Week 14: The Future of Comics

I was relieved that at least one other person in class wanted to mention Homestuck (much to our class' chagrin), because it really is one of the biggest things to happen in webcomics within the last five years. Beginning in 2009 and exploding into popularity last year, Homestuck is a multimedia narrative including extensive lengths of text, flash animations, original music, interactive pages, minigames, funny dialogue, and a story that gets pretty convoluted at times. Most readers, after seeing an animation for the first time, react by asking “what” or by screaming and crying because all their favorite characters died (By now, I would not consider this a spoiler. That’s how frequently this happens).

Despite the fact that Homestuck spans over 5,000 pages (PBS refers to it as the Internet’s Ulysses in the video below), usually the only preliminary information given to new readers is that “four kids start playing a game and shit goes down.” It’s up to the reader to find out what else happens. This video makes an interesting point on the challenge Homestuck presents.

However, I feel it is necessary to include Homestuck’s criticisms and controversies (any work of this scale would have them). Homestuck’s eccentric creator, Andrew Hussie, tends to take advantage of his fanbase (which I have decided not to write about, as they’re not as much a part of the story) and often teases them, and writes unforeseen twists because it’s fun, usually leading the story nowhere for months at a time. On another note, TV Tropes lists Homestuck as having so many “’Funny Aneurysm’ Moments,” (meaning that a joke can be funny the first time, but becomes cringe-worthy the second time around, due to traumatic events in later updates of the story), that “it’s getting to the point that laughing at anything is a dicey proposition.”

Presented without context...

As of the past few months, the story has gained 14 new characters, 12 of which are copies of the story’s most beloved characters (except the personalities of these ones are supposed to reflect the fans’ interpretations of the original characters), with another story arc and love triangles and it’s really testing my patience. Nevertheless, knowing Hussie’s storytelling style, it will always circle back to the story, and eventually everything will make sense.