#explodingdog

[oldinterneticons]

[homestuckreplay]

Webcomics at Day 100 #4: explodingdog

Pages read: 2000-01-10 - 2000-09-17 (100 update days, but over 500 pages) & 2009-04-13 - 2009-05-26 (a further 13 days/42 pages)

Reason for selection: explodingdog may have been the first popular webcomic to work from reader submissions, and its drawings look like they were made in MS Paint, both key features of early Homestuck. explodingdog also broke containment, with many of its drawings spread elsewhere without attribution, such as being turned into LiveJournal icons or even painted on a building in Seattle.

Original run: 2000-2015, with lots of pages but an intermittent update schedule. Ongoing while Homestuck is getting started.

Content warnings: Extreme (but very abstract/cartoon) violence, gross-out humor involving bodily fluids

Overall thoughts:

I love the idea for this comic. Readers send in a short phrase via email, which can be absolutely anything, and artist Sam Brown chooses the ones that inspire him and draws a picture based on that phrase. However, reading the comic as an archive in the future, I don’t love the execution. Quite a few of the drawings made me openly groan, roll my eyes, or shake my head. There were definitely a few that got genuine laughs out of me, but they were a small percentage.

None of this is intended as shade to the artist – Brown seems like a decent guy based on the interviews I’ve read, and I hope he had fun making this. Running a webcomic for fifteen years is an impressive feat in itself, but this one just isn’t for me, at this point, in its current form.

Brown has stated that he has ‘never really seen explodingdog as a comic’ and calls his work a ‘collaborative art project’ although his reasoning hinges on the idea that comics have to be funny, and that humor isn’t the goal of his work. I personally think that comics are a medium that can work in any genre, not just comedy, and so webcomic is appropriate. In an essay, Kyle Conway argues that explodingdog is an absurdist theater performance, employing improvisation and experienced as live by its audience. Conway also highlights the design of the website, where instead of placing the most recent installment on the homepage as most webcomics do, individual titles have to be clicked on to see the accompanying artwork. In Brown’s words, ‘the story happens in your head’ between the title and image.

Conway’s arguments make sense from his position as a real-time reader. A huge draw of explodingdog is the knowledge that the captions came from ordinary folk on the internet, and that you, the reader, could submit a caption, and a cooler guy on the internet would think it was interesting or poignant or funny enough to make a drawing out of. The moment between clicking on the page’s title and seeing its corresponding image, where the reader comes up with their own interpretation of the title, is meaningful when the drawings are given out a handful at a time on sporadic days.

But these things don’t work the same in an archive. There’s a much greater distance between the reader and the creator, with no chance of personally becoming part of the work. And having to click every individual page from the menu isn’t a smooth reading experience for over 500 pages at once – there’s no ‘next’ button, although weirdly the entire image on each page functions as a ‘previous’ button, which makes an accidental click really frustrating. Brown knew from the start that creating art on the internet made it more temporary than physical art, as websites changed form over time – in a 2006 interview, he said ‘i think it is very possible that either because of government regulation or changes in technology or greedy corporations or a combination of all three, the internet as we expect it to be in 2006 won’t exist in ten years.’

The response to explodingdog during its release seems extremely positive, with lots of people praising how it twists the meaning of prompts and comes up with unexpected interpretations. I personally found that it got very repetitive, very fast. The same twists would happen in a lot of drawings, and would usually involve 2000s-era internet humor such as robots, aliens, stick figures bleeding due to missing their head or limbs, green monsters that are referred to as ‘monkeys,’ and riffs on the idea that ‘other people are stupid.’ There are recurring characters, including the Red Robot – famous enough to be featured in quite a few other webcomics – a second robot that grows roses in its stomach, a guy watching TV in a space wasteland, Phil, and more.

In some cases, an entire picture is reused. ‘better than being lost in the city’ (6/29/2000) and ‘In the morning things will be better’ (7/13/2000) feature the exact same piece of art, the later one slightly zoomed in. ‘toast from a toaster’ (1/11/2000), ‘Toast goes in the toaster’ (6/19/2000) and ‘Toast’ (7/17/2000) all three contain the same image. The gimmick, as discussed often by Brown, is that the images are inspired by the captions – not that the images already existed and happened to fit something that was submitted. I really hope this disappears in later years.

