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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
As with many of the communities that I'm part of, you can trace the origins to childhood. My family are newspaper readers, and subscribe to the local news outlet, which means that I regularly got to look at the comics page, and then the comics pages in color, on Sunday. There are entire volumes written about newspaper comics, issue comics, and the industries that produce them. I got a lot of how things felt from the artistic perspective from the commentaries that Bill Watterson provided in the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, which may be biased, but I don't doubt anything he said about syndication, creative control, and the ways that the relationship was very much about the power the syndicate had. The big comics publishers are often the same way, from stories that I have seen published there. Very lucrative, a very wide audience, but very little control. And, of course, the constraints that publishers will put on creators about what they can and cannot do with character, situations, or explicit content, when it comes to material that's going to be sold in comics shops, newspapers, and bookstores.
As with all of the other publishing houses, methods, and media that had a near-lockdown on what was produced for mass consumption, the Internet proved that there were many more comics creators and readers than there were slots available on a newspaper comics page or a 32-page floppy. As with all such explosions of independent publishing, hosting, and presentation, Sturgeon's Law still applies, for whatever definition of "crap" you want to apply to the corpus of what's available. What it also means, however, is that there's the possibility that someone out there has created a work that sings to your heart in a way that no other piece would. If only you could find it. (Professional curses unto the seventh generation to all of those people who were responsible for turning search into something that benefited advertisers and who are further polluting it with LLMs and other slag.)
Newspapers had strict size limits in this era (rather than the lush pages of comics in their earlier incarnations where everyone could have the amount of space they needed), and so did comics issues, since both of them were printed products. Originals could be whatever size was needed, but the finished products would always be of a specific size, and therefore, as Watterson said, you needed to write and draw more so that you could be sure the reduced product was legible to the viewer. My pathway into webcomics at this point in time through the Keenspot network, for reasons I do not actually remember, although there are plenty of other non-Keenspot comics as well involved in my heyday of webcomics. Some of them stuck with the newspaper comic format, for at least a little bit of it, but many of the other ones have since gone on to at least experiment with what was the biggest stated advantage of moving to webpages as the medium of choice: the infinite canvas.
A webpage is, after all, only really bounded by the viewport that someone sees it through. (Which actually became a real issue once our Internet-capable devices became portable, and also started having different orientations that we viewed web content with. Text was relatively easy to reflow depending on the size of the viewport, but images and other fixed-size objects were much harder to wrestle into compliance.) Panel comics would still work on the Internet, obviously, as would comics where you could view one page at a time, but those formats were convenience and convention more than they were any kind of hard requirement on a webpage. If a story needed to break form to achieve the desired result, it could. Or those lovely spreads could be shown in their entirety, without having anything in the way, and at sufficient size to showcase all of the detail that went into the original. Or an episode could be a scroll from top to bottom, rather than broken up into pages to be thumbed through. Since there were no hard boundaries such as page edges or panel space when creating something digitally, only the requirements of memory and disk space, a lot of experimentation happened there. Animating panels, motion comics, visual novel creation, and lots of technical improvements in digital creation that have been fed back into the community to create even more visually impressive works.
Web pages and self-publishing also meant that it was possible for a creator to update and publish on their own schedule, rather than having to fit the dailies-and-Sundays idea of a newspaper, or the monthly issues of a floppy. And if something got in the way of a scheduled update, something like a Dead Piro Day would appear, and the reading audience would presumably understand. Life happens, and for a lot of artistic creators, the thing that pays the bills is not the thing that you are posting on the Web. For some, of course, it turns out extremely well and they can, off the sales of things related to the comics, or book deals, or even going from a well-selling independent artist to a newspaper-syndicated comic strip (along with a few other transitions.) For most people, though, if they had revenue dreams from their creation, it was probably through advertising banners and ad networks that were supposed to both bring in new readers and provide some money for the ads shown to the people who were there for the comic. Like basically everything else that was ad-supported, it did not work out the way it was intended to, and a lot of those ad networks didn't work as intended, because someone basically set the price they were willing to pay at auction higher than anyone else could afford, so they always won the auction. (And also, gesturing at the wreckage of the Web wrought by all the people who thought and still think that ads are the way to generate revenue.) So the state of things generally evolved into merch and print-on-demand services that could create collections for the fans.
