A Historical Approach to Webcomics: Digital Authorship in the Early 2000s

Available on the web and often excerpted by the visually-oriented algorithms of social media feeds, webcomics arguably have the broadest reach of any form of comics, yet they remain under-theorized. Given the close association with the development of the mode (digital technology) and the medium (webcomics) that Campbell (2006) points out in his history of the form, webcomics ought to be studied alongside other digital media, approached not just as comics, but as a series of websites and webpages where comics appear amidst such elements as ads, banners, links, and comments, all of which shift over time. By discussing not just the comics, but also the contextual elements of the webpages and websites of reciprocal guest comics from Jeph Jacques’s Questionable Content (QC) and Sam Logan’s Sam and Fuzzy, this article applies a historically-focused approach to webcomics as digital media to demonstrate how the attention economy, where ‘eyeballs’ are a form of currency, recasts relationships between authors so they are characterized by cooperative competition via webcomics collectives. Webcomics, as serial texts published by the same author over long periods of time, can teach us much about how developments in digital technology have shaped digital media over time.

webcomics ought to be studied alongside other digital media, approached not just as comics, but as a series of websites and webpages where comics appear amidst ads, banners, links, comments, and other elements, such as author social media accounts or the blog-like newsposts that some authors write to accompany a posted comic.
The frequent shifting of these contextual elements should also encourage scholars to consider webcomics within particular historical frames. As odd as it might seem to historicize within a twenty-year span, the swift development of digital technology necessitates this contextualization if research is to remain relevant over time.
Scholarship has mainly focused on the opportunities the digital space provides for comics. Scott McCloud's (2000) notion of the 'infinite canvas,' meaning the ability of digital comics to innovate beyond current page-based formats, remains the touchstone for such scholarship. Perhaps because of this influence, there has been much attention to alt-text, which is text that appears when a user scrolls over the comic (Kashtan 2018;Bramlett 2018). While analyses of alt-text and the notion of the infinite canvas do take into account the digital nature of such comics, when I suggest we consider comics as digital media, I mean we need to widen our scope beyond the comics themselves to pay attention to their digital contexts and how those digital contexts shape the comics. This attention to context will also necessarily involve paying attention to digital history because webcomics are often published in series over time, and thus their appearance and form shift with the digital landscape. In arguing for a historical approach to these digital media, I build on Julien Baudry's (2018) work on the evolving aesthetics of French webcomics to propose a new methodology that considers webcomics, and the sites and pages in which they appear, as information rich media grounded in a particular time.
This article applies this historically-focused approach to comics as digital media in order to reveal a new perspective on how the attention economy of the internet reframes traditional notions of authorship. In this case, my historical approach reveals a form of cooperative competition amongst authors trying to succeed in the attention economy of the internet in the early 2000s. I accomplish this goal by discussing not just the comics, but the other elements of the webpages and websites of Jeph Jacques's Questionable Content (QC) and Sam Logan's Sam and Fuzzy from

Misemer: A Historical Approach to Webcomics
Art. 10, page 3 of 21 [2004][2005][2006][2007]. Note that the methodology I demonstrate through this example is two pronged: I both contextualize these comics within their web contexts amongst forums, newsposts, advertisements, and other elements of the authors' websites, and focus my analysis on how these elements provide insight into a particular historical period on the web when search algorithms encouraged cooperative competition.  (Jacques 2004b).
The main point of the rivalry was to come up with the most ridiculous insult, much in the same vein as the one upsmanship present in yo mama jokes. At first glance, this rivalry, begun with Logan's claim that Jacques has more readers than he does, makes sense given traditional conceptions of romantic authorship, a category designed to promote the individual as part of a capitalist economic system. But upon closer examination, we see that the relationships between individual authors change when placed in the economy of attention that defines the internet.
This rivalry is a joke meant to promote one another rather than a sincere competition. The pages with the insults I just referenced also include links to each other's websites, so that, even amidst their 'rivalry' the two authors are providing access points to each other's work. They promote one another because Logan and Jacques both belong to Dayfree Press, a webcomics collective where all members link to one another in order to increase readership across the board. Logan mentions their common membership in his original callout ('fellow Dayfree Press-er Jeph'), and, even more telling, the Dayfree Press ad on Jacques's site on the day he throws down the gauntlet is for Logan's Sam and Fuzzy (Figure 1). These links helped each author advance in Google search results, which, in the early 2000s, were based on the number of links to a site. The fact that the rivalry is a joke meant for promotion, rather than a true attempt at competing, captures the kinds of relationships authors in an attention economy have with one another. In the online context, authors still compete for the limited resource of readers' attention (as James G. Webster (2014: 10) reminds us, there are still only 24 hours in a day and audiences must choose what media to consume), but a spirit of cooperation tempers that competition. Jacques

Misemer: A Historical Approach to Webcomics
Art. 10, page 5 of 21 and Logan, as individuals, still have to compete for the limited resource of attention, but they do so by bolstering one another's web status via links. During this period, the currency of links in the early Google search algorithm encouraged partnerships that helped individuals compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace. That spirit of cooperation causes us to rethink traditional notions of romantic authorship, particularly as authors position themselves as readers of one another's work.
The attention economy of the internet encourages a different kind of relationship between authors than the competitive one seen in the material world of print. As my description of the fake rivalry between Logan and Jacques demonstrates, this economic system recasts relationships between authors so they are characterized by cooperative competition via webcomics collectives. We see these relationships most

