For the longest time, I have had a biting frustration with the art form we call “webcomics”.  They’re a funny art form, but not always intentionally funny.  I’m not sure if you know this about me yet, but I love webcomics, and comic strips in general.

At one time, the comics pages in newspapers featured page-long comics, comics that were comics before “comic books” came on the scene.  Comic “strips” came out of newspapers condensing their comic pages smaller and smaller until almost nothing was left.  This came out of papers buying up syndicated comics, big names that people wanted to read.  Who is the newspaper to deny people comics they clamor for?  Ever seen a newspaper without a Garfield strip in it?  The page would just look weird without that orange cat on it.  And I hate that orange cat.  Well, shit, just shrink the comics and put as many on there as possible!  Hell, chop some panels off them while you’re at it.  That’s why many syndicated comics feature “lead-in” panels.  The first two panels of any given Sunday strip sent to be published are typical 2-panel jokes that don’t effect the rest of the strip.  That’s because the newspaper will chop them off if they need to fit more crap onto their page.  Then why bother making more panels anyway?  ‘Cause screw the newspapers, that’s why.

It was this very limited, very controlled and edited format that gave birth to the comic strip in the first place.  We would never, never in a 1,000 years have the brilliance of something like Calvin and Hobbes if Bill Waterson was just left alone to do whatever.  There’s a reason bits of genius like the Far Side do not appear in comic books where they could flow out and not be held back by page restrictions (well, they still exist in comic books, but it’s no where near as intense, and you NEVER see a comic book publisher chopping panels out without at least telling the artist it’s happening).  When you push and pressure artists, limit and cage them, often times, that’s when the best art and the best stories slurg out of them.  The smaller comics got, the more inventive the artists became.  When 12 panels became 8 and 8 became 6, then became 3, the art form wasn’t dying, but reinventing itself.  Then you have single-panel comics, which to this day remain the most popular and most loved of all (i.e. the political cartoon, which, weirdly enough, predate multi-panel comics by several hundred years… maybe even several thousand years, depending on how you define them… many paintings hanging in museums are ancient examples of the art form).

The newspaper may have invented the art form of the comic strip, but as newspapers die, comic strips have found new life on the internet.  On the internet, those trappings of the newspaper page are gone.  Gone are editors re-sizing panels or chopping them away.  Gone is anyone telling the artist, “That’s too adult for our readers,” or, “Are you kidding?  This is too long!” or, “Why the hell is that priest on fire?”

Even with the endless freedom of the internet, the strip has held onto the old trappings set up by the printed page.  Penny Arcade, the most popular webcomic on the planet earth, is three panels.  Just three.  Sometimes they open it up, but they rarely need to.  Granted, their subject matter would never fly in a newspaper (thus why it’s not published in any that I know of), but otherwise, Penny Arcade is as close to the traditional as you can find on the internet.  Some other strips have even increased the limitations.  Dinosaur Comics is the same drawing with new words.  The same drawing.  For every.  Single.  Day.  And yet, despite that, Dinosaur Comics remains one of the freshest and funniest comics out there.

And you would NEVER find something as thought provoking and down-right insane as Dresden Codak in newsprint.  Never.  Dr. McNinja (my personal favorite webcomic)?  Nope.  The editors would laugh at you, then call the police and have you escorted out of the building.

So, what the hell frustrates me about webcomics?  Simple.  They are so hard to find, so niche, that no one reads them.

The nice thing about the newspaper is how easy it is.  It’s right there in the lobby of your building or (if you still do this) on your doorstep in the morning.  Most people who read the comic page (or the “funnies”) do not even intend to read them.  They’re just flipping through the newspaper, bored, when, BAM, there’s something draw on the page, standing out from the words.

There is no equivilant for that in webcomics.  Finding new webcomics, even for people like me who actively look for new webcomics, is difficult.  I’ve been finding new webcomics for years, even ones that are famous  that I somehow never heard of.  The only way people like me find them is from a link on another site, an ad, or by word of mouth.

