Yesterday morning I carpooled into town with my housemate on the way to work (it’s a longish story involving a haircut appointment, a crap bus schedule, and the Dalai Lama). I was in the middle of a transaction at the teller window when I heard, “Anne! Look!”
I turned around and saw a scruffy looking kid sauntering across the bank lobby with the Red Robot on the back of his black hoodie, and then my housemate said something that sounded like mumble mumble Exploding Dog? mumble and I realized, interestingly, that even though she reads both Exploding Dog and Diesel Sweeties, she knew the character but didn’t associate it with the comic of its origin.

It got me thinking about how webcomics references pop up in the most random places. Not long ago, I was at a drugstore on the main street of the town where I live, and I was being rung out by a teenaged cashier who’d stuck a hand-written sticker on her uniform which read, “I’m a rocker. I rock out.” It was weird enough that I couldn’t help but comment, “Hey, I know a guy who makes t-shirts with that slogan on ’em.” She looked at me with the disdain reserved for old, un-hip folks and said, petulantly, “Well, it is a really popular webcomic, you know.” Yeah, I thought, that was kind of my point.

I had begun to wonder if it was just going to be all Diesel Sweeties references (surely other webcomics show up in weird random places!) but last night I returned to my alma mater to lecture, and the first thing out of someone’s mouth in the audience participation part was “goats!” Which of course led to a digression about Goats.

When I got home yesterday evening, I found a charming wee email from Kyle Sanders, prompted by my column last week. He’s the creator of Standard Deviation, which he describes as “a webcomic based on the college experience.” I figured I’d have a look, for a few reasons (including the timing, which was just too perfect with me all nostalgic and such). First, I know that there’s a whole lot of webcomics on the college experience. Second, I usually enjoy reading them since my college experience deviated pretty radically from the traditional experience (did you check out that alma mater link?) It updates Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has been online for just over a year (though, of course, he’s been drawing for a while longer than that…), so it’s still fairly new and the archives aren’t too difficult to read through.

But while I was reading through his archives, I also clicked on a link for Blue House Comics by Stirling Morris and Shawn Miller. It’s also about the college experience and seems relatively new as well (it updates Mondays and Fridays).

I’m still, of course, reading through them both, but my initial responses are fairly positive. I’m enjoying reading through the archives, despite a few small navigation issues, and I was wondering if there were other “college experience” webcomics out there that folks read and enjoy?

Yesterday morning my presence in a juror pool was required by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while I ended up being excused for what must be one of the more random of small-world reasons (I had designed and printed holiday cards for the partner of one of the attorneys involved), it led me to come home and find out what comes up when you go looking online for “webcomics” and “jury duty.”

This idea worked out well; I’m still looking for new work to read since I’m determined not to write a column about the same webcomic more than once. (I don’t know how long that’s going to last, but I will name-check, relentlessly: High Maintenance Machine is back from hiatus! Hurrah! A new long work titled The Lower Kingdom from Bryant Paul Johnson is in the works! Hurrah! Gary got namechecked and pixellated! Hurrah! I got namechecked! Yikes!)

In sifting through the results, I found comics that extolled jury duty and others which used it as just one of many bad things which can befall someone, but I landed on John Rios’s Dead Days, which I’d never read before.

There’s a story about jury duty, obviously, but the comic, started in 2004, tackles a wide range of topics in relaying the day-to-day life of two college guys, like online social networking, cramming, superheroes, ridiculously funny wooing, car repair, and …icky girls!

The strip gets a little meta from time to time, as many do, but I really like the blocky style of the artwork, even in color, since it reminds me a bit of some of the other webcomics I read. It also wasn’t too difficult to read through the archives, since they’re well-organized, and the strip finds a good middle ground between 4-panel strips traditionally composed with an end punchline and longer continuing stories (as well as sometimes breaking from that 4-panel structure).

If only I’d found it before I went in for jury duty…

I’m kind of fascinated by online social networking systems, and I’m particularly intrigued by how they function as promotional tools in all kinds of different ways. It doesn’t surprise me all that much anymore when I run across someone online who I’ve actually met in real life, but there’s always, for me, a moment of dissonance between the actual person and their online self (or selves). It makes me think about how characters are constructed; I’d thought of it as a process alien to me, as someone who does an autobio comic, but then I realized that the dissonance I described above is always amplified when those roles are reversed and someone finds me. Plus I don’t really look like how I draw myself.