Economics of Readership and Authorship
In most scholarship, writers and readers remain separate, with edited collections devoted to one or the other. Authorship is associated with notions of individual Romantic genius. Foucault (2006: 285) connects authorship to ' a system of ownership and strict copyright rules', and Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (1994: 5-6) remind us that these copyright rules were connected to the 'possessive individualism' of early capitalism in England. Authors needed to assert control over their texts in order to make money from them, making the function of authorship an economic one. Even more recent conversations about authorship are concerned with authors 'getting credit' (to use an economic metaphor) for their work, asserting moral or legal rights over their productions, whether they be films (Caldwell 2003;Brisbin 2003 (1991: 50). Therefore, it makes sense that scholars often take ethnographic approaches to recover reading communities, as Janice Radway (1984) does in studying how women use romance novels for gender identity formation, and as Elizabeth McHenry (2002) does in examining how literary societies help nineteenth-century African Americans forge a new, distinctly American identity. While both of these works situate reading as an active practice, they focus on how readers read works against the grain, often positioning readers in opposition to authors. Comics scholarship on readers has employed similar methodologies and come to similar conclusions (Brown 2000;Gibson 2015). In both scholarship on authorship and scholarship on readership, readers and authors retain an antagonistic relationship to one another.
For authors, there's the sense that pandering to an audience compromises artistic integrity, while readers are frequently cast as underestimated or misunderstood by authors. Thus, scholarship enacts Barthes's (2006) statement that the author must die in order for the reader to be reborn.
Despite previous separation of authors and readers, reading and writing on the internet are characterized by a blurring of the lines between these two forces as reading becomes a more interactive process. Axel Bruns (2008) named this blurring of boundaries 'produsage,' which he defines as 'the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement' (21).
He connects the emergence of produsage to the shift from an industrial economy where ' only industrial producers…were directly involved in production processes, while audiences were cast in the role of consumers' (17), to a networked economy, where 'the creation of shared content takes place in a networked, participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge-frequently in a hybrid role of produser where usage is necessarily productive' (21). To relate this description to authorship and reading, whereas in an industrial society, authors and other privileged members of book distribution networks, such as printers and booksellers, were the only ones who could shape texts, in the networked society of texts on the internet, readers, as produsers, can also shape texts. In other words, while it may have made sense to separate scholarship on authorship from scholarship on readership in the industrial age of print, in the networked age of the internet, it makes more sense to examine how interactions between the two forces might shape texts. Yet Bruns's claims about producers and consumers are a bit too idealistic. True, anyone can produce content and usage often involves production, but in order to actually become public, authorship must garner attention. According to Foucault (2006), lots of people may be writers, but only those identified by their names become authors. Thus, authorship remains a privileged position for those able to attract attention. Many webcomics authors in the early 2000s, like many creators of digital media, accomplished that goal through a combination of cross promotion, public reading, and guest authorship, all tactics dependent on digital search algorithms of a particular era, but which continue to shape webcomics and their communities today.

Cooperative Competition
Because of its origins, authorship is always bound up in questions of economics.
When the economics of authorship shift from those of one based on material goods to the attention economy of the internet, relationships develop the quality of cooperative competition. I began this article by laying out the rivalry between Logan and Jacques because I wanted to highlight how economies of authorship on the web are still competitive, but are also cooperative. Competition doesn't go away entirely; it shifts so that those trying to reach audiences or sell products aim to capture attention on the internet as a means of attracting currency in the capitalist economy. As Richard Lanham (2006)  to, 'bring a small group of web cartoonists together in order to be a stronger force on the internet' (Gustavson 2003). In the collective, authors cooperate as a 'small group of web cartoonists' that form a ' community of readers and creators' (Gustavson 2003). However, unlike other groups of authors, from coterie writing groups to the Misemer: A Historical Approach to Webcomics Art. 10, page 10 of 21 Bloomsbury group, these authors used their community to become more competitive, to 'be a stronger force on the internet' by 'sharing readers' and ' cross-promoting each other' (Gustavson 2003). This cross promotion allowed each member to gain Jacques write guest comics for one another), is insincere, characterized by its joking one upsmanship rather than any kind of actual substance (I'll refer you back to the fact that it begins because Logan thinks Jacques is 'shifty eyed'). It is, instead, the parody of a rivalry in a space characterized by cooperative competition, as captured by an autobiographical panel that Jacques (n.d.) posted on QC after sitting with Logan at a booth for the comics convention Sakura-con in 2007 (Figure 2).
The text references the rivalry, with Jacques claiming that 'Sam and I are mortal enemies,' and the speech bubbles highlight how each author is drawing their character abusing the other author's character. Yet the two authors are sharing a table and sitting amicably next to one another, as was common when in the same collective, since members often networked with one another in order to split the cost of attending conventions where they encouraged their loyal readers to buy the material goods-shirts, prints, books-that earned them their living. The cooperative competition that originates in the internet space, then, also permeates webcomics 1 The connection of the attention economy of the internet to the capitalist economy of material goods outside the web space that we see in this panel reminds us of the stakes for capturing attention on the internet, suggesting why competitive forces still exist despite seeming internet freedom.
While attention might be desirable, there is still the desire to convert that attention into currency to purchase material goods.

Misemer: A Historical Approach to Webcomics
Art. 10, page 11 of 21 author interactions in the space of material goods. As Aaron Kashtan (2018: 104) notes, establishing a large enough audience to justify printing a book, a material object, is a mark of success for most web cartoonists.
In this example, we see how this cooperative competition leads to a destabilization of the competitive focus we expect in romantic versions of material authorship as the authors borrow