There are webcomic syndicates, small bands of webcomics that have grouped themselves together.  They have ads to each other on their sites, links, even little insignias that indicate how cool they are.  The comic equivalent of that kid from elementary school who had that sweet glowing ring who was the member of that secret club you couldn’t be in.

No one stumbles upon new comics on the internet like they do in the newspaper (unless they use the Stumble Upon service, which, as cool as it is, still doesn’t have a webcomic category in its filter settings).

I really wish there was one website that you could go to that pooled comics together.  One page you could flip through.  Maybe you would discover new comics.  But every day, all your old friends would be there, with smiles on their faces waiting to spread that joy to you.  There would be editors who would select the good comics from the bad (and, man, there are THOUSANDS of bad webcomics out there, most of whom are desperately grabbing for the video game niche that Penny Arcade holds onto so well).  In many ways, it would be a newspaper, but without the paper.

Won’t ever happen.  The business of comics on the internet is dependent on separation.  The more pages out there for people to surf, the more ads that you can fit on those pages.  It’s the opposite of the newspaper effect.  Where newspapers had to cut down pages due to costs, the internet needs more pages to sustain itself.  It needs more crap to make the readers fish through.  And since your average person doesn’t actively, purposefully look for comics in the first place, there is no way they’re jumping through that many hoops for a silly “comic”.

And that’s why I’m frustrated, and that’s the end of my rant for today.

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Often, I do comics because I’m interested in drawing fun things.  Today, I wanted to draw an ancient Chinese Fu dog.  I also enjoy making fun of Joan of Arc, who may or may not show up again in Meaningless.  She’s fun.  Because she’s craaaaazy.

I stopped reading the comic strips found in the newspaper a long, long time ago (mostly because I don’t get a daily newspaper, and because if I’m going to read comics on the internet, there’s better crap out there for me), but there are some days that I wish I did.

I just started reading Josh Fruhlinger’s The Comic’s Curmudgeon again after a long hiatus from his blog (it usually makes me depressed at the state of newspaper strips), but through his site, I discovered Masky McDeath, Tom Batuik’s idea of an angel.  And the saddest part of this is I’m about a year late to this party, as other comic strips have been making fun of this for ages.

Funky Winkerbean has always been one of my least favorite of the newspaper comic strips.  See, the thing about newspaper comics is there’s two basic kinds of them: the ones attempting a serious storyline and ones that just try (and often fail) to be funny or charming.

For example, I avoid eye-contact with strips like Rex Morgan MD or Mary Worth because with just a cursory glance at them, I know they’re the serious kinds of strips I can’t stand (there is no such thing as a good “take me serious with my real-world characters” newspaper comic strip, but the funnier ones often can approach better, more compelling serious drama… for example, the storyline in Calvin and Hobbes where he finds a dead cat has way more real-world weight to me than anything in Judge Parker).

But Funky Winkerbean tricks you.  Like For Better or Worse (which is guilty of the same crime), Funky Winkerbean is drawn in a cartoonish manor.  The uninitiated may glance at it and expect some kind of witty or charming punchline.  Sure, most newspaper comics aren’t funny really, but they at least can leave a smile on your face.

Funky Winkerbean takes pleasure in stripping smiles off faces.  It fills its panels with boring and snobbish characters who are all-too happy to remind you how TERRIBLE life is.  It’s a seriously depressing strip that accomplishes its sadness with snide, off-hand remarks that act as punchlines.

There is always a character about to die in Funky Winkerbean, or the characters are dealing with someone who had died.  Because of that, even when it tries to be funny, the strip always comes off as depressing (and often slightly pretentious).

