» Paper vs. Pixels

When I was 15 years old, more than half my life ago, someone said to me "Have you ever thought of making a comic book?" The truth was that I hadn't, not really, but this particular someone was older and much, much cooler than I was. He read cool books, he listened to cool music, he wore cool clothes, he had a cool job (to a 15 year old, anyway) and he made comics, which meant comics must be cool too. Well, six months later, I had my very first eight-page comic story inked and lettered on big, thick paper and ready to hand over to another friend who put it together with stories from a handful of other friends. This was back in the dark ages of the early 90's when the internet was still something confusing and elite. It wasn't even commonly known as the internet, then, we called it The Information Superhighway. Before web browsers had burst onto the scene, before email was king, even before newsgroups began belching opinions into the ether. What we did with our comics then was a sheer revolution to me... we took it to a printer, had copies made and sold them at the local comic shops. They were called zines.

I was the new kid then, working with guys who had been making and printing zines since the early 80's. They told me about other guys who had been making zines in the 70's, and eventually I would hear about guys who were doing this as far back as the 60's. And there were others that came after me, those I would end up teaching what I had been taught, and eventually they would teach others. It may seem self-important, probably it was, but it felt more and more like I was part of a tradition of underground artists who were toiling away in this wonderful yet much maligned and misunderstood medium, and to be honest, I felt pretty smug about it. In time I would even come to have some small measure of notoriety at it, and even though the smugness had mostly vanished as I had matured, I still enjoyed being almost famous. After all, I was Indie, and that made me cool no matter what. Right?

I continued making and producing zines for several years, and after a while they stopped sucking as much. The longer I made them, the more I would meet or hear of others who made them, and it felt like I was kindred to these people, most of whom I would never meet in person. I stopped doing it sometime in the late 90's. I'd started working as a freelance writer and graphic designer and it didn't really seem worth the effort, but I would still go hunting for them at the local shops. These were my people, and I think in the back of my head, I knew I would go back to them sooner or later. We were like 60's beat poets or garage bands signed to SubPop before anyone really knew what SubPop was. Of course, now no one knows what SubPop is again, and strangely, now there don't seem to be as many people making and printing underground comics anymore either.

I don't remember the first time I ever heard of web comics, but it's been many years now. They started as whispers among the comic scene, I suppose, this strange fad that some people were trying, but it would never catch on. Paper comics, zines, that's what people really wanted. As time went on, though, and as zines became harder and harder to find, the whispers of web comics became murmurs and then grew into rumblings. I started to find some of my favorite zine producers had moved into digital work, and a small part of me called them traitors.

Looking at those works by artists I had loved, I felt somewhat cold. The excitement of finding a new title by them had vanished and had been replaced by the hum and glow of a computer monitor. Sure, now it was in color and the lettering was easier to read and it was free, but how the hell was I supposed to curl up on the couch with this? How was I supposed to fit this on my shelf? Jason Turner, how could you do this to me?! William Beckerson, it used to be about girls!! With a zine, it was mine, I owned it, it was like having a membership card to the Kiss Army. It was real, it was tangible. With a web comic, there was no illusion that this was a product of the world and my place in the life of this comic was no more significant than anyone else. Perhaps it had never been, but the illusion that I had found a secret world was gone. The click of a mouse was no substitute for turning a page, and it left me disillusioned.

Years passed. I continued typing out scripts and scribbling out pages of art on big pieces of paper, getting my hands dirty while I inked them and feeling pretty groovy that I was holding onto this part of my beloved medium while everyone else was taking the mark of the beast with their pixels and memory. I would snerk at people who would talk about their web comic with lines like "One well-placed magnet destroys your life's work." Thankfully, no one ever came back with "One well-placed match destroys yours." I had no retort for that.

In 2006, I began collaborating with an amazingly talented artist named Ben on a project I'd spent many years writing. I'd known him for a while, though not well, and I knew he did a couple web comics on a site called SmackJeeves, but my distaste for web comics prevented me from ever reading them. When we began working together, though, propriety demanded that I go take a look, and while what I saw wasn't as good, in my opinion, as the stuff he was drawing for our project, I was still wildly impressed, and I read through the 50 and 60-plus pages he had of those two web comics. I signed up on the site so that I could rate his work and leave comments as I saw many others doing.

Lo and behold, a community! Worldwide and interactive!

