This week, my students began reading scholarship on print culture and community building, beginning with the classics in the form of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, and then moving on to some more current scholarship: Margaret Galvan’s “The Lesbian Norman Rockwell,” about the print communities of Alison Bechdel and Nami Kitsune Hatfield’s “TRANSforming Spaces,” about the communities of authors and readers webcomics about trans experience have facilitated.  While I feel a bit ambivalent about how overused Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community” can be in scholarship (for him, it’s distinctly tied to nationalism, and lots of people who use the concept ignore that aspect), that concept and the Radway reading were good ways to get students starting to actually dig into the communities of readers for webcomics.  One of my students wrote about the niche community of Lunar Baboon as seen through Twitter, and another student went searching through Amazon reviews for comments about Hark! A Vagrant.  In the meantime, Galvan’s article got students thinking about the archival qualities of the web and the role they play in making marginalized audiences visible, while N. Hatfield’s article made them recognize the important role niche communities can play, particularly for those struggling with identity.  Community, here, as elsewhere in the class seemed to be an uninterrogated given, and I want to spend this blog post discussing how I see communities differing from audiences.

Audience is a broad category that does not necessarily imply interaction, though audiences can certainly interact with digital media.  All comments left behind are evidence of audience, regardless of their content.  A community is a subset of an audience that, in my view, follows three principles: 1) members express self awareness of themselves as part of a community, 2) members interact with and address one another, not just the author or creator, and 3) membership is sustainable over time.  While the first two principles are relatively easy to track in comments sections based on individual comments, the last has been a difficult element to prove, particularly with large comment sections like Hyperbole and a Half.

In broadening my focus from a single comic post, I am developing a new methodology for studying webcomics that requires me to sift through a lot more information in order to come to conclusions.  I have made my task even more difficult by broadening in two different ways, one that captures serial publication and the other that considers the webcomic within its broader digital context, including comment sections and other page and site elements.  My initial idea when trying to track sustainable membership in the community formed in the comments sections of the posts on depression was to start in early comment sections and track forward.  While this was possible for the early years of Brosh’s work, when comments were limited to less than 100 per post, it became increasingly difficult to correlate users across comments as the number of comments increased.  I also had no clue whether the people I was tracking in early comment sections would eventually appear in the comments for the posts on depression.  Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content I was trying to process and analyze, I needed to develop a different approach.  Enter the idea of backwards planning, which comes from my teaching.  Instead of starting at the beginning and going forward, I am now recording commenters from the depression posts and tracking them backward in other comment sections, paying particular attention to commenters who claim to have been reading for a long time or who identify themselves as part of Brosh’s reading community.  This new approach allows me to distinguish Brosh’s audience from her community.

A week or so ago, my students gave presentations on the webcomics they have been following throughout the semester.  The aim of the presentation was to test their chosen webcomics against two of the tenets from the framework we developed at the beginning of class and to develop one new tenet about webcomics based on their observations and scholarly readings.  They were to use their observation of the webcomic alongside those tenets to make a case for whether their peers should include the webcomic in the final exhibition.

As might be expected, xkcd was a clear darling amongst the group, with two presentations that recommended its inclusion because of its popularity, creativity, community, and use of digital affordances.  One of the two students even developed an animation (above) that showed how Randall Munroe uses the infinite canvas.  I was particularly excited to see my students capture webcomics’ global reach, with one student looking at the Korean Webtoon Cheese in the Trap and another looking at Dragon Ball Multiverse as a web-based community of fans.  We also had three presentations on The Loneliest Astronaut, which I had not heard of before the class, with the three presenters managing to vary their presentations considerably.  Two who went on the same day gave different recommendations, with one suggesting peers should not include it because it failed to reach broad audiences and the other claiming they should include for the same reason, as a way of examining what doesn’t work in capturing attention.  This same student also tracked the development of the comic over time from non-continuous narrative, to more continuous storyline, pointing out how the earlier approach allowed for collaboration amongst many guest artists, while the latter told a compelling story, but likely wasn’t as shareable for casual viewing on social media.

