Defining Webcomics

Some webcomics are very simple to define. One or two creators, working in the funny pages or comic book tradition, sit down to create a straightforward comic where images and text work together to culminate in a punchline or in moving ahead a narrative. These comics are easy to conceive and easy to classify. But what if someone took it in another direction, moving away from this traditional framework and utilizing the unique opportunities that the internet offers as a medium? How, then, could a definition account for all the variety and ambiguity within the webcomic medium?

Difficulty arises when trying to pin down any definition with broad absolutes, and webcomics present a more unique problem than most. They draw heavy influences in form and content from many different media—not only from the print comics which are the most literal source of their origin, but also to an extent animation, literature, photography, and perhaps other internet-specific media for which there is not yet a concrete name. Thus although a simple preliminary definition may suffice for the average reader, any sort of broad attempt to encompass all web-based comics may actually raise more questions than it answers.

The Webcomics Examiner defines “webcomic” in their glossary as “a comic that appears on the World Wide Web.”[1] With this as a definition, any web archive of any print comic is automatically a webcomic simply by being accessible on the internet. Yet it seems absurd to call Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland a webcomic just because of its being hosted on ComicStripLibrary.org, especially since its author was dead fifty years before anyone was on the internet. And when Megatokyo and Toothpaste for Dinner, which originated on the net, are published into printed volumes, it is tempting still to refer to them as webcomics, despite their newly-assumed format. For this Wikipedia offers a slightly more useful definition, saying that webcomics are “comics published on a website, often exclusively, providing easy access to an audience, though some are published in books and newspapers but maintain a web archive.”[2]

Thus perhaps the issue of definition is in part an issue of origin. “Webcomics: The Influence and Continuation of the Comix Revolution” by Sean Fenty, Trena Houp, and Laurie Taylor suggests something very much along these lines. They propose that “webcomics” specifically refers only to “comics that are made first for the web, made by an independent creator, who may be working with others, but who all have no originary print version and no corporate sponsorship.” [3] This is a practical definition which allows most things which we might intuitively consider “webcomics” to fit under that term.

Yet taking this as an effective definition of webcomics, a problem still remains in how we define “comics.” In the realm of print comics even there can be some gray area as to what specifically can be called “comics.” An illustrated children’s book, for example, often bears a striking resemblance to a large comic book panel. Formally, any page of Edward Gorey's macabre children's book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, all of which consist of a single image subtitled with a single line of text, is identical to certain pages in Will Eisner's seminal graphic novel, A Contract With God. However the creative and formative flexibility provided by the internet gives rise to an exceptional amount of ambiguity. So where do we draw the line between webcomics and animation? Or illustrated text? Or captioned photography? Or something else entirely which we have never seen before?

First, there are straight-forward examples which seem to have been literally translated from the funny page format right onto the web. KC Green, the creator of numerous projects all available from Rumblo.com, specifically describes his comic Gun Show as an “an experimentation with the three-panel comic format” which he was so often tempted to break given that he was working with an infinite canvas rather than within the confines of a newspaper strip.[4] The extremely long-lived and popular Penny Arcade usually functions in a similarly traditional format. Speaking strictly in terms of format and style, either of these webcomics would be at home among a collection of mainstream newspaper comics, although their content and language would need to be severely censored before any newspaper would publish them. In fact, that irreverent, uncensored, and offbeat sensibility is one of the few things common to nearly all webcomics.

