Faster Than a Speeding Packet...

Comics on the Internet

By Mark Shainblum

Please note: This article was written in 1996 for Sympatico Netlife magazine and is quite obsolete. I don’t vouch for any of the links listed below.

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It’s ironic. As a writer of comic books and newspaper strips, I live with comics on a daily basis, in the here and now. Yet they still evoke my childhood, lazy Saturday mornings with fried eggs and toast and the Montreal Star comics section spread across the kitchen table; or leisurely summer bike rides up to Mackle Handy Store, where Bill the owner would let you sit on the shelf at the bottom of the magazine rack and read Superman and Green Lantern and The Avengers to your heart’s content, as long as you bought something in the end.

There’s no way I could have known, in those Mackle Store days, that comics would change beyond recognition in less than two decades. There’s no way I could have foreseen the rise of comic book specialty stores and independent publishers, and twenty dollar book format “graphic novels.” There’s certainly no way I could have known about the rise of web-comics; comics painted in phosphor on a screen instead of ink and dye on paper. The Internet was still the plaything of academics and soldiers in those days; it’s doubtful one person in fifty outside universities or the military even knew it existed. Yet we sure know it exists today, and as in so many other areas of life, it is re-shaping the comics right before our eyes.

Ironically, comics as we know them today originated almost exactly 100 years ago, with the 1895 publication of the first comic strip, Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, in the Chicago Tribune. Later known as The Yellow Kid, the strip was a groundbreaker in every sense of the word, and it soon opened the floodgates to a host of imitators. The first comic books appeared early in the 20th century, in the form of hardcover reprints of popular newspaper strips like The Yellow Kid, Mutt & Jeff and Little Nemo in Slumberland.

The more traditional newsprint colour pamphlet that we know today as the comic book was invented by salesman Max Gaines, who in 1936 launched More Fun Comics #1. More Fun was also an immediate hit, and it eventually spawned the company which would become DC Comics. Two years later, in 1938, DC began a modest little publication called Action Comics, which featured a strip called Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and modest Canadian-born Joe Shuster.The rest, of course, is history.

Comics have changed so much since then that if you somehow magically brought Outcault or Gaines to the present-day, they’d just be mystified. Superheroes still challenge evil and funny animals still bop each other with bricks and flower-pots, but this similarity is only skin-deep. Comics are an established medium now; older even than movies, radio, and television and certainly much older than the Internet. The innocent charm of a form no one took seriously is long gone, replaced by cynical multi-million dollar merchandising of well-known characters on the one hand; and serious striving for genuine artistic merit on the other.

Computers have also had a massive effect on the comics; an effect which can be broken into two phases: They first began to transform the field over a decade ago, when digital colouring and illustration programs first hit the market, and when comics first made the leap to computer-controlled, full-colour offset printing presses. The way comics were produced and printed --unchanged since the 1930’s-- altered radically overnight. This leap to good paper, good colour and digital reproduction was more important than you might think, because the terrible print quality of comic books up until the early 1980’s actively discouraged artists from doing their best work. It also wiped out whole professions, including old-fashioned comic book colouring and lettering, painstaking hand-crafts now performed instantly within the computer.

We’re just at the beginning of the second phase. Perhaps because they are a such a graphic and universally accessible medium, perhaps because the majority of comic book readers and the majority of Internet users spring from almost exactly the same cross-section of the population, comics are migrating to the Internet at a dizzying pace. Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian media theorist, always claimed that new media encompass the old and transform them utterly. Television, for example, encompasses both movies and radio but it’s completely inaccurate to call it “radio with pictures” or a “movie screen in your living room.” Comics may eventually be similarly transformed by the Internet. Scott McLoud, author of the acclaimed bookUnderstanding Comics: The Invisible Artform, is hard at work codifying a theory of digital comics, because he believes that paper comics as we now know them may completely disappear in the next decade or so.

Not even Superman, it seems, is immune to the overwhelming power of this new medium.

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Even today, the first thing you notice when you start your quest for comic book content on the Internet, is just how much of it there is, certainly more than any casual netsurfer would be able to cover in a reasonable amount of time. With comics, as with so many other things on the net, you must be selective and search thoroughly. Random following of links may be fun, but more often than not will lead you up blind alleys. There’s so much good material out there that it would be a shame to waste time on the bad.

