This week, students chose the webcomics they will be following over the course of the semester.  To help them select, I provided them with links to the Webcomics Web Archive from the Library of Congress and to the Global Webcomics Web Archive from Columbia University.  Created relatively recently, these archives demonstrate that librarians, once again, are ahead of the curve in thinking about the importance of comics.

The delay may stem from the fact that webcomics creators generally archive their work on their site as a way for new readers to catch up or to binge content.  However, creator priorities generally relate to comics content only, and some creators have even remastered their comics, redrawing old comics using their new tools.  Archivists and scholars, though, have preserved comics as originally posted, and the digital archives resemble those in the WayBack Machine.  This method preserves to the fullest extent possible the whole page: the comments, the ads, the website formatting, and the comics as originally posted.  I will be interested to see how these differences play out in student research over the course of the semester, since some of them selected based on the archives and some chose webcomics they already follow.

Student choices reflect the diversity of webcomics as a form.  Some are studying old favorites like XKCD or Girls With Slingshots, while others want to think through social media darlings like The Nib or Poorly Drawn Lines.  Some of the comics are new to me, such as Sin Titulo and The Last Mechanical Monster, and it will be interesting to see what gaps students identify in the archive as they explore these older comics. A few students have taken this opportunity to investigate how women specifically have used this form, which involves less gatekeeping, to reflect their concerns and their lives, such as the student following Sticky Comics by Christiann MacAuley.

As students selected their comics and in response to my forthcoming piece on webcomics for the Keywords in Comic Studies volume, we started to build a definition for this medium.  Students questioned what counted as a webcomic both in my office and on their blogs.  Is a meme a webcomic?  Does it have to have a continuous narrative?  Alternately, do long stories later published as books count?  What about fan comics only posted online?  This last question, in particular, appealed to my interests in the history of reader contributions to comics, and I have advised the student studying Multiverse, a fan comic based on Dragon Ball Z, to consider his comic as a limit case which will be useful in identifying the boundaries of the form we are investigating.

This week, my students have shown me that, indeed, webcomics are out there in social media feeds and across other kinds of digital networks.  The pedagogical approach I am taking, where students each follow a different comic, is facilitated by webcomics’ accessibility.  The fact that they came to me with requests to study webcomics they already follow demonstrates the vanguard nature of this form and makes a case for the importance of its scholarly study.