This is the death knell of webcomics. I can already see it coming. In fact, I can see it so clearly I’m going to write the rest of this article from the point of view of the future, after it’s already happened.
It was 2008 when Hollywood first noticed webcomics.
Well, in 2007, Boxjam made a cameo appearance on a T-shirt worn by an extra in the background of a Tom Hanks vehicle. But that hardly counts as being noticed.
In 2008, Megatokyo became the first webcomic to hit the silver screen. The movie millions of web comic fans had been screaming for had finally been made.
It was a colossal flop.
But it got Hollywood’s attention nonetheless. Studio execs suddenly realized that webcomics were out there. They were being produced for free, and they had a (small) built-in audience.
Like superhero comic books a few decades earlier, they strip-mined the webcomics world, adapting everything they could get their grubby hands on. The Gods of Arr-Kelaan. Psychic Dyslexia Institute. Chopping Block. All became movies. A few were even hits.
Because of this, everybody who had a taste for fame suddenly decided that the way to do it was to start a webcomic. They began popping up like dandelions, each new one more atrocious than the one before. Any talentless hack who could put two words together or draw a stick figure was churning out a webcomic. 99.999% of them stank.
The remaining 0.0001% of them were so hard to find in this sea of madness that they may as well have not existed at all. With dwindling numbers of readers, the creators lost interest. All the good comics died out.
Some of the good comics died because they had been turned into movies. Or even TV shows — Scott Kurtz gave up PVP the webcomic in order to work on PVP the sitcom.
Pay webcomics found that they couldn’t survive. They were being squozen out by the sheer number of free comics. Even though most free ones stank, there were just enough good ones that no one saw any reason to pay for any.
But, like American kids who discovered Japanese manga back in the ’80s, the 2010s brought a new ray of hope in the form of a foreign source.
Hollywood has never been comfortable with foreign-made entertainment. Sure, they give an Oscar to the “Best foreign movie” each year, but you can tell that’s the moment when everybody goes to visit the rest room. They couldn’t care less who that one goes to, they’re just doing it to toss them a bone. The reality is they wouldn’t know any of the candidates in that category if we were invading them.
It was in the early 2010s that people disovered the vast untapped talent creating Brazilian webcomics. The fact that 90% of these comics were in Portuguese didn’t even slow them down. Webcomics had their new heyday, and you only needed to study Portuguese to participate.
Of course, by 2023, the Alex & Ilia movie was being made in Sao Paulo — Brazil’s answer to Hollywood — and the cycle started anew.