LAUNCH POINTS

Though there’s plenty of material on comics in text-only areas like Gopher and Usenet (see sidebar), the World Wide Web is really the natural home for any picture-based medium on the Internet. There’s everything under the sun on the Comics Web; from fan-created pages devoted to Superman and Dilbert, to publisher-owned corporate websites to original comic books and strips which appear nowhere else. There are even those sites like Toronto’s Internet Comics(http://www.inetcomics.com/) which defy easy categorization because they are something new under the sun, something for which no earlier metaphor like “magazine” or “publisher” quite works.

Sympatico itself can simplify your search for comics. There’s a link to United Media, home ofPeanuts, Beetle Bailey and Marmaduke at (http://www1.sympatico.ca:80/Contents/News+Magazines/news_stand.html#canan) and you can search for comics across the net using search engines like Maple Square, Alta Vista, Yahoo!and Excite directly from the Sympatico Search the Web page (http://www1.sympatico.ca/Tools/search.html) and Be warned! There is so much material out there that you will get literally hundreds of hits unless you tune your search very finely.

Another option is to start your comics quest on the Internet with a good general-interest comic book or comic strip website like the following:

AAA-Aardvark-Wraithspace Comics Index (http://comics.redweb.com/) is a graphically simple but extremely useful comic book resource. It has hundreds of links in categories ranging from Animation to Biographies to Comixographies to Creators and Criticisms and Web-Comix, and it’s as good for finding little-known alternative comics as offerings from the major publishers.

Charles S. Lepage’s New Comics Release List(http://www.america.net/~cslepage/ncrl.html) is attractive and up-to-date site which, yes, lists all the comic books being released on a weekly basis --an incredibly useful tool all by itself-- but the site is much more than a simple listing. It’s graphically attractive but not browser-chokingly over-designed, and it’s chock full of useful information for fans and professionals alike.

The HYPE! Comic Cafe (http://www.hype.com/comics/cafe/comicafe.htm), is a basic little site offering comic book industry gossip, a feedback area and a new comics release list filched from the site above. Because it’s not kept up to date regularly and is full of typos and wonky grammar, it’s not as inviting a place as the previous sites, but it does have more (and nastier!) industry gossip than almost any other website I’ve seen.

Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources (http://comics.envisionww.com/) is a smooth, professional-looking site, with good links. The content doesn’t seem to be updated as often as some other websites, though, and it’s occasionally slow to download.

It’s harder to review Toronto’s own Internet Comics (http://www.inetcomics.com/) because it’s a brand new site still going through teething pains (see sidebar). Backed byNetwork Connections (http://www.connections.ca/), the firm which provides Bell Canada’s Z@P ISDN service, it aims to become a major comic book centre on the net, aimed at both fans --who will come for the content-- and professionals, who will come for the international exposure of their work. Once fully up and running it will feature original comics content by well-known Canadian creators like Ken Lashley, Dave Ross and Richard Pace; it will host virtual comic book conventions or VirtuaCons, and encourage talented wannabes by posting their work in a New Talent section. Comic professionals will be encouraged to set up Galleries of their work to promote their careers, initially at no cost but perhaps for a fee later on down the line.

One of the major advantages of the Internet is that it can put you into immediate contact with people through e-mail and homepages. A comic book reviewer once found me through my own homepage (as did numerous old high-school and college buddies, for that matter). The Comic Pro E-Mail Address homepage (http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/pro.html) is one of the most useful sites on the Web, if you’re at all interested in contacting your favourite cartoonists, comic book artists, writers, editors and publishers.

PUBLISHERS

The two largest comic book publishers are latecomers to the booming Internet, and their websites reflect this. Both DC Comics (http://www.dccomics.com/) and Marvel Comics(http://www.marvelonline.com/) were paid big bucks by America OnLine to put most of their online content on AOL’s own proprietary service, leaving fans without an AOL account no access to their offerings. DC and Marvel have finally migrated some content to the Internet, but both companies still seem to reserve the most interesting stuff for AOL.

