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Introduction by Joe Zabel

Even as we continue to look forward, we now have good reason to look back. This past summer, the first web-only comic, Argon Zark, celebrated it's 10th anniversary. And coming this winter, Antarctic Press will publish a 192-page history of online comics by webcomics wunderkin T Campbell.

T joins fellow commentators Shaenon Garrity, Eric Millikin, Wednesday White, Eric Burns, William G., Mike Meginnis, A. G. Hopkins, and myself to explore the artistic history of the form, by way of discussing a number of key figures in webcomics history.

The key figures are not necessarily the best cartoonists, the most popular (though some of them are), or the most influential. But they serve as "keys" to unlocking the recent past and understanding it better. Their work helps to form a narrative of the past ten years. One of many possible narratives, to be sure, but a narrative we hope is revealing.

For Part One, our key figures are:

Charley Parker (Argon Zark)

Scott Adams (Dilbert)

J. D. Frazer (User Friendly)

Pete Abrams (Sluggy Freelance)

Brian Clevinger (8-Bit Theater)

Fred Gallagher and Rodney Caston (Megatokyo)

Tatsuya Ishida (Sinfest)

Scott Kurtz (PVP)

Tycho and Gabe (Penny Arcade)

Scott McCloud (I Can't Stop Thinking)

Charley Parker

Zabel:

Begun in June of 1995, Charley Parker's Argon Zark was the first comic created specifically to be published on the World Wide Web, and it remains the longest-running.

Indeed, the web could hardly have picked a more outstanding premiere series. Parker's full-color rendering exploits a dazzling array of techniques created in Photoshop, Bryce, Kai's Power Tools, and other potent packages.

The series is a Hitchhiker's Guide for the World Wide Web, as Zark, his companion Zeta Fairlight, and robot assistant Cybert hyperlink from one end of the galaxy to the other, their adventures a giddy celebration of the vastness and interconnectedness of the web.

One of the more interesting aspects of the series is Parker's use of animation effects and alternate links from the comic. He was among the first to push his comics beyond the limits of what is possible on the printed page.

Zark received much recognition and many website awards in the heady days of the dot com boom. More recently, the series had the transitory honor of a proposed webcomics awards being named after it. Alas, the Zark Awards never got past the discussion phase!

A freelance web designer and college instructor, Parker still updates Zark on an irregular schedule. "In terms of my work on Argon Zark!," says Parker, "I'm continuing to pretty much mine the same vein, since it's been a rich and deep vein for someone with my disposition (i.e. comics + computer graphics + web tech). I'm still fascinated in particular with the possibilities presented by hyperlinked "extra pages" adding depth or playing off of elements in the main story. I love the idea of stories that carry their own supplemental material sort of "inside" them, as opposed to interactive stories with alternate plotlines (which I've never liked)."

Campbell:

Argon Zark is the earliest strip I've come across that doesn't look "early." Although Parker is obviously in love with the possibilities of computer art, he's also learned the right lessons from old-school Marvel-- how to use perspective and camera distance to add interest to a scene, how to build forms and anatomy from simple shapes up, and how to use lighting to make objects more 3-D. He was far, far ahead of his time in figuring out how to adapt that lighting to computer graphics. His work is positively exploding with bright cotton-candy colors. And he throws technical innovations at the reader with the enthusiasm of a theme park designer. This series is clearly meant to be fun.

Unfortunately, the writing's a bit like a theme park, too. Most of it is entertaining enough for a while, but it gets harder and harder to believe that Argon and his buddies are in any danger, and the comedy doesn't have a lot of variety. Argon enthuses about the Web, Zeta flirts with him for no easily discernible reason, Cybert turns their dialogue into gibberish, and the background makes a visual pun. Lather, rinse, repeat. At times, Parker has the Zarkies smile without giving them any motivation to do so, as if asking them to say "cheese" so we won't forget how much fun this is.

All in all, I think Argon Zark is a celebration of the Web by an artist who wanted to put the beauty of its basic concepts and the ugliness of some of its early flaws into visual form. In that respect, Zark succeeded quite well.

The second volume of Zark, still uncompleted at this writing, harkens back to the 1995 vision of the Web. As production crawls along, this makes it feel more and more like a museum piece (especially in its portrayal of Bill Gates-- can anyone doubt that Microsoft, befuddled by the Web in the mid-90s, is now a major player on the board?).

But maybe it's not all that bad to be a museum piece. These young whippersnappers could stand to learn what it was like. Despite the flaws in storytelling, Parker paints a highly rendered picture.

Zabel:

I agree that Argon Zark's enthusiasm about the web is very 1995, and seems rather quaint from a contemporary perspective, where all the marvels of the web are now taken for granted.

This is an issue that cartoonists often run into when their work succeeds in capturing the moment-- after that moment passes, is the work still relevant?

I wanted to talk a little more about the technical innovations of Argon Zark, some of which have never been replicated. For example, page 40 and 41. These two pages are linked together by a toggle switch in the lower right hand corner labeled "Chaos and Darkness / Order and Light". When you click on the switch, the picture changes alternately between a shadowy tableau to a bright, energized picture.

I'm sure it's just intended as another witty idea that demonstrates a technical possibility while spicing the story with droll humor. But it's especially interesting because it's giving the reader control over the picture, as if the comic was some kind of toy. It has the potential to create an entirely new kind of reading experience!

All the effects Parker uses are executed with exquisite craftsmanship. Possibly the reason why these effects haven't caught on as much with other strips is because other artists have been more sloppy in conducting their experiments.

Campbell:

Yeah, you already know my take on that-- the harder it is to grift your moves, the fewer people will.

Zark's also very "meta." It's about the Web, so the Easter eggs and suchlike are a fulfillment of its theme, rather than a distraction from it.

Meginnis:

I originally came to Argon Zark long after its initial heyday -- I think something like '02 or '03 -- so I've got a bit of a different perspective on it than most of you guys, I think.

What was most striking upon my first reading is something Joe mentioned. While Parker clearly made a number of innovations that were really the first of their kind, and while he is doubtless an influential artist, a lot of his ideas just didn't stick. Nobody that I knew of had ripped them off since.

And while I agree that this was partially due to the fact that the average webcomic artist has about a tenth of Parker's software wizardry, I think it goes deeper than that and speaks to Zark's main failing. [Note -- I won't be linking individual comics for Zark discussion, because I don't have broadband and it would take literally an hour to find anything I wanted to link.] I remember the comic that really crystallized this point for me was one where the characters were falling into this vortex. It was handled with a rather stiff little animation of the same image of them slowly spinning around and shrinking into the distance. As time passed, different speech bubbles would pop up and disappear. You either had time to read them or you happened to look away, in which case they were lost on you -- not that they were a particularly important part of the story, but that's sort of unprecedented in comics.

Honestly I think the biggest reason innovations like this haven't caught on is that they're almost totally useless for storytelling purposes. Neil Gaiman once said of Scott McCloud's efforts to coerce him into starting some sort of web project that webcomics were really great if you wanted to have three screens of a guy falling -- this being an obvious reference to infinite canvas. If he ever needed to show a guy falling for a really long time, he said, he'd probably go ahead and use the web.

Of course, I'm a big supporter of infinite canvas, but it was a good point. The fact is that many of the innovations the web make possible only apply in ludicrously specific situations, and Zark demonstrated this most clearly. Parker could do so many wild things with his comics because that was essentially what the comic was about: the promise of technology to let us do crazy things. Most comics aren't really interested in that subject, so most of them aren't going to have much use for a technique that lets them simulate a virtual cyber vortex.

