The World of Comics

 

I was prowling around the web, searching for some comics that I might be able to use for a lesson on Onomatopoeia today when I found this site called Comics.com.

 

I love comics and I always have loved them, back from the days of delivery newspapers as a kid. I used to spend hours with the newspaper and comic books when I was young, and I still wrestle with my own kids to get to that section of the paper. I think the web, like so many things, has the ability to make content more available in our own time frame, for our own interests in a way that is changing the delivery and discovery of comics. (There are downsides to that, too, including the lack of serendipitiously stumbling on something cool that you did not know was there).

When I travel to other cities, I always buy the local newspaper. It’s part of the old journalist in me to see how things are faring in the local newspaper market.  You can often tell the status of a community by the quality of its newspaper. I also turn to the comic page to see what comic strips I am missing.

 

This comics site has a lot of comics that you might find in various daily newspapers, but what I found it interesting is how they sort them and break them down by age and gender. It made me truly wonder who designates what age a comic is appropriate for? Whose to say that I don’t like a little Reality Check in the morning? Or that Lola’s joke about ebay dentures this morning won’t be funny for a man?

 

I know everything out there is just waited to be sorted and indexed and put into little small piles of information. But I kind of wish they would let me, and not them, do it for myself.

 

I noticed that they also have a category just for web-based comics, although I wish comics would begin to push the envelope a bit, using hyperlinks and embedded audio and video, and other elements of the web. I think it is possible to push beyond the frames.

 

Peace (in little square stories),
Kevin