Webcomics of the New Millennium
Well you’ve been a long standing patron of Charlie Brown, Calvin or Dilbert for their self-deprecating humor, vivid leaps of imagination and witty yet incisive commentary on the white collared. But then if by some accidental occurrence you ended up cryogenically freezing yourself or in a less plausible event -got busy with life; and lost touch with your passion for comics!
However you often wondered if strip comics still preserved the existential angst, absurdity and the morbid legacy that rightfully characterized the latter half of last century. Being equally concerned as you about the cultural direction of this succinct but potent medium I decided to investigate and wandered the post-Y2K webcomic landscape. These adventures in webcomic-ville spanned from the delightfully original to the horrendously hackneyed.
Unquestionably, cherry picking a list of Webcomics is a matter of personal taste. That’s why ‘List of Top N things’ nature of articles; almost never agree with each other. The assemblage offered here is not a list of most popular or critically acclaimed. It’s a list that captures the essence of the new millennium webcomic. It’s also a list of original webcomics by independent artists that I personally enjoy.
The Perry Bible Fellowship
Nicholas Gurewitch’s The Perry Bible Fellowship originated in the Syracuse University newspaper 'The Daily Orange'. The comics are usually three or four panels long, with meticulously colored illustrations and crafty cursives. The art varies from minimalistic human figures to emulations of greats like Robert Crumb and Edward Gorey in a few rare tribute strips.
Humor frequently relies on juxtaposition of the text with a visual gag and does not always have a punchline. Gurewitch has mastered the ‘soaker’, which endures in your mind before finally sinking in. The joke is often linch-pinned in a deeper philosophical musing which makes it ever more haunting.
xkcd
The webcomic is created by Randall Munroe- A former NASA Roboticist. The comic's tagline describes it as "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. The comic does not strictly adhere to any panel format, recurrently featuring landscapes, mathematical patterns, graphs, charts and equations along with scientific in-jokes and pop-culture references. The characters usually are simple stick figures sometimes accessorized with hats influenced from ‘Men in Hats’. Similarly Kurt Halsey's bleak romances can be seen as antecedents to certain romance strips which are not intended to be humorous. The central character to the comic is often a geek which makes a strong association with the target audience. Subsequent panels often reveal a geek quirk, a non-sequitor, irony or self-reference that capitalizes on this strong character association. This particularly gives XKCD its cult following, so much that it has on occasions, inspired original research.
Dinosaur Comics
Possibly this is the best example of constrained art in recent times on any medium. The Canadian author Ryan North (a computer science major in linguistics) sets dialogues between T-Rex and his gay comedic foil Utahraptor within a fixed comic panel that has rarely changed in more than 1000 entries. The boldly colored anthromorphic T Rex serves as a perfect anachronism to the typewriter text and the philosophical themes of the comic such as death, nature of happiness, moral relativism et al.
Cyanide and Happiness
Well here’s Wikipedia’s terse definition of the comic which I believe is fairly accurate:
Cyanide and Happiness is best described as dark, cynical, often offensive, and exceedingly irreverent. Frequent topics of humor include disabilities, terrorism, rape, cancer, murder, necrophilia, pedophilia, sexual deviancy, self-harm, and vehicular manslaughter. These topics are usually introduced in an unexpected or shocking way that is jarringly different from the natural "obvious" reading on the strip thus far.
There are few comics that have the kind of breadth in humor despite maintaining its niche in dark humor. Another thing the comic really excels at is the use of Meta fiction or self-reference where characters acknowledge their status as cartoons in a webcomic and discuss what is expected of them as a consequence.