Thus, while Zark doubtless had influence on artists, Parker ultimately limited his impact by drawing a comic that only managed to provide the barest pretext for its technical innovations. More often, his creations felt like gimmicks, and in any other context, they would have been impossible to justify. Even the much-vaunted supplemental material, which is pretty much the last thing the webcomics world needed. More effort wasted on frills and even *less* emphasis on the main storyline? If you can think of a contemporary strip that would benefit from that, you deserve a medal.

Zabel:

Gaiman's attitude was pretty obtuse. What it really amounted to was, "I'm a big fish in a small pond (print comics), so why should I swim into a larger pond where I might just be a minnow?" That's a strikingly different attitude than Scott Adams had. Adams embraced the internet, and was able to connect with a vast new readership.

But before we move on to talking about Dilbert, I wanted to respond to Mike's remarks about the experimentation in Argon Zark. Parker was really the first to explore these new techniques in a slick and professional way. We couldn't really know what these techniques would look like until we had examples of them to study, and that's what he provided. And the loose, spontaneous storyline of the series allowed him to dive into these various tangents more easily.

I certainly don't think the experiments were futile. Patrick Farley made heavy use of Parker-esque techniques, and was able to endow them with depth and meaning that they didn't have in their prototype versions. We won't be discussing Farley in too much depth, since we published a retrospective of his work last year; but there is an undeniable line of evolution from Argon Zark to Electric Sheep. One example is the scene where Argon and Zeta emerge onto a Yahoo-like webpage. In Spiders, Farley has similar scenes where formatted webpages are used as scenes within the comic itself.

Meginnis:

Well, let me be perfectly clear on something. Obviously when you experiment you don't know what the results are going to be. That's what makes it an experiment. And as an experimenter, Parker is an undeniable success. He has certainly shown us what happens when you do the things that he has done with his comics.

But that hasn't, in my opinion, made for great reading. And it certainly hasn't made for a sweeping artistic movement of any kind. We can acknowledge Parker's spirit of invention, but at the same time I would be hesitant to call his inventions useful to the average or even most extraordinary artists.

Campbell:

Well, in terms of the income, webcomics was actually a smaller pond than print comics, at least at Gaiman's level.

If you're generous, you can find lots of kinda-sorta descendants of Parker's ideas. Search Engine Funnies (cough cough) also uses Web iconography, but then, it and Patrick Farley's The Spiders are also about technology. If you broaden this device to include any computer-based media image, repurposed but kept in its "native" onscreen format, then hello! You're into sprite comics!

One of the challenges of history is to distribute credit fairly for something that evolved in a lot of baby steps. I don't think Parker "invented" sprites, but the spirit of invention Mike cites certainly helped them along.

Garrity:

I think Argon Zark did have a considerable influence on the experimental/artcomics end of webcomics. It clearly influenced Scott McCloud's ideas in "Reinventing Comics," although McCloud's pet innovation, the celebrated "infinite canvas," is one of the few Web-specific tricks Parker doesn't embrace. As has already been mentioned, Patrick Farley's work recalls Parker's, as well as perhaps some of the work of the webcartoonists who work in Flash, like John Barber and D. Merlin Goodbrey. Tracey White's work is in some ways a smoother, more intuitive version of what Parker does with embedded links, although I have no idea whether she's familiar with Argon Zark.

Parker was playing with the full palette of Photoshop colors and filters at a time when the very act of putting a comic on the Web was a novelty. Argon Zark was very nearly the first comic on the Web, and it was easily the first webcomic with artwork worth looking at; once Parker settled down a little with the Photoshop tricks, he was able to use them to produce some beautiful pages, like this hall of links. His technical innovation and playfulness are amazing; it may be that he was so far ahead of his time that the rest of webcomics simply hasn't caught up yet.

Or maybe some of his ideas really are dead ends. In Book Two, the current volume of Argon Zark, Parker seems most interested in experimenting with animation and hyperlinks. I like each of the rollover he employs to activate the animated elements in his pages, but it's really hard to do this type of animation in a way that isn't gimmicky or extraneous to the story. On one page, for example, rolling over each panel activates a different animation: Argon's fingers type, Cybert's eyes spin, a glow throbs behind Argon and Zeta. On a technical level, it's a lovely piece of work, but none of the animated cookies adds anything to the action of the page. They're just bells and whistles. The more expanded efforts at animation, like the vortex page and the later "falling through space" page, slow reading to a crawl and threaten to turn the work into a cartoon rather than a comic. These are common problems with animation in webcomics; in general, I think there's much more promise in the way Flash elements are used by cartoonists like John Barber, weaving animation into the structure of the page so that it becomes an integral to the reading experience rather than a distraction from it.

I do like a lot of the side links, and I'd like to see more webcartoonists experiment with this idea. I studied and wrote hyperfiction a bit in college (tip o' the cursor to my prof Michael Joyce), and, although it's not the sort of thing that will probably ever have massive mainstream appeal, it can be artistically interesting and fun to play with. Like the animation, however, the hyperlinks in Argon Zark are there mainly as "extras" for the truly interested, when they might be more engaging if they were developed as part of the story. On one page, for example, clicking on a cereal box brings up a humorous "Computer Geek Food Pyramid"; other pages lead to parodies of Microsoft ad campaigns featuring the evil Cancelbots from the comic. These are cute but have nothing to do with what's going on in the main story, and they're not substantial enough to encourage readers to check out every single link. Other links lead to mini-tutorials about the making of Argon Zark (I think the very first bonus page, in Book One, is a "How Did He Do That?" feature) or links to materials Parker used to create an image. This is not a bad idea at all, but it's a bit distracting that some links lead to material that's, at least tangentially, part of the comic, while others lead to material that takes the reader out of the comic.

And, yeah, the story isn't particularly substantial, although this would hardly be the last webcomic whose plot boils down to "heroic male geek, hot chick with inexplicable attraction to geek, and cute sidekick critter have nerdy adventures."

I hope this hasn't come off as too critical of Argon Zark. I really do think it's an amazing work. But it's also a very, very early webcomic, and there are always some drawbacks to being the experimenter, the pioneer, the one to take risks and try ideas that may not actually work. Overall, I admire not only Parker's innovation, but his level of control over his visual creativity: after some early excesses with the Photoshop filters, he settles into a fairly disciplined and consistent style, he doesn't let his effects do anything he doesn't want them to, and he sticks to one screen-size page format. Pretty impressive stuff.

Hopkins:

I first read Argon Zark a year or three ago, prior to my involvement in supporting artists. When I reached the end of the current series, I quit reading. I have no idea how long ago the last publicly available page was created.

However, going back through the archives, I remember how fresh and intriguing it all was, even in terms of today's work, although, as Shaenon points out, Barber's animation work is more intrinsic to the story, whereas Parker seems to be doing a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy style of comic asides, especially in the second book.

Parker bounces around a lot with different ideas, which simply reinforces the concept of him being a pioneer. Some pages are clickable to take you to the next page, while others require the use of the navigational buttons which never seem to be in precisely the same spot; (a bit of sloppiness which is seldom tolerated today.) While he may not have explored infinite canvas techniques within McCloud's definition, he has done some interesting things with animation and multiple scenes with the same background, and a few other intriguing concepts, such as the light/dark switch. It may be mostly primitive by today's standards, but considering the ground he was breaking back then, Parker showed a surprisingly versatile imagination.

