Faster Than a Speeding Bullet!  More Powerful Than a Locomotive!

The World of Online Comic Strips, Part 1

by Brian Cremins
University of Connecticut
brian.cremins@uconn.edu

Posted: October, 2003     Student Affairs Online, vol. 4 no. 4 - Fall 2003

This semester I’ve had the opportunity to teach a variable topics course in the English department at the University of Connecticut on The Graphic Novel.  Several of my students have admitted that when they first signed up for the course, they had no idea what they would be reading.  One of these students recently confessed, “When I registered for the course, I thought we’d be studying something graphic.  You know.  Banned books.  Lots of sex and violence.  Controversial books, really graphic ones.”  Early in the semester, after his mother asked him which books he’d bought for the fall semester, he said, “One is about Batman,” to which his mother responded, “Are you sure you’re in the right course?  You’d better go back to the bookstore and double check.  Textbooks are expensive.”  Later my student told his mother, “The bookstore was right––it’s a class about comic books!” 

When I began researching this course on comics, American culture, and the emergence of the graphic novel as a unique art form which blends words with pictures, I selected works by a wide variety of artists and writers, ranging from Harold Gray’s “Little Orphan Annie” strips to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus to Chynna Clugston-Major’s funny and surreal punk satire Blue Monday.  What I failed to take into account––aside from the potential reaction of parents rendered speechless by their children buying comic books for an English course––are the numerous and popular comic strips now available online.  Several of my students have been sending me links to electronic comic strips––those of their favorite artists and, in a few ambitious cases, links to their own sites (it should come as no surprise that the students in the course include fine arts majors, some of them aspiring cartoonists, in addition to communication sciences and English majors).  Student Affairs Online has given tactical support to the electronic comics revolution by including strips and single panels contributed by undergraduate cartoonists from around the country. 

Now that comic strips in the daily paper are the size of postage stamps and comic book spinner racks are missing in action in America’s drug stores, the world wide web offers writers and artists a new and inexpensive means of communicating with the next generation of comic book fans.  These do-it-yourself comic art pioneers of cyberspace are part of a long tradition in the world of comics, dating back to the mimeographed fanzines of the 1960s and the self-published underground comics of the 1970s.  These online strips, and the creative spirit which they embody, also call to mind the mini-comics of the 1980s, those small, self-published pamphlets mass-produced not on a printing press or with the aid of desktop publishing equipment but with the assistance of a Xerox machine.  Although mini-comics still exist, they are slowly disappearing due to the greater flexibility and potential of online comic book and comic strip publishing.  The mini-comic book subculture of the 1980s, however, has many lessons for modern-day cartoonists, who now send scans of their strips to friends and admirers via e-mail.  Twenty years ago, with the internet in its infancy, the U.S. Postal Service offered the most efficient means for a young cartoonist to get his or her work out to readers all over the world.  All you needed was a stamp, an envelope, and access to a photocopy machine.

When I was a freshman in high school, I visited my father at his office and stood in silent awe of the large copy machine adjacent to his secretary’s desk.  I knew little of what my father did for a living, though I knew it had something to do with the cosmetics industry.  I later learned that his company was responsible for making the palm-sized mirrors for ladies’ compacts.  Every day the small factory he presided over would produce boxes filled with tiny mirrors of all shapes and sizes––circles, squares, rectangles, even a few triangles (in the 1980s, the triangle was the signifier for all cutting edge fashion.  A t-shirt with a neon-green triangle cut into the fabric of the collar was the pinnacle of hipness and echoed the abstract, day-glo shapes in every MTV video and commercial).  Although these mirrors held no interest for me, I found myself fighting the urge to ask my father if I could have access to his office.  An aspiring cartoonist, I had seen the Xerox machine and nearly wept.  If only he would give me the chance to use the machine and make copies of my latest comic book epic for all of my fans.  Well, at least my two pen pals in New York and Texas. 

After explaining to my father the central place his copy machine held in my scheme to dominate the world of miniature comic books, I succeeded in producing a run of twenty-five copies of my very first book, a 6-page knock-off of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five called Bully.  A few weeks after mailing my entire print run to my two pen pals and a few of my classmates, I started to receive the 1980s equivalent of electronic Spam.  Each day the mailbox on the front porch of our house was filled with manila envelopes containing comics from other cartoonists.  There were superhero stories, romances, Westerns, political satires (most of them featuring Ollie North, Ronald Reagan, and the eternally creepy John Poindexter), and, in one especially memorable case, a comic book with illustrations based on late nineteenth century Victorian-era erotica!  (My grandmother found these risqué comics especially amusing, as I recall).  The junk e-mail of the twenty-first century lacks the charm and the utter weirdness of these unsolicited letters and fanzines.

The online comic strips and comic books today are an extension of these mini-comics, though I fear that electronic strips, most of which are produced by artists using sophisticated graphic design programs, lack the raw, visceral appeal of their photocopied ancestors.  Each mini-comic was unique and bore the mark of the craftsman––thumbprints, misspelled words, faulty stapling, brittle paper.  Most appealing were the comics printed by a copy machine running low on toner.  Filled with gray, faded images, just a ghost of what they had been when they first left the drawing boards of their creators, these comics proudly proclaimed their outsider status.  The secret message of these difficult-to-decipher, faded masterpieces of the underground press was a simple but bracing one: you too, gentle reader, have something to say, and you don’t need glossy production values to communicate your ideas.  Online cartoonists are carrying on this tradition, recording images which most of us take for granted and offering insight into politics and culture, art and history, science and technology.

Later this term, my students have the option of producing their own comic strips and comic books.  I have urged them to create their own mini-comics, to fill them with words and pictures which are meaningful to them.  For those of you now keeping track of your daily experiences on a web blog, I offer a humble suggestion.  Words tell only part of the story, after all, so why not visit the local art store, buy a box of pencils, an eraser, a few black markers, and record your experiences in the form of a comic strip.  Making that first mark on the page might be your first step into a wide universe of story-telling possibilities.  As a result, you might get to know yourself, and your friends, more closely.  Come to think of it, the world of online comics might be transforming the ideal of an earthly Utopia from an abstract “no place” into a true state of being.  The perfect world just might be one in which everyone looks like a character from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and the adults who believe they’re in charge of things don’t make a sound.