Pop culture trends come in cycles. A new property shows up on the scene, gains traction, and explodes in popularity. Entropy always gets a vote, though, and the IP holders inevitably turn to milking the brand. A consequent decline in quality follows, and the brand–sometimes the whole genre–goes moribund.
The web comics fad of the early aughts gives us a fascinating case study in the rise and fall of an entire medium.
While sticklers can point to primitive examples of web comics from the early 90s or even the 80s, those precursors are analogous to Pong played on oscilloscopes. Web comics as we think of them now didn’t get a foothold until 1997 when outfits like Big Panda offered hosting to hundreds of digital comics creators.
That web comics didn’t start their rise until that year will have significance to frequent readers of this blog.
By the year 2000, you had print comics industry wonks like Scott McCloud waxing utopian about the “infinite canvas”. In retrospect, the notion of artists posting free comic strips to dedicated web sites and thriving off tee shirt sales seems cockeyed. That kind of wishful thinking will be familiar to newpub authors who remember big indies’ lauding of Amazon as our liberator from oldpub’s chains.
It comes off as laughably naive in this day of Big Tech censorship and rampant deplatforming, but a stock character of every aughts tech blog and combox was the technocrat who’d mount his soapbox and declare the internet the solution to every problem imaginable. Always lost amid the grandiose promises of technological progress was the unchanging, fallen state of Man.
Not even tech-savvy whiz kids can dodge the Gods of the Copybook Headings. By the middle of the last decade, the web comics bubble had burst–a victim of ascendant social media and changing consumer tastes.
Sometimes, though, a property gets enough going for it to weather its industry’s collapse. If you can attract a big enough fan base for Brand X, you’ll stay afloat when the hangers-on who chased the Brand X-fueled trend fall away.
In the web comics scene, Penny Arcade stands as the exemplar of that rule. Created by then-roommates Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, PA spearheaded the video gaming subgenre that took web comics by storm in the low 90s and early aughts. Contra public perception of PA’s closest competitors, writer Holkins wasn’t dragged to fame on artist Krahulik’s coattails. His distinctive wordsmithing and daily blog posts proved essential to the comic’s “it” factor.
Comics are a visual medium, and to its credit, Penny Arcade could trenchantly get its point across without a single line of dialogue.
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| The single greatest web comic strip ever produced. |
It takes more than a competent artist to pull off that trick. You need a solid writer informing the visuals.
Those visuals started out pretty crude, as the PA duo readily admit.
But to paraphrase George Carlin’s character in Bill & Ted, they did get better.
And bigger. Throughout the aughts, PA grew to become the top web comic in the world. Under the capable guidance of business manager Robert Khoo, Krahulik and Holkins expanded their operation to spinoff comics, print books, a clothing line, an abortive video game series, a charity, and most notably, an international convention franchise.
Neither the manufactured controversies nor the creators’ personal challenges were what led to my parting of the ways with Penny Arcade. The site gradually went from a thrice-weekly must-read to an occasional side trip over the course of the aughts, mainly owing to PA entering the corporate IP Milking Phase.
What can be laid at the creators’ feet–particularly Krahulik’s–was the art and subject matter’s rapid drift into self-indulgence. There was a long stretch from about 2004-2005 when two out of the three weekly strips would be based on World of Warcraft. That was uninteresting enough to someone who didn’t play WoW. Even worse, the strips started relying on WoW inside baseball for their humor value.
Frankly, and there’s no beating around the bush here, PA’s once crisp art degenerated into vomit thanks to Krahulik’s imitation of Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.
Still, the honored axiom, “Hate the game, not the player,” applies. Krahulik and Holkins achieved remarkable success in the cutthroat entertainment industry and have maintained that success despite their market sector collapsing around them. No less impressively, they remain surprisingly resistant to the Death Cult despite their prominence in the Pop Cult.
We’re on the cusp of a possible renaissance. And the first step that we can all take to make it happen is “Don’t Give Money To People Who Hate You.”