Of course, if all this work is from relatively recent activity, this is a skewed (and highly inaccurate) perspective. It's my assumption that those first 74 pages were completed quite some time ago.

Millikin:

While I was heavily into art in the internet back in the mid- nineties, I was oblivious to Argon Zark. I can't help but wonder how many other artists working now were as well.

If there was no audience for web comics when Argon Zark started, just how influential could Argon Zark be? Joe mentioned that "there is an undeniable line of evolution from Argon Zark to [Patrick Farley's] Electric Sheep." I'm not sure there is. Just because Farley's experiments followed Parker's chronologically doesn't mean that Farley was necessarily following Parker's lead; Farley may have been arriving at similar destinations independent of wherever Parker had gone before. I know I have. The spinning vortex comic which Mike M. describes as being hard to read sounds eerily similar to some of the spinning Quick Time VR comics I've made. A reader might look at a QTVR comic I've made and think it's me trying to improve upon one of Parker's ideas by giving readers control over the spinning, when in fact I've never even seen the Argon Zark vortex comic to this day.

So, I'd just like to caution against drawing too strong of a correlation between "being first" and "being influential." Like I said before, the fact that early webcomics were read by such a relatively small audience really limited their potential influence. But then again I can't speak for Farley and who his influences are. Maybe Argon Zark was the Velvet Underground of webcomics, where very few people actually saw the band play, but every one who did started their own band.

Looking at Argon Zark now, I can't escape the feeling of "You just had to be there." T Campbell makes reference to how it "doesn't look early." Well, it looks early to me. Some of those experiments in hyper fiction seem oh-so 1995, and that day-glow anarchy color palette, while far better than what was going on in some of the printed Image comics at the same time, makes the often-derided Serialize homepage look monochrome in comparison. Looking at Argon Zark now makes me wonder how well the artwork I was looking at back in the mid-nineties has held up. Molissa Fenley's "Latitudes" comes to mind -- and I don't think it looks nearly as dated as Zark. It was probably a million times less influential as well, but that's beside the point.

Zabel:

I'm not sure that Parker is so much "dated" as nostalgic. The cultural references in Argon Zark were almost as remote from 1995 as they are from today-- quotes from Kubrick's 2001, the Yellow Submarine, etc. It's an homage to the 1960s.

Of course it would be a mistake to take the work more seriously than Parker himself does. It was just a series of exercises in computer graphics techniques, done strictly for fun. The fact that it was so well done gives it a greater significance than some other experiments.

Was Farley aware of Argon Zark? I'd love to ask him. But if Parker didn't influence Farley, he most certainly anticipated him in a number of interesting ways.

Stevenson:

Just a comment on the relative visibility/importance of Argon Zark to other creators. I'm not all that knowledgeable about the history of comics on the internet, but I ran into Argon Zark early and often, and I'm certain it had an intimate relationship with some of my early attempts at comic creation. I think he posted a couple of how-to's linking to, among other sites and tools, Blambot fonts. Those early strips and tutorials were at least partially responsible for getting me interested in making the jump to using computers in the comic creation process. I'm sure I can't be alone. Heck, the twenty dollars I spent on Blambot's "Wild and Crazy" font files was my first internet-based purchase.

Neither the story-line of Zark nor animation held my interest, but some of the art had me thinking, "How did he do that?" The tutorials helped me answer that question and decide that this might be a medium I'd like to dabble in. A reformatted version of one of the pages I remember being very important to me, technologically, is still there, updated but still containing some of the original links, including the one to Blambot.

Meginnis:

And that is one of the more intriguing elements of Parker's work that we've alluded to, but which could perhaps use some of our more explicit focus: he does expend a lot of effort on inviting artists into the world of digital comics. A lot of his more visually and technically elaborate pages are initially quite daunting. Looking at them, a prospective comics artist is likely to initially feel intimidated. They might think they could never do what Parker does. And, let's not sell him short, the chances are pretty low that the average person is going to be able to to really replicate his results right away.

But a lot of his most technically impressive work comes with explanations, tutorials even, instructing would-be webcomic creators in how he does what he does. This "come on in, the water's fine" attitude, combined with the general "look how awesome the Internet is!" thrust of the narrative, makes Argon Zark pretty much the most friendly webcomic a new artist can happen across. I am, as Eric is, hesitant to name specific comics as influenced by Parker, but I do think that as an enthusiast and a promoter of webcomics and innovation in general, he is a noteworthy success.

Zabel:

By the way, Eric, I looked at Molissa Fenley's "Latitudes" and was impressed. This is an ingenious variation on the concept of sequential art, refreshingly detached from the constraints of narrative.

It certainly addresses the challenge of digital sequential art-- how do you use the new tools to create something different and unprecedented, something in which the electronic "gimmick" is not irrelevant?

Fenley's work consists of frames from a photographed dance sequence, arranged in a series of rows. Each of the frames is a hotlink that causes an isolated image to appear below the row of photos. Some of the isolated images are closeups of the dancer. Others (usually the first in the sequence) are prose descriptions. Some are photos of art objects, whose shapes intriguingly parallel the dancer's position. And the last isolated image is always a short animated sequence from the dance.

The piece compels the viewer to interact with it by clicking the hot links, causing the isolated images to be revealed. It also gives the viewer a degree of choice and control, since they can click the links in any order. The final, animated image is kind of a reward, a seductive swelling of action that invites us to proceed to the next row.

Is it comics? It certainly is by McCloud's definition from Understanding Comics; but the piece seems intended as a specimen of interactive art, rooted more in the museum than the newsstand.

The work is more sophisticated and inventive than any of the individual pages Parker did, but less playful and open-ended; it doesn't exactly invite artists to try the technique out on something else. As a matter of fact, the piece runs on too long without any variation in the approach; after about ten of the rows I think we've got the idea.

Campbell:

For clarity's sake, the hyperfictional side of Zark never related to its "look" in my eyes. The day-glo colors I never associated with Image-- they're too cotton-candy, too friendly, while early Image was all about XTREEMM OMG LOOKIT ALLDA BLUD.

Millikin:

I'm with you on the length of Fenley's dance comic (about 2 pages too long), which is sort of odd. While we seem to disagree completely on how many pages of Argon Zark one needs to read before boredom sets in, I guess it's reassuring that we can find common ground on when the modern dance has gone on too long. There are a few animations in there that still really do it for me though; the animation panel on page three where her right hand comes in from off-panel to meet her left -- that's the good shit.

And you're right that Molissa Fenley owes next to nothing to the newsstand tradition, which, in my easily bored mindset, is a good thing. Far too many comics we'll be talking about seem to be little more than retreads of comics I was reading in my father's newspapers in the late '80s. They're like bad Calvin and Hobbes fan fiction.

Scott Adams

Campbell:

Talk about timing. Dilbert got into the game just as Generation X was beginning to shout to the world, "I am not my job!"... and then going back to work for employers who saw them, increasingly, as interchangeable and disposable. Early Adams captured this career anxiety like no one else on Earth. Virtually every office comedy since 1993 or so owes a huge debt to Adams, and not just those in webcomics.

The early Internet was The Ultimate Break Room for the downtrodden tech-savvy worker, a place to bitch together about all those idiots who Just Didn't Understand, especially those idiots with power over you. It's a bit outside the scope of this piece, but Adams' early use of interactivity created the first organized online fandom for a single comic. Some of his techniques are still in widespread use today; others damn well should be.

