the dangers of webcomics

Submitted by Tom Swiss on Wed, 07/03/2013 - 15:26

Two things about me. One, like most hackers, I have the ability/capacity/flaw of being able to become temporarily obsessive about something. It's what has me up at 3 a.m. coding when I've fallen into deep hack mode -- or, similarly, up at 3 a.m. writing when something catches fire. (If I could do it at will, I might be a productive human being, but unfortunately it seems to be a random thing.)

Two, I'm not a huge comic book geek, but I've got a shelf of graphic novels and "trade paperback" collections of comics. I'm just enough of a fan to have all of the volumes of Gaiman's Sandman, and know Superman's Kryptonian name and Swamp Thing's reconned origin story, but on the scale of comics knowledge that's small beer. I might have become a bigger comics fan as a kid, but as I was an early reader teachers and parents discouraged me from comics in favor of "real" books. All in all that's not horrible, since I could chew through our library's SF collection. And somehow newspaper comics were exempt from this pressure, and it was also cool to check Tintin collections out of the library. Point is, I developed some comics literacy, the ability to enjoy the medium.

When I rediscovered comics in the 90s, Sandman and Dark Knight and all, there was a limit on each hit of graphic goodness. I'd borrow or buy one volume at a time, read through it, and have to wait for another trip to the library or bookstore for the next one.

But now, we have webcomics. Titles typically have a few years of complete archives instantly available.

Combine that with the ability to fall into a temporary obsession...and this is why a few weeks ago I was up at 3am Sunday catching up on over a decade's worth of Sam And Fuzzy, which has joined xkcd and The Adventures of Dr. McNinja on my reading list.

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