Are the limits our topic choice? Is it our deliberate off-the-beaten path content desicions what’s keeping us from becoming that household object? Is it our nerdcore nature? is it the profanity we use, and the harshness that comes with being edgier humor?

Are our very creative desicions keeping us from becoming that household name? Is it by simply being ourselves?

It’s the fans. And the fact that comics are being made by fans for other fans. Fans are overly notorious for treating their pet entertainments as their personal playgrounds. And every time a fan says, “This isn’t who Reed Richards is. Civil War is wrong!”, or leaves death threats on the answering machines of a producer of a movie or TV show that changes things, (like whiat happened with Beast Machines) or spams a messageboard talking about what a hack Brian Bendis is, or treats someone who doesn’t know all of the ins and out of the piece of entertainment like a moron, and as long as fans will continue to look down upon the “mundanes” the medium will never have mass appeal.

because when they do get into positions of influence in comics or whatever, they’ll be at a loss to understand why comics is such a ghetto medium.

Yes, internet fanboys are the minority, but the majority of fans will always sit back and allow them to do this because they want to keep the sandbox to themselves as well.

Mostly due to the inevitable destruction of net neutrality. Also, comics will never reach the grannies. The medium is far too damaged for that.

We are bcomics. We are the medium. This medium ius not si,polky the formal elements of th art and writing and composition of Webcomics. The direfct reader-creator cinnubucation, the delivery method. This is what makes us Webcomics, dammit.

Tossing aside the idea of household recognition, because… meh. What exactly makes webcomics a new medium? That idea has been tossed around for years now, sometimes by me, so feel free to say shut up you hypocrite, but seriously, now, what is it, like… 95% of all fifteeen billion webcomics are four-panel daily gag strips? Some damn good ones that I make sure to read each day, but shit. Nothing new about that, by any stretch of the imagination.

Not that there needs to be anything new, but it seems to me that with the exception of a you-can-count-’em-on-one-hand number of wild experimental awesome loonies, (within a field of umpty-kajillion webcartoonists,) the only thing new about webcomics is a new method of publication and distribution. And that method, while kinda radical six years ago, is just an assumed fact nowadays. Half of America has a website of some kind, where they distribute information about their business, creative endeavors, or pictures of their cat. And the other half is saying, “Oh, look! The cat is standing up, and there’s a caption saying, ‘All your base are belong to us!’ How adorable!”

So… distributing informtion via the internet? ‘Kay. Four panel gag strips? ‘Kay. (Again, some amongst them are ones I consider some of my favoritist comics of all. But nonethelss, as far as the new goes… ‘kay.)

When you come down to it, the psycho newness of webcomics seems obsolete to me. New? Fuck yeah, if you happen to have hopped in a time machine and traveled to 1996, when people were still wondering if this “e-mail” thing was gonna take off or not. Brand spankin’ new if you happen to have folded space all wrinkle-in-time-style and hung around the year 2000, and proclaimed in astonishmet, “HOLY SHIT! I CAN LOAD THIS PAGE OF JPEGS IN LESS THAN AN HOUR! THIIS SHIT’S GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD!” But here and now? Distributing information via the internet is just what people do now. So sure, it applies to cartoonists as much as it does to anyone above the poverty line. But it ain’t radical anymore. It isn’t new and exciting, and while the potential for radical formal experimentation still exists, that potential has existed for print comcis for something like 100 years (or back to the depths of ancient Atlantis when they carved comics on walls, blah blah blah) without anyone doing more than scatching the surface of the tip of the iceberg. I don’t see an overwhelming amount of evidence that webcomics will fulfill its potential any more than print comics do, and no reason to assume that the distibution-method-formerly-known-as-new shouldn’t be seen as anything other than a standard fact of daily life.

The lesson of the day? “Shit, I get fucking cynical when I drink.”

Something about this medium is unavoidably tied up in technology. Sure, the point of the glorious INTARWEB is that anyone can use it – but how much? And what for? The way I use the internet is different from my mother, and from my grandmother: it’s different from my husband, it’s different from you. What are we likely to see? And I guess… what makes a medium “legitimate”? For webcomics, is it grandma & grandpa reading? It’s a tricky question – I know this because we’re getting more people of ages and genders gaming – yet are video games respected as a medium? Kind of? They’re lagging behind comic books, I can tell you that much.

I guess… what do we feel can kill a medium? Once something’s opened its eyes and stretched its limbs like this (or, for the most cynical out there, when it’s started making money – even in a very small way), can it ever be killed completely? Well, I suppose if something killed the Internet… but on the whole – aside from the Net Neturality Act, should we worry about this? Should we panic?

I think you’re right that the big “explosion” of attention won’t be one of us, that it’ll be in the reverse… but who in that reverse direction will be able to make that jump? Will it be easier for them to come here and be a success than for one of us to leap into another medium? Gaming is the perfect mate for webcomics, I think, because of how the Internet began to orignally expand in power and popularity: from the nerd elite to the masses – just like gaming. And with gaming growing more mainstream… PA on the internet. Hop to gaming. Hop to… something? Will they go from there? Will it be them? What do we call PAX, then? Do they WANT to go further?

I think that brings us to another bit of this: we’re in control of our own destinies here, kinda. Success is a crap shoot so much of the time, yes: but when we get success, it’s up to US what to do with it. We aren’t controlled – we don’t have sponsors screaming for us to do X or Y – we don’t have agents signing us up for jobs we’d rather not do. We don’t have publishers demanding features of us. It’s just us – our selves – our readers. Maybe some other people, but hey – we have freedom. That might change someday – but for now it’s refreshing, kinda, don’cha think? ::wink::