It also got me thinking about how the subjects of most of my recent posts have been almost entirely selected through a system not so different from social networking. For example, I started reading Planet Karen in part because there was an ad for it on Teaching Baby Paranoia, which I started reading regularly because I got friended on both Comicspace and Livejournal. How embarrassingly hypertexty. I have a similar path to Minimalist Stick Figure Theater, all the way back through to these guys, the gateway drug of my webcomics experience. But the subject of this week’s column—Eric Schlegel’s Skipping Out—came from one of my new co-workers, Patrick (who’s apparently a bit of a rockstar), in the midst of a discussion about MySpace (he’s a fan; I’m not).

So I decided to write about it this week, because it is not something I think I would have found on my own, even though I do know about Prism Comics, who have a good list of webcomics artists. However, this review’s going to be brief since there aren’t a whole lot of archives to this strip–apparently it’s only been online for a very little while even though Schlegel’s been drawing for much longer. It’s an interesting webcomic to me since the artwork’s very different than the kinds of things I’ve written about in the past, plus it has taken me a while to warm up to lettering that’s not hand-lettered.

In truth, Skipping Out feels fairly nascent at this point, and that’s part of the appeal. Most of what I’ve been reading are well-established webcomics that have found their footing and their niche, and are great at what they do. As for Skipping Out, I’m waiting to see where it goes with the characters and the satire, since the model it seems to be following (and might be inspired by) are other slice-of-life strips like Dykes to Watch Out For, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green and Leonard and Larry. However, you’ll have to start here and work your way back to the front page in order to read them chronologically since the running joke about the hair works a bit better in context.

On a recommendation from the fella who creates the charming High Maintenance Machine, I finally checked out Sarah Morean’s comics. I was given a lovely little business card with 3 stamps on it: one a web address in blue, a red squid, and the word “comix” stamped out in little black letters. The web address led to a little treasure trove of choices. Turns out that Sarah Morean’s not just someone who crafts webcomics and zines–she’s a musician and a crafter as well. She’s got a few different projects posted, including Old Timey, which is produced for a museum newsletter.

Her work–the one I’m looking at the most, Plastic Frames, which she describes as “diary gag sketchbook comics”– varies. Sometimes what she posts is very political and at times it’s totally introspective. Sometimes her images remind me a little of Natalie Dee’s work. Sometimes they’re single panel minimalist images and at other times longer works, or very detailed. Sometimes black and white, sometimes color, it’s impossible to predict what will come next. Some images, like the one above, are simply heartbreaking. Some are just goofy. And you folks who like print also, take note: you can get her work in print form (including her recently self-published book Human which is gaining great reviews).

Sarah Morean’s work wasn’t quite what I imagined when I thought about what I was looking for this week, but I’m fond of it anyway. I’ve been staying away from the internet lately for obvious reasons. When I was in college, nearly fifteen years ago, something quite like what happened this week happened on my campus. So I wanted something cute for this week’s column, something that would cheer me up. I’m glad, though, that I found something that wasn’t just cute, something that had a little more depth and range to it. (So instead, forgive my brevity, and check out some beautiful, weird webcomics.)

Last week I attended the joint meeting of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association, and I heard papers on topics as wide-ranging as Morrissey, fandom, and identity through to Appalachian banjo stylings, and that’s a fairly narrow sampling of the various papers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is perpetually popular, though the hot show this year seems to have been Gray’s Anatomy). The conference spans four days and has a conference program that’s about 400 pages long.

I’ve presented with the PCA before, both nationally and regionally, since for many years while I was in graduate school the Modern Language Association—the major pinnacle of conferences in my field — very much frowned on papers having to do with comics unless they had something to do with a children’s literature panel. But in the 12 years between when I began graduate school and now, there’s been a definite jump in the number of academics who teach comics, the amount of scholarship on comics (just check out ICAF, for starters), and the response to that scholarship both inside of and external to the academy. Even in the five years since I’ve finished it does seem like the proverbial tide has actually turned a bit.

