'But it's so cute!' 'Sure, but I still think they should be playing the banjo.' by Kara
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 6:51 AM

You know, as far as I can remember, I don't really talk much about the actual webcomics industry (and I'm not being pretentious -- it really is an industry at this point) a hell of a lot. Well, sure, I'm in the mood for it now.

This was mainly kicked along by an article by Eric Burns: Entitlement and the Modern Fandom. See, I have this problem where I can't phrase important things very well. I don't consider it a curse, though, as someone or something almost always comes along that can do it for me.

Mr. Burns's article is wonderful, in that it really does cover rather comprehensively the line between fans and Fandom, the good side of Fandom, and what Fandom can do to a creator of any type (in webcomics, dead tree comics, sci-fi, mainstream TV, whatever) when it gets ugly. And how it gets ugly, a few examples of which I have observed, and to which I have, on occasion, been subjected myself.

(Which is really ridiculous, because I'm not a Big Dog. That sort of attention really belongs to Randy Milholland, Mookie, Tycho and Gabe, and then that clump of Uber-Big-Dogs up there that I really can't tell apart anymore.)

My favourite summing-up in the article:

If you invest so much of your own sense of well being into a comic strip that anything bad happening to the comic strip characters feels like a personal affront, you officially need to get a fucking hobby away from your computer. If the Cartoonist does his strip as his job, his only obligation is to produce strips on time, and try to make them high quality enough so he doesn't alienate his audience. If the Cartoonist is doing this as a hobby or on the side, he doesn't even have that obligation. In neither case does he owe you or me a good life. He probably doesn't even know us. So get over it!

I still do encourage you to read the full article, though. And to look around Websnark. I really do love it now that I've started reading, even though I tremble in fear at the day Burns reads work of mine and decides it's bad.

In other webcomic news, Josh Lesnick just smacked down Tim Buckley. I'm curious as to what the rebuttal will be (if any), but I do think it was unwise to alert people to their 'magnetic poetry' line directly after Lesnick's comment.

Heh. It's times like this I really appreciate not being a Big Dog.

If you have been, did it really?