Browse Exhibits (7 total)
Building Community
This collection seeks to explore why webcomics pose as a safe space for minorities and other oppressed groups of people to form communities and connect with one another. In this collection, you will find examples of webcomics that are relatable to specific groups of people. Topics that are seen as somewhat controversial in daily conversations, such as cancer, sexuality, and diversity, are found in this collection. This is important because those who struggle to talk about these topics can find community online with others who share similar interests. How do these webcomics pose as gathering points for community building? Why are they so effective in bringing different types of people together? Using examples such as “Mom’s Cancer” and “Rain”, this collection showcases many examples that display the community built from these webcomics.
Online Identity
Webcomics are a medium used by authors to establish their voice and identity through autobiographical comics, niche audiences, and online communities. Authors are sometimes unable to demonstrate their ideas and emotions through standard print texts that have no images. Instead, they are able to form niche audiences and convey their emotions through different webcomics or autobiographical comics. This collection explores how webcomics are able to gain a niche audience and establish a voice in various webcomics. Alternatively, this collection contains a counter-example to demonstrate a poor way in which a webcomic failed to gain an audience and establish an online identity. Through webcomics, authors are able to convey their online identity and create online communities.
Digital Affordances
Digital affordances, defined as “functional properties of objects or environments-the properties that allow particular uses”, are an aspect of webcomics that is truly unique to the platform (WOVENText 35). While webcomics themselves are a relatively new domain, the use of digital affordances has accompanied them from the beginning. Common examples of such affordances include alt-text, the infinite canvas, sound/flash animations, and user input/interactivity. This collection examines the effect of these affordances by analyzing comics that heavily employ such affordances, as well as those that stray away from their use. It includes popular comics such as Homestuck, The Oatmeal, and Dinosaur Comics to investigate how different affordances can change the perception and popularity of a comic.
Digital vs. Print
Often times, webcomic creators will publish print versions of their work as a source of revenue, however, print is a fundamentally different medium from digital. This forces creators to decide how they can create a print version of their digital work while preserving the nature of the content itself. This is more challenging for some comics than others. For example, Homestuck has many animated strips in its digital form, but Hark! A Vagrant completely lacks any use of digital affordances, making it much easier to print. This collection seeks to analyze the differences between publishing comics in print form vs. digital form through popular comics like Alison Bechdel’s print-native Dykes To Watch Out For from the mid 1980s all the way to Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, with it’s heavy use of digital affordances.
Global Reach
Many of the affordances seen in popular webcomics such as Dinosaur Comics and Saturday Morning Breakfast are also used in the webcomics we see internationally. This collection seeks to show these affordances and the purpose they serve using popular webcomics such as Jimga Toons and Royal Existentials. This collection includes a diverse range of comics that cover webcomics from different countries, explores the influences of global reach between the webcomic and the audience, and identifies the strategies in which webcomics can gain global attention. It explores the use of webcomics in different nations as political tools, promoters of social progress, and just general forms of entertainment. There's overwhelming evidence in this collection that webcomics are used to critique human society and or governments in other nations.
Diversity of Purpose
A tenet of webcomics frequently discussed by scholars is the freedom comic authors have in creating and outputting their content. This collection includes a variety of comics designed to demonstrate how webcomics creators have used the connective affordances of digital media to both entertain and inform. A fluid genre is a common theme among a lot of webcomics. Just as an example, Rooster Tails is a webcomic that looks to promote LGBTQ awareness, whereas Cold War is a comic that simply seeks to educate readers on historical events. With this ability to diversify, authors can criticize specific facets and groups that exist within this world, promote certain ideas, come up with philosophical ideas, or merely just entertain.
Case Study: xkcd
Created in 2005 by Randall Munroe, xkcd and its familiar stick figure characters have amassed a extensive fan base worldwide. This collection is a case study approach that examines the webcomic from the perspective of all other collection themes. Described as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, the webcomic’s wide range of humor has transformed Randall’s doodles into a webcomic whose fan social media accounts have over 80k followers. Whether it be how “Time” employs digital affordances, or how the “explain xkcd” forum fosters community building, this collection will demonstrate how the tenets highlighted in the other collections can interact within a single comic.