For example, at this recent conference, there were lots of papers on comics. There’s a Comic Art & Comics interest group that ran programming for the duration of the conference. There were a series of panels about comics in other discussion groups, such as both the Medieval and the Composition & Rhetoric groups. There was even an entire panel organized around Sandman, dealing with Neil Gaiman’s use of myth in the series.

What particularly caught my eye, though, were the papers on webcomics. From just skimming the program (remember: 400 pages) I found two: one titled “Penny Arcade and the Manipulation of Subcultural Capitalâ€? presented by a scholar from the University of Calgary, and another, “The King of Lizards Comes out of the Closet: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Heteronormativity in Dinosaur Comics â€? by a scholar from West Chester University. And those are just the ones which name-check webcomics in their titles. There must have been others which mentioned webcomics in the body of the papers; for example, I heard a paper about “hipster librariansâ€? mention Unshelved, which makes sense given the subject matter. I know from posts on a comics scholars discussion list I’m on that there are folks worldwide writing dissertations about webcomics, which means the number of undergrad papers on them must be exponentially higher.

All of it made me return, again, to the question of context. In writing last week’s column on Minimalist Stick Figure Theater, I thought it would be a fabulous text to use in a women’s studies class. I think it’s a great webcomic, and it raises points worthy of discussion in a way that I think would be ideal for just such a class.

I know that there’s webcomics out there which poke fun at academic culture (which is great; it’s pretty goofy from time to time, and though there isn’t a secret handshake it does certainly have its own weird internal culture). What I’m wondering is if there are folks out there who have used webcomics in an educational setting, and, if so, which ones and how? How does a webcomic change when it is printed out and distributed to a class (sort of thinking about fair use and not fair use and outright theft, since that’s been the focus here for the last few days)? Is it realistic to assign students to look at websites for homework, since it’s becoming ever more rare to find students who are not online? And in ten years are we going to see the PCA flooded with papers about webcomics? I don’t know. But it’ll be interesting to find out.

Thoughts?

You’ll have to forgive me; I’ve been a little distracted this week, what with Passover, the upcoming PCA/ACA Conference (there are papers about webcomics…), and the ongoing job search. Sometimes I know what I’m going to write about ahead of time and sometimes I don’t plan. I have a general idea of what I like in webcomics and I have a list of recommendations.

But this week I’m going to deviate from all of those plans and plug Minimalist Stick Figure Theater by Thanatos Omega instead. Since I mentioned it two columns back, after reading last year’s Girlycon minicomic, I’ve been kind of sucked in despite wondering if maybe I should know better. But when I started thinking about it, Minimalist Stick Figure Theater (henceforth MSFT, ’cause I’m still a lazy academic!) kind of weirdly fits into some of the things I’ve been considering lately.

For starters, there’s some sneakily funny gender critiques in here. This strip about knitting actually made me laugh out loud, even though the joke basically telegraphs from the first panel. In truth, sometimes things are funny because they’re hitting a nerve. These strips don’t represent the whole of the different ongoing storylines (some are in a cafe, some are to do with a blender…), but it’s a decent mix of funny stuff, weird stuff, and geek stuff. (Actually, now that I think about it, those things aren’t mutually exclusive, but those three words sum the strip up fairly well.)

There’s also a bit of autobio going on with the notes underneath each of the strips. Part of the draw for me is that these places getting namechecked in the notes are places that I know because I live in the same town as this strip’s creator. But there’s interesting stuff in there past the name-checking; sometimes it’s about gender, sometimes it’s about programming, sometimes it’s about the composition or genesis of that day’s strip. They can actually be wickedly funny, even with bad puns. MSFT is one of those webcomics that’s quick to read but they’re not just one-note jokes, exactly. I found that while I was reading, the snappy punchline of the final panel would get me thinking, even if I was sometimes also groaning. I’m not sure I agree with some of it, but I’m enjoying reading it.

Even though MSFT is, you know, stick figures and all, there are some quirky features. Panels like the last one here–::awkward::– are, I think, really well done because of the way the creator uses the tools available. You can render what awkward looks like, but somehow “::awkward::” just fits perfectly in the context here. I guess what I mean is that even though it’s stick figures, it isn’t always simple, and I particularly like that about MSFT.