Visually, he doesn't impress me much, but I think a painstakingly executed style might get in the way. Dilbert's is a world of painful mediocrity, and it just feels more authentic for looking like something you doodled on your lunch break.

Zabel:

When I first started seeing the series, I found it not only funny but quite involving, because it so accurately portrays my own professional situation. I think the first series to mine this particular subject matter was Cathy, but Adams' strip has far more edge and intensity.

Adams' strip is not merely about how the boss is an idiot. He has an understanding of the entire environment of business and IT development, and he creates a remarkably detailed insider's portrait of its vanities and absurdities. As one of his fans said in a Washington Post call-in, "I know you hear this from everybody, but I live in your universe. Dilbert isn't satire. It's a documentary."

The Dilbert website claims, "The Dilbert web site, dilbert.com, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995 and is the most widely read syndicated comic on the Internet." That sounds credible. One of the first mentions I ever saw of webcomics was a commentary about the Dilbert strip proliferating over the internet. And as T mentioned, Adams made it a two-way street, with fans of his website submitting story ideas and anecdotes that worked their way into the actual series.

Dilbert is the strip that transformed the computer-obsessed nerd into an embattled hero, creating an archetype that can be found in countless series. It wasn't that comics and popular culture hadn't dealt with nerds before. But there was a tendency to clean them up and make them cool. For instance, Argon Zark is drawn as an acceptably handsome young man with a quasi-punk hairstyle (In one sequence Zeta thinks "Sigh... he's actually kind of cute for a hypergeek.") Not Dilbert, though-- he was portrayed unapologetically as a homely overweight stiff wearing a tie that refuses to lie flat.

Adams clearly was an influence on many of the most popular webcomics that came after him. T has a term for the resulting genre-- "Nerdcore." But unlike most nerdcore series, Dilbert rarely indulges in Star Wars references and other Nerd touchstones. Adams' readers don't need the security blanket, because their identification with Dilbert is already absolute.

Meginnis:

Boy oh boy. Dilbert. You know I used to love that comic. Of course I was about seven or something when I discovered it, so what should have theoretically been its appeal was totally lost on me. What did it for me was the dour sense of humor, the bizarre and strangely cute character designs, and, you guessed it, the feeling that if this guy could do it, why the hell couldn't I?

On the subject of nerds as main characters, I think there's a rich historical vein to tap coming directly from that subject. Namely, there are a hell of a lot more geeks concentrated on the web than in any other location. Of course, that's the nature of the web, which is hardly a geek's exclusive paradise. It crystallizes and divides us into demographics and convenient marketing groups by way of our interests. Casual gamers have their sites, and self-professed hardcore gamers have theirs. Likewise, middle aged women who enjoy Reader's Digest and cats have their websites, too.

But nerds are still a damn sexy market where the internet is concerned. We put in the most time, and inasmuch as a nerd is merely someone who is enthusiastic about things that aren't beer, muscles, and sex in the missionary position, a nerd makes a wonderful audience. The nerd's enthusiasm and experiences as an "early adopter" of technological trends is easily translated into a revenue source for new cultural trends like the webcomic. This shows most clearly in the way that the super stars of the webcomic world have fairly consistently been the geekiest of the geekiest -- Penny Arcade, PVP, User Friendly, 8-bit Theatre, and yes, Dilbert. While online syndication of most strips doesn't seem to get very far for a lot of good reasons (really, why would anyone in Garfield's target markets prefer to read it online?) Dilbert was a big success online because a large segment of its audience thought it was cool to read comics on the 'net. It doubtless successfully transitioned a large number of its readers to reading web-only comics about geeks like those mentioned above.

Dilbert also lends a certain legitimacy to the online comic concept. If there's one thing America is impressed by, it's success, and Adams has a lot of that. There's a natural judgment to be made here. If the 'net is good enough for Scottie, well, hell, it's good enough for any of us.

Dilbert appeals to everyone who ever worked in an office, not just the geeks. The appeal is generic enough that anyone in corporate America (or even abroad) can relate to the situations. Even though Dilbert is an engineer, there's a nearly complete lack of geekspeak involved, which keeps the comic accessible to a wide group of people. Star Wars references would actually alienate members of Dilbert's audience. Unlike UF, which is strictly targeted at a select group of techies, and plays to their knowledge and environment, Dilbert was broadly based enough to be successful in print. This underscores the difference between webcomics and print comics. If you want to target an extremely small demographic, you have to do it online. Adams (or his editor) has really shown that they have a finger on the pulse of their readership, and have managed to encompass a wide audience base, and make them their own.

Of course, this doesn't really touch too much on artistic significance.

Garrity:

It may be worth remembering that Dilbert was originally both less office-oriented and more attuned to a specifically geeky sense of humor. Early storylines included Dilbert and Dogbert being involved in a plane crash with an airline pilot who deliberately crashes his planes into mountains so he can eat the passengers ("Nice folks. I'll eat them last") and Dilbert being killed by a vengeful Mother Nature and returned to life via a cloning machine in his trash, which his supergenius garbage man repairs for him.

Dilbert only became a workplace strip after several years, when it was clear that Adams' forays into office humor spoke to readers in a vital way -- and not just readers who identified with Dilbert's techie job. Adams has long taken a white-collar "What Color Is Your Parachute?" approach to cartooning; he prepared for the creation of his comic by writing the affirmation "I will become a syndicated cartoonist" fifteen times a day until it came true. When the office humor in his strip caught on, he dropped the other elements and focused on this. It was the right move at the right time, given the huge number of middle-class Americans, not just geeks, trapped in soul-deadening cubicle farms.

One thing I find interesting about Dilbert as an online comic is the way that Adams makes extensive use of ideas and feedback from his readers. For years now, much of the material in the strip has been based on personal stories Adams gets from readers via his website and email. Instantaneous feedback is one of the features of webcomics that many of us under-utilize, but Dilbert makes full use of Adams' ability to summon a steady stream of input from his fanbase.

Millikin:

My first Dilbert story: I read a rave review of Dilbert in an online zine. So then I went a bought a newspaper so I could read the comic. What can I say; it was the mid-90s and we didn't know how to use the internets so good back then.

I, too, remember those early Dilbert strips Shaenon was talking about. They seemed to have an imagination to them, and attitude of "anything can happen," that the current Dilbert strips lack. When Dilbert became more about white-collar hijinks, I lost interest. The hilarious struggles of marketing vs. engineering or whatever are lost on me.

Joe talked about Dilbert being a logical successor of Cathy, and a precursor of the "nerdcore" web comics. I can see that. But I also think Dilbert was a powerful reverse-influence to artists who've chosen to rebel against the ultra-simple writing and artwork that is so easy for newspapers to justify reducing. This is part of what Bill Watterson called "The Cheapening of the Comics":

"At current sizes, there is no room for real dialogue, no room to show action, no room to show exotic worlds or foreign lands, no room to tell a decent story. Consequently, today's comics pages are filled with cartoon characters who sit in blank backgrounds spouting silly puns. Conversation in a comic strip is a thing of the past. The wonderful dialects and wordplays of Krazy Kat and Pogo are as impossible now as the beautiful draftsmanship that characterized those strips and others. All the talk about how 'sophisticated' comics have become shows a woeful ignorance of what comics used to be like. Comics are simpler and dumber than ever."

