I love checking out T. Campbell’s rankings on the most popular webcomics by readership at his webcomics.com site. It soothes my inner statistician. Plus it’s always fun to see what webcomics people are reading. However, T’s latest list had a strange new addition, which is now occupying the #1 slot. And that would be LOLCats. No, not Ape Lad’s Laugh-Out-Loud Cats (which can be seen at the beginning of this post).
I’m talking about the friggin’ I Can Has Cheezburger? internet site.
T. explains it all in a previous post. Here are the relevant bits:
Scott McCloud’s widely quoted Understanding Comics broadened the definition of comics to “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence.” In the Internet age, we have to be careful with the words “juxtaposed” and “deliberate.” McCloud argued that single-panel strips like The Family Circus didn’t qualify because there could not be a “sequence” of one pictoral image. But I’d argue that an archive of single-panel “comics” counts in this context– Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is meant to be read in a certain order, and one of the pleasures of webcomics is watching a cartoonist grow and refine his technique. The sequence is deliberate, and as three-dimensional text, it’s about as “juxtaposed” as the pages in a book.
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I Can Has Cheezburger? is a playful spin on a popular fixture of the Internet– cat photos. The site asks its users to submit pictures of cats with deliberately bad grammar and spelling, sometimes laced with Internet slang (“LOL! I’m in yur base! I has a bukkit”) the better to represent the “voices” of not-quite-literate kitties. (Or “kittehs,” as the kitties would describe themselves.)
ICHC? has expanded its focus to photos of animals in general, but it’s best known for these “Lolcats,” which have attained widespread popularity through the blogosphere. (Lolcats didn’t originate with the site, but the site popularized them.) Much like xkcd and Cyanide and Happiness, ICHC? actively encourages file-sharing, so its reach exceeds its site traffic.
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For many, “Web 2.0″ means “user-edited” as well as user-generated, but both sites have editors choosing the most interesting submissions…. ICHC?’s two-person “burger team” chooses some of the most promising submissions and lets user voting determine which ones make the homepage.
Frank Warren and “the burger team” may rely on others for their words and pictures, but in their role as editors, they’re three of the most successful creatives of the year.
If you disagree, I’m sure you already have a rebuttal formulated. I’ll only state the most obvious one: “Webcomic readers dont consider LOLCats a webcomic. And LOLCats readers don’t either. It’s a friggin’ Internet meme! GAH! What, are Star Wars caption contests webcomics now? Give me a friggin’ break!”
Ahem.
So…
What do you think? Are LOLCats really webcomics, since photo comics are legit and I’m just being a crusty old fuddy-duddy? Or do comics need a creator to guide the creative process?
Al Scaduto (That’ll Do It Every Time! funny page comic) may have taken reader submissions, but, God bless his soul, he at least re-worded everything in Scaduto-speak and did his own friggin’ illustrations. Am I to believe that my humorously captioned photo albums are really webcomics in disguise?!??!
(Note: I plan on turning this debate into a controversy of “Ebert does not think video games are art” proportions.)
Well I have the I Can Has Cheezburger RSS feed in my comics folder. So I guess that makes them comics.
Are “LOLcats” webcomics? Nope. If they are then I don’t wanna be a webcartoonist anymore. I don’t understand why they were included in this ranking. But then I’m anti-”Reinventing Comics,” anti-photocomics, anti-clip art, and anti-sprite comics, so what do I know, right? Comics are a form of communication using a series of drawings arranged sequentially to tell a story, and, crucially, are simultaneously an art form. Thus, when at their best, comics combine aesthetics and communication in a unique manner. Verbally, you can tell a joke. In a comic, you can tell a joke beautifully. Comics are NOT pictures of your cat with a silly caption. Good article!
This makes me very internet nerd angry because a) this LOLCats shit is garbage and b) My most favoritest comic of all time was/is Leisuretown, which actually IS a photo comic (among other things) and actually IS funny and well done. Hours in photoshop for a single frame vs. 12 year old Timmy Dumbass from down the street who just figured out how to switch his font to Impact.
Comics should represent some vague degree of effort, at the very least. There’s no effort in LOLCats beyond the dexterity required to type “funny cat” into Google.
LOLcats are not comics, because they have no fourth wall.
When the LOL(ing? er? ist?)cat says the he is in ur bukkit, he’s talking to you, the reader. Unless you come at the thing with that assumption, it simply isn’t funny. When Billy says asks if the sunset means that God is going to bed too, he’s not asking you.
While comics do occasionally break the fourth wall, they have an operative assumption that it’s there; that’s why they can break it. LOLcats have no fourth wall to break.
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