web comics yay!

So, one really good example of how the internet has changed how people communicate & consume media is... web comics! I love to read the comics in the paper but there are also several that I love even more that are strictly available online. The newspaper has the classics, but web comics have several advantages over print comics...

• they aren't subject to censorship (newspapers can stop printing comics that their readers object to)
• they can be in color every day!
• the increased competition means that each artist has to be on top of their game every day (Wikipedia says there are over 38,000 web comics being published!)
• they can be in whatever format they want... a single comic could be 10 or 6 or 1 panel long depending on how long it takes to tell that day's joke/story
• because they can have a niche audience as opposed to comics in the paper that have to appeal to a wider audience, they can be more specialized. 

 My two favorite examples of well-written, funny, interesting web comics are: Dinosaur Comics & Achewood. They are both pretty popular so I apologize if I'm not telling you anything new, but they are my two favorites so I wanted to share them. Dinosaur Comics is written by Ryan North, a charming young Canadian who writes witty observations about modern life in the voice of a neon green T. Rex. Sometimes they are super funny. Here is a good one.  If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see a black-lined box? That is a list of other comics that Ryan thinks are worth publicizing. Web-based artists frequently depend on that kind of reciprocal advertising to build their audiences & find enough readers to make a profit.

The other comic I wanted to talk about, Achewood, is in some ways the polar opposite of Dinosaur Comics. It's still funny... hilarious actually... but it's darker & more pessimistic. Also, instead of a one-off joke in every strip, author Chris Onstad often creates elaborate story lines. This comic is the end of a story about little Phillipe going missing & the daring rescue. It's a good example of just how weird & random Achewood can be, but at the same time the world created in the strip has perfect internal consistency. Achewood is a good example of an awesome comic that just never would have had a chance to be picked up by the newspapers...it's just too WEIRD. and also dirty, plenty of the strips are not child-appropriate. But so wonderful! Achewood makes me happy when nothing else can.