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The Process of Virtual-Community
Gentrification in Digital Comics
by Steven Withrow
Gentrification: the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces earlier usually poorer residents
Virtual communities, like all natural systems, are prone to entropy. Their survival—here specifically the endurance and propagation of webcomics anthology (i.e., multi-artist) sites—depends on the determinate process of digital infrastructure improvement and persistent cosmetic refurbishment.
 The administrators of and participants in such so-called “webcomics collectives” must, if they are to reap maximum benefit from their endeavors, establish an internally consistent action pattern or coordinative method for total and continual enhancement of all operative elements, be they structural, directorial, or conceptual. Initiating membership in a webcomics virtual community should prefigure total and inexorable public and private confrontation with the unkempt and the digitally decrepit. In the parlance of the lay practitioner or casual observer: We must clean up our acts lest we let our cherished neighborhood go to seed.
A modest spectrum affirming the process of virtual-community gentrification (VCG), effectively challenging the utter solipsism and grievous content paucity of single-creator sites, encompasses such perpetually progressive entities as Dumbrella, Girlamatic, Graphic Smash, Komikwerks, Modern Tales, Project Kooky, PVComics, Serializer, The Secret Friend Society, ScottMcCloud.com (technically a single-creator site, but a multifaceted institution eclipsing all others and therefore deserving of inclusion), as well as the allied Flight anthologies (though print-based, this notable effort is clearly grounded in VCG principles). 
The natural countercurrent to the above-stated ideologies has driven a sampling of once-burgeoning communities out of existence, among them, NextComics, AdventureStrips, and E-volution Comics. Message-board scholars have argued that precipitously negative market forces, in conjunction with a host of other organizational issues, were also contributing factors beyond strictly VCG issues.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of VCG-in-action is 01Comics. This “scaffolding” site typifies a key theme of VCG: Make it new. The founders of 01Comics have embraced this idea to such a degree that they will not publish any content until their renovations are complete. (One wonders how swiftly the “new” will become the “standard,” but that discussion lies well outside the scope of this report. VCG, after all, is a moral imperative.) One hopes that the next iteration of 01Comics proves to be so novel that no one remembers that anything “old” had previously existed in its webspace.
 Another salient example is Blank Label Comics, the creators of which fled the overcrowded, underfunded, possibly even “ghettoized,” conditions of Keenspot.com, proclaiming boldly that certain webcomics need a clean, well-lighted space of their own. This relates directly to the slate-wiped-clear, construction-through-obliteration model of 01Comics and acts as a corollary: Out of the mess of the masses comes the most massive message and/or missive.
Moreover, the full gamut of major operative elements in VCG comprises structural (i.e., architectural), directorial (i.e., user-operated), and conceptual (i.e., aesthetic) features and encompasses the webcomics proper and all peripherals including site architecture and navigational devices, forums and blogs, archives, paid advertising, donation or subscription systems, and banner swaps and links lists.
 In rhetorical conclusion, it must be stressed that VCG is a global phenomenon, and now that the world is indeed a village—and webcartoonists have outplayed their roles as village idiots—isn’t it about time we removed the riffraff? Isn’t it time that we see a brighter day for ourselves and our children, and our children’s children, and our pets, and their clones, and their clones’ clones, and…
Editor’s Note: A spokesperson for the Bush administration denied rumors that federal funding for VCG initiatives would be slashed due to preexisting international policing efforts. However, the receptionist at FEMA, the national emergency agency, did promise to look into the issue of tax exemptions for those downtrodden webcartoonists whose sites have crashed in calamitous Free-Webcomics-Day traffic spikes.
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