If that's not the longest title ever, I don't know what is.
So, webcomics. According to Wikipedia, over 18,000 of them exist on the Internet currently. That's a scary number, especially if you consider that the vast majority of them is the digital equivalent of mind-numbing poison. Personally, I only follow Penny Arcade, because I'm a total nerd and proud of it, but I like xkcd and Cyanide and Happiness as well.
The problem with webcomics is the fact that they're so damn easy to make. All you need is spare time, the illusion that you possess something resembling a sense of humor, and the ability to draw a straight line. And it's a blessing that I don't possess the latter, as I would have definitely been tormenting humanity with my unfunny webcomic already.
But that's exactly the reason why there are so damn many webcomics out there. They're easy to make, and the successful ones amongst them are so unmistakably so that most others want to steal their glory, have a piece of the pie, and other horrid clichés like these.
For these reasons, I was glad to see that a genuinely funny and witty person like Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation decided to make a video targeting webcomics and their lack of quality. His description of webcomics is right on the money:
"How to make millions of gamers happy with the minimum amount of effort."
The video itself acts as a hilarious guide on what to not do if you insist on unleashing yet another webcomic on us weary readers, as well as a satire of already existing webcomics that have become famous without any apparent reason.
It might not be as funny as it should be if you're not familiar with webcomics in general, and with a certain soul-crashingly bad one in particular, but it should at least get a chuckle out of you. Watch the video here.
TL;DR version:
Filler post. Just watch the video.
Do answer me this, if you can, though: Why do people like VGCats?
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5 comments:
Holy crap, did ctrl-alt-del do a miscarriage comic? That guy's an epic douchebag.
That "Drawn by Pain" thing is visually nifty but I get the feeling that it's going to be thematically defunct.
Yeah, I only found out about this recently too, kinda wish I hadn't.
Seriously, I understand trying to do different things, but that was way out there.
You can argue taste when it comes to comedy all day long, but trying something so serious in this a fucking webcomic is simply retarded.
The thing is, if somebody who has the emotional core of a human being, solid storytelling skills and good, mostly realistic characters did it, like PvP, or somebody who was completely irreverent and had established "shock value" credentials did it then I could see a storyline like that being worthwhile but ctrl-alt-del has none of those things. Besides that, the guy who writes it is a complete fucktard.
I agree. Well, I never followed CAD enough to know a lot about the guy behind it, but the consensus tends to point to that direction.
As for CAD itself, it was always pretty shallow entertainment (for some people at least), such a change felt tacked on and fairly pretentious, too.
Not to mention that trying to tell a "serious" story with that kind of artwork just doesn't work.
You know, I think that you can tell a serious story with that sort of artwork. It's a matter of how you present it and how well you establish real characters. It would be very difficult, certainly, but I imagine it could be done.
Actually, that reminds me of "serious" comics that were in newspapers when I was a kid. They were three panels long, six on Sundays, and they were on the funny pages but they were telling dramatic stories. I never bothered with them because I was 10 and all I wanted to see was the new Calvin and Hobbes. Pet tigers are awesome.
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