you like with your friends, and teach them RSS. Choose to kick us a few bucks when you can, buy our books and give them to your local libraries if you can. Choose to let comics be challenging and weird, choose to let artists be messy humans who are growing and learning just like you are.
The attention-economy game is boring, but this one is still here for those who want to play :)
I'm on my second semester teaching a class actually called "web comics," lol, and it has been helpful to articulate my experience of this shift to students (all too young to have been around for much of the transition being discussed).
It IS bleak, it IS a predictable corporate colonization & hollowing-out process. The internet IS culturally broken in ways that it wasn't several years ago, when I and others participating in this conversation here were starting making webcomics.
BUT: people are still people, and there are still many of them who will be interested in the weird, idiosyncratic work you want to make. There is functionally an infinite number of them. This is still in a way a MIRACULOUS time to be making independent comics: you don't have to pay thousands of dollars to print and distribute your serialized book, you can put it online, EVERYWHERE, for free. This is INCREDIBLE.
As individual artists we can't change the huge, systemic things happening! We can't turn the tide of the algorithmic-presentation logic of the entire internet! We can't make huge swaths of the population go back to RSS, or get back in the habit of visiting individual websites, or whatever. BUT we can do something-- we can make work without compromising in the ways the platforms want us to compromise. We can engage with our audience and other artists in a humane and honest way... We can say things and make things that institutional pop culture can't.
basically we are doing the actual work of pop culture here, as independent & self-motivated artists. what we are making is more important than these platforms and will outlast them.
I have been wanting to make a low-artifice interview podcast around a lot of these ideas; maybe i do that sometime soon; it is nice to see this stuff talked about by folks I know and whose work I really like
(also, bbys, you have a right to bodily autonomy, make yrself at home in your body however that looks for you, gender is a choose your own adventure and I’m rooting for you, ily)
“A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man’s consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.”
I wrote a short vaguely historical vaguely spooky ghost story about Jews and burial rites and I have to justify it existing so here it is.
“Are you the leader of the Jews?”
There was no good that ever came from that question. Rabbi Jacob stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob and the other on the frame, ready to yank it closed at a moment’s notice.
“Well, not all of the Jews.”
The man at the door made a frustrated little grunt. He was clad almost completely in dark grey clothing that seemed to fade into the shadows of the darkened street behind him. The collar of his coat was pulled up so high that it was impossible to make out more than a pair of sharp grey eyes beneath the brim of his hat, and the cloak he wore over the top of it concealed most of his body. There could be any number of guns, knives, or angry mobs hidden under there.
“But the ones in this town, yes? You are their priest, you lead prayers and weddings and so on?” the man said impatiently.
“Rabbi. Yes. I’m the rabbi, that’s correct.” Jacob said, stiffening his posture and assuming the most neutral expression he could manage. Being completely ignorant didn’t exclude someone from being completely dangerous–if anything, that heightened the risk. “What can I do for you?”
“Rabbi,” the man repeated, as if to seal it into his memory properly. One gloved hand squeezed the pommel of his walking stick. “And you preside over the funerals of your people, and perform the rites to send them to the next world?”
“Yyyyyes?” Jacob shifted his weight to his back foot, poised to slam the door in his face. This sounded unpleasantly like an opening for a death threat.
“To any of them, regardless of the sins they carried in life?” An eagerness entered the man’s voice.
“Of course. Though sin as a Jewish concept differs from the Christian…mm. Yes, of course.” The scholars of old might have debated the nature of the evil in men’s souls until the crack of dawn but Jacob had no intention of doing so at half-past midnight with a complete stranger.
The shadowed man took a half step forward and Jacob leaned back to maintain the distance between him. “What about a gentile?” the man pressed. “Would you tend to his corpse too?”
“Huh?”
“There is a man needing to be buried tonight who requires absolution. He is not a Jew, but a Jew’s prayers may be close enough for what is needed.”
“Um. It’s not usually a request I get.” Jacob tried to keep his voice calm and soothing. There was some kind of entrapment lingering in the conversation, he just knew it. That or a giant box of crazy that had managed to dress itself stylishly. Gentiles asking Jews intrusive but urgent questions never turned out well for their target–a day-long case of irritation was the best outcome the target could hope for.
The man’s hands pressed together as he completed the full step forward, making Jacob back up into the doorframe. Desperation was in his tone and Jacob was forced back over the threshold just to stay out of his grip “All I need is someone to accompany me to the cemetery to consecrate the body and pray for its soul. Barely an hour of your time. I cannot pay you with anything but my gratitude, but you will have it eternally.”
“And you came to me?”
The man sighed. Even the top hat seemed to slouch slightly as his body slumped. “I have asked every holy man in the city, Catholic and Protestant alike, and they have refused to come to the cemetery,“ he bemoaned. “The last one told me to visit you. Likely a ploy to make me leave faster, but you are all I have left.”
“What did this man do, that so many people refused him? Who was he?”
The man at the door hesitated. The sharp eyes vanished as his eyelids slid down, and then appeared a few moments later.
“Must you ask?” he said quietly. “Is it not enough that it is a corpse which can do no man harm any longer, and you will lose nothing but a half-night of sleep?”
The inside of Jacob’s head was ringing with warning bells like the frantic clanging of gongs announcing a fire. He swallowed and tried to ignore them.
“You say he wasn’t Jewish?”
“He was not…much of anything. He felt God had no interest in him, and returned a lack of interest in kind. Perhaps if he had been more attentive he wouldn’t lie in a pauper’s grave…or perhaps he would have not changed a whit.” The man’s voice was bitter and the sharp eyes briefly looked away from Jacob, to Jacob’s deep relief.
“Who was this man, to you?” he asked.
“Close. I would prefer to say no more. Please, rabbi. It must be done, and it must be tonight.”
Seminary did not prepare me for this, Jacob thought, and then thought again. There is absolutely something in the Talmud about this and I’ve just forgotten it, because I’m an idiot and I’m half asleep and there is a goy on my doorstep asking me to go out to the cemetery with him at midnight to bury a man whose name he won’t tell me.
“Look, I’ll need someone to help dig the grave.”
“Of course.”
“And a coffin. A plain pine box. And I’ll need to get my supplies from the–”
“But you’ll do it?” said the man excitedly, standing up even taller. “And do it tonight, before the cock crows?”
Jacob held up his hands to keep the man from getting even further into his personal space. “Fine. Yes. Give me half an hour and a lazy rooster.”
The cloak almost seem to inflate as the man gasped for joy. He grabbed Jacob’s hands and shook both with enthusiasm, sending Jacob stumbling. “Thank God for you, my good rabbit! Whatever God there is, thank God for you!”
The man ran off into the shadowed streets and was out of sight almost immediately.
Jacob’s hands slowly fell back to his side as he mumbled, “Rabbi,” to the darkness.
My wife is going to kill me if whatever’s at the cemetery doesn’t.