The element of webcomics that seemed to stand out most clearly was the success developed by posting on a regular schedule.  Given my scholarly interests in seriality, you can imagine I’d gravitate to this topic, though I don’t think I did anything specific that encouraged so many students to choose this particular tenet from our framework.  As some of my students noted, being able to get in the habit of returning to the same space at regular intervals helps maintain investment, and the idea of regular posting is a cornerstone of social media management.  While I take these points, I want to spend my post today using Hyperbole and a Half as a way to complicate the assumption of success with regular posting.

While Brosh’s comic started in 2009, it wasn’t until 2010 that she gained a large following.  Her breakout post from April 2010, “The Alot is Better Than You at Everything,” has 784 comments compared to the previous record of 132 comments.  The attention may stem from the fact that she posted 78 times in 2010, one to three times a month.  After the Alot post, number of comments remains high, with each getting at least 300 and quite a few reaching into the thousands.  This evidence suggests that regular posting in 2010 helped Brosh build her audience, as my students have suggested most webcomics authors do.

However, the post that has the most comments, “Depression Part Two,” with 5,000 appeared after an absence so long that Brosh wrote an announcement post before it.  The second most commented on post, “Adventures in Depression” with 4,624 comments, came after a five month gap.  Many of the comments on each of these welcome Brosh back, with community members saying they have missed her and have been waiting for her to post.  I suppose, in some ways, once Brosh had helped her readers develop a certain set of habits and then disappeared, the gap between posts built tension and suspense. Moreover, because HH is an autobiographical comic, readers feel like the posts help them get to know Brosh as a person, and the fact that she left after posting about dealing with depression caused concern in the community.  Of course, there are likely other factors at play in helping Brosh build audience, such as her engagement with followers on Reddit, and there are other ways of judging “success” other than comments, especially because not every reader comments, but while a regular schedule might contribute to audience engagement, it is not the only factor at play.

The students in the course finished up their scholarly reading about webcomics this week and moved on to considering webcomics as a form of digital media.  Their final scholarly readings were Geoffrey Long’s piece from the online supplement to Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s Spreadable Media and Fenty, Houp and Taylor’s piece on webcomics as the continuation of the underground comix revolution.  Fenty, Houp, and Taylor’s piece helped us begin a more in depth conversation about the importance of webcomics for marginalized audiences and authors, an aspect of the subject I have been interested in since I put together a panel on women and webcomics for MLA 2015.  The idea that the web provides a space with fewer gatekeepers resonated particularly well with a student who has been following a webcomic about detention centers in Australia, especially since prisoners are often overlooked. We spoke briefly about why spread might matter for marginalized audiences, but we’ll be getting more into that aspect of webcomics later in the semester as we transition to thinking about print communities of marginalized audiences.

Long’s piece, which lays out the many different ways and reasons users share webcomics around the internet, meshed well with the readings about digital media, which considered Axel Bruns’s concept of “produsage,” alongside Richard Lanham’s ideas about the “attention economy.”  For those unfamiliar, produsage is Bruns’s portmanteau that identifies the blurred lines between consumption and production in the digital realm, while Lanham’s concept marks attention as a limited resource when browsing online.  Though there was some slippage during our conversations, in my mind, between collaboration and feedback in terms of supply and demand, Bruns’s piece encouraged students to dig deeper into how reader interaction shapes subsequent content.  For example, one of my students wrote a blog post where he correlated the number of comments to the development of the author’s style.  Another student wrote about the xkcloud phenomenon on XKCD, where readers submit content and Munroe turns uses those suggestions to guide his art.

While I would identify the latter post as true produsage, I’m eager to see how students interpret the supply and demand element the other student identifies once we get to some of the readings on print comics.  From the perspective of the attention economy, I had students engage with whether their comic failed to succeed in the attention economy or with how having a corporate sponsor helped the comic succeed in the attention economy.  Blog posts and in class discussion led to the following question: Does produsage, the ability for reader interaction and, to use a term often applied to digital media, remix, determine success in the attention economy through spread?

