Jumping the shark at the third post

One of these days, I'm going to have to take the time and sort through the various web pages that I have bookmarked in Firefox. I have been consistently putting off the task for months and the number of bookmarks that I have has probably doubled ever since I discovered the TV Tropes Wiki, a fascinating website which covers various clichés and overused plots in not just the world of TV but in videogames, comic books, etc. I'm currently making my way through the entire website (and have been doing so for weeks) reading each of the entries and bookmarking the ones that I hope to avoid or reference in my own fiction writing exploits (more on that later, when I, you know, actually get around to writing some of it).

Anyway, while looking through my bookmarks, I keep noticing the sheer size of the number of webcomics I read and am planning to read. A subfolder of my “Webcomics” folder marked “Current” contains precisely 75 webcomics which I go through every day. On yet another of these hypothetical future days I'll have to go through them and reorder them according to their update schedules so I don't have to go through the loading pages closing 60-odd tabs every Tuesday.

As I said yesterday, I intend to use these weekly doodles (aha, the mystery behind “woodle” is solved) to credit myself as a webcomic writer but I do have some greater plans which I will now describe nebulously, for three reasons:
1.I hope you will be intrigued enough to, well, be intrigued by it and all that it entails without realising that, as I've already said, I really haven't done that much actual writing for it.
2.The additional pressure of the two people who read this blog being intrigued by it will be enough to get my frickin' artist off his lazy ass and do some of the concept art I've been asking for since last July!
3.I get to use the word nebulously, which is just an awesome word.

I guess the topic for this post has now really become webcomics (expect it to come up again), so I may as well tell you about my own views on webcomics, because you already know your own and I can't really write about anybody else's.

I first got into webcomics when Sam Stafford, my good friend, close collaborator and dogsbody, pointed me in the direction of Ctrl-Alt-Del. Fairly videogame oriented and perhaps not the best comic out there (though certainly very good and successful), it was enough to get me intrigued and lead me to poke around this big Wikipedia list of webcomics. Now I'm not going to get into the whole “there's a bunch of Wikipedia editors out to get webcomics” thing, and I'm not explaining it either, but suffice it to say that led me to a few gems such as Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire and and Sluggy Freelance, which really showed me just how well long, linear stories and arcs could be accomplished with webcomickry (please note: webcomickry may or may not be a real word, the author is in no way responsible for any kind of situation in which you may be dumb enough to use it in general conversation and can't explain what it means).

There are a few others (well, 73, not counting the couple of hundred which I have links to the archives of with the intent of reading them at some point) which I count myself as a fan of and perhaps some day I'll list more of them. Although they run the gamut (another great word) of daily gag strips to complex decade-spanning (don't believe me? Read Sluggy Freelance) plots to utter nonsense that's inexplicably funny, I definitely prefer the plotted, more character humour based ones to the more off the wall ones.

I've actually developed a system for determining if a particular webcomic is going to have much of my beloved character development. Look at the cast page, many comic have them, and see if there's a female main character. Nine times out of ten, the protagonist will be a 15-25 year old male who will have an awkward relationship developing with any female character for the first couple of years at least, thus ensuring some level of plot arcs and development, hopefully without too much angst and drama. In badly drawn black-and-white.

Come to think of it, awkward clearly mutual attractions between fictional which seem never to pan out bug the hell out of me. I can just about tolerate it in series where it's a very occasional sub-plot, such as O'Neill and Carter in Stargate SG-1, though even that was pushing the limit towards series 8, any show where it's a major factor will eventually reach the stage when you can look beneath the TV while watching it and quite clearly see a shark.

Since I've now written over 800 words of this tripe (I've written shorter English essays) and I still need time to format it for the interwebs, I'll leave you, still with next to no knowledge about my crazy webcomic plan. Fare thee well!


Image: Why does the iSight camera in my iMac invert everything?