The Strip, The Comic and the Web Comic

So why did the comic book come about? It offers the audience something that the strips don’t and in a time where the internet was not a resource everything had to be bought. If you were a big fan of a particular character and you brought a paper just to read his little strip each week then the chances of you spending a couple of bucks to grab the collection at the end of the year was incredibly likely. As such, financially it was a way to resell work that had already been produced. You could even advertise in the very same paper in which you placed the comic. Storing all the newspapers would be a waste of space and I’m sure would get annoying incredibly fast. So, in that regard shifting to the book makes sense. There are other practical reasons however. If you ever missed a week, you’d be stuck if there was ever a running, long term narrative so the comic book made that viable. The short panels also weren’t set up for it, they suit gags far better and to have a narrative would mean that it could take weeks before any resolution was found and I would imagine it would get incredibly frustrating week after week just to find out what happened to a character.
The comic book market already has it’s top dogs up there with Marvel and DC and is predominantly overrun with superhero books in the mainstream. So, while you can try and get funding to publish a comic you’ve made (and some people do), it’s unlikely, as a much greater financial risk, that they’re going to get funded. Unless you’re someone like Neil Gaiman and then you can kind of make what you like.  A comic is an incredibly large feat to undergo, it is a lot of work and there is no guarantee that once you’ve finished it that anyone will even give it the time of day or will even like it.

As a result, artists turn to webcomics in order to provide a cheap medium for people who are already having to pay the bills somehow, at college, or just with a passion to create a chance to pursue their dream of telling their own stories through a visual medium. Then, if that becomes successful the chances of someone putting funding into the webcomic becomes much larger as there is already an established fan base. They also, much like the strips, much better suited to gags, giving you a short and sweet place to tell your joke. In a comic book, you cannot shift between a narrative and then gags, but I’ve often found that webcomics can afford to do both. They may have multiple characters, some that are story driven while every so often having one comic be a specific character whom they just have a short gag about.