And, of course, as time went on, comics started, stopped, disappeared, and otherwise became part of the ephemera of the web. The practice of putting comics on the Web never stopped, even as I drifted away from them, and the various syndicates put their strips online as well. One thing I never hard of people managing to generate was, essentially, their own customized funny papers page/feed, for those of us feeling kind of nostalgic for the layout, but without any of the arbitrary restrictions. I'm sure that with some fancy RSS tap-dancing and extraction, someone could save the images, them plug them in to a website template and generate such a thing, but I don't have the gumption to try and program something like that. And, also, I had a lot more free time when i was strongly into my webcomics bits. These days, I'd need those digital comics compilations delivered to me in some way to consume while having lunch, or something.
These days, I'm more likely to be introduced to comics by seeing them at convention tables, where they're often selling books or merch. This weeds out a lot of things from my noticing, as there has to be at least a moderate amount of success, either in this thing or in some other thing, to afford a table/your half of a table. There are still some collectives banding together to try and make it work financially (like Hiveworks or Webtoons), and with the normalization of both crowdfunding campaigns and patronage accounts, it's easier to get support from the readership in ways that aren't advertising. Which in turn makes it easier to fund riskier or risqué-ier projects, either as the main thing or as side projects that fund the main thing. (Even though, I'll admit, I find it disheartening to hear everyone getting and having to flog their patronage account as a way of making money to keep doing art. There are so many more enjoyable things, arts, and beautiful things that we could have in the world if we could solve the part where so many entities want large amounts of money for the basics of survival.) The advantage of seeing merch at a table, of course, is that so many of them then have sample copies to leaf through and see whether or not I'll enjoy what's happened in the book. Or they'll have a convenient link, so that even if I didn't actually get sold on the idea from there, then I can circle back to the web presence and look at it later on a device. Some of the things I'm very interested in, but I take a card because my con budget won't allow purchasing everything (books are still expensive.)
Weirdly enough, comics publishing works pretty well with my VAST, because when I remember to circle back and check in on comics after having forgotten them for a couple of months, what that means is that there are a couple months' worth of updates for me to go through! It's a tiny little gift to me to get through all of it. (The other reason for wanting one of those customizable funny pages ideas would be to have my RSS feed deliver to me when things update, rather than holding open a browser tab for each of those comics pages and then having to remember to check them and/or letting them take up precious memory on a machine.)
So, yeah, I'm still a comics reader, especially for comics on the web, although which comics I've read have changed significantly in the last so much.
As with many of the communities that I'm part of, you can trace the origins to childhood. My family are newspaper readers, and subscribe to the local news outlet, which means that I regularly got to look at the comics page, and then the comics pages in color, on Sunday. There are entire volumes written about newspaper comics, issue comics, and the industries that produce them. I got a lot of how things felt from the artistic perspective from the commentaries that Bill Watterson provided in the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, which may be biased, but I don't doubt anything he said about syndication, creative control, and the ways that the relationship was very much about the power the syndicate had. The big comics publishers are often the same way, from stories that I have seen published there. Very lucrative, a very wide audience, but very little control. And, of course, the constraints that publishers will put on creators about what they can and cannot do with character, situations, or explicit content, when it comes to material that's going to be sold in comics shops, newspapers, and bookstores.
As with all of the other publishing houses, methods, and media that had a near-lockdown on what was produced for mass consumption, the Internet proved that there were many more comics creators and readers than there were slots available on a newspaper comics page or a 32-page floppy. As with all such explosions of independent publishing, hosting, and presentation, Sturgeon's Law still applies, for whatever definition of "crap" you want to apply to the corpus of what's available. What it also means, however, is that there's the possibility that someone out there has created a work that sings to your heart in a way that no other piece would. If only you could find it. (Professional curses unto the seventh generation to all of those people who were responsible for turning search into something that benefited advertisers and who are further polluting it with LLMs and other slag.)
Newspapers had strict size limits in this era (rather than the lush pages of comics in their earlier incarnations where everyone could have the amount of space they needed), and so did comics issues, since both of them were printed products. Originals could be whatever size was needed, but the finished products would always be of a specific size, and therefore, as Watterson said, you needed to write and draw more so that you could be sure the reduced product was legible to the viewer. My pathway into webcomics at this point in time through the Keenspot network, for reasons I do not actually remember, although there are plenty of other non-Keenspot comics as well involved in my heyday of webcomics. Some of them stuck with the newspaper comic format, for at least a little bit of it, but many of the other ones have since gone on to at least experiment with what was the biggest stated advantage of moving to webpages as the medium of choice: the infinite canvas.
