Spinning a dark web of fun
The Hindu : y>Web comics are an integral part of cyber life. Profane, funny, sadistic and inspirational at the same time, Pheroze L. Vincent finds out why they tick
It’s a silent revolution. Web comics have been taking modern offices, universities and almost any online work place by storm with their wit, sarcasm and alternative insights. There are innumerable such comics online today and a few of them are even commercially viable. These include “xkcd”, “Ctrl+Alt+Del”, “Questionable Content”, “PhD” and many others.
“xkcd”’s creator Randall Munroe, a former NASA contractor, describes it as a comic of “romance, sarcasm, math and language”. The comic, which has a loyal geek following, has funny observations of daily life with references to theorems and space research.
There are others like “PhD” that are based on the idiosyncrasies of university life. “PhD”, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, also appears in the Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Caltech newspapers. It has been linked to The Washington Post and USA Today’s websites.
The creator of “PhD”, Jorge Cham, gives talks on the ‘power of procrastinating’, full time, in universities in the US. “PhD” has all the varsity stereotypes: the bookworm engineering student, the closet-geek college sweetheart, the lazy varsity bird who’s been there forever, the activist social scientist, the plagiarising professor and so on.
While most web comics are stick art, many of them have distinct genres of art like fumetti, pixel art, and photo manipulation. Joey Comeau and Emily Horne’s “A Softer World”, for example, is made by photography overlaid with strips of typewriter-style text.
Comics like “Married to the Sea” and “Monkey Fluids” use Victorian illustrations. So popular have they become that Indian comic artist Saad Akhtar, who creates “Fly, You Fools”, wants to do comics with Mughal illustrations.
“Fly, You Fools” is a hit with its sarcastic take on daily life, newsmakers and popular culture. Saad Akhtar…More