The "current sizes" Watterson was referring to were current sizes circa 1989. They've only gotten smaller since. All four major Detroit newspapers (two dailies and two weeklies) have switched from 54-inch rolls of newsprint to 50-inch rolls. A newspaper in North Dakota just switched to 46-inch rolls. I think the artists who are looking to the web for opportunities to use larger formats, more detailed artwork, and more complex storytelling possibilities are a logical backlash against the Dilberts and the Cathys that have enabled newspaper publishers to continually shrink comics pages.

Zabel:

Watterson's critique doesn't make sense to me. I was reading the funny pages back in the early 1960s, and even back then there was too little space to do the things he talks about. But that's why there's comic books, where the artist has the space, the length and the palette to achieve a full range of dramatic effects.

The real change between the 1960s and now was the gradual withdrawal of the comic book market from all genres except the superhero story. The comic book medium continued to mature, but the evolution was within a narrowly-confined range of possibilities. Of course underground/alternative comics existed outside of those confines, but they were severely restricted in their ability to find a market, because about 90% of the comic book shops refused to carry them.

Webcomics should have blasted open the possibility for alternative comics to reach an audience, while exploiting new possibilities that didn't exist in print. Argon Zark was a prototype for this new avenue for alternative comics. But ironically, Dilbert was the more influential series, because the webcomics medium was even more conducive to expanding the possibilities of comic strip (as opposed to comic book) art.

In defense of Dilbert, 1) the shrinking of the funny pages was not his fault; he merely came up with a design that could project well under the harsh circumstances. And 2) the conflict between programming and marketing is interesting for the same reason that all conflicts between social groups are interesting; it's a universal theme. The interest in it might be lessened, however, if the reader has little sympathy for either group.

Millikin:

Joe, yes, the comics were fairly small back in the '60s, but Watterson and I are looking much further back than just to the '60s. The shrinking of comics has been a gradual shift calculated to be nearly imperceptible to people only looking at a brief period of comics. This transition has happened at a fairly slow pace that has been acceptable to most readers' enjoyment, artists' ambitions, and publishers' business sense. Take a look at this auction listing for old "Mandrake the Magician" comics.

That "c" stands for a newspaper's "columns." You can see here that over the course of a decade, Mandrake was shrunk from 6 columns to 4 columns. By the '80s, you'll find that comics are shrunk to 3 columns (half of a six column page). And as newspaper pages themselves shrink (from 54-inch rolls to 50-inch rolls to 48-inch to 46-inch) the size of a single column shrinks as well, meaning a three-column strip back in Watterson's day (the late '80s) is larger than a three-column strip today.

For comparison, here's a 1938 Mandrake, a 1945 Mandrake and one from 2005. I think you can see pretty clearly what shrinking comics pages have done to quality of writing and artwork in comic strips. Unfortunately, too many web comics artists are looking to imitate today's simple comics rather than finding any inspiration in the more ambitious comics of the early 20th century.

Hopkins:

That's a dramatic difference in text and detail. I note also that the first strip used 4 full panels, while the later strips not only reduced the number, but the sizes as well. Note the especially narrow panel in the 2005 strip. Apparently, even from '38 to '45, the reduction was so difficult to work with that corresponding reductions in detail and content were necessary to keep it readable.

Zabel:

Rob, during prelims you mentioned Red Meat, from the Secret Files of Max Cannon as a notable comic from this era.

Balder:

I'll defend Red Meat as deserving a mention because it crossed the gap first, before Dilbert. It rode along with The Onion as that went from print-only to being a giant on the web. Whether or not it was in print, Red Meat's influence on early web culture can't be denied. Plus artistically, Red Meat was one of the very first strips to use the new computer graphics tools that came along in the mid-90s. You could not create Red Meat before computer image manipulation, and it very much opened new ground for whole classes of us--sprite, clip-art, digicam, etc. Our comics would not be possible to make if we had to rely only on traditional illustration to depict what we write.

Think about what comic strips looked like before Red Meat. Was there anything like it? Whatever you may think of cut/paste and digital manipulation of images as art, Red Meat was the first successful use of a technology that now drives half the comics on the web.

Millikin:

Red Meat to me always seemed to be following closely in the footsteps of Matt Groening's ultra-repetitive Akbar and Jeff strips (as well as David Lynch's "Angriest Dog in the World"). I did not see my first exposure to Red Meat as a life-changing event, but that may have something to do with the context that I encountered it in -- in my local alternaweekly, as a replacement for Life in Hell. I still read Red Meat in the newspaper rather than on the Web (I actually read the Onion online on Tuesdays, but skip past the Red Meat link; then I read Red Meat in the paper on Wednesday). I also read This Modern World in the paper, because I actually find my newspaper a lot more reader friendly than Salon's web site.

J. D. Frazer

Campbell:

JD Frazer is one of the guys who owes a heavy debt to Adams, but his "nerdcore" was a purer sort: the jokes were often for nerds ONLY-- NO NON-TECHIES ALLOWD. If you didn't know what Linux was or who "Clippy" was, some of the strips would sail right by you. But if you did, then you knew JD was talking *especially to you.* He wasn't the first webtoonist to target his audience so precisely, but he was the first to do it on a daily schedule, and that kind of single-minded dedication is something most techies could appreciate. User Friendly set the tone for nerdcore strips to follow.

Zabel:

T-- Looking over the User Friendly archives, I think they really owe everything to Dilbert. They're obviously inspired by Adams-- the office even has a boss with a funny haircut.

Also, this series may be one of the earliest webcomics manifestation of the use of templates. User Friendly was employing templates right from the beginning. For the uninitiated, templates are renderings of the characters that are cut and pasted directly into the comic strip, saving the artist a lot of time and creating a certain amount of consistency in the art. Templates can aid the humorous effect of the joke, because they create an effect of stasis that contributes to the deadpan mood. But overuse of them reduces the characters to lifeless icons, and give a comic a "phoned-in" feel.

I think the main significance of User Friendly is that in 1997 it was really, really crude in every respect. Horrible artwork, terrible storyline, zilch characterization, and extremely dull, obvious jokes. And yet it was a smash hit! I think this demonstrates that the public will embrace just about anything if it's free and the circumstances are right. And it indicates that new internet users of the time were really hungry, downright starving, for entertainment.

I hope this doesn't sound shrill. J. D. Frazer's style eventually improved, and his current work is comparatively slick and professional. But I suspect that his early work had enormous influence, because it encouraged thousands of people with few skills and little talent to jump into the webcomics field. The vast majority of them were headed for instant obscurity. But a significant number of them found their voices as creators and were able to connect with a sizeable and loyal audience. This could never have happened in print comics, because the financial investment to launch a comic is too high to risk it on a seemingly incompetent cartoonist.

Hopkins:

UF really did follow closely in Dilbert's footsteps. Anyone who has ever worked in high tech can instantly identify the archetypes that JD placed onscreen. We've all worked with the aging ubercoder, or the smarmy salesman who promises things we have to try to deliver. The mainstay of his humor for me, as a support technician, was the TechTales style strips, where clueless users would call Greg, the support guy, and frustrate him with their ignorance of computers. It absolutely mirrored the frustrations I put up with every day. I'm sure the same held true for anyone else involved in any other aspect of the tech field.

Because so many online were involved with tech, in one way or another, JD's stories really resonated with them. This is how niche marketing really got started for webcomics. JD was fortunate (or savvy) enough to pick one of the earliest and best established niches out there.

