This past Veterans’ Day, there was a joke in Garfield that suggested that day should be called “National Stupid Day.” It was a complete coincidence, of course, and creator Jim Davis issued an apology very quickly. What struck me as interesting was that Davis pointed out that particular strip was written an entire year earlier. Working that far in advance is by far not the norm, but it highlights an element of comics that are run in newspapers: namely, that they’re generally written far enough in advance of the day’s news that it’s almost impossible to keep current.
Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha strip sometimes tries to pick up on current events, but they wind up sometimes being decidedly behind the news curve. For example, this week’s strips are themed around Sarah Palin’s misinterpretation of Paul Revere’s ride -- a news item that was running in headlines at the beginning of the month. Today’s headlines about her, though, are focused on her changing travel plans. The Revere jokes are old news.
Webcomic creators, though, are able to move faster than that. They can publish their comics as soon as they’re done working on them, giving them a much more contemporary flavor. Here’s Ryan Dow’s Introspective Comics from earlier this week with a brief review of the Green Lantern movie that was just released.
Interestingly, though the more topical comics in the newspapers tend to focus on news items like politics, current webcomics are, as the title of the previous one notes, more introspective in nature. They’re more personal works with the creators reflecting on their own thoughts and feelings. Which isn’t to say they ignore the world around them, but the emphasis is less on the news items themselves, but more on people’s reactions to them.
Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist is a very personal comic that Hanuka started in part to help process some issues he was having. He has kept working on it, though, and continues to look at issues that impact him, whether those are as mundane as shoe shopping with his wife or as dramatic as learning about a nearby stabbing while still trying to wrap his head around the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
Of course, not every webcomic is quite so directly biographical. Comics Critics regularly discusses the current and hot topics in comicdom (often the printed comics from Marvel and DC specifically) but uses a regular cast of fictional characters to comment on them. Writer Sean Whitmore notes it is “just a matter of taking my own deep-seated self-hatred – it’s flames fanned by a crappy apartment, L.A. traffic and no girlfriend – and transferring it to others.” The characters doubtless pick up and amplify Whitmore’s thoughts about the DC reboot (or whatever the topic du jour is) but the specific situations and actual discussions in the comics by and large are fictional, I suspect.
Even less weighty, though no less entertaining, is something as simple as Tim Chamberlain’s Our Valued Customers. The single panel comics are drawings of actual customers that come through a comic shop, with dialogue taken from what they say in the store. Things that seem bizarre or exceptionally strange, at least when they’re taken out of context. These comics, by their nature, are almost certainly posted within a day of the event that inspired them. Probably within hours. It’s a simple concept, but one that relies more heavily on the speed with which they can be posted online.
It’s frequently cited that one of the great revolutions that has stemmed from the internet has been the speed with which information can travel. Whether a webcomic creator is working out of Minnesota or Israel, anyone around the world can keep up with their comics in almost real time, allowing for them to make contemporary and relevant points, whether they’re deep social commentary or snarky one-liners.
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