One of the frequently touted advantages webcomics have over typical printed comics is the ability to narrowcast to a limited audience. Newspaper strips are designed to appeal to as broad a range of readers as possible; that’s why Dagwood Bumsted, Jon Arbuckle, and Rob Wilco have such a non-descript jobs. But webcomics, because of their lower production costs, can afford to have a smaller audience, and can therefore target a much smaller swath of readers. That gives rise to strips that focus on role-playing gamers who’ve started their own magazine, or feminist comics that satirize the misogyny and sexism in Marvel and DC superhero stories. Those types of topics are too narrow to appeal to the “everyman” that reads newspapers.
But one would presume that there’s a limit on how narrowly a webcomic can focus. After all, there are quite a few gamers out there that regularly buy gaming magazines, and quite a few feminists that are unhappy with the way women are often depicted by Marvel and DC. Even if only a small percentage of them read and enjoy the webcomic, we’re still talking about hundreds or perhaps thousands of readers. And while that might not be enough to pay all the cartoonist’s bills, it might be enough to pay to keep the webcomic itself from going into the red.
But what about something like Existential Comics? It’s a webcomic about “the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world.” The cast is essentially a who’s who of history’s philosophers, from the more well known like Karl Marx and Ayn Rand to the more obscure like Gottlob Frege and Kurt Gödel. Most of the strips revolve around multiple philosophers arguing and exploring their respective ideas in the context of a contemporary game setting: from soccer to Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons. The comedy often comes from how these ideas work (or don’t) within the artificial confines of the game’s rules.
Because so many different philosophers are used throughout the strips, and how much of the comedy centers around their particular ideologies, the anonymous creator generally has to include a “Didn’t get the joke?” link at the bottom of each page that leads to details of who the various characters are, what their philosophies stated, and how those philosophies related to one another. The jokes are frequently meaningless without the context provided, and the wide array of philosophers that are used suggests that only someone who has spent a great deal of time studying philosophy—not just someone who took a semester course in college—would understand most of the comedy. Alexa reports suggest that most of the audience have completed graduate degrees.
I don’t have access to Existential Comics‘ traffic reports, but I can’t imagine they’re very high. That there’s no advertising or shop on the site reinforces the notion that it’s not especially popular as far as webcomics go. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The author seems to understand that it’s too esoteric a comic for many people and doesn’t even try to make money from it. It presumably satisfies a creative itch, and that’s all it’s meant to do.
And that’s the level of niche comics that you can get with webcomics. And is precisely the type of thing you can’t do when you have the production costs of a newspaper strip to consider. If you’re happy with making webcomics just as a hobby, you can select any obscure niche you like and draw away!