Zabel:

I think one of the secrets of User Friendly's success has been the series mascot, Dust Puppy.

The popular gag-a-day cartoons almost always have some kind of mascot. Dilbert has Dogbert, Sluggy Freelance has Bun-Bun, PvP has Skull, Something Positive has Choo-Choo Bear. These characters are easy to identify with, and they often represent a point of view outside of the main action; that gives them the ability to comment on things, or to go off on crazy tangents.

With his simple and striking design, and his occasional toothy grin, Dust Puppy is the most identifiable of User Friendly's characters. His very existence represents a PC geek's insider's view-- most folks don't even realize that dust puppies collect inside their computer!

Pete Abrams

Campbell:

Pete Abrams did pretty much everything the hard way. Other strips averaged three or four panels a weekday, but Sluggy Freelance averaged five, with as many as twenty on Sundays. His characterization was SPECTACULARLY original, both his fully human personalities and his animal archetypes. And while he often played with tropes from science fiction or popular movies, his storytelling largely defied a predictable pattern.

In later years, he came to lean on his cast's established tics a bit more, but kept pushing them into new plots... and somehow, more or less, retained what was humorous about their characters while the stories could be serious or even grim. Eric Burns called this tonal juggling "Cerebus Syndrome," after a critically successful independent comic book, but Sluggy proved more popular than Cerebus had ever been, and I don't think it's a coincidence that so many other strips tried that approach afterward.

Also of note: the strip got as steeped in its own continuity as a superhero comic book, but because the archives were always available, and free, it was never as inaccessible as X-MEN got. Still, it was the first and most successful strip whose niche audience became its own fan base, and hardly the last.

Zabel:

Actually, Dave Sim became a wealthy man by publishing Cerebus. He probably never had as many readers as Abrams, but you can't judge free comics and comics people pay for by the same yardstick.

Fun fact: Sluggy Freelance is the only webcomics series that has it's own category in the Yahoo groups directory!

William G.:

This isn't particularly relevant, But I was wondering: Since it got mentioned in passing, just how much of an influence do you all think "FREE" has been on the success of a lot of these comics? Could they have made it otherwise? Forcing someone to pay a buck for them in a comic shop, for example.

A lot of the criticism of early webcomics I came across way back when was the idea that this stuff wasn't good enough to pay for.

Campbell:

It was critical.

Back until about 2001, Web readers openly ridiculed anyone who dared ask for money for their entertainment. Even after that, Modern Tales' audience numbers never touched Keenspot's, and it did as well as it did because of people whose earlier free work had given them some buzz. The "Webcomics Want To Be Free" attitude is still very popular. It's the single biggest obstacle I have when seeking out new series for Graphic Smash. That's about as much as I should say in an artistic talk.

Hopkins:

I think FREE has made it possible for people like JD Frazer to build a webcomic marketed to a (relatively) tiny group of people. I don't think User Friendly would ever have gotten off the ground, otherwise. Whether it would be the cost of printing and distribution, or just finding enough people in comics shops that would be attracted to his stuff, I think he'd have found the print market a nearly insurmountable obstacle when he was starting out.

It's been said before, many times, many places. The internet allowed everyone who ever wanted to the opportunity to produce a webcomic. It's the only place where you can have an audience of 3 and still keep producing. If you have a good idea, or decent art, you'll eventually draw the numbers. If you're a marketing whiz, this happens that much faster. Unfortunately, this also means if you have absolutely no talent, you can continue to produce for your audience of 3 for months, or even years. I think what people were seeing was this flood of dreck, (overshadowing the few really good comics) and they were saying, (and rightfully so) that this crap wasn't worth paying for. However, as T points out, that mindset became entrenched, and even today it's difficult to convince people that talent should be rewarded. And yes, I'm also wandering away from artistic history.

William G.:

Well, can you really separate the history of webcomics from the idea of giving out free entertainment? Aside from Argon Zark and a few other experimenters, the web has mostly been used as a form of distribution instead of as an exciting new medium.

While I'm on it: The limitations of that distribution system may have shaped the current landscape far more than artistic desire. Really, if you're some kid on a dial up five years ago, would you rather wait ten minutes for Argon Zark's latest bit of coding cleverness, or wait ten seconds for the latest Sinfest "slut!" gag? I think the limitations of the technology may have been a powerful factor in what defined the tastes of the webcomic audience (and later influences) over the medium's history.

Garrity:

As someone who read Argon Zark back around 1996, I can attest that this must have been a big factor. I remember waiting literally twenty minutes between pages. And I didn't get really hooked on webcomics until a few years later when I read Sluggy Freelance (on DSL, even).

I think that's going to change in the coming years, though. Not that I expect strips to entirely die out, but faster connection speed is one of several factors likely to make longform comics more common and successful on the Web of the near future.

Meginnis:

I think Cerebus syndrome is a perfect description of what Sluggy simultaneously suffers and benefits from. You've got an incredibly hard working, intelligent artist who started out with something really simple. In the case of Cerebus, it begin as a silly little Conan the Barbarian satire. In Sluggy's case, a geeky gag strip. But Cerebus became...well honestly, who knows what it became? And Sluggy has developed into a schizophrenic but compelling read, thanks to a creator who I would suggest is perhaps more driven by his work ethic than a definitive artistic vision. If you told me he knew when he set out that Abrams intended to take his comic where he did, I'd call bullshit on you. But if you said that he's gotten here because he pretty much can't help himself, I would say, "Hey, that's what I was just thinking!"

I don't mean this as a slight to Abrams. His dedication to his characters feels like it comes from a sense of responsibility, which is, in my view, the highest motivation a writer can work from. He feels responsible to his characters to develop them, to make them complete, and to make their lives interesting and worthwhile.

Sluggy did a lot of things historically. It showed that a comic creator could be a big hit and even go pro without pandering to any specific demographic. Abrams' sense of humor is a bit geeky, but even in dealing with computers, movies and video games, he always stayed in the mainstream. It was one of the first webcomics to grow its own dedicated and friendly community, a large group of disparate human beings with a web site and a hell of a lot of enthusiasm. Middle aged parents can enjoy it in pretty much the same way that fourteen year old kids can. So Abrams broadened the appeal of webcomics and, in doing so, naturally brought them thousands of readers that might not have been snagged otherwise.

What I personally appreciate most about Abrams' work, though, is simply how hard he really does seem to *work* at it. His is an example it would be very nice to see more artists follow. He continuously reminds us that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right -- even if you do have to draw two or three times as much fresh material as your peers on a given day. While it's difficult to point to someone who I suspect he transmitted this work ethic to, without standard bearers like him, the bar would be a little lower for everybody.

Hopkins:

Abrams has skated the thin line between Cerebus Syndrome and First and Ten fairly often, but he's never really crossed it that I can tell. Some of his story arcs, such as Fire and Rain, have been wonderfully rich explorations of characters which really have no reason to have such depth. Riff and Torg were little more than frat boy stereotypes to start, but they have both been developed into three dimensional characters. Riff's relationships are second only to Torg's for complexity, angst and unresolved feelings.

Of course, Abrams brings back that original playful naivete on demand, as in the recent Playstation Puny and iPodling mini-arcs. This is what keeps the strip funny and intriguing at the same time. Mike's use of schizophrenic as a descriptor is very apt here. Other long running strips could take a clue from Abrams' work. If you start as a gag strip, you have to return to your roots on a regular basis.