And along comes Josh Fruhlinger to show me not only the funniest Funky Winkerbean, but one of the funniest newspaper comics I have ever, ever seen, even though it’s 100% unintentional.  It AMAZES me that anyone who would want people to take a comic seriously would concoct something as insanely hilarious as Masky McDeath (that name is Fruhlinger’s doing, and it’s brilliant).

Damnit, if every Funky Winkerbean strip was like that, I’d get a newspaper subscription.  Hot damn.

Oh, and Brett Farve is a New York Jet now, and I couldn’t be happier.  I was pretty much setting myself up to root against whatever team Farve ended up with this season, and seeing how I can’t stand the Jets, this works out great.  Serves him right.  Now I can be a Packers fan and not give a shit about Brett Farve’s silly legacy… whenever that starts happening.

To be fair, I like Brett Farve.  As a person.  I just hate when very, very good athletes “retire” at the height of their game… then come back, only to ruin whatever legendary image we had of them.  It’s the sports equivalent of when you throw a party and you have this friend who takes off.  The party winds down, then he shows back up wondering where everybody went.  He could just go, but he just bought more beer and, hell, he’s going to fucking drink it.  So, he doesn’t leave and you’re forced into staying up until 6am as he regales you a drunken story about that time he almost hooked up with his own cousin.  You do this because you’re too damn polite to ask him to leave.

Michael Jordan on the Wizards.  That’s it.  I’m done talking about it.

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I don’t know about you, but I would personally be super excited about a video game like this.  Can you imagine all the insane shenanigans that would go on in a game like that?  Prime Minister’s Questions would take on a whole new dimension.

I’ve been planning a cartoon making fun of political cartoons for a while now.  I was debating to use it for Meaningless, but the nature of my idea didn’t fit the art style of the strip.  So, I was just going to draw it and put it up on the blog.

Then, when I was doing a Google search for Jeff MacNelly, the deceased political cartoonist and creator of the once-funny newspaper strip Shoe, I discovered this comic.

It’s not drawn by MacNelly, and I’m a little confused as to why it came up in my search, but basically what I was going to do, this guy beat me to it.  The cross-hatching, the over-excessive labeling, the stupid metaphors, all of that I was going to make fun of in a similar fashion (although I wasn’t going to shoot for Karl Rove, but on a second brain-stewing of this idea, Karl Rove is perfect).  But, now the wind has been released from my sails.  I might find a way to do it in Meaningless anyway, just for the hell of it.

I once drew political cartoons in high school, and I hated it, mostly because political cartoons fall into the trappings mocked in that comic I mentioned before.  As a political cartoonist, you have several responsibilities.  You have to not only be funny, you have to be witty.  Witty is hard.  It requires a certain amount of intellect combined with the right amount of pretentious snobbish humor.  And you have to deal with an editor, one who will constantly tell you, “That topic is off limits.”   You have very limited space, so most comics shoot for the single-panel approach.  Nothing wrong with that.  Most political cartoonists can’t draw very well, either.  Again, nothing wrong with that (my own comic as well as many others look like crap, but that’s kind of the point).

I just have a problem when political cartoons start slapping labels on things.  If you can’t draw George W. Bush (and it’s harder than it looks… he’s a weirdly boring person to draw), get better at it.  Slapping “W” or “BUSH” on his shirt clutters the image and makes it look pedestrian (and that covers any political figure).

And then there’s the metaphors.  Oh, you drew an elephant scared a mouse labeled the “NATIONAL DEPT”.  Man, aren’t you fucking clever.  And of course you slapped a huge label on the elephant (a highly recognized symbol of the Republican Party) reading “GOP” or “REPUBS” because you think people who read political cartoons are idiots.  You know.  Just in case we missed the full impact of your stupid metaphor.

I’m not saying what I do is any more or less prone to laziness or short-cutting.  And there are certainly great political cartoonists out there doing really fantastic work.  I just wish we could stop with slapping giant post-it notes on inanimate objects, stepping back, and saying, “Damn!  I’m a clever sonofabitch, aren’t I?”

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