#Arguably the 1337speak in Megatokyo inspired the trolls in Homestuck

[thewebcomicsreview]

anonymous asked:

What do you think are the most influential, successful, or popular webcomics? It can be kind of hard to tell, because the internet is really good at segmenting itself, so I would be curious about your opinions.

Penny Arcade is so obviously the most influential webcomic of all time that I’m going to ignore it in favor of the second most influential webcomic of all time, one that has fewer direct clones than Penny Arcade, but which influenced early webcomics in varied and strange ways. A little 1337sp34k comic called

Megatokyo was started in the year 2000 by two dudes named Piro and Largo. in the year 2000.

The year 2000 was a very different time, a limbo time. The 90s had ended with the Dot-Com bubble collapsing and average people starting to realize that computers weren’t literal fucking magic, but the 2000s hadn’t really started yet. Al Gore was running against George W. Bush in an election where everyone thought the two candidates were basically identical and it would be the least important election of all time. After all, it was the End Of History, America was at the height of its power and would stay there forever, wages were rising and that obviously wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, and our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity seemed unceasing, while our culture was united in the belief that torturing people was “bad”. Pokemon was far huger than it is even now, and a generation of kids was unaware of what Digimon Tamers was about to do to their burgeoning sexualities

This show mostly just got me into Kazaa-ing to get the far superior Japanese OSTs, but other people had....stronger....reactions to Renamon.

Webcomics of the time were mostly influenced by newspaper comics. Simple are, gag a day, and aimed at the kind of middle-aged tech nerd who’d be an early adopter of the “computer” thingies. Penny Arcade mainly broke the mold by being edgier and aiming at a younger audience, but even they were clearly influenced primarily by newspaper comics first and foremost.

And in this ecosystem, a dude named Largo wanted to make a gag-a-day comic and roped his artist friend Piro into drawing it for him. Largo wanted to make a traditional newspaper-style comic, but Piro was a massive weeb who wanted to do a vertical comic like Japanese 4Koma strips.

They decided to split the difference with this 2x2 grid as a compromise. The grid was actually a pretty efficient use of screen real estate on low-resolutions 90s monitors, and a lot of new comics started copying this odd square format. That’s since fallen out of fashion, but one artifact of this arbitrary compromise lives on in internet culture to this very day

As the comic went on, it became Piro’s comic more and more and Largo’s less and less, eventually leading to a falling out and the first big bit of Webcomic Drama, but for this essay what matters is that Megatokyo got weebier.

This is not what webcomics looked like in 2001. The art was phenomenal (er, by 2001 standards, at least. It was a different time, before anyone with an art background was making webcomics), and instead of being gag a day newspaper strip, it was a romantic dramedy graphic novel heavily inspired by anime and dating sims. Webcomic creators in 2001 were too old to have grown up with the mid-90s anime boom, but webcomic readers were, and the weebs and squeebs filling America’s high schools in the Bush administration ate this shit up. That’s not a random catgirl hat Piro is wearing up there, it’s specifically the hat worn by Puchiko in Di Gi Charat, a contemporary anime that didn’t air on TV on America and you either bought the DVDs or torrented it (you torrented it). You didn’t get those kind of deep cuts from Penny Arcade, or PvP, or really anywhere on the internet but Megatokyo and anime forums.

Megatokyo was responsible for bringing anime fans into the gamer-dominated world of webcomics. Would that happened anyway? Perhaps. Probably. But maybe not! Is it possible that, without Megatokyo, webcomics go the way of animutations and machinima and youtube poops, a small part of an internet subculture that never really becomes a “thing” generally, until and unless some 90s kid gets old enough to create a hit comic of their own?  Maybe. I wouldn’t have gotten into webcomics without Megatokyo. A lot of people wouldn’t have. And perhaps, by bringing in a new and different audience, Megatokyo is actually the most influential webcomic of them all?

But the strangest influence Megatokyo had was Ping. Ping is an accessory for the then-new Playstation 2 who is a robot. Because this is Megatokyo, it’s a robot that looks like a cute anime girl with pigtails, but, regardless. Piro and Largo had a pet robot. And other webcomics liked the idea of robots. They liked this idea a lot.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete ripped this idea off most blatantly. Megatokyo had a Playstation robot, so CAD had an Xbox Robot

Applegeeks, a popular-but-not-dead comic had a Macintosh Robot

And Questionable Content had a PC robot (if you ever wondered why the otherwise realistic world of QC had sentient robots for over a decade before treating it as worth mentioning, that’s why)

And then, eventually, QC made its robot a cute anime girl with pigtails, and the circle of reference was complete.