It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Kids who grew up in the 90s manga boom weren’t old enough to get scanners and the like, so the first webcomics were Newspaper comics based on nerdy things.
Like General Protection Fault, which was an even nerdier version of Dilbert.
And, of course, 1999′s Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade’s success would inspire a million “two dudes on a couch playing video games” clones.
A dude saw Penny Arcade and convinced his artist friend to make a comic with him. He wanted a standard 4-panel comic just like in the newspaper. But his friend was a huge weeb, and wanted to have four vertical panels like in Japanese 4koma comics. So they found a compromise format and started a comic in 2000.
Megatokyo had a lot of video game jokes early on, but quickly morphed into being about anime stuff, which happened to be pretty popular. In lieu of video game jokes, it introduced some light sex humor, a woman with huge boobs who wanted to fuck the gamer dude, and a sentient android that everyone accepted as normal because it was a silly comic and a lot of early-2000s internet humor tended towards randomness.
So you had these two really popular webcomics with elements that had obvious appeal: Dudes on a couch playing video games, sexy chicks with huge boobs who wanted to bang the MC, robots, and a weird square format that happened to be easier to read at lower resolutions. But could these elements be combined? One man dared to dream they could. And in 2002 he made his dream a reality
Given what a joke it’s rightfully since become, I feel the need to emphasize that CAD was one of the big early webcomics, and helped inspire it’s own share of imitators. It’s probably fair to say that it was more influential than even Penny Arcade, in that it had more elements that could be slavishly copied and passed around.
(If you ever wondered why it took so long for anyone in Questionable Content to acknowledge the weirdness of all the robots, it’s because random unexplained robots were really popular in webcomics in the early 2000s)
Meanwhile, it its own little isolated corner of the internet, Bob and George was popularizing “sprite comics”, a genre that consisted of itself,8-Bit Theater the next year, and a trillion shitty comics not worth mentioning. These were less influential than the Penny Arcade ==> Megatokyo ==> CAD ==> Questionable Content progression, but even this early the tiny webcomic scene was start to grow and split. Questionable Content was much more grounded than other webcomics at the time, and it’s rom-com plot was a big step away from the gag-a-day strips, but its influence was dulled because a bunch of other comics were starting to spring up. In the early 2000s, everyone was reading the same things because there were so few comics worth your time, but by the mid-2000s you were starting to see some quality.
You were also starting to see people getting serious about monetization. Scott McCloud’s dream of selling your comics for ten cents a pop and making bank in volume had crashed into the twin peaks of “most comics are also good and they’re free” and “credit cards charge fees, idiot”. Some of the better, more respected comics started joining together into one site with all of them that you needed to pay to access, kind of like how Slipshine works now except without the porn.
This didn’t work out financially, and it also meant that the best webcomics of the mid-2000s like Digger and Narbonic had really small audiences because you couldn’t read them without paying a fee first. Advertising was less useless then than it is now, but times were tough for the webcomics business in the pre-Patreon days. But some webcomics realized that they could find a profitable niche by appealing to new audiences. Instead of the straight white boys who made up the general webcomics audience, they’d reach out to a new demographic:
Perverts!
And, more specifically,
Furries!
Because furries really wanted furry content, and they were willing to pay for it. Pay a lot for it. Furry cheesecake comics prospered, and even though they didn’t have mainstream success, they were pulling it the big bucks compared to your average video game comic. People were starting to realize that 1000 hardcore fans was better than 100,000 casual fans, and a lot of comics started searching for a niche. (This is kind of related to webcomics becoming more progressive/inclusive a bit later, but that’s a whole ‘nother essay that I’m not the one to write)
These webcomics were pretty tame PG-13 stuff like you’d see in the shounen manga its creators were fans of, with nary a nipple to be seen, and a lot of them would die out in favor of straight-up porn.
In the late 2000s, art students realized that making a webcomic was a great way to build a portfolio, and we were hit with the Great Boom Of Webcomics By People Who Can Actually Draw. In 2003, that TwoKinds art was not only acceptable, it was top-tier for a free comic
By 2006 it was not the top tier
By 2008 it was no longer acceptable.
The world of webcomics became flooded with high-quality work by actual artists who’d gone to school and everything. The first generation of webcomics creators no longer ruled as the comics everyone read. Doctor Fun, the first-ever webcomic, ended in 2006. So did Narbonic and Mac Hall. Applegeeks, one of the most successful PA clones, ended in 2010 alongside 8-Bit Theater. Ctrl+Alt+Delete ended and rebooted to the interest of no one.
While in 2001, a bad artist could build a following just by updating regularly and slowly improving, that became a lot harder to do as the Bush Administration ended. There were too many brilliant artists making great content for someone to break onto the scene with simple art or sprites. And one day a lot of people gave up on ever being able to make a successful webcomic if their panels didn’t look like a magic the gathering card.
And it just so happened that that day, the 13th of April 2009, was a young man’s birthday…
Make webcomics long enough, and you’ll start showing up in Tumblr posts tagged #history
I do miss the late 90′s/ early 00′s comics though. There are actually a lot of under-the-radar comics that have great art (but never really figured out the marketing side of things) still running a decade or two later, just have to poke around a little.
This was a pretty great read. The only thing that surprised me, when delving back into the history of the earlier webcomics in the late 90s, was the lack of mention for Sluggy Freelance, which debuted a year prior to General Protection Fault:
By the time GPF was starting, Sluggy was publishing its first book collection. I admit, I wasn’t a GPF reader, so I can’t compare them content-wise. Just that, perhaps like GPF, and unlike successors such as Penny Arcade and CAD, Sluggy was less “two nerds on a couch” and more of a wide-ranging, gag-a-strip but overarching plot kind of comic with a large cast, leaning heavily on pop-cultural genre parodies. And its creator, Pete Abrams, is generally credited as the first webcomic artist who was able to monetize his creation and turn it into a full-time job. (Like GPF, Sluggy is still running; although, to be honest, I didn’t realize that until looking it up just now!)
Looking at this history, though, it’s fair to say that Sluggy (and GPF) were less influential than PA or CAD… at least based on the webcomics this article is covering. (But since it left out Sluggy entirely, it makes me wonder what other early webcomics it isn’t including in its overview of their evolution, and what else was going on out there simultaneously.)
Oh wow, Sluggy Freelance. I remember Sluggy. It was the epitome of a late 90s/early 2000s webcomic in its art, characters and tone.
It had every single webcomic trope from that era: Cute, furry, violent and foul-mouthed mascot. Two dudes who liked beer and nerdy things as main characters. An ostensibly slice-of-life setting but with crazy characters and tropes from sci-fi, fantasy and other genres thrown in, usually without explanation. Lots of “wacky random” humor. Sexy female characters who were sexualized in comedic ways.
(Though credit where it’s due–Zoe and Gwynn quickly became much more fully realized as characters than 90% of the “hot girls in a nerbro comic” that populated the webcomics of the early 2000s and were at least allowed to have personalities, character arcs and conversations that passed the Bechtel test. They were always secondary characters and often sexualized, but they were at least as human as their male counterparts.)
It’s hard to tell how many of the tropes Sluggy ticked off were a result of it influencing other comics, and how many were other comics influencing it. (There is definitely a “newspaper comic” flavor to a lot of its humor, especially early on.) But one thing about Sluggy that I remember made it stand out in its time (and yes, I was an avid reader back in the day) was its sense of continuity and tendency towards long, epic storylines.
Specifically, long, epic storylines based on dumb jokes. Like, there was this running gag early on about how their pet rabbit wanted to kill Santa Claus, right? Would you believe me if I said it turned into a multi-storyline arc that spanned years, eventually involving a whole mythology around Nightmare Before Christmas-style Holiday dimensions, the rabbit gaining godlike powers, multiple near-apocalypses and ended with a character being removed from space-time and then followed into the time-out-of-time realm he’d ended up in which had its own mythology and rules?
(Also at one point Santa was mutated into a killer alien that was allergic to Nerf.)
It had a surprisingly strong continuity too, even if it meant the storytelling often devolved into wall-of-text explanations about how everything was linked together.
If nothing else I think Sluggy Freelance probably deserves a nod for being the first major comic to succeed with the “take a dumb joke from ten strips back and turn it into an action-adventure storyline” attitude that you see in successful webcomics like Doctor McNinja and Order of the Stick, that came along just a few years later. (And tbh, did it better. Sorry, Sluggy.)
Marshmellowmilktea 