Dark Horse Comics (http://www.dhorse.com/) has actually been on the web much longer than its larger competitors and its site is simply better. Dark Horse is a publisher of high-quality comics adapted from films, including long-running series based on Star Wars, Aliens, and Predator, as well as a whole range of cutting edge alternative comics like Paul Chadwick’s acclaimed Concrete series. There’s a great Star Wars section here, as well as all sorts of interviews, previews and freebies.

Image Comics, currently number three behind Marvel and DC, is a cooperative of independent artist-owned studios and does not have a single corporate website. Many of the individual studios which make it up however, do. Canadian superstar Todd McFarlane, creator of that creepy undead superhero Spawn, is one of the founders of Image, a group of creators who walked out of Marvel Comics when they found themselves creatively stymied. Spawn has been spectacularly successful... uhh... spawning a hugely profitable line of toys and other merchandise. More can be found at (http://www.mcfarlane.com/). Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Productions studio (http://www.wildstorm.com/), originators of WildCATS and Gen 13 is another highly successful component of the Image line.

Montreal alternative publisher Black Eye Productions (http://www.blackeye.com/) has always been known for its superiour graphic design, and the same sensibility is reflected in their beautiful website, one of the cleanest and most sensibly designed I’ve ever seen. Moreover, it actually has solid content worth the download time, including original, eclectic comic strips like James Kochalka’s Magic Boy Does Laundry, Jay Stephens’Yellow Devil, and New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks and his hilarious Milo’s Weeknewspaper strip. Aside from the latter, none of these strips have ever seen print in a paper publication.

Not Available Comics (http://www.redweb.com/cynicalman/) is the home of wonky genius Matt Feazell and his mini-comics empire. Feazell is an extremely talented cartoonist who has ridden his own train to fame. Though capable of complex cartooning, he generally prefers a souped-up stick-figure style which looks misleadingly simple at first glance. He has also eschewed the traditional comic book publishers in favour of the ultra-small press, self-publishing his own work in playing-card-sized mini-comics on photocopy machines. His work is engagingly heretical and fun, especially in hisCynicalman series. Highly recommended.

New publisher Virtual Comics (http://www.virtualcomics.com/) has taken a unique approach to comics and the net, closely tying their new comic books into their lush, (perhaps overly lush) website. It’s too new to really make a judgement, but it’s certainly slick.

NEWSPAPER STRIPS

The United Media website is available through a link in Sympatico’s own News and Magazine section (http://www1.sympatico.ca:80/Contents/News+Magazines/news_stand.html#canan) and features The Dilbert Zone, Snoopy’s The Dog House, Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Marmadukeand the rest of that gang. There’s also The Inkwell, showcasing the best US political cartoons, The National Cartoonist Society homepage and more.

Universal Press Syndicate’s comics site (http://www.uexpress.com/ups/comics/) features Calvin and Hobbes,, Doonesbury, For Better or For Worse, Garfield andBizarro, among others.

Puckermuck Cove (http://www.mi.net/users/ang/index.html) is a newspaper strip without a newspaper by Maritimer Michael B. McNeill. It’s the kind of thing that would never have gotten an audience before the Internet existed. Warning: Some adult content.

TRADE MAGAZINES

If you really want to understand the ins-and-outs of comics, one of the field’s many trade magazines is a good place to start.

The Comics Journal (http://www.halcyon.com/fgraphic/home.html) is a very literary, almost scholarly magazine which features great interviews and a very grumpy attitude about the state of the comics art. It’s affiliated with alternative comic book publisherFantagraphics Books, whose site is also accessible through the same homepage. A good, solid website.

Wizard (http://www.wizardpress.com/), is the antithesis of the Journal, a very slick publication obsessed with the hottest superhero comics and this week’s collectible values (an attitude which, honestly, gives me hives. Comics are meant to be read, not sealed in plastic bags and stored away). Like the magazine, their website is slick without having much in the way of content. Also, like DC and Marvel, Wizard reserves some material for America OnLine.

Comics Buyer’s Guide (http://www.tias.com/mags/krause/ComicBuyersGuide/) is the weekly newspaper of the comics field, and it has an extremely weak website. It’s basically just an advertisement.

indy (http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~cwaldron/indyweb/), as the name would suggest, focusses on independent comics and is the most recent comics magazine of the bunch. The content of its website also seems to be the most solid, if you are at all interested in comics beyond the commercial offerings of the mainstream companies.

