Are All Comics Webcomics?
by Joey Manley
When you take control of the language, you also take control of the underlying assumptions about reality that people live by. This doesn’t have to be a deliberate strategy. In fact, it’s often accidental.
For example, I stumbled on this blog post today when searching for webcomics reviews:
Dilbert is one of the rare webcomics also syndicated in various newspapers and magazines. …read more
Before reading this review, I would have thought of Dilbert as a newspaper comic that is also posted on the web … but why would I think that? It’s true that, historically, Dilbert was in papers before it was online. But that’s the distant past, and, these days, functionally, there’s no difference between Dilbert and any other webcomic (except that, as the blogger noted, Dilbert also happens to appear in the newspaper, which is rare — but not unheard-of — for a webcomic).
Just about all newspaper comics are now available online. And almost every comic book and manga title ever published has been digitized (illegally or otherwise) and made available via the Internet.
Are all comics webcomics?
If so, should we just drop the “web,” and start calling webcomics, simply, “comics?” I guess we can call them “printcomics” when they — rarely, as noted in the Dilbert review above — actually appear in print.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Dilbert’s readers, I’d guess, are primarily being exposed to it in print. The web readers it gets are almost exclusively being drawn by the fact that they know of the comic from print. Webcomics, on the other hand, are distributed primarily on the web, and if a webcomic artist sells a print version of his strips, it’s bought by fans exposed to the comic online.
Of course, the distinction is always going to be a little blurry, because all comics are obviously comics fundamentally. But insomuch as the term webcomic means anything, Dilbert is not one.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:49 pm
I’ve been saying this for years. I also run into this with a lot of alt-comics like This Modern WOrld and Maakkies, presumably because, for whoever is talking they are primarily webcomics.
I remember Rob Balder, for example, telling me that one of the webcomics that inspired him was Red Meat. Red Meat wa sin my local alternaweekly; I suspect it wasn’t in his. Red Meat was a webcomic to him.
I’ll always think of Cynical Man as a comic I first read in an alt-weekly, to others it’s a classic of DIY minicomics, and after serializer launched I started hearing about it as a webcomic.
Fetus-X was in newspapers in early 2000 before it ever had it’s own domain on the web in the summer of 2000. Before that it was a small print run comic book in the late ’90s. And before that it was on the web in 1996 as part of what I was calling online art installations as an art student. I guess that was webcomics. Which were based on a series of silk screens and sculptures I did before that. Which were based on sketches on napkins, which were based on ideas in my head …
So, yeah, categories fall apart the longer you think about them.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Oh, but to answer the question, “Are All Comics Webcomics?”
No, not all comics are webcomics, but almost all of them are. All webcomics are comics, however.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:09 am
> Should we just drop the “web,†and start calling webcomics, simply, “comics?â€
I’ll second that.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:55 am
Pretty much the only time I ever use the term “webcomics” is within webcomics circles. In any other context, I just say the I write comics and publish them online.
Out of curiosity, I just checked the index of my character design book to see how often the word “webcomics” appears. Grand total: 3. Twice in the phrase “Welton Colbert, a satirical webcomics review column published in the webcomics news magazine, Comixpedia.” The third instance was simply mentioning the title of Steven’s previous book, “Webcomics.”
And this, despite the fact that almost half the creators featured in the book are people I know primarily as web-based creators.
I really don’t predict a very long life for the term “webcomics.” Remember how trendy it used to be to tack .com onto your business name, in order to appear high-tech? Same deal. Putting your comic online isn’t inherently innovative anymore, so hyping the concept of “webcomics” is getting to be more and more like promoting a movie by hyping the fact that it’s in Technicolor and has sound.
May 4th, 2007 at 8:34 am
[...] This is related to yesterday’s post, “Are All Comics Webcomics?” I think (see particularly Alexander Danner’s comments). [...]
May 5th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Interesting point about Dilbert being or not being a webcomic. Since, like many other people on this planet, I don’t live in an English-speaking country, I don’t have access to the sort of newspaper that usually publishes Dilbert. So from my point of view, it stands or falls by what you get online: the site, the whole of the site and nothing but the site. I can only see and judge it in its aspect as a webcomic: what gets printed is quite another matter. I do try to make it clear that even if the strip exists in other, dead-tree formats, it’s the online side being looked at.
I suppose we could always start a discussion about the merits of publishing on the web and in the printed media, but since the remit of my site (NOT a blog, thank you) is primarily Web-related I’ll leave that up to you.
May 5th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
People ask me all the time at cons whether I consider my comic to be “primarily a web comic or a print comic”. My answer, “it is a print comic that I publish on the web first”, has actually made people angry. But it’s true. I format it to be printed, then I make a web graphic from that. I publish pages on the web as I make them. Printed collections come later. I think of it as a print comic as I’m making it. But it goes on the web first. I hate the whole print vs. web thing. It’s a friggin’ comic.