Last week I was looking for autobio works by male-identified authors. I suspected there were many more online than I’d found, but it took my going offline to find the totally endearing High Maintenance Machine by Matthew Reidsma, which is available both online as well as in minicomics form (depends how you like your reading). High Maintenance Machine is a sketchbook diary that visually very much evokes James Kolchalka’s work, and in fact name checks him from time to time.

I discovered the print collections at this past weekend’s Boston Zine Fair; the webcomics (which appear daily) are collected monthly and printed in minicomics form. About one of his issues, Reidsma writes, “If you like comics about people talking on cell phones and leaves falling off of trees in New England, with a bit about naughty cats and sleepy boys, this might just be for you.�

The main character grapples entertainingly with simple things, like getting the lid off a jar of salsa (or not), a sneezing spouse (who creates her own incredible art as well) and, it’s true, the aforementioned naughty cats, who are also sometimes abominably cute. There are of course mentions of holidays as well as random sweet moments interspersed throughout.

We see him solving a cake problem and surviving cooking mishaps. Reidsma disarmingly details the very real perils of autobio work and reveals the real truth about graduate school.

But his work is most disarming when it is evocative and heartbreaking. These are strips that are so personal and poignant that it just kind of stuns the reader for a second, especially someone just clicking through the archives. Any autobio author can take moments from his or her life and spin them into a one-note joke (I know this punchline as “banjo player� rather than “philosopher�), but it takes someone who really understands how comics work to create strips like these which just so gracefully knock the wind out of you. They’re amazing, beautiful things, all the more so for their economy.

It’s fascinating to watch Reidsma’s drawing style become more refined the more he draws; the differences between the early strips composed shortly after his 30th birthday freakout and his current work is noticeable but charming. It’s always interesting to see an artist’s work develop over time, and that’s one of the real strengths of High Maintenance Machine. It’s also relatively recent (August 2006) and the strips are perfectly sized little slices of life, so reading through the archives is not a daunting task.

Reidsma also has a number of other projects available online, the only one of which with regular updates is Happy Child, which are stories from his childhood. But there’s also the utterly winsome 24-hour comic Skippy and the Magic Tricycle, as well as a number of the newspaper strips that Reidsma published in the Western Michigan University Herald in 1999. You can see echoes in High Maintenance Machine of some of the elements in these strips (like the bar-code faced people).

Have a look. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

I recently attended a comics-folks meet-up sort of thing (it’s more organized than I’m making it sound) in which two things fell into place. First, one attendee gave a tiebreaker vote to Planet Karen by Karen Ellis for this week’s column (thank you, by the way). Second, someone else asked if I had a theme for this column, and I do even though I haven’t quite articulated it. My academic work is largely to do with gender, comics, and popular culture, so I’m interested in webcomics that do interesting, smart things with gender. The original plan was for the column (updating Thursdays) to alternate between longer, critical pieces one week and shorter reviews the next, and they’re going to be in the first person. As I’ve continued, however, those boundaries have become less easy to delineate (today’s was supposed to have been a shorter piece, for example).

Planet Karen is an ideal example, actually, in this case. It’s a diary webcomic in which the gothy title character details her day-to-day life in England with a ten-day lag with subjects as varied as publishing her webcomic diary, making merch, discovering she has diabetes (during the holidays, even), fearing she crashed a website, paying the rent in cash because she’s lost her checkbook, and so forth. It’s upfront and earnest and self-reflexive, even for autobio work. It’s pretty captivating and led to a number of interesting questions (most of which I’m still thinking about).

Part of my desire in reading it was also to consider autobio work’s appeal a little more critically. I have a decided preference for autobio work (and admittedly, I’m not objective as I do a print-only autobio comic), and part of what’s so interesting to me about autobio work is that it seems to break down some of the distance between creator and reader. Now, with webcomics, this distance already seems a little blurry because of both the immediacy and the anonymity of the internet.

