by Eric A. Burns

For me, Webcomics began years before User Friendly or Sluggy Freelance or even Kevin and Kell. My interest in them began, as so many of these things do, with a friend of mine. His name was Dominic White, and I was living with him in the early-mid nineties in Seattle. He was an illustrator, and he loved comic strips.

His strip would stand out even today, I think. It was called Slugs!, and it proceeded (like most good strips) from a simple premise: anyone who moved to Seattle became a slug. In Dominic's own words:

Slugs! is a cartoon about moving to the northwest and becoming a slug. It's just the way things are. Anthropomorphized Slugs lead perfectly normal lives with the exceptions of slime trails, prehensile eyestalks with removable eyes, and the constant, everpresent danger that salt may be lurking around the corner!

The strip just worked. The style was cartoony without being simplistic. White knew how to balance his premise and also pull it back to let jokes work. Had he started drawing it in 1996 on the web, I think he'd have ended up in T Campbell's History of Online Comics. Instead, he's at best a footnote, unknown to most.

White started drawing Slugs! in 1992. After a little bit of time, he actually hooked up with an online service called Seagopher. Seagopher was, as the name implied, a gopher service, letting people from all over connect to their servers and download content. It was a subscriber service -- an entrepreneur in Seattle thinking he could actually get people to pay access fees every month: a revolutionary idea in a time when the World Wide Web had little to no penetration and "online services" often had no connection to the Internet. People could dial in, connect, pull down images and files from their servers, and view them on their computers. Having been exposed to Slugs!, Seagopher thought an electronic weekly comic strip was just the kind of hook they needed.

It almost worked, too. Seagopher actually told White that Slugs! was the most popular content on their servers. During this time, Adam Engst -- the author of the hugely popular Internet Starter Kit for the Macintosh (and its non-platform specific sequel) and William R. Dickson were writing a book called The Internet Explorer's Kit -- "a road map to the Information Superhighway" back before those clichÈs got hammered into the ground. They actually contracted White to illustrate their book with Slugs!, so not only did White have an online comic strip, he actually got it into print years before Plan Nine Publishing was even a dream.

I have a lot of affection for Slugs!, in part because I ended up a character, as with many of White's friends. (I'm the bearded one submitting 'Tintinnabulation' into the contest. The character's name is "Sabre," for reasons far too complicated to explain.) This too became a common sight among webcomics -- the friends and loved ones of the artist become the fodder for humor. For Dominic, it was a way to fill out his cast and use the idiosyncrasies of daily life for humor. So, his friends Adam and Tonya, after they had a baby, could allow for babyish humor to creep in. Bill's new glasses turned into a sequence of ridiculousness -- glasses on eyestalks indeed. He even made fun of my admittedly quirky appreciation of large coinage.

While Slugs! merrily churned on at Seagopher, the favorite of hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of readers, the World Wide Web was spreading out over the Internet. White was certainly aware of the Web and its potential, but at this stage it looked like any number of competing technologies could become ascendent. And as it was, he had made a small amount of money from Slugs!. The Web couldn't make that kind of offer. He was content.

In other words, he bet on the wrong horse. Obviously, gophers didn't remain competitive with the web for long. Had he jumped ship at that point, he probably could have established an early readership and been in prime position to take advantage of the dot com bubble (and dot com advertising rates). But, with little to worry about except a weekly upload, and an assurance that no matter how small the pond Slugs! swam in, it was the big fish, White stuck to his plan.

And then, the owner of Seagopher passed away, and the service closed up rather than continue. And, thinking that he had probably peaked, White decided to close Slugs! down and concentrate on other things. And across the internet, webcomic precursors became actual webcomics, and an entire movement began. Pioneering strips found audiences and began generating revenue. Webcomics became a curiosity, and then a fad, and then a movement. Big Panda rose and fell, and Keenspot came closely behind, and then Modern Tales and all the rest followed. You know that part.

In mid-2000, White actually began Slugs again. This version of Slugs didn't last long. Paradoxically, Slugs! was just one strip out of thousands now, and it didn't find an audience very quickly. After about five months, White lost interest, and Slugs! has sat unnoticed, an artifact on the web of a different era -- a relic of a competing species of online access that died out young. The last strip -- leaps and bounds higher in technical proficiency than White's original drawings -- sits on the home page. It's somehow apropos that the punchline is that Ick -- Dominic White's own avatar -- is feeling out of step with modern technology. I take some pleasure that my own avatar gets the last line (and drinks tea, which proves without a shadow of a doubt that it's based on me).

But I read that line -- "begone, you antiquated Luddite" -- and I wish it were something different. I wish that Slugs! weren't gone, that White had jumped to the web early on, that now he would have merchandise and book printing and advertising. I wish he were on Keenspot or making a ton of money or had an Image comics deal. It could have happened. He was in the right place at the right time. I read untold messages from webcartonists today who wish they'd started in 1999 instead of 2003, when competition was light and the world was starved for online comic strips, and there he was -- right there, doing it!

I doubt Dominic White will ever draw more Slugs! for online audiences, though. He's moved on. He's a studio artist and web developer now. He's married and enjoys his life. And online comics have surged forward. There are always dozens more really good comic strips than there is time to read, anyhow.

Still, I look at Slugs!, and I think of what might have been, if the evolution of technology had gone just slightly differently.