Ever Wished Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? He Just Did

Berkeley Brethed ran several Bloom County strips which featured the need for more space too, such as: http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add.php?iid=82665

Someone should introduce the man to the internets capabilities. Bill Waterson can have all the space he needs.

The question wasn't whether or not comics is a dying art form. The question is if Bill Watterson BELIEVES that it is, with the suggestion that he might believe so because he possibly doesn't like computers very much and therefore might not be fully aware of web comic artists.

It's a dying art form. Just because they are thriving doesnt make them art.

Comics aren't thriving more than ever. Comics peaked in the early 20th century. Look at the internet comics and then look at what people were doing from 1900 up to WW2. They were working with full newspaper pages at times so they were making more use of space than most webcomics. They also had much larger audiences. Ridiculously larger. Tens of millions of fans. Rube Goldberg received a contract to work exclusively for one paper that I think paid around $50000 a year... in the 1910s. The fact that you're talking about crowdfunding at all is a reminder of how far comics have fallen; comics as an independent underground thing is taken for granted now, and crowdfunding is(while incredibly useful) frequently a way to squeeze as much support as is possible from a small audience. The options for that comic market are much better than they were, but the market taking the shape that it has is precisely because of its falling popularity. The equation of superheroes with comic books was similar; in the dying comic book market, superheroes were one genre that survived, but even that survival was fought for in the form of specialty shops for fans; the mainstream support was already lost and the characters maintained popular support through other media like cartoons and films.

That second list has some very good ones. Some other ones that are or were popular:

Girl Genius, winner of several awards for both story and art, a story about a world ruled by MAD SCIENCE: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

8-bit theater (finished now), an overall parody of Final Fantasy: http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/02/episode-001-were-goin...

Megatokyo - it used to be pretty big among manga fans, I don't know if it still is: http://megatokyo.com/

Savage chickens, a strip drawn in sticky notes: http://www.savagechickens.com/

Basic Instructions - hard to explain, but still, very funny: http://basicinstructions.net/

Penny Arcade, one of the first "big" webcomics, from the same guys that run PAX: http://penny-arcade.com/

Manly guys doing manly things, an overall parody of macho characters in popular culture: http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/

XKCD, terrible (minimalist?) drawing, truly great writing (if you are geek and/or math inclined): http://xkcd.com

Keep in mind that for new readers it is usually better to start from the first strip and move on, but that usually means that you have to endure some pretty terrible artwork (check the "first" button, and move on).

Also, it depends a lot on what you like reading - XKCD is almost exclusively math-oriented while Penny Arcade is not really funny if you are not into videogames. Then again, that's the good side - there's something out there for everyone.

Not exactly a comic, but MATT from the telegraph often cracks me up no end:

http://telegraph.newsprints.co.uk/view/14935264/tg3482987_ma...

I can definitely recommend Achewood (21 on the buzzfeed article). It can take some time to get into it, and it has a distinct flavor that you might never learn to like, but if you do, it's amazing. I haven't really read any of the comics in years, but I still find myself using 'Achewood' language in some of my conversations.

I rather like these two: http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=12282007 http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=01272003

Probably my favourite is actually Calvin and Hobbes which I missed out on the first time around and are being rerun on GoComics http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/. Monty's good too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_(comic_strip)

Also see Sluggy Freelance, running for six or seven years now. Long convoluted story arcs punctuated with frequent gags, and a cast of characters I've grown to love. I keep wondering/worrying when Pete Abrams is going to burn out.

http://sluggy.com

From what I've heard, dude is basically kinda done with the comics grind.

Which is not surprising. I do a webcomic, and have no day job to distract me from it, and yet sometimes I can't even manage one page a week, let alone the six B&W strips and one Sunday strip that being a Syndicated Cartoonist involves. I have a friend who's doing the syndicate gig right now[1] and she's basically impossible to get ahold of because she's always got to stay on top of her buffer.

It's kinda like coding for video games. It's a dream job but the reality is that there are a ton of other people clawing for the same position so you better work your ass off, kiddo!!11!!!. Well, okay, maybe less of a dream job now that newspapers are dead but you know what I mean. That shit burns you out but good.

1: http://www.gocomics.com/heavenly-nostrils

Yeah, but Watterson clearly doesn't like working with technology. He's very much a pen-paper-human kind of guy, and I don't see him all of a sudden deciding to step into the internet.

I'll be darned if he couldn't find someone to work with who could handle getting his work online though. It's mere wishful thinking, but he could draw and communicate (or not) in whichever way he wants, and some trusted friend and gatekeeper handles all of the scanning and online stuff, which could be kept very simple and noncommercial. No ads, twitter, comments section or any of the usual "social media branding" stuff, literally just a page with a comic on it.

Sigh. Man, I still miss Calvin and Hobbes.

Judging from what some other webcomics do, it would be beautiful. This webcomic shows how much freedom can be had with paneling, and how detailed the art can be: http://dresdencodak.com/2010/07/10/dark-science-03/

So... you're saying it's a good comparison?

I think you're right. The Washington Post article backs this up,“Several years ago, when Stephan did one of his strips that mocked his own drawing ability and mentioned my strip in comparison, I thought it might be funny for me to ghost ‘Pearls’ sometime, just to flip it all on its head,” the goateed Watterson tells me, offering a clear indication that he still follows the funnies. “It was just a silly idea, and I didn’t know Stephan, so I never pursued it, and years went by.”

After spending years reading Web comics I now find that "C&H" maps to Cyanide & Happiness rather than Calvin & Hobbes. (Which is crazy; I read all the Calvin & Hobbes strips and grew up in Cleveland Heights for pete's sake!)

It didn't used to be that way. Modern Webcomics are starting to be big cultural phenomena (income comparable with a comfortable full-time job or better for the stars in the industry)

Pastis is no stranger to playing with panel structure too. I guess most of the cartoonists had the idea at some point.

It's a bit of a pity then, since the primary strength of Watterson's work is his writing. His art is good, sure, but what made his name was the underlying substance, methinks.