asdfMTV Geek

By Sean Kleefeld

One of the things that many proponents of webcomics have been striving for is achieving a sort of popular legitimacy. They want to overcome a stereotype of just doing a handful of doodles that get posted online where only a dozen people see them. You and I know, of course, that’s not remotely accurate, but I think that people in business still feel that’s how they’re perceived. We’re almost at a tipping point where webcomics achieve that legitimacy goal and, while I can’t tell you when or where that will exactly happen, I can tell you what form it will take.

Al Capp created the newspaper comic strip Li’l Abner in 1934. The story centered around the title character, his hillbilly family and friends who lived in Dogpatch, Kentucky. One of the recurring scenarios was that Daisy Mae kept trying to capture Abner’s interest romantically, generally with no success. Abner tended to be quite naive and oblivious to Daisy Mae’s charms. For that matter, Abner was oblivious to every girl’s charms; he was considered quite the catch and Daisy Mae wasn’t the only girl with her eyes on him. Read More...

Despite what you may have seen on the comics pages in the newspapers over the last several decades, comics have a long history of using humor to create social commentary. As I noted in this column not that long ago, use of the word cartoon to refer to humorous illustrations was a direct result of Punch magazine satirizing what was going on in British Parliament at the time. Early favorite strips like Hogan’s Alley spoke to working class issues of the day, and later classics like Pogo often spoke very directly to social concerns held by the creators. The famous “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” line from the strip was specifically from a piece on the issues of generating garbage and waste.

But since the 1970s, comic syndicates (as well as many other large corporations) have become increasingly risk averse. That is, they really don’t want to take a chance if they can avoid it and they’d rather play things as safely as possible. That’s one of the reasons they like to keep legacy strips like Popeye or Blondie going after their original creators have passed away; they know the basic set-up of the strip and there’s less of a risk having a new creator work on established characters than there is with a new creators working on new characters. Read More...