Web comics were a big part of what I used to like about the old – pre-social-media – Internet. Diesel Sweeties, Penny Arcade, PVP, My Extralife, Nothing Nice to Say, Orneryboy, etc. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but I just sort of forgot that web comics existed for a good decade plus. Sure some of these classics quit publishing and I think my sense of humour shifted away from others. Whatever the case, it really seems like web comics are back. Or at the very least my interest has been reignited.
Recently in the past month or so, a few really great comics (strange planet, poorly drawn lines to name a couple) have popped on to my radar and I’m all in. Hard.
Now that I’m back in I am bumping into an old problem. There’s not a great centralized location to read everything. In the past I’ve read web comics inside an RSS reader. But RSS readers never felt like the right context, their UI is too ridged, too geared towards written content or something.
Do a search for “web comics reader” and you’re get various websites. Outdated websites from the early days of web comics. You’ll also find webtoons.com, a site that’s taking a good stab at solving this problem. I just don’t like it, it doesn’t feel right for me.
Enter webfunnies.online. The beauty of an open internet is the ability for anyone with some development skills to build their own solution to a problem, just the way they like it.
In the process of looking through dozens of web comics, I discovered some troubling things about the state of online creation.
RSS
RSS still exists as a solid machine-readable way to syndicate arbitrary content.
However creators seem to have forgotten it exists. Less than 50% of the web comics sites I visited advertised and RSS link, even though every one of those made an RSS feed available and published it in the HTML source.
Perhaps this is a moot point since feed readers are good at automatically discovering the
Content Ownership
A large contingent of content owners are publishing original content exclusively to platform like reddit, instagram and patreon. Platforms they don’t own or control. By “exclusively” I don’t mean that they are getting paid to post on those platforms (though in the case of Patreon may be). I just mean that they are posting original artwork directly to those platforms. They simply using those platforms as quick and dirty hosting.
To put in another way, they are giving their intellectual property for free, to for-profit corporations who are using it to sell advertisements.
This does not sit right with me. And I’m not even an artist.