Webcomics Then vs Webcomics Now

Ro Salarian opined some time back that they were glad webcomics weren’t as big of a deal when they started out, compared to now.

I was a dumb kid, and my plots contained a lot of misguided ideas about things, and the way the current internet would have reacted to them, I imagine things would have been way too harsh. Nobody would look at my work and think “This person is 15 and has the potential to grow up and learn and figure things out and get better.”

There’s no question that webcomics are a bigger deal now than they were a decade or two ago and I don’t doubt that they see comics, possibly their own, that are on the receiving end of a great deal of internet venom. But I think Salarian might have been conflating two issues that don’t necessarily correlate with one another. (To be clear, too, I'm saying "might have been" because the Salarian quote is from several years ago, so I don't know if they necessarily feel the same way today.)

Salarian was still a teenager when they started YU+ME:dream back in 2004. It’s the comic that first gained them some notoriety, and they've since gone on to I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space, Meaty Yogurt, and more recently Spectacle, all of which garnered them even more attention including an Eisner nomination. Their assertion that they might have quit doing comics if, at the very start of their career, they had been on the receiving end of the vitriol that they got later as their comics became popular doesn’t seem to take into account, though, that the Prism grant that gave them a big boost in notoriety didn’t come until 2007, three years later.

Now, they were absolutely not laboring in complete obscurity that whole time, and I’m sure they got more than a few terrible and frightening comments in that time. (Which, to be absolutely clear, is under no circumstances acceptable behavior!) But my point is that the attention they have now is more because of their talent and years of hard work, and not the fact that webcomics are bigger now in general than they were twenty years ago. In fact, I might argue that someone starting now would have more anonymity precisely because webcomics are bigger; there’s much more competition and it’s infinitely more difficult to even raise awareness as a newcomer, consisdering that you’re now in competition with industry heavyweights.

And that anonymity helps. In fact, I just caught a creator that was going to have to pass on printing the first season of his comic because he hadn’t yet worked out some of the technical issues, leaving him with many files that aren’t suitable for print. And while that’s not due to his working out storytelling issues that bedevil many newer creators, the comparitive anonymity he had when he started afford him the opportunity to essentially create a new launching point. One that avoids some of the pitfalls he may have stumbled into originally.

By its very nature, almost anything you post on the web is available for the world to see. But, in competing with everything else, a creator that has not yet established their own following can safely experiment in relative obscurity. But that same availability almost needs to be in place so that they know there is in fact an audience out there, expecting them to deliver. The realization that one’s work is being put on regular display almost inherently forces a creator to up their game very quickly. Without that pressure, that peformance anxiety, many people don’t have the internal fortitude to work to better their craft on an ongoing basis.

That sets the web up a double-edged sword. It allows a creator to present their work to an interested group and receive feedback, but it also opens them up to potential attack from internet trolls. Unless that creator has a big name for themself already, however, those attacks won’t likely come until they’ve got a bit of experience under their belts.

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