Contemporary Comics: The Digital & Diverse
Detail from cover of Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann (2019).
In those early days, webcomics were some of the most influential pieces of the early-ish internet — vibrant and weird. They formed followings, which became communities, which became culture.
— Cat Ferguson, "Webcomics: An Oral History"
Webcomics & Webtoons
Since the early 2000s, the comics industry has undergone a slow but marked shift towards more diverse representation among creators, fueled in part by the growing ubiquity of the internet and the consequent rise of webcomics. While webcomics existed in some form since even before the World Wide Web — the first, Eric Millikin's “Witches in Stitches," was created for CompuServe, an early online service provider — the form exploded in popularity in the first decade of the 21st century. This period saw the creation of hundreds of beloved, long-running titles, including James Kochalka's autobiographical daily American Elf (began in 1998 but moved online in 2002), Nicholas Gurewitch's darkly funny and lushly illustrated gag strip Perry Bible Fellowship (2001), Chris Onstad's absurdist epic Achewood (2001), Ryan North's fixed-art masterwork Dinosaur Comics (2003), Kate Beaton's history-joke strip Hark! a Vagrant (2006), and Meredith Gran's character-driven Octopus Pie (2007).
The first Dinosaur Comics strip by Ryan North (February 1st, 2003).
With the rise of "Web 2.0" and the shift to social media, individual webcomic sites saw a fall in traffic as readers began to engage with content through these third-party platforms. However, crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter and Patreon provided new revenue opportunities for both established properties and newer titles, such as Tom Parkinson-Morgan's Kill Six Billion Demons (2014) Guillaume Bonnet and Eve Bolt's Thief of Tales (2016), and Tommaso Devito's Ten Earth-Shattering Blows (2017).
Since the mid-2010s, readers have increasingly shifted to consuming digital comics through aggregator platforms like Webtoon and Tapas, which host vertical-layout "scroll comics" better formatted for reading on mobile. Titles such as Alice Oseman's Heartstopper (2016) and Rachel Smythe's Lore Olympus (2018) have cultivated massive readerships, eventually making the jump to physical print collections.
Webcomics and Webtoons
Heartstopper, Vol. 1
Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. An LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between.
Hyperbole and a Half
Collects autobiographical, illustrated essays and cartoons from the author's popular blog and related new material that humorously and candidly deals with her own idiosyncrasies and battles with depression.
Hark! a Vagrant
This collection takes readers on a romp through history and literature — with dignity for few and cookies for all — with comic strips about famous authors, their characters, and political and historical figures, all drawn in Kate Beaton's charming pared-down style.
The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack
For more than 20 years, various cartoonists have jostled for the title of spiritual heir to Gary Larson, the famously weird creator of the groundbreaking strip The Far Side. Web cartoonist Gurewitch is a solid contender for the title.
Octopus Pie
Follow the adventures of two Brooklynites — Eve, a nerdy acerbic twentysomething, and her roommate Hanna, a long-lost friend who's blossomed into happy-go-lucky stoner. Crazed childhood rivals, art world hipsters, Eve's meddlesome mom, and romances past and present crowd their odd yet ordinary lives
Gunnerkrigg Court, Vol. 1: Orientation
Antimony Carver is a precocious and preternaturally self-possessed young girl starting her first year of school at gloomy Gunnerkrigg Court, a very British boarding school that has robots running around along side body-snatching demons, forest gods, and the odd mythical creature.
Detail from East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta.
Image [Comics] started to subtly change as the years went on, going from an artist-focused company to one that was more writer-driven. Writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Jonathan Hickman, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, Rick Remender, and so many others got their big breaks at Image...[the publisher] was responsible for an artistic renaissance in the early-'90s and then a writer renaissance in the '00s.
— David Harth, "10 Ways Image Comics Changed The Industry"
The New Mainstream
At the same time that the internet was providing unknown creators a way to get around gatekeepers like newspapers and publishers, the business of comics was undergoing another transformation. Following the narrative and artistic innovation of the 80s and 90s, graphic novels were increasingly seen as a worthwhile art form, and were being reviewed, discussed and taught in a variety of contexts. While the "big two," DC and Marvel, still dominated the publishing market, they had been joined by a number of competitors.
