Geekly an’ Webcomic Musings: We Get Around
Some were expecting me to write a nice long rant about Jeph Jacques’s* recent blog post on the “State of the Webcomics Union”, part of which read:
The idea of critical analysis of webcomics has largely died out. Sure, people still blog about webcomics and “review” them and stuff, but it’s become a tiny, tiny niche sector. I think this is mainly because there’s not a whole lot of point to reviewing something anybody can go look at for free and make up their own mind about! Is this a good thing? I have no idea.
*The creator of the terrific webcomic Questionable Content, reviewed by yers truly here.
I’m not going to write a nice long rant on this rather controversial view because, well, just look at that statement. I shouldn’t have to point out the irony of someone saying that talking about the world of webcomics is becoming obsolete in a heavily-read blog post that is talking about the world of webcomics. Also, even though the majority of my current articles aren’t about webcomics, most of the traffic I get here on Spwug comes from people who are looking for more information about them. So, you know. Suck on that for a bit. You can split hairs about what you think was actually being said on ye olde LiveJournal, but I’m here to write about something more positive this week.
Instead of complaining about geek divisions, I’m here to talk about geek love, and how it penetrates (huh huh, I said “penetrates”) webcomics, even through other genres of nerdism.
Tonight, I watched the supremeariffic (it’s a word now) parody movie The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. As anyone who’s seen it knows, it relies heavily on making funny commentary about dice gamers. But it went beyond that, oh, yes. Within the first few minutes, the character Nodwick was introduced–a henchman NPC (not to be confused with Dungeons & Dragons’ hireling NPC’s), whose primary role is to lug the adventuring party’s crap and do all the little odd jobs the player characters just don’t want to do–like guarding treasure–as it would distract them from seducing tavern wenches and priestesses.
Hey, wait, this Nodwick guy sounds familiar…and I don’t just mean in the context of Dungeons & Dragons parody. Why is that….Oh, I know! The webcomic Nodwick, which is itself a nod to tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. A gaming movie nod to a webcomic that’s a gaming nodwick?
META BLACK HOLE. MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF SCARS.
For much of the movie, the gamemaster wears a shirt featuring switchblade-toting rabbit Bun-bun, from the webcomic Sluggy Freelance. While not a gaming parody webcomic (Sluggy pokes fun at pretty much everything), it wasn’t any less “nifty” a nod, as the Sluggites would say. It gives me a fuzzy tingle to think of the movie crew, largely geeks in real life as well, leaving the dice and the set to go home and possibly read webcomics.
Maybe we don’t have hundreds of thousands of webcomic-reviewing blogs right now, like we do for celebrity scandals and politics (both MASSIVELY more well-known topics than online comics; let’s be honest here). But it’s not like discussion of the digital-comic world is going away, despite what Jacques wrote. If anything, the discussions are growing in number, as webcomics themselves become less limited to the dark corners of the Internet and start penetrating (heeeeee) the general online realm, and the world outside our computers as well. More people read webcomics; thus, more people discuss webcomics. (How many movies would have featured webcomics fifteen years ago, hmmm?) You no longer have to perform arcane rituals in order to find a webcomic review, and these reviews are no longer limited to randomly-updating personal blogs. Now, you can talk about your favourite online comics at convention panels, while hanging out with friends, or even with total strangers who recognize your Bun-bun shirt on the street. Online, you can find reviews of webcomics on almost any site that appeals to the general nerd, in the comments as well as the posts. Opinions are EV’-RY-WHERE! To say that expressing opinions about one single topic is dying out is not that much less absurd than saying that expressing opinions in general is dying out. You know what they say about opinions and arseholes, after all….
And this was mine. Opinion, I mean. You don’t get to see the other thing.
Well. I guess I did rant a little after all. Therapeutic! I’ll see ya all next time, yo.
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