I think Mike is exactly right on this. The depth is because of Abrams' dedication to his characters. The sheer accumulation of residue from the various story arcs makes each of the cast members fairly complex. Zoe has a tattoo which can turn her into a camel, Gwynn has sorceress powers and an affiliation with a certain grimoire, Bun-Bun has been the incarnation of nearly every major holiday, Aylee has been through many literal transformations, and all the cast members have dealt with various dimensions and planes of existence which have had lasting repercussions on their lives. Even bit players like Sam the vampire have recurring roles which maintain the continuity from previous arcs. And all of the characters have dealt with various relationships, obstacles, enemies and experiences which have added to their depth.

I think one of the most interesting things about Sluggy is that Abrams manages to maintain continuity in the face of all the years of details and weirdness which have affected the entire cast, and still finds ways to be funny while doing so.

Zabel:

Even while he's sweating over restoring his hard drive, E.B. is here in spirit!:)

By the way, could somebody explain the terms Cerebus Syndrome and First and Ten?

Hopkins:

Both terms are from Eric Burns' blog, of course.

Cerebus Syndrome is the natural, possibly inevitable transition of a Story/Funny style strip's characters from two dimensional gag characters to fully realized, even complex characters, usually over extended periods of time. Personally, I think Effect would have been a better choice than Syndrome, but it works.

First and Ten refers to the painful process of attempting to force paper thin characters into three dimensions, and failing utterly. Funny is forsaken for the sake of Drama, and any semblance of enjoyment is driven from the strip.

Garrity:

Damn that Eric Burns! His tentacles are everywhere!

Hopkins:

Eric is a hentai monster? I never knew!

White:

Not at last check.

Zabel:

Regarding Cerebus and First and Ten--

It seems to me that these dual syndromes are almost inevitable in the context of evolving webcomics culture in the late 1990s.

Cartoonist A creates a webcomic more or less as a lark. Relatively little planning or thought goes into it when it first launches.

But then, to the artist's surprise, the webcomic is being read by thousands of devoted readers every day. This tossed-together enterprise becomes the most significant creative work the artist has ever done, their key to fame, fortune, and respect!

And with a rigorous daily schedule, the artist's skills begin to mature, realizing all kinds of creative possibilities that they'd never thought of before.

It seems inevitable under those circumstances that the artist's work will change and become more ambitious. And even if this presents the risk of killing the golden goose, it also presents the seductive opportunity to prove oneself artistically in the presence of a large audience.

Does this make sense?

Meginnis:

Oh yeah, Joe, that's exactly what happens. 1/0 had an evolution along those lines -- although it was never really what you would call a "golden goose" as far as bringing fame and fortune.

In a way this makes artists better, and in a way it really limits them. On the one hand they're forced to really hone their skills and to think creatively to keep the storylines fresh. On the other hand, if Abrams were to, for instance, start a new comic, I think it would be better than Sluggy. He would have all he's learned to work from in building this whole new work, and it would, as a result, probably be more consistent, more coherent, and better paced. But since he's tied to Sluggy, he just can't get that kind of a fresh start. Not without taking a huge financial risk.

Campbell:

Yeah, just before I left Fans, I was really starting to get impatient with some of the character templates I'd designed seven years ago. Certain strips-- I won't name names-- seem to have hit stagnation because all the creative energy is going into the cartoonist's efforts to convince himself he had it exactly right on the first day.

Burns:

Which, not that this is directly germane, is exactly what happened to Jeff Rowland and Wigu. Interestingly, he had already gone through that process with the transition from When I Grow Up to Wigu -- and as predicted, Wigu was a stronger strip. WIGU-TV had a significant amount of potential, but the financial impact was so sudden and severe that Rowland had to backtrack back to Wigu/Magical Adventures in Space almost immediately.

Garrity:

I think this is a pretty common phenomenon. Looking at a lot of the major serial webstrips in particular -- Sluggy Freelance, College Roomies from Hell, Megatokyo, It's Walky, GPF -- it's clear that the cartoonists' original intentions were a lot different from, and generally less ambitious than, the work they ended up producing. Heck, the first CRFH strips are actually about college. This may be less common in recent strips, now that webcartoonists are likely to start out with a more coherent idea of what they want to do and what they're likely to achieve on the Web. In a strip like Something Positive, for instance, there's been character development and narrative fine-tuning, but the overall direction is pretty consistent; it's doubtful that the whole thing will suddenly turn into a wacky fantasy or a battle for the fate of the Earth.

This sort of thing goes on in print comics, too, and was particularly prevalent in the early comic strips. Thimble Theatre ran for ten years before the introduction of Popeye, at which point the entire cast and the overall tone of the strip underwent a major overhaul. Same thing happened in Alley Oop: after ten years of drawing caveman adventures, V.T. Hamlin got bored, introduced a time machine, and changed the entire strip.

And, as the ghost of Eric Burns ought to be quick to remind us, there's Cerebus, which underwent perhaps the most extreme shifts in tone, theme, and scale of any comic book, sometimes with magnificent results, sometimes...um, not. These retoolings can go disastrously wrong; all three of the comics in Burns' infamous "You Had Me and You Lost Me" file are on my list above.

Zabel:

This really suggests another important factor that weighs in these artists decisions-- perpetuation of characters and perpetuation of trademark.

The literature-class idea about storytelling is that you come up with some characters and a plot, and you invent something with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. You put it all together with some kind of style, and you end up with a short story, a novel, a play, a motion picture, or a graphic novel.

Literature-class storytelling has only a limited relevance in actual popular culture. In the modern world, most readers want to follow characters from story to story. And most of the time, publishers find it more profitable to sell a new chapter in a saga than to sell something completely new.

But the ethics of the literature class arise from a sound principle-- the study of the classics. Most enduring literature arose from unified intentions, where the beginning of the saga anticipates the endings. You may have some masterpieces like Don Quixote that went through a Cerebus-like evolution, but I don't think Shakespeare meandered into Hamlet thinking it might have a happy ending.

The maturing artist with a successful series faces a dilemma; there's only so far you can stretch and mutate the series structure to make it walk and talk like a classic.

Campbell:

Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" seems like a better comparison-- he wrote a series of love poems which he thought would have a happy ending when he began, but, well, things didn't work out.

Hopkins:

I think it's possible, but far from inevitable. UF is a classic example of a strip which hasn't really changed it's format since the beginning. The only nod JD gives is to story arcs which can run for days or weeks, but are little more than opportunities to do more gags. There's no significant 'finish' for any of the arcs. Sometimes there's no resolution at all. JD found what he wants, it works, and he's very good at keeping it that way.

Mike mentioned the advantages and drawbacks of someone like Abrams starting over. Michael Poe apparently went through exactly this kind of evolution with Exploitation Now. He started what was apparently a quick and dirty gag strip, and eventually ended up with a rather touching story. He wrapped it up, and had a wealth of knowledge and experience gained from that to back his new venture, Errant Story. Naturally, Abrams' situation is slightly different, considering Sluggy is supporting him, and how many others?

Garrity:

Sluggy Freelance holds a special place in my oft-misguided affections. Although Argon Zark was the first webcomic I ever read, Sluggy was the one that got me hooked on webcomics and interested in drawing one of my own. I found it at the right time: I was graduating from college, I'd been drawing strips for my campus newspaper, and I was looking for a way I could keep drawing comics out in the real world. Sluggy made me think, "I can do that!"