Like other comics I’ve read, I did notice a lot of improvement in the art between 2000 and 2009 in terms of complexity and ease of understanding. In both cases the art is mostly irregular, childlike stick figures and blobs, with no intent for the art to be technically good. In 2000, there’s a lot of muted colors including browns, grays, khakis and oranges. The color palette often isn’t nice to look at (in my opinion) and as the images often depict unpleasant things such as vomit and lobotomies, they sometimes feel like shock value art. In 2009, the colors have brightened and become more varied, and there’s more use of backgrounds even when the image doesn’t require it. The stick figures are more polished with smoother lines. I was surprised to learn that Brown was already a fine art graduate in 2000; in the nicest possible way, he does such a good job of hiding any actual skill.e

I think that even in the modern day there is great potential for certain explodingdog comics to be used as reaction images or ‘tag your oc’ style memes. However, due to the nature of the project, I think this comic would be better enjoyed as a greatest hits collection than as a full archive.

Relevance to Homestuck: explodingdog is one of the webcomics linked from MSPA under the heading ‘No Shortage of Good Websites,’ and due to its prominence in the 2000s, may have been a direct influence on Hussie choosing to work from reader commands. They’re both comics that collaborate with their audience and invite readers who want to share in the work’s creation.

In explodingdog, the images vary on how they relate to the captions – some draw the phrase straight up, some are a ‘yes and,’ some are a direct response (if the caption is a question) and some feel unrelated, but feature a stick figure who could possibly be saying that caption. The ‘yes and,’ where Brown uses the phrase and adds a second, followup phrase that changes the context, were the most effective ones for me. This might be because they felt the most Homestuck – Hussie does the same move where they take a reader command and add something else so that the command is followed, but is different to intended. A recent example is p.597, where the command is ‘Use ice maker, it’s still hot around here.’ and the response is ‘yes, Dave uses the ice maker, and it’s full of cherry bombs, not ice.’

Finally, both comics put out a large number of pages per day, unlike the majority of comics which stick to a single page per day. Both explodingdog and Homestuck published 4-6 pages on most update days in their first years, and both occasionally broke into double digits. Clearly some aspect of their creation is designed to make a lot of content, as fast as possible, to the point that some readers might consider them quantity over quality.

Continue reading? In a 2004 interview Brown said ‘my website is available to anyone on the Internet for free, but millions of people would rather see porn or sports scores.’ I’m not huge on either porn or sports scores but I still think I am one of those people.

[dreamineuphoria]

[rawwithlove]

I'm not saying this is the best thing that's ever happened to me but it's definitely close.

[wubble]

"where did i go" by explodingdog

@explodingdog

[yourlatesttrik]

Source: explodingdog

[livnbreathe-blog]

[wineandwin]

... but it’s all I want.

Credit: @explodingdog

[girlinspacepodcast]

me, making Girl In Space:

h/t http://explodingdog.tumblr.com/post/109333548490/a-song

[m1ss-r]

@explodingdog_unofficial #mynewfavorite #explodingdog #oneofmyfavoriteartists (at Portland, Oregon) https://www.instagram.com/p/B386QlBH1Ll/?igshid=1cvvpydkgoph6

[oldinterneticons]

Here... I don't need it anymore

[birdfox]

by explodingdog

[xodarbiox]

You left me outside for 20 mins and it just exploded. #dog #explodingdog #misbehavingdog

[gaydelgard]

sam brown @explodingdog​ come back to tumblr challenge

[explodingdog]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sam Brown (@explodingdog_sam) on Jan 4, 2020 at 7:25pm PST

I’ve been doing this explodingdog thing for 20 years now

[britttheillest]

To be frank, my mental health, sanity and mood have been questionable at best lately. It’s been a hard few days/weeks/year/fuckyou2017. Spent many years doing a lot of hard work to come as far as I have. So these rough days sting a bit more than it feels like they used to. Sometimes we forget how much those around us are capable of hurting since we get lost in the series of 10 second stories. So here’s a very real sad post in the midst of the cool things in my life to remind myself that this is real and okay too. Anyway, this was for me and an attempt to embrace vulnerability and recognizing the balance that life requires. But if you’re having a bad day, maybe it’ll remind you that you’re okay and normal and you’ll be fine and I’ll be fine because this is how life works. Also I’ve loved @explodingdog_sam most of my internet life so here’s a particularly relevant illustration. #explodingdog #sad #mentalhealth #vulnerability #reflection #balance #heartpalpitations #tomorrowwillbebetter