Those of you who are linked to my Facebook and Twitter accounts know that I’m still putting my brain back together after New England Webcomic’s Weekend. Once I have all put all the teeny little pieces collectively into some working gray matter (well mostly working,) I’m going to post some pictures of the event to my flickr page, from which I’ll link too from here.
It almost goes without saying this past weekend was amazing, and not only do I hope they do it again next year, but I can’t wait to see what will change from this one to the next as the field grows and matures.
If there was one major theme to the NEWW experience this year, I am going to go ahead and stick my neck out and say it was that webcomic’s time has come. You see a lot of mainstream articles talking about the inevitable migration of daily comic strips from the newspapers to the web, but they always talk about them in the future tense. Well, I can safely tell you those author’s have miscalculated, the webcomic’s revolution will not happen in ten, five, or even two years, but is ongoing now. You could feel the sea change at the NY Comic-Con this year, but a lot of old media was diluting the message, making it harder to tell if this is really happening or just some magical hype.
Spared of the ongoing carnival theatrics of NY-Comic-Con ( which don’t get me wrong…I am a fan of ) it was easier to connect to the message at NEWW and it was very apparent that not even the current dismal economy can slow the growth and progress of webcomic’s everywhere.
Which of course, lead into a lot of talk about the demise of the comic strip page as part of American newspaper experience, and then on to the downfall of printed materials in general, some of which could have been almost taken as gloating, but actually I believe really just showed the amazing and overwhelming total love everyone in attendance has for the medium and the work they are willing to do to see it survive into it’s next form. Which brings me to the little talked about aspect of webcomic’s at the show, it is going to be a rough road for a while until new and better ways come about to spread the word about the creativity and talent going on in web comics right now. However, as anyone can tell who was there, the time for speculation is over, regardless of hits or misses, webcomic’s time is here.
Maybe now we can just start calling them comics again, and drop the tedious “web” distinction.
Just Kidding! But after reading CNN’s tech article; 