Webcomics Part 1

 Webcomics: The Shift in American Culture from Productive Critique Into Youthful Oblivion

                The growth of the internet as a source for immediate gratification has led to the expansion of fan created entertainment, where the fan is no longer receiving information top-down, but is finding new ways of engaging with it. The wide access that the internet provides has allowed “fan-culture” to expand in new and inventive ways, one of these being Webcomics. The internet has allowed for the propagation of “amateur” created comics which has created a phenomenon that is based on the idea of convergence culture, a mash up of old media with new media, created not by corporate America but by the consumer. The roots of comics lie within the political cartoon, and William Hogarth's woodcuts which possessed an element of social critique. Traditional comics as we think of them today are a medium of entertainment which has appealed to children, or to an audience that wishes to be taken out of the monotony of their life into a fantasy world far away. Yet, it cannot be ignored that a shift began to occur in comics when they were appropriated by counter culture as a new means of expression of social critique, and which culminated with the creation of the graphic novel in the eighties as a vehicle for discussing socially relevant topics, such as the holocaust or the Islamic revolution in Iran, in an experimental new way. However, the “serious” graphic novels that tried to deal with social topics, or tried to implement social critique into the myth of superheroes like Batman, could not be taken seriously due to the eruption of comic book and participatory fan culture. Comic book culture evolved along with participatory culture, which sprang out of the science fiction community, over the decades to allow for these so called geeks – which refers to persons who are obsessively devoted to comic books, science fiction, and technology – to create an entirely new community that embraced the fantasy worlds of their entertainment into their everyday lives. This community of people who seized upon the idea of living inside a fantasy overshadowed the literary and erudite aspirations that graphic novel artists had sought. Similarly, when webcomics boomed on the net the topics they dealt with were not ground breaking, socially critical or analytic works, and were rather a return to an emphasis on the comical, and once again placed the graphic novel in the background. Although webcomics are not produced by the corporations that control printed comics, they are mass produced in such a way that they can be described as “fast-food” comics, in the sense that they are watered down versions of what the graphic novels have to offer. In other words, because webcomics are abundant, and so readily available, they become the replacement for the thought provoking graphic novels of the eighties and nineties. A culture where entertainment is required to be instantly available at the touch of a button, allows for the amateur to stand in for the expert, or the skilled artist, who cannot produce their art at a sufficiently quick enough pace to serve the demand. Therefore, a society which is built around the idea of immediate gratification that the internet provides, creates a great demand for childish entertainment, that takes a fraction of a second to read. This kind of entertainment that is vacuous and lacks intellectual stimulation is a sign of a society which allows adults to live suspended in fantasy within their own “personalized lifestyle cocoons,” (Maasik/Solomon 485) and to remain in a perpetual Never Never land, where play and fun are all that matter, and adult responsibilities are only secondary.