What were early 2000's webcomics like?

Meta
Title:	Note: the meta is untitled and is referred to here by its first sentence.
Creator:	The Webcomics Review
Date(s):	Feb 8th, 2018
Medium:	Posted to tumblr
Fandom:	Webcomics, various
Topic:	History of webcomics in the 2000s
External Links:	on tumblr, archive link
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What were early 2000's webcomics like? is an essay posted to tumblr by Daniel Kelly on his blog The Webcomics Review. The essay traces the history and development of webcomics from the start of the millenium, touching on social trends, their underlying causes, and notable examples. The essay also covers related technology trends, advertising and monetization.

Specific Webcomics Discussed:

• General Protection Fault
• Penny Arcade
• Megatokyo
• Ctrl Alt Del
• Questionable Content
• Bob and George
• Digger
• The Wotch
• Two Kinds
• Lackadaisy
• The Meek
• Homestuck

Related concepts and people:

• The two-by-two square layout for webcomics (famously seen in Loss)
• "Two Gamers on a Couch" comics
• Sprite Comics
• Scott McCloud and monetization
• The rise of furry webculture and its influence on webcomics
• The professionalization/increase in art quality in the mid-late 2000s.

Responses

As of October 2021, the essay has garnered over 27k notes on Tumblr.

Many people commented on their experience making and reading comics during that time period:

[rosalarian]
Webcomics has changed so much since I started doing this in ‘02. This is why I can’t really give advice to people asking me how to get started with a webcomic in our current times. The content is different, the audience is different, the delivery is different. It’s a whole other world man!

[shingworks (author of The Meek)]
Make webcomics long enough, and you’ll start showing up in Tumblr posts tagged #history

I do miss the late 90′s/ early 00′s comics though. There are actually a lot of under-the-radar comics that have great art (but never really figured out the marketing side of things) still running a decade or two later, just have to poke around a little.

[polyphonetic]
I love that brief time in the late 90's where you could find 90's style newspaper comic artists making webcomics, like Bob The Angry Flower

Many responses bringing up webcomics left out of the original post that people felt were notable:

[wellofloneliness]
how can you leave Achewood off this!?!?!??! And White Ninja!?

Also, for the proto-hipster LJ set, A softer world!

[lateoctobermoon]
This is so good and such major fuckin’ temporal whiplash, but I am absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that there is no mention of Sluggy Freelance in all of this

Many responses pointing out that the author of Twokinds is Markiplier's brother.

Many responses by people reflecting on their own experience reading webcomics during that decade:

[legendaryjellyfishfest]
This was such a flash back to my early teens when I found most of these for the first time. And it’s a little funny being reminded of Megatokyo, and how it has influenced some of my tastes in manga as I grew.

[lwhoscribbles]
i couldn’t tell you which webcomic was my first, but i was raised on the comic books my mom and my uncles kept (bloom county, calvin & hobbs, archie) and the comics section of the paper that my grandpa always set out for me if my mom didn’t snag it first, so a friend one day passing me a url (honestly, probably hand written, because cell phones were still mostly just telephones with texting and solitaire, if you were cool enough) and making me promise to check it out next time i had a class with computer time was a small revelation in retrospect. i’d already been shown mangas scanned in and accessed through mildly dubious download sites and passed around on forums, and i had friends who drew art and little mini comics passed just around us in notebooks or across msn messenger and emails, but that there were people out there making their own comics and uploading them to super basic websites as they were able for anyone at all to see was magic to me. i read everything i could get my hands on. i discovered artists i loved (some of them not even calling themselves artists yet, because they were just doodling whilst on other paths) and a lot of them had a big part in shaping me, shaping my sense of myself and my okayness with everything i am. yeah, there were a lot of the gamer/geek/nerd bro ones, but i wandered in just in time for dominic deegan, el goonish shive, dar, girls with slingshots, and a bunch of others that were focused on adventure and friendships and life outside the ‘norm’ in so many different ways. for as disconnected as i felt, even to the people who were closest to me at the time, they gifted me hope that i wasn’t– broken, or alone, a creature god or nature or whatever never intended, a living blight, destined to be a burden if not a outright curse– so many things it was too easy to believe (hello, my early suffering, i did not miss you). they gifted me vocabulary and insight into things i was thinking and feeling and gave me the space to process them safely and with humor. i’m not being dramatic when i say that i don’t know that i would have survived without them and the books and music that found me. i’m so grateful to all those artists.

[howemuginative]
Great write up! This is my history!

I mean, I didn't start reading these until 2010 but I belatedly sped through it all by reading *everything*

(I had undiagnosed anxiety in Uni and my executive dysfunction was at an all time high)

I read through the shoddy art and writing too. It actually gave me a lot of hope as an artist to see people starting with whatever skills they had, disciplining themselves with a schedule and an actual audience to please, and improving their skills because of it.

I started a webcomic myself. No you will never see it. No one read it anyways haha.

[deflare]
…So this post can also be described as “a summary of my teenage years”, as from around 2002 to 2008, I was really into webcomics. Like, I followed literally hundreds at one point (easier than it sounded, due to the number that only updated rarely or had intermittent hiatuses). I only really stopped because I went to college and got busy. I not only read almost every comic in this post, I remember them well enough to have opinions on them. They were very formative to my youth and to my concept of art and storytelling. Definitely some nostalgia to some of those old formats that have fallen by the wayside.

Digger is REALLY good, I highly recommend it.

Followup posts

Followup addressing some other specific webcomics or related people and events that didn't make it into the original post:

[thewebcomicsreview]
I got about 50 asks about why didn’t I mention this or that comic, which was mostly to keep the post under a novel’s length by limiting things to the most “influential” comics that had the most copycats and defined what a webcomic was at that time. There weren’t a lot of noteworthy Order of the Stick or Freefall ripoffs, for instance, that I remember. Probably the most significant omission in my post is that I don’t mention Josh Lesnick, whose effects were a bit more behind-the-scenes and I don’t know them as well. Wikipedia deleted the page for Girly as non-notable and it was a big controversy at the time (It’s part of why TVTropes exists), but I don’t know that situation well enough to go into it, even though I really should.

Further discussion of what makes "good art" in webcomics, and some elaboration on other notable comics from the end of the decade:

[thewebcomicsreview]
When I said “art”, I meant more in terms of “drawing quality” than “artistic value”, which is relevant here because “Look, I’m a semi-competent drawer!” used to be a successful hook to get people reading and no longer is.

[...]
And while that ending was a lead-in to a Homestuck joke that served as a good kick to end a long blog post, it was a little disingenuous in its glibness. 2009 also saw the launch of Axe Cop, Bad Machinery, Hyperbole and a Half, The Oatmeal, and a webcomic with cruder drawings than Homestuck that nevertheless managed to arguably eclipse it.
Jesus, 2009 was an amazing year for new webcomics, actually.