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I thought I’d start this week with a quick note of thanks. The list of suggestions on last week’s column was both interesting and lengthy, so much so that I’m still reading through those suggestions rather than moving forward too much further with the article I want to write about women in webcomics. Some of them—like Jennie Breeden’s The Devil’s Panties and Leanne Franson’s Liliane, Bi-Dyke weren’t unfamiliar to me, though I think The Devil’s Panties is probably one of the better-known webcomics out there, and though I’m much less familiar with Franson’s work online, I know her print collections well. Others, like Normal Life, and Planet Karen, I’d just never heard of. As a group of recommendations, they’re a wide range of different styles and subject matter, and not all are American, which is good. It’s always interesting to me to see what people recommend and why, and I’m glad for a diverse set of new things to read.

The comments, of course, raised the issue for me of wondering about how do people initially find the webcomics that they read and follow (and maybe this overlaps a little with earlier pieces about readership and introducing folks to webcomics)? Certainly, recommendations go a long way, be that a suggestion from a review site (there are lots of ’em out there), a link on a friend’s blog, or someone you know emailing you a link directly from a webcomic’s site. Sometimes this transmission becomes almost viral; someone emails you something you think is so cool that you blog about it and then email a couple of other folks about it, who in turn email a bunch of other people, and so on. Word of mouth (so to speak) is a powerful force.

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In honor of International Women’s Day I decided that this week I’d cull suggestions from the folks I know who read webcomics. I was specifically looking for something created by someone who identifies as female that felt pro-equality to me without necessarily identifying with the f-word, which I know makes some people nervous (but it really shouldn’t), and had interesting things to say about gender. The immediate option was Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For but even though it is available online, I have difficulty thinking of it as a webcomic because for so long it’s been a print-oriented piece, either through syndication or through trade paperbacks.

The search raised an interesting issue, one I plan to consider in a future column: there are lots of webcomics out there with strong, smart female characters who don’t look like the stereotypes of women in comics (you know exactly what I’m talking about here, folks). They’re complete characters who make their own choices about life, and work, and sex. They hold a range of different jobs, from coffee baristas to mayor’s aide and saving the world from the devil to working in the sex industry.

And many of these webcomics are created by men, which is not a surprise given the arc of the industry. Many of these creators are, in fact, very attuned to equality and don’t hesitate to respectfully call fans out for sexist comments on messageboards or blogs as well as to actually use the word “feminism” in their webcomics without making it too much of a glib punchline (sometimes, anyway. See again Diesel Sweeties). And I think that’s worth noting.

But I’m lately interested in learning more about women in the industry especially since what’s so great about webcomics—easy access to cheap-ish publishing without editorial boards and so forth—should, in theory at least, lead to less of a potential divide than we’ve seen in the history of the comic book up until about Sandman and Love & Rockets. (I’m skimming the surface, obviously, but if you want to read more on the topic, there’s lots out there– Trina Robbins, Friends of Lulu , and Sequential Tart are three which pop immediately to mind).

Where I landed was reading In the Puddle by Cique Johnson. It’s a mostly-auto-bio webcomic (it’s described as “functioning as a personal diary”) about the life of Cique and her boyfriend Axe, who work in Philly and live in Delaware (a quirky fact I relish as a native Delawarean myself) with their flying fox bat, Atreau. The webcomic follows these characters in and out of goth clubs and work situations and discussions ranging from everything from ethical sluttery to RenFairs, from pirates to babies and so forth. Cique describes the plot as “Together these devout Pastafarians brave mosh pits, exploding tomatos, hot bikinied women and epic battles! Thus is life in Phildelphia and Delaware.” (If my time in graduate school in Delaware had been more like ITP, I would have had a hell of a lot more fun.).

Initally, I found In the Puddle a little hard to follow, primarily because the coloring in it is different from what I’ve gotten used to in webcomics. Often, only a character’s hair will be colored, which at first made me stumble a little in reading (it sort of altered my visual flow in a way I wasn’t expecting. But it grew on me). In the Puddle has a very quirky sensibility to it, one that’s smart and respectful and distinctive. There are guest strips and innovative clothing uses and I’m just finding it a lot of fun to read. I’ve very much been enjoying sifting through the archives and I think it’s a webcomic worth mentioning.

Enjoy! & see you next week…