To answer this question, first we need to ask: How do webcomics spread?  Our class conversations have turned again and again to the importance of being able to excerpt in order to share.  This idea seems to privilege non-continuous comics over those following a continuous storyline.  And it holds true for many of the most popular webcomics, like XKCD, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and The Oatmeal.  Hyperbole and a Half posts also stand on their own, though reading over time helps provide a more complete look at Brosh’s personality as we follow the exploits of the character based on her.  This excerptability is evident in the way the posts on depression have travelled the web, with links appearing in such vastly different places as on websites for lawyers with depression and listicles collecting webcomics about depression.  Communities of both patients and caregivers have circulated the comic as an example of, on the one hand, a sense that you are not alone, and on the other, advice on how to relate to a loved one with depression.  If the webcomic were not easily sharable through a single link (or occasionally two links), would it have traveled so far?  If this were a continuous story, told over time, would it be as popular?  I’m not sure, but this seems to be one of the negative aspects of seriality that I often overlook in my research, the idea that, especially in our digital culture where we so often read on small screens, we are looking for the whole story, in the shortest format possible, and sustained attention must be earned.  There are successful webcomics with continuous stories, to be sure, (e.g. Questionable Content, Girls with Slingshots, Unsounded, Stand Still Stay Silent, etc.), but the engagement is fundamentally different in some interesting ways.

The other question this brings up is: What are the limits within which spreadability determines success?  To answer this question, it’s useful to interrogate the meme (also excerpted from Hyperbole and a Half) that begins this post.  That particular panel got excerpted and then travelled, and as it spread, people remixed it and it reached new audiences.  Yet many people know only the meme and not its association with the webcomic.  Unlike the posts on depression, which feature heavily in introductions to Brosh, the panel that became the meme is seldom used to identify Brosh as an author despite the fact that it is arguably more popular.  I’ve had students over several semesters wonder about the relationships between memes and comics, and I think this example presents a limit case.  Why are the Depression posts comics, while “Clean All the Things!” is a meme?  Differences include narrative, length, attachment to original author and links back to original context.  Depression does not get remixed, either.  If we define the limit as original context or author, how does that affect comics excerpted to social media feeds?  Does it have to be remixed before it becomes a meme?  What constitutes remix?  Clearly, many questions to consider as our class exploration continues next week with student presentations.

 

This week, my students read Aaron Kashtan’s “Click and Drag” chapter from Between Pen and Pixel, and Frank Bramlett’s “Linguistics in Digital Comics,” from an edited collection on linguistics in popular culture.  They also experienced Homestuck, both in its print edition and on the web.  For those unfamiliar, in “Click and Drag,” Kashtan uses the persistence of print webcomics to complicate Scott McCloud’s notion of the “infinite canvas,” which refers to the vast amounts of freedom webcomics creators have because they are not limited to the space of a page.  Bramlett is also interested in digital affordances, primarily the appearance of alt-text (text that appears when you mouse over an image) and hidden comics, which appear after clicking. Understandably given the focus of these articles, conversations on blogs (both across posts and in comments)were mostly about the affordances of the print versus the digital and why we need both, with some students expressing preferences for one or the other.  I kind of loved seeing them assert the merit of print books, a stance which generally supports the broader claims Kashtan makes in his book about the evolution, rather than the disappearance of print.

This week I’d like to discuss how scholarly focus on anomalous webcomics has prevented attention to the ways less anomalous webcomics take advantage of the opportunities the web provides, thus limiting the conversation about webcomics so far.

Homestuck is a scholarly darling in thinking about webcomics (someone this week referred to it as “the Ulysses of webcomics), particularly because it makes use of the infinite canvas, incorporating Flash animations and sound files into what basically ends up seeming, at least in the beginning, like a video game that plays itself.  As a print object, Andrew Hussie includes commentary in footnotes that one student compared to movie commentary on a DVDs.  In these footnotes he often references the limitations of the print object, such as when he recommends that the reader take the page out and shake it to emulate the animated gif that appeared in the online version and then highlights how they have now ruined the book.  I assigned this text because I am perplexed by the fact that the print object even exists.

As this description might demonstrate, Homestuck is not like other webcomics.  The infinite canvas is not something most web cartoonists take advantage of.  The anomalous case allows us to explore many possibilities of the medium.  Kashtan and Bramlett are engaged in this case study of the anomalous, with Kashtan discussing an XKCD comic that takes advantage of the infinite canvas and Bramlett focusing on the alt-text feature, which, as my students have discovered, most web cartoonists don’t use.  In this case, the scholarship seems to pay attention to an object in order to advance the medium it discusses. But with a scholarly area as young as webcomics, it seems to me that we should be paying more attention to the norm.  Instead of denigrating the short strip by casting it as a pale comparison of newspaper strips, what if we thought about the opportunities it provides.

