I first got online a little over a quarter century ago. Which I point out to say that 1) I’ve been watching this whole webcomics scene play out since Day One, and 2) I’m just really frickin’ old. Back then, we had a 20Mb hard drive and a 300 baud modem. That’s about 3000 times slower than what a standard smart phone will do these days, so graphics weren’t really a consideration. You could technically download them, but it would literally take days to get a single image that was still low-res.
Even so, one of the benefits I quickly saw for the internet was the ability to see the continuing adventures of my favorite characters. Nothing official, of course, but people were posting fan fiction of the Captain Kirk and Indiana Jones and all of these other famous pop culture characters. So readers could indulge in off-the-record stories while they were waiting to see if the local PBS station would pick up the next season of Doctor Who.
But I also quickly realized that a lot of fan fiction is crap. A lot of professional writing is crap, too, but publishers, editors, retailers, and reviewers were able to weed out a lot that, so I knew not to bother with certain authors or styles. In fan fiction, though, there are no gatekeepers and it was largely up the individual reader to ascertain which stories were worth reading. I ended up getting turned off to fan fiction as a whole because I had so many bad experiences with it back then.
My wife has no such compunctions. In fact, her reading is almost exclusively fan fiction. And, in looking over her shoulder on occasion, I can see that there’s much better systems in place today for determining whether or not I might like any given story.
The problem, as pointed out by Theodore Sturgeon back in 1958, is that 90% of everything is crap. Sure, a lot of fan fiction is crap, but so is a lot of professional fiction. So is a lot of film. So is a lot of journalism. So is a lot of webcomics.
Lately, I’ve been eyeballing the hundreds of webcomics I read and keep thinking, “This is lousy. I’ve been reading this for months and still don’t know what the basic plot is.” Or “The art hasn’t improved one bit since they launched back in 2009.” Or simply, “I don’t get it.”
And that is precisely where a lot of the traditional (i.e. newspaper) cartoonists are coming from. They look at the webcomics landscape and see that 90% of what’s out there is crap. But, like fan fiction, it’s not all supposed to be great. It’s supposed to be a testing ground for creators to learn the ropes and make mistakes and see if it’s really something they want to spend their lives doing. That’s precisely the beauty of webcomics and fan fiction.
And that’s when I remind myself that’s why I read so many webcomics that just aren’t all that good. Because as these creators who might not be good now are trying to sort their way through the world of making webcomics, I can ride along with them. I can see what they’re doing right and wrong, and learn from them the very same lessons they’re teaching themselves.
I’m still not going to start slogging through fan fiction though.