Part of the impetus behind this thought, to be honest, was that Sluggy in early 2000 was not exactly the most polished of comic strips. It's still not. Although the art does what it needs to do and occasionally more, it's bare-bones stuff, with a vaguely manga-influenced, vaguely "How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way" approach to character design that looks, more than anything, like your typical nerdboy's comic-book fanart. The plotlines are based on geek humor and sci-fi/fantasy parody, the sort of humor to which geeks of a certain stripe can not only relate, but aspire. (I can't be the only one who spent long evenings in college writing sci-fi spoofs and song parodies with my nerdy friends over Mountain Dew and cheap beer. Wait, maybe I am. Crap.) The comedy is usually as sophisticated as a not-very-sophisticated Monty Python sketch, and is frequently downright sophomoric. (I just popped over to sluggy.com, and the current storyline involves Torg accidentally swallowing an iPod, leading ultimately to a strip in which it returns to the world as "iPoop." I'm just saying P.G. Wodehouse might have handled it differently.) In a nutshell, Sluggy is DIY. It looks like something any geek with a sense of humor could produce.

And yet, under the sketchy artwork and White Wolf in-jokes, there are complex, or at least complicated, forces at work. After the first year or so of the strip, the plotlines progress beyond one-off genre parodies and grow longer and more involved. There are story arcs that develop over the course of years, mysteries that keep cropping up but still haven't been answered. Pete Abrams has a natural gift for characterization and has been able to breathe life into characters who were originally flat comic-strip types: the wacky buddies, the patient girlfriend, the cute little animal with a violent streak. After almost ten years of steady daily output, Sluggy has accumulated a staggeringly huge cast, to the point that Abrams can run lengthy storylines in which the central characters appear little or not at all. Even the core cast is big enough that members disappear for long periods of time without leaving much of a gap in the action (where's Aylee these days?). Abrams is clearly a comic-book fan, and he seems to have both a fondness and a knack for the type of endlessly-unravelling serial fiction that characterizes modern superhero comic books.

It was the serial nature of Sluggy that originally attracted me to the strip. In newspapers, daily serial strips have all but died out: aside from "Doonesbury," "For Better or for Worse," and hoary soap strips like "Mary Worth" and "Judge Parker," long-running storylines have been supplanted by short plots and standalone gags. This is, perhaps, an inevitable change: long-running serials in newspapers could only work when the majority of readers paid attention to the funny pages and were actively interested in the characters, which isn't really the case anymore. There was a time when ordinary people got emotionally invested in the fate of Little Orphan Annie. And there was a time when newspapers were filled not only with serial drama strips, but serial humor: the ongoing adventures of Popeye, Alley-Oop, Li'l Abner, Pogo. But that was a long time ago. In newspapers, anyway.

On the Web, it's a different story. When the entire archive of a comic is available at the click of a button, it's easy for readers to follow a long, ongoing story. Abrams was one of the first webcartoonists to realize this and take advantage of the opportunity to develop complex storylines in his strip. The strip format could be seen as an unnecessary holdover from print, or as a practical approximation of the amount of art and story the average cartoonist can comfortably produce in a day.

Since Sluggy launched in 1997, Abrams' approach to cartooning has become one of the most widely-imitated on the Web. Countless webcartoonists, myself included, now draw humor strips with ongoing serial storylines. I suspect that the era of the webstrip is slowly drawing to a close (although I'm sure it'll always be a popular format, since it's easy and fun to do), but the influence of Sluggy up to this point has been considerable.

A big reason for this is its accessibility. The strip is filled with geeky humor, but it lacks the computer-oriented, jargon-laden, techie-knows-best tone of many early webstrips. Abrams' brand of geek humor comes more from the tradition of sci-fi/fantasy fandom: lots of in-jokey parody, lots of absurdist silliness, lots of witches and aliens and demons and talking ferrets. By playing with a wide range of characters, topics, and themes, Sluggy attracts a fairly wide spectrum of readers. And, despite the prevalence of fratboy "Torg and Riff hoot at babes" humor -- or perhaps, perversely, because of it -- Sluggy was one of the first webcomics to attract a sizeable number of devoted female fans. There's something in it for everyone, or at least for everyone who's a little bit nerdy.

With all that said, I don't read Sluggy anymore, and I haven't read it regularly for several years. For all of Abrams' efforts to expand the strip and occasionally push the boundaries of his own storytelling and art, the strip has certain built-in limitations. On the most basic level, the lack of sophistication -- in the art, the writing, the humor -- means that, sooner or later, a lot of Sluggy fans will grow out of Sluggy. Some people can be entertained by Bikini Suicide Frisbee forever, and others... can't. Abrams has tried to deepen the strip by increasing the complexity of the storylines and the characters; sometimes this works, but at other times it's just loading too much weight onto essentially lightweight concepts. The Dimension of Pain as a one-off gag is funny; the Dimension of Pain as part of an annual Halloween adventure is cute; the Dimension of Pain as a real, serious part of the Sluggy universe, with its own characters, conflicts, and months-long storylines, is too much, at least to my taste. It's called "the Dimension of Pain," for heaven's sake; how seriously am I supposed to take it? Sluggy has reached the point where the disconnect between the throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks silly material and the more carefully-developed plotlines and character arcs has become distracting. A number of fans have, for example, complained about the recent appearances of Bun-Bun, who, as the most two-dimensional character in the strip (he's essentially just a running gag), doesn't fit comfortably into complex storylines or attempts to add depth to his character.

Then there's the lack of resolution to any of Sluggy's countless storylines. Sluggy is rapidly developing the narrative problems that plague superhero comic books: storylines pile up over the years, few or none are allowed to end, and as a result the story gets more and more complicated without developing real depth. There's no easy solution to this; you can end individual storylines and hope it doesn't kill reader interest, you can end the entire comic, or you can just keep plugging away and let things slowly amass. Sluggy has taken the last path. It grows more convoluted with each passing year, but it never really changes or advances. Abrams makes the occasional attempt at closure -- Bun-Bun finally ended his ever-escalating war with the holidays -- but the whole project almost seems to be growing beyond his control.

To be blunt, Sluggy has a lot of storylines, but it doesn't really have a story. It's not about anything. Most of the major webstrips can be summed up in a one-line description: PvP is about a group of coworkers at a video-game company, Penny Arcade is about two gamers commenting on geek culture, CRFH is about a bunch of college roommates who have bizarre fantasy adventures, Megatokyo is about the romantic adventures of two Americans in Japan. But Sluggy Freelance is about... well, anything. It's about a bunch of people having adventures of pretty much every conceivable type. It's whatever Pete Abrams wants to write/draw/parody, and it has scores of characters and oodles of storylines and keeps sprouting more. Even the title is a non sequitur designed to duck the question of what actually happens in the strip. It's huge and sprawling and increasingly ambitious, but ultimately it's not going anywhere. I can't blame Pete Abrams for this; I doubt he started the strip with a solid idea of what he wanted to do with it, and he may in fact still be trying to figure it out. But this endless freewheeling expansion is a limitation in its own way.

Of course, this may be only my personal prejudice speaking. Other serial comics have made do without any great degree of structure, and have been wonderful; you'll never hear me say a word against Alley-Oop. But the sense that the story will never reach a satisfying conclusion is the main reason that, despite many fond memories and the strip's impact on my own questionable webcomics career, I don't read Sluggy Freelance anymore.

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