Table of Contents

Introduction Historical Overview Social and Cultural Impact Ubiquity Technology Conflicts with Newspaper Strips Audience Participation Education/Social Causes Formats Financing Key Texts Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio Penny Arcade by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques Stand Still. Stay Silent. by Minna Sundberg The Adventures of Gyno-Star by Rebecca Cohen Dumbing of Age by David M. Willis Empathize This by Tak Shiota et al. Critical Uses Discussing Webcomics Webcomics as a Genre? Genres in Webcomics Defining Success Success: Easier or More Difficult? The Negative Side of Creator Access Permanence vs. Etherialness Paratexts Appendix Solution Squad Lesson Plan Glossary Resources

Promotional Information

The first critical guide to cover the history, form and key critical issues surrounding webcomics and includes important examples of key texts.

About the Author

Sean Kleefeld is an independent scholar based in the USA. He is the author of Comic Book Fanthropology (2009) and is a regular columnist and blogger.

Reviews

Sean Kleefeld’s Webcomics, an entry in the Bloomsbury Comics Studies series, is essential because it remedies the lack of a high-level account of webcomics. It allows the reader to survey the entire field and to see the common threads that link seemingly disparate genres together ... I hope that other future scholarly works, by Kleefeld or others, will complement Kleefeld’s perspective by offering more critical and theoretically informed analyses of webcomics. For such works, however, Kleefeld’s Webcomics represents an essential starting point.
*Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society*

I’ve always been a great fan of Sean Kleefeld’s writing: its clarity, its circumspection, and the measured quality of his tone. Kleefeld is an ideal writer to chronicle the rise of modern webcomics. He patiently explores not just the nascent realities of an industry in flux but all of the roads not taken, all of the false starts and dead ends, with the perspicacity an unformed future demands. In Kleefeld’s hands, defining what comics looks like today is less a sorting out process for the ages than a mad crash down a steep hill hoping to scoop up some village's bouncing wheel of cheese set loose on the valley below. By the time you’re through, you’ll know just what set of circumstances won the day, and what set didn’t and what might be yet to come. The longer you take to find and read your own copy is the amount of time I get to be smarter than you.
*Tom Spurgeon, Publisher and Managing Editor, The Comics Reporter*