No laughing matter

Some online comics play to obvious Internet strengths. Iliad's "User Friendly" targets hacker culture, while "Player vs. Player" goes after the computer gaming crowd. But old standbys like sex and consumer culture are also favorite topics for the new generation of webcomic artists. "Exploitation Now" and "Jerkcity" mix pop-cultural criticism with dark, often sexual humor.

"College Roomies From Hell," "Living in Greytown," "Sinfest" and several others also offer regular sendups of everything from poetry slams to pop music. One strip of the comic "Diesel Sweeties," which details a love affair between a woman and a robot, even took on another webcomic by dressing up a character as "Buzzboy" -- an online comic superhero -- whom no other character recognizes.

It would be overreaching to suggest that any of these comics approach the heft of Spiegelman's "Maus" or Crumb's classic "Self-Loathing" comics. In fact, many devolve all too often into penis-and-boob jokes, with plentiful cursing providing limited shock value. Groth and Spiegelman argue that the spread of webcomics threatens to undermine demand for lengthy, complex comic stories, but one also suspects that they simply don't like what's being published, and are looking for reasons to decry the entire phenomenon. There are no gatekeepers approving or disapproving the right of comics artists to publish online, a fact that may be a continuing affront to those who, like Groth, make their livings as critics and publishers.

Groth also dismisses the entire webcomic universe as a place that's primarily filled with silly strips. He argues that this newspaper-mimicking format dominates because "the Net is all about short attention spans."

"It takes three hours to read a serious comic book," he says. "Most people want to read a comic in three minutes."

And there's a danger there, suggests Groth. Because the Net treats comics as "an inconsequential distraction," he says, audiences are trained to see comics as nothing more than a simple way to waste time. It's ultimately a matter of competition: The Net isn't good for "serious form comics because it means there's less room for them," says Bill Griffith, "Zippy the Pinhead's" creator and a friend of Groth's. "With so many choices, many people will go on the Web instead of buying a Fantagraphics book."

But is it true that webcomics and serious graphic novels can't artistically coexist, or even merge? Some webcomic artists are already toying with longer forms, and succeeding. Maritza Campos, creator of "College Roomies From Hell," recently ran a story line that lasted 22 weeks.

"My numbers never went down," she says. "People will read what you give them, if it's good enough."

Chris Crosby, creator of "Superosity" and the founder of Keenspot, a webcomic co-op that hosts the work of about 50 artists, argues that webcomics are actually too complicated to encourage short attention spans.

"Many of our comics, some of our most popular ones, have such complex story lines and situations that you couldn't even follow them if you had a short attention span," he says. "If you wanted to start reading them, you have to spend four to eight hours reading the Web archive. That's a giant commitment."

"Webcomics are actually building the type of people who will be reading graphic novels and loving them in years to come," says Crosby.

Even Spiegelman, who largely agrees with Groth's pessimistic view of webcomics, maintains that "content isn't the issue." There's no inherent reason why an Internet comic can't be as good as "Maus," he says.

But if content isn't the problem, then what exactly is it about the Net that has Groth, Spiegelman, Griffith and others so up in arms?

The heart of McCloud's thesis is that the Net is somehow better than outmoded paper -- and that's where the griping becomes most bitter. Young artists, comic book veterans argue, have grown overly enamored with the Web. They're ignoring key proofs of the medium's immaturity -- its lack of business models that will sustain new artists and its low production values.

Even though e-mail makes it easier to keep up with a daily serial, "the physical book is still a lot quicker to access, of higher resolution and a lot more portable," says Chris Staros, co-owner of Top Shelf Productions, an underground comic book publisher. And as musicians, filmmakers, authors and dot-commers have already discovered, the Web is no gold mine. The numbers rarely add up.

Webcomic artists don't deny that Spiegelman and Groth have an economic point. Despite his best efforts, McCloud has converted only a handful of artists to the micropayment cause. The artists who do make a living from webcomics -- such as Iliad of User Friendly -- are rare.

But in today's webcomic community, money is not the primary goal. In an industry where bestselling offline comic books sell only 100,000 copies, and where the overall audience for comics has dwindled to an estimated and paltry 500,000 people, few artists pretend that they'll ever become wealthy through their craft. Instead, they care about reaching new eyeballs and moving comics out of the hobby-shop ghetto. Sure, the Web isn't a perfect medium for comic delivery, but artists say they've embraced it because it offers what the comic book industry cannot: access to large, diverse audiences.

Indeed, for those like Vogler and Campos -- who posts "College Roomies" from Mexico -- the Net offers the only path of distribution that's available. "Thousands of people from all around the world read every day my comic for a very low cost [to me], and it's in full color, sometimes bigger than the average Sunday comic strip," Campos says. "I couldn't do that in print. In fact, if the Internet didn't exist, I wouldn't be a cartoonist, period."

Even if Groth is correct, and today's artists are placing too much faith in the Internet's ability to revive the art and business of comics, the artists will continue to draw, to write and to post. Their mission is not to convince Groth through words, but rather through comics.

"There's a simple way to shut the naysayers up once and for all," say Farley of e-sheep.com. "Create amazing work and let that work speak for itself. That's what [we're] trying to do."

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