Lauren Davis of the Storming the Tower webcomic blog has a great post she’s written called “What I’ve Learned from Reading Print Comics.” She recounts experiences from being a print comic fan, what advantages the format has over webcomics, and the areas the webcomic community needs to work on to capture the same zeitgeist.

Here are some highlights:

Reading comics should be a social activity. I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did; buying comics is a social activity. You head down to the shop on Wednesday afternoon — roughly the same time each Wednesday — and buy your books. You shoot the shit with other folks who buy their comics at the same time you do. You talk about the books you’re buying, this week’s True Blood, the weather, whatever. You see roughly the same people each week and, over time, you get to know their opinions on this artist or that character. I’m a pretty hermetic person, but even I think it’s kind of nice.

I’ve never found anything that’s quite analogous for webcomics. I have some friends IRL who read webcomics, but we don’t really critique webcomics in the same way print comics readers do. We don’t discuss Hazel’s role in Girls with Slingshots or how Randy Milholland handles other creators’ characters or whether Fans! makes any damn sense half the time. We don’t talk about the direction we’d like to see Questionable Content take or whether the titular character in Bruno is a Mary Sue and whether it matters.

Individual comics have comment sections or bulletin boards, and some of them are a lot of fun. I’ve probably spent more time reading Penny and Aggie’s board than reading the comic itself. But the reading community hasn’t developed a central place where it can discuss the wider ecosystem of webcomics. We have websites and blogs, but we’re not polishing ourselves against one another. With a few glancing exceptions, we’re not forming relationships with one another over our bickering and our shared admiration. We’re not elevating the discourse about webcomics. We’re not creating a central place for criticisms and small experiments and parodies. We’re not providing a social resource for newbies to the webcomics scene. We’re not even providing a scene outside the creative community.

I often tell people that webcomics are awesome because for every “two dudes playing video games on a couch” comic, there is a comic about post-Reformation theologians or karmically-challenged Brooklynites or a grumpy wombat on a mystical quest or the zombie post-apocalypse or an alternate-history Arizona or female professional wrestlers. There are artists who put out clean and polished lines, others who prefer to leave theirs sketchy, and still others who rely primarily on clip art. While traditional print comics wring their hands over girl power and attracting younger readers, webcomickers offer plenty of honest-to-God feminism and teen drama. Webcomics have something for everyone, assuming you know where to look.

But this also means that webcomickers have to identify their target audience, grab ‘em by the ears, and pitch and market their little hearts out. DC and Marvel can lure us in with new stories about familiar characters, even if we didn’t grow up with superhero comics. You can bet I’ll pick up Batman Beyond #1 this week, if only because I loved watching the show so much in high school. Webcomickers have to say a lot more than “Hey, remember how awesome Terry McGinnis was?”

Sharing books beats sharing links. An interesting thing happened to me recently. My mom was visiting for a few days this month, and I showed her my copy of The Fart Party. She sat down, read most of the book, then left it on a chair in my living room. Fast forward a few days, and my law school roommate, a corporate litigator whose never expressed any particular interest in comics, is staying with me. I’m trying to get some work done when I suddenly look up and she’s sitting there reading the book she’s found on the chair.

“This is really funny,” she tells me. “Why have I never heard of her before?”

I am speechless.

This is more or less why I bought the Octopus Pie treasury. I’ve been trying to convince my comic and non-comic-reading friends alike of Meredith Gran’s brilliance, but when I send people the link, they assure me that they’ll “get around to it eventually.” As a person who has a lot of comics I plan to “get around to eventually,” I know exactly what that means. I got my copy of There Are No Stars in Brooklyn just two days ago, and I’ve already loaned it out. Giving someone a physical book to read adds a little weight to your recommendation (about two pounds — har, har), and gives your bailee a ticking clock. They have to read your book so they can return it to you. Just make sure you can trust the person you’re loaning it to — those things aren’t cheap.

Not too long ago, a reader put comments up on this site questioning the general quality of webcomics. I thought it would be good to respond via post not to pick on the guy, but because his point is one that’s been made may times by many people, whether they’re proponents of print comics or casual webcomic readers or what not.

“comics not good enough to end up in print” sounds about right. We’d like to think that some vitriol-filled, scathing reviews would improve any of these end products, but the fact is, that, yes, just as the internet is a wonderful library of information in which every piece of information you never wanted to see or have contact with is usually in the path to your goal, likewise good webcomics are incredibly difficult to come by, and even most of the review sites that claim to point toward the higher-quality work are sycophantic droolers.

….

… Penny Arcade and Chugworth and Megatokyo and other low-quality comics may have acheived print status, finally, but they’re still webcomics, and will always only ever be “webcomics.” They will be “comics not good enough to make it into print, who’ve found a wide and mediocre audience that will eat dog food if you serve it to ‘em, and through the powers of the internet, gathered this niche of chowder-headed buffoons and united them into a market that might actually buy the crappy book.” It serves two purposes. It tries to elevate them to the same status as any other book of newspaper cartoons you might find in the humor section, and it gives ‘em something pretty to sign at conventions, and we KNOW how much egomaniac artists and writers love to sign things.

I’m sure that I probably shouldn’t be taking this post too seriously. However, his views are neither wrong nor a minority opinion. There really are a lot of awful webcomics out there. If this blog were to ever to reflect the true depth and breadth of all the webcomics I’ve read, 90% of them would be filled with zero-star reviews. That’s right, those not even good enough to warrant a write up. Half of them have no right telling jokes, half of them have no right telling stories, and almost 100% of them should not pick up a pen or pencil or Wacom tablet without taking a basic cartooning class or at least reading How to Draw Cars the Hot Wheels Way first. ’tis only my pity for these misguided souls that stays my hand.

But does this mean that webcomics, as a whole, are thus inherently an inferior medium to print? Around the same time, I ran across a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” The article wasn’t specifically about webcomics. However, it did examine the total mediocrity of everything online. Think webcomics are the only thing plagued by awfulness? How about Youtube vs. television? Blogs vs. newsprint? The problem is everywhere.

The writer of the article, Clay Shirky, takes things one step further. He mentions that this is hardly the first time the world has seen such a phenomenon. He compares the modern digital revolution to the advent of the printing press.
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