Then we can find many examples of somewhat ambiguous webcomics. At first A Softer World by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne seems to be a straight-forward comic with the familiar three-panel layout and juxtaposition of text and images. Upon second thought, the comic seems less traditional; the text is not illustrated by drawings, but by photographs—in fact, sometimes by only one photograph split spatially into three different panels. More often than not the text does not even directly relate to the images. Intuition tells us that this is a webcomic, but one could argue that it is more along the lines of captioned photography or perhaps even illustrated poetry. Superpoop, the newest comic creation of Drew, the mononymous author of Toothpaste for Dinner, is created by combining images (usually photographs) found throughout the internet with witty subtitles ranging from dialogue to narrative to newspaper-style captions. Again, Drew tells us that what we are reading is a webcomic and we do not question this. But if text added to any photograph constitutes a webcomic, what else might fall into this category? This might open the door to considering the “lolcats” of ICanHasCheezburger.com and other image macros to be webcomics. The most significant difference between ICanHasCheezburger.com and Superpoop.com is that the former is user-generated content where every “panel” could potentially be made by a different person while the latter has one consistent creator who has made a name for himself as a webcomic artist.

Finally, some webcomics are more deliberately experimental and blur the lines of what we really can call “comics.” Patrick Farley’s Apocamon, which draws much of its text from the Biblical book of Revelation, incorporates sound and animation into a manga-inspired multimedia comic. It does rely mostly on traditional image-text juxtaposition, but the addition particularly of Flash animations seem to push it slightly nearer the edge of being a separate medium from ordinary webcomics.

Teddy by Ethan Persoff is less experimental in that is could easily be published in print, but perhaps more experimental in its identity as a comic. A large number of "panels" feature only text on a colored background with no image at all, and in nearly every "panel" which does contain an image the text and the image are ostensibly unrelated. The varyingly grotesque characters do not directly act out the story; for example the narrative might be telling of a heart-breaking fight in an apartment while the drawings might depict smiling characters in a park. And although speech balloons are present, they do not usually contain speech but rather continuations of the first/second person narrative. This disjunction makes Teddy extremely hard to classify, and therefore it is feasible to imagine Persoff claiming some alternate identity to what he decided to call (perhaps only for lack of a better word) a webcomic.

Thus we are brought back to the need to form a practical definition for webcomics which includes everything from Penny Arcade to Apocamon but which excludes web-hosted versions of Little Nemo. If we return to Fenty, Houp, and Taylor's definition of webcomics as "comics that are made first for the web, made by an independent creator, who may be working with others, but who all have no originary print version," we find that it stands up fairly well to all the criteria proposed here, although we also ought to add the possibilities for multimedia and/or interactive components which are unique to the internet as a medium. Moreover, the ambiguity inherent to the medium might be reconcilable by taking into account authorial intent. Therefore if it fits into the above definition and if there is an understanding between creator and audience that what is being shared is in fact a webcomic, then most likely that's what it is. Even then there is room for ambiguity, but that is not unexpected in a medium so expansive and diverse as webcomics.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. "The Webcomics Examiner Glossary." The Webcomics Examiner. 26 Feb 2009. http://webcomicsreview.com/examiner/glossary.html.
2. "Webcomic." Wikipedia. 26 Feb 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcomic.
3. Fenty, Sean, Trena Houp and Laurie Taylor. "Webcomics: The Influence and Continuation of the Comix Revolution." ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 1.2 (2004). Dept of English, University of Florida. 26 Feb 2009. http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_2/group/index.shtml.
4. Green, KC. "F.A.Q." Gun Show. 26 Feb 2009. http://gunshowcomic.com.

References
Brownstein, Charles. "Tape This to Your Cubicle Wall." The Comics Journal, Issue 240. January 2002. http://www.tcj.com/240/r_yic2.html.

Webcomics
Comeau, Joey and Emily Horne. A Softer World. http://asofterworld.com.
Drew. Superpoop. http://superpoop.com.
---. Toothpaste for Dinner. http://toothpastefordinner.com.
Gallagher, Fred and Rodney Caston. MegaTokyo. http://www.megatokyo.com.
Green, KC. Gun Show. http://gunshowcomic.com.
Holkins, Jerry, and Mike Krahulik. Penny Arcade. http://www.penny-arcade.com.
Persoff, Ethan. Teddy. http://www.ep.tc/teddy.html.