FRENCH-LANGUAGE COMICS

One of the ways that the English-speaking world differs dramatically from other cultures is in its attitude towards comics. This notion that stories told in words and pictures are only for children is a peculiar Anglo-Saxonism not shared by French-speaking cultures worldwide. Belgium and France have thus long been bandes dÉsinÉes (or comics) powerhouses, with dozens of publishers producing beautiful book format comics unimaginable in English-speaking North America. French-speaking Quebec, because of the relatively small size of its market, lags behind Europe in bandes dÉsinÉes, but some tremendous work is still produced here.

Homegrown French-language sites include Michel Pleau’s Page Sur le BD Francophone du QuÉbec (http://www.quebectel.com/gt/usagers/mickplo/) and BD À Bord (http://www.generation.net/~antibug/bd.a.bord/index.htm), both excellent general-interest QuÉbÉcois sites, which also provide links to more specialized information.

French-language European comics are dominated by that Belgian superstar Tintin(http://www.synapse.net/~areopage/tintin/tintin.htm), and that indomitable little GaulAstÉrix (http://w3imagis.imag.fr/Membres/Stephane.Riviere/bd/asterix/asterix.html), but these well-known series only scratch the surface of a vast repertoire of comics of all types, produced without the self-conscious “pop-culture” attitude of North American creators. A good French launch point is BD Zone(http://w3imagis.imag.fr/Membres/Stephane.Riviere/bd/bd_gb.html), which, yes, features some resources in English. Many European websites do. Many are written exclusively in English rather than in the mother tongue of the originating country.

CREATING COMICS

There are several great places on the net to learn about writing, penciling, inking, editing and even publishing comic books. Just to name two, there’s the Creating Comics section of the Dega Studios homepage (http://www.cadvision.com/dega/creating.htm/), which has links to many other similar sites, and the cool advice about creating your own small press comics offered by small-press genius Canadian John MacLeod(http://www.sentex.net/~sardine/small.press.html). MacLeod, the creator of the acclaimed mini-comics parody Dishman, also discusses the tools of the cartoonist’s trade elsewhere on his site.

Another good way to learn about creating comics is to join a comics APA, or Amateur Press Association. Within an APA you can exchange information and advice with other would-be professionals and publish your own work in a regular amateur magazine (or “fanzine”) produced collectively. One of Canada’s longest-established comics APAs isComicopia (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Mike_Aragona/Copia.htm), co-administered by Mike Aragona. Everything you need to know about the APA phenomenon and participating in an APA is on this homepage.

BUYING COMICS

There are many places to buy comics on the Internet. Several dozen mail order houses and specialty shops are listed on the AAA Aardvark Wraithspace Index: Shops and Sales page (http://comics.redweb.com/Shops_and_Sales/), and on the Antarctic ComicsRecommended Stores List (http://www.texas.net/user/antarc/stores.html). One page of particular interest to Canadians is the homepage of Montreal’s Nebula Bookstore(http://www.cam.org/~nebula/), often the only source north of 49 for hard-to-find independent comics.

SUMMING IT ALL UP

Frankly, there’s no way to sum it all up. People working in radio must have felt a little like this in 1949. They all knew tremendous change was on the way, but no one knew exactly what shape it was going to take. As this article is written, the comic book market staggers through its worst sales slump in 20 years and giant Marvel Comics hovers on the brink of bankruptcy. Meanwhile newspapers have been continually cutting the space allotted to comic strips for 30 years, and as the chains cut expenses, often the first thing to go is syndicated material. The time is ripe for a change, and as the Internet’s technology changes and faster and faster download times are possible, it’s inevitable that more comics content will be available digitally. Whether net comics will ever completely replace paper comics is open to debate, but they are already changing the landscape and the old rules of the game.

Look! Up on the Web...!

Mark Shainblum (shainblum@vir.com) is a comic book writer and journalist living in Montreal. He is the former writer of such Canadian superhero series as Northguardand the Captain Canuck daily newspaper strip, and he co-created the superheroineFleur-de-Lys featured in 1995 on a Canadian postage stamp. Currently he writesAngloman, a series of political parody comics in book form, from Nuage Editions. TheAngloman Page! can be accessed at (http://www.vir.com/~shainblum/angloman.htm).