This blog post is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan
One of the weird things about being on the internet for a bit is seeing entire mediums essentially die out. And for me, one of the saddest deaths is the death of webcomics! I don't intend to write this as some sort of in-depth look into how they died - I think I can make an educated guess and say it was probably just the rise of social media and the lack of interest of consumers to support webcomic merch as they did in the past. I more so just want to talk a bit about them in general. Late night webcomic thoughts™.
My all time favorite webcomic is still to this day Brawl in the Family (which has a kickstarter currently active!) This was a webcomic themed around Smash Brothers Brawl, active from 2008-2014 (Realizing the death of BitF was over a decade ago now is something else!!!) I have no clue how I originally found it, probably the Super Mario Wiki forums? I was an active lurker of those as a young kid. Once I did find it, however, I became an obsessive reader. I have vivid memories of reading all the comics, watching all the videos, listening to the songs on repeat, etc. Some kids had Charles Schulz, I had Matthew Taranto.
I thought it was super funny, and honestly looking back? It was! I still think it was incredible, especially as most video game humor (and video game webcomics especially) was so hacky. It's easy to fall into stupid "lol this isn't realistic" or "lol what if Mario had a gun???" Dorkly-type humor (and I say this as a kid who watched more Dorkly than I should have). Brawl in the Family was no Calvin and Hobbes, but there was a layer of professionalism there. It was clever! There's a reason my Dededoll, which I begged my parents to buy, still sits across from me as I write this.
I also spent way more time than I should have on the BitF forums. Also just on forums in general. I was too young to contribute so I just read lines and lines of what random adults were talking about. It's a weird feeling knowing that unlike most forums I read as a kid, such as the Mario Wiki forums or Zelda Dungeon, the BitF forums are just completely gone. Sad stuff. I tried looking for it just now to check, and any guest just sees a "you are banned" message from vBulletin. Image verification doesn't work so you can't register a new account either, I tried :(
Of course Brawl in the Family wasn't the only gaming webcomic I read, just the only one I gave that much of a shit about. I read my Awkward Zombies, my VG Cats, my Brentalfloss comic (please tell me someone else remembers that????) I read a lot of them more so on other sites. I was a big Dorkly kid, as mentioned before, so I read a lot of the comics posted on the Dorkly website. (Side note: I wish more people had nostalgia for the website because honestly I spent more time there than the channel, need to talk to someone else about PWN Up!!)
There's something so poignant about webcomics to me. There was no Comics Code for the internet, so you could make a comic about or containing practically anything. And people did! The internet was like the world's best and worst indie comic shop. In the 2000s and early 2010s there were so many different people making webcomics, from kids making sprite comics about Mario and Sonic to professional stuff like the Perry Bible Fellowship. You could make a comic centered around some serious story, gag-a-day strips with random humor, political satire, parodies, porn, and so much more. I think it says something that XKCD, arguably the biggest webcomic surviving, is mostly about science and math. You could really do anything. And there was no need for publishers!! (Unless you wanted to make a book out of your strips)
And each of these comics had bona fide communities. Not just fandoms, communities. The intimacy of the 2000s internet combined with the popularity of message boards for basically anything meant nearly every comic had a fanbase constantly in communication with each other and the author(s). I saw this first hand with BitF. Most of those forum posts weren't about the comic, they were just about random shit. You couldn't do that with physical media, and you can't really do it now.
It's a shame. Webcomics meant so much to me as a kid. I used to spend hours daydreaming about writing my own (Smash-centric, of course). I couldn't draw then, but I assumed I would be able to in the future. I still can't draw but even if I could it'd be pretty difficult to build the webcomic empire younger me dreamed of. The medium that gave me hours of fun, the medium that helped me go through my days as a lonely nerdy kid, the medium that made me feel like there were people like me out there, the medium that introduced me to so many different artistic ideas, is mostly dead. That makes me sad.
Then again, blogs are dead too and yet here I am writing one. Maybe the idea of a Liam webcomic isn't too out of reach after all.
Song of the Day: The Squish - You Once Said