Perhaps this kind of limited thinking has led to the many discussions of webcomics that treat them as print objects, which in turn has led to the general lack of scholarship on webcomics as a form.  For example, Hyperbole and a Half is usually discussed as a print book rather than a webcomic.  People can buy it, hold it, and pour over its pages. But as with Homestuck, the experience of reading it in print is fundamentally different.  I’d argue that Brosh actually takes advantage of the infinite canvas online, though in a more subtle way than Hussie, through the way she creates a reading rhythm in the scroll through the screen. This makes sense because she has compared her work as a cartoonist to stand up comedy, which also deals with timing.  Both when scrolling and when reading on a screen, I have control of how long I spend on each image, but the page turn interrupts both visually and physically, while scrolling is smooth and continuous.  Scrolling through multiple panels in a row that are visually similar almost feels like viewing an animation, an aspect I lose on the page.  We simply don’t see these features when we only look at the book.

Perhaps if we were to think about webcomics that aren’t anomalous, the ones that travel around the internet and get posted on social media, we would be more likely to acknowledge these subtleties of form.  There’s a place for anomalous scholarship, but the case study still has value, especially when we are just beginning to build a framework for a new form.

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.

This blog will be a public space for posting research related to webcomics, as explored in the English 1102: Webcomics, Print, and Digital Culture first year writing course I am teaching at Georgia Tech in Spring 2019.  In the course, students will hone their research skills by testing out theories presented in research on webcomics, print, and digital media.  They will be keeping blogs (see blogroll) where they experiment with how and whether scholarly readings apply to their chosen webcomics.  Everyone in the class will follow a webcomic for the entirety of the course as they test theories, and I have chosen to follow Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half, a webcomic blog where Brosh published autobiographical comics in a crudely drawn, yet expressive style, from 2009 to 2013.  Posts include a meditation on the correct way to write “a lot,” a reevaluation of the pain scale, an account of misadventures with geese in the house, and, my personal favorite, The God of Cake, which I still cannot read in a public place because it makes me laugh so hard.  While we might easily dismiss the comic as merely entertaining, I think we have something to gain from taking its humor seriously, from seeing how Brosh wields humor as a digital creator trying to attract readers, but then mobilizes that community to discuss serious, stigmatized subjects like mental health.

Part of my decision to follow Hyperbole and a Half stems from its popularity: a number of Brosh’s images still travel the internet as memes and her posts on depression have been shared in numerous communities.  In comics studies and graphic medicine circles, her work has become canonical when discussing mental health, so much so that chapters on Hyperbole and Half appear both in Hillary Chute’s recently published Why Comics? and in the Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives collection published in 2016.

Yet, except for a brief mention in Why Comics?, those who discuss the comic discuss it as a book, not as a webcomic.  When we focus only on the print form, we miss essential opportunities that webcomics can provide, such as providing a sense of community in comments sections or building an audience by posting at intervals.  While my own work has focused mainly on community formation and spread of Adventures in Depression and Depression Part Two, there is much to be learned from examining this webcomic as a form of digital media that developed over time.  We watch Brosh develop her art in public and can see what kinds of posts gain followings.  Through Brosh, we see how medical narratives are integral to diary comics published on a regular basis, as she begins discussing medical experience very early on in the comic’s run.  From a digital media standpoint, Brosh is a master of using screen-oriented scrolling rhythm for comedic and emotional effect.  The website itself, despite only being 5 years out of date, seems of another digital era, posted on Blogspot with an endless list of image links on the sidebar and outdated links to forums long gone.  Brosh’s abrupt disappearance shortly after the publication of the book has turned her site into a piece of digital history, while also providing evidence that, as Aaron Kashtan claims, print is still the webcomic author’s ultimate goal.

With these as jumping off points, I embark on this research journey with my students, writing in public as I ask them to write in public, using the very digital mode that we seek to study.