A webpage is, after all, only really bounded by the viewport that someone sees it through. (Which actually became a real issue once our Internet-capable devices became portable, and also started having different orientations that we viewed web content with. Text was relatively easy to reflow depending on the size of the viewport, but images and other fixed-size objects were much harder to wrestle into compliance.) Panel comics would still work on the Internet, obviously, as would comics where you could view one page at a time, but those formats were convenience and convention more than they were any kind of hard requirement on a webpage. If a story needed to break form to achieve the desired result, it could. Or those lovely spreads could be shown in their entirety, without having anything in the way, and at sufficient size to showcase all of the detail that went into the original. Or an episode could be a scroll from top to bottom, rather than broken up into pages to be thumbed through. Since there were no hard boundaries such as page edges or panel space when creating something digitally, only the requirements of memory and disk space, a lot of experimentation happened there. Animating panels, motion comics, visual novel creation, and lots of technical improvements in digital creation that have been fed back into the community to create even more visually impressive works.
Web pages and self-publishing also meant that it was possible for a creator to update and publish on their own schedule, rather than having to fit the dailies-and-Sundays idea of a newspaper, or the monthly issues of a floppy. And if something got in the way of a scheduled update, something like a Dead Piro Day would appear, and the reading audience would presumably understand. Life happens, and for a lot of artistic creators, the thing that pays the bills is not the thing that you are posting on the Web. For some, of course, it turns out extremely well and they can, off the sales of things related to the comics, or book deals, or even going from a well-selling independent artist to a newspaper-syndicated comic strip (along with a few other transitions.) For most people, though, if they had revenue dreams from their creation, it was probably through advertising banners and ad networks that were supposed to both bring in new readers and provide some money for the ads shown to the people who were there for the comic. Like basically everything else that was ad-supported, it did not work out the way it was intended to, and a lot of those ad networks didn't work as intended, because someone basically set the price they were willing to pay at auction higher than anyone else could afford, so they always won the auction. (And also, gesturing at the wreckage of the Web wrought by all the people who thought and still think that ads are the way to generate revenue.) So the state of things generally evolved into merch and print-on-demand services that could create collections for the fans.
And, of course, as time went on, comics started, stopped, disappeared, and otherwise became part of the ephemera of the web. The practice of putting comics on the Web never stopped, even as I drifted away from them, and the various syndicates put their strips online as well. One thing I never hard of people managing to generate was, essentially, their own customized funny papers page/feed, for those of us feeling kind of nostalgic for the layout, but without any of the arbitrary restrictions. I'm sure that with some fancy RSS tap-dancing and extraction, someone could save the images, them plug them in to a website template and generate such a thing, but I don't have the gumption to try and program something like that. And, also, I had a lot more free time when i was strongly into my webcomics bits. These days, I'd need those digital comics compilations delivered to me in some way to consume while having lunch, or something.
These days, I'm more likely to be introduced to comics by seeing them at convention tables, where they're often selling books or merch. This weeds out a lot of things from my noticing, as there has to be at least a moderate amount of success, either in this thing or in some other thing, to afford a table/your half of a table. There are still some collectives banding together to try and make it work financially (like Hiveworks or Webtoons), and with the normalization of both crowdfunding campaigns and patronage accounts, it's easier to get support from the readership in ways that aren't advertising. Which in turn makes it easier to fund riskier or risqué-ier projects, either as the main thing or as side projects that fund the main thing. (Even though, I'll admit, I find it disheartening to hear everyone getting and having to flog their patronage account as a way of making money to keep doing art. There are so many more enjoyable things, arts, and beautiful things that we could have in the world if we could solve the part where so many entities want large amounts of money for the basics of survival.) The advantage of seeing merch at a table, of course, is that so many of them then have sample copies to leaf through and see whether or not I'll enjoy what's happened in the book. Or they'll have a convenient link, so that even if I didn't actually get sold on the idea from there, then I can circle back to the web presence and look at it later on a device. Some of the things I'm very interested in, but I take a card because my con budget won't allow purchasing everything (books are still expensive.)
Weirdly enough, comics publishing works pretty well with my VAST, because when I remember to circle back and check in on comics after having forgotten them for a couple of months, what that means is that there are a couple months' worth of updates for me to go through! It's a tiny little gift to me to get through all of it. (The other reason for wanting one of those customizable funny pages ideas would be to have my RSS feed deliver to me when things update, rather than holding open a browser tab for each of those comics pages and then having to remember to check them and/or letting them take up precious memory on a machine.)
So, yeah, I'm still a comics reader, especially for comics on the web, although which comics I've read have changed significantly in the last so much.