Now, granted, by this time I'd been published and read in many countries all over the world, but it was very much like a mother sea turtle with its young. You birth them and off they go into oblivion, rarely if ever to be heard from again. Now and then, I would get a fan email or someone would hear my name and say "Oh, you're that guy who did that thing!" and as gratifying as it was, it was sparse to say the least. Perhaps the sparsity made it mean more when it happened, but there was no part of me that didn't want it to happen more often. Suddenly, I saw Ben's work being praised and commented upon instantly and frequently. After a decade and a half of publishing comics, I hadn't amassed as much reader response as Ben had in a few short months of web comic posting. Literally hundreds of instances of reader feedback compared to my few dozen. Good lord was I jealous.

So it was that a few months later, I made the jump to The Intertron and posted my first web comic. It was an awkward and uncomfortable effort at first. I was beginning all over again from square one doing something that I had been doing for a very long time, and it was frustrating trying to learn not only a new trick, but a new language. Updates, postings, jpegs vs. pngs, urls, flingfarnfilth. I stumbled and I staggered, but then something amazing happened. Someone I'd never met, someone I'd never heard of and who had never heard of me, posted a comment on my comic, "This is great stuff." and they added me as a favorite. I wet myself with glee and posted another page. It had taken me six years of printing comics to get a reader response, but I had managed it in a handful of days with a web comic. Well, what do you know, maybe there's something to these thingamajigs after all.

Two web comic titles and 80, give or take, fans later, I've been given to reflection on my one-time disdain for them, and I find that most of my reasons for disliking are still there. They are very cold and two-dimensional, not as art but as entities. There is no feeling of collection, there is no physical presence to slide onto the bookshelf and dig out from time to time to rifle through in a big pile on the bed. I can't sit back and relax with a glass of whiskey or wine and dive into someone else's world. Most of all, though, they can be hard to read. This is not so much true of the single-page one-offs, but for the story-based works, when you sit down to read them, you are sometimes left hanging for days or weeks and the flow of the story suffers, perhaps unfairly. As I've written before, even when one is posting a storyline comic daily, it is still not being read as it is meant to be. Maybe this is the reason that there are so many one-shot comics and maybe it isn't, but it is one way that stapled paper will always win over digital images.

On the other hand, there is no question that a web comic can and does reach a wider audience faster, and that the feedback from that audience comes easier and far, far more frequently, even in the morass of web comic titles of SmackJeeves alone. In addition to the feedback, there is the option for the author/artist to provide a page-to-page commentary of their own, something that would be ludicrous in a zine, and also to interact with the readers' comments. And a web comic affords more artistic possibilities, such as color and varying page sizes, things that would be either impossible or implausible with a printed magazine. It is also far cheaper to produce and simpler by light years to circulate. No longer does one have to beg and bargain with the local comic shop to please collect a dollar per copy in a plastic container, all you need is a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse.

Also, it should be noted that the ease of posting a web comic is a double-edged sword. Because all it takes is the click of a mouse, it can lend a certain lack of dedication or commitment to the creative process. Not in all cases, not by far, but it can be seen in the number of web comic titles that exist without a single comic page attached to them. Being someone who would not even consider posting a new title without a significant catalogue of pages ready to post, it is with no small amount of offense and awe that I see titles with no comics, but scores of fans. I may never understand how this occurs, but it does illustrate the upside of the ease of the web comic. Without question, the community of creators and readers is broader. The question then becomes which is better, a large, diverse community comprised of serious artists and recreational dabblers or a small yet dedicated cabal?

There is no sense in comparing the quality of work. Web comics are made up of a number of very good, well-made comics among a sea of pure treacle. Everyone who has read web comics has read bad web comics. While I can look at my shelf and see nothing but quality zines, I can remember easily a severe amount of terrible ones that I have leafed through or passed over entirely, or purchased and later discarded. Everyone who has read zines has read bad zines. The only difference in the numbers are in the amount of each form. The percentages, I will purport, are the same. There is a smaller number of bad zines, but this means a smaller number of good ones. Conversely, there is a greater number of bad web comics, but there is a greater number of bad ones to wade through to find them.

Which is better? Which one wins? Paper or pixels? Well, gosh Timmy, I just don't know. At the end of the day, I think it boils down to the same thing as with radio. Some folks like their Top 40 FM blaring, some folks like their iPods full of Chet Baker and Tom Waits, and what makes one better than the other is the taste of the user and what he or she wants to get from it. Each has their benefits and each has a flavor of fun unique to itself, as each has drawbacks. As a reader of both and as a creator of both, I would offer the opinion that the best course is a fine blend of both, if for no other reason than it is always a good thing to have the option.

A great Canadian once said "The medium is the message." A lot has been said about this line, but at its core, it means that the method of delivering the story defines the parameter of the story, and this defines how we perceive the story. Which is better, film or television? Which is better, a CD or a concert? Which is better, a web comic or a zine? I don't know, Timmy. You tell me.

- Gibson Twist