The 80s and 90s had seen the creation of alternative publishers such as as Fantagraphics and the Canadian Drawn & Quarterly. These continued to publish work by now-established artists like Charles Burns, Dan Clowes and the Hernandez Brothers, while discovering new creators who pushed the aesthetic and conceptual boundaries of narrative art — including Simon Hanselmann, Tom Gauld and Norwegian cartoonist Jason.
Meanwhile, non-superhero genre comics were undergoing a revival, thanks in large part to Image Comics and DC's Vertigo imprint. Image, which had cut its teeth in the 90s with superhero properties like Todd McFarlane's Spawn and Jim Lee and Brandon Choi's WildCATS, began turning out pop-cultural phenomena like Saga (Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples) and The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore). Meanwhile Vertigo built its own impressive backlist, including Bill Willingham's Fables, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher, and Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y: the Last Man.
Finally, while graphic memoir had always been an important genre within narrative sequential art, the 2000s and 2010s witnessed unprecedented artistic output in this form, with many titles garnering wide recognition and praise outside the usual comics readership. Notable works include Marjane Sartrapi's Persepolis, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Craig Thompson's Blankets and Gene Yuen Yang's American-Born Chinese.
Literary and Biographical
March: Book One
Congressman John Lewis' first-hand account of his lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.
American Born Chinese
Tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate Chinese stereotype.
Blankets
The story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice. Craig Thompson's poignant graphic memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely-hewn linework draws together a portrait of small town life, a rigorously fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was the director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Are You My Mother?
Bechdel investigates her relationship with her mother: a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood...and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven.
The Complete Persepolis
The story of Marjane Satrapi's childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming -- both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland.
The Silence of Our Friends
A white family from a notoriously racist neighborhood in the suburbs and a black family from its poorest ward cross Houston's color line, overcoming humiliation, degradation, and violence to win the freedom of five black college students unjustly charged with the murder of a policeman.
Contemporary Alternative
Megahex
Megg is a depressed, drug-addicted witch. Mogg is her black cat. Their friend, Owl, is an anthropomorphized owl. They hang out a lot with Werewolf Jones. This may sound like a pure stoner comedy, but it transcends the genre: these characters struggle with depression, drug use, sexuality, poverty, lack of work, lack of ambition, and their complex feelings about each other.
Goliath
This is the story of David and Goliath as seen from Goliath's side of the Valley of Elah. Quiet moments in Goliath's life as a soldier are accentuated by the author's drawing style, which contrasts minimalist scenery and near-geometric humans with densely crosshatched detail.
Why Are You Doing This?
Imagine a long-forgotten, never-produced Alfred Hitchcock "wrong man" thriller screenplay discovered, adapted, and filmed by a modern minimalist like Jim Jarmusch, and you'll have some idea of the unique flavor of this graphic novel.
Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam (and Other Stories)
Megg and Mogg decide to take a trip to Amsterdam for some quality couple time, although the trip gets off to a rocky start when they forget their antidepressants. They need Owl to come and help them save their relationship. But why does he have a suitcase full of glass dildos?
White Cube
Lushly painted, these irreverent strips poke fun at the staid, often smug art world, offering an absurdist view on the institutions of that world--questioning what constitutes art and what doesn't, as well as how we decide what goes on the walls of the gallery and what doesn't.
Cyclopedia Exotica
In Cyclopedia Exotica, doctor's office waiting rooms, commercials, dog parks, and dating app screenshots capture the experiences and interior lives of the cyclops community; a largely immigrant population displaying physical differences from the majority.
Blacklung
A bookish sixteenth century teacher finds himself accidentally aboard a ship of bandits who partake in a level of violence and comradery that opens his eyes to a different kind of human interaction, suffering and violence.
Image and Vertigo
Monstress
Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900's Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steam punk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power.
Saga
The sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the universe. When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old world
Fables: the Deluxe Edition, Book One
Imagine that all the characters from the world's most beloved storybooks were real -- real, and living among us, with all their powers intact. How would they cope with life in our mundane, un-magical reality?
The Wicked and the Divine, Vol. 1: The Faust Act
Every ninety years, twelve gods incarnate as humans. They are loved. They are hated. In two years, they are dead.
