I whipped up this comic strip in the context of a Facebook discussion about Hark! A Vagrant, a web comic which everyone on the Internet except me seems to think is the greatest thing since chewable laxatives. The strip is meant to be a parody of Hark! A Vagrant, pointing out the fact that Hark! A Vagrant is a comic with, as Kenny put it, "a quirky tone and no real jokes." Or, as I put it, a "Heavily stylized, 100% humor-free webcomic that a lot of people seem to love for some reason, probably because it's drawn by a girl."
I myself subscribe to the old school of comic strip humor, and I tend to expect the strips I read to build toward some sort of punchline in the final frame. Admittedly, this often enables me to see the punchline coming two miles away and around the corner, but it's still a format in which I find some familiar comfort.
My Facebook debate about Hark! A Vagrant made me realize that this dated view has led me to largely misinterpret the zeitgeist of webcomics. When I launched my own at-best-uneven strip back in 2002 I assumed that the advantage of web comics was the ability to take the traditional form of newspaper comics and make the subject matter extremely esoteric and the content unfetteredly profane. That may have been true at the time, but apparently many of today's webcomics follow a different set of rules entirely, relying on mood, tone, and general wackiness rather than formally structured jokes. Tragically, my own comedic talents are probably more suited to the latter format, but at this point I can't seem to muster the energy to get back on the strip-drawing bandwagon.
Anyway, my days of regular strip-drawing have been over for quite some time, but the above strip was described variously during the Facebook discussion as "brilliant" and "the funniest comic [I] have ever made" (I make no representations as to the irony or hyperbole of either statement), so I figured I'd share it with the half-dozen or so people who still occasionally read this blog.
