A Historical Approach to Webcomics: Digital Authorship in the Early 2000s

Abstract

Available on the web and often excerpted by the visually-oriented algorithms of social media feeds, webcomics arguably have the broadest reach of any form of comics, yet they remain under-theorized. Given the close association with the development of the mode (digital technology) and the medium (webcomics) that Campbell (2006) points out in his history of the form, webcomics ought to be studied alongside other digital media, approached not just as comics, but as a series of websites and webpages where comics appear amidst such elements as ads, banners, links, and comments, all of which shift over time. By discussing not just the comics, but also the contextual elements of the webpages and websites of reciprocal guest comics from Jeph Jacques’s Questionable Content (QC) and Sam Logan’s Sam and Fuzzy, this article applies a historically-focused approach to webcomics as digital media to demonstrate how the attention economy, where ‘eyeballs’ are a form of currency, recasts relationships between authors so they are characterized by cooperative competition via webcomics collectives. Webcomics, as serial texts published by the same author over long periods of time, can teach us much about how developments in digital technology have shaped digital media over time.