Evan Dahm, the amazingly prolific artist behind Riceboy, Order of Tales, and Vattu, recently weighed in on the value of webcomics… GOOD webcomics, that is, in this article.
He begins simply enough:
A medium gains legitimacy and respect when people making work in that medium legitimize and respect it.
He lays out a short, and compelling case that webcomics will continue to gather more artists and readers, filling the role that “indie” comics used to fill. Now that the medium is free to share and free to read, the bar to entry for both artist and reader is much lower.
Unfortunately, so is the quality bar.
As I’ve remarked before, now that anyone with a computer, some time, some software and website can slap something together and put up a webcomic, the webcomics world has become flooded. Some of it is crap. OK, let’s be honest – most of it is crap. There is simply no guard at the door. Each well-written, well-drawn webcomic shares the same platform with dozens or even hundreds of poorly written attempts, scribbled on notebook paper during algebra class, scrawled on napkins on the bus to work, or clumsily thrown together on a state-of-the-art Cintiq and written with all the care of a hastily-composed drunken mobile text.
If Evan’s thesis is correct, then the corollary is also true, that when people who disrespect and delegitimize a medium work in that medium, it’s hard for that medium to find respect and legitimacy. At the same time, we’ve seen professional artistic and comic heavyweights like Doug Tenapel and Michel Gagne making entries into the form. The quality level of webcomics, as with indie comics previously, stretches from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Evan supposes that the market will decide, that people will naturally gravitate toward excellence. I hope he’s right. We live in an environment currently where popularity has very little to do with quality, and we are all the poorer for it.
My advice, dear reader, because you can really help here – seek out and patronize quality work. Help others find it. Ignore the crap. If you’re making a webcomic, don’t make a crappy one. Respect the form, and who knows? Maybe what Evan suggests could come to pass, that eventually the prefix will drop, and we’ll just call them comics, and they’ll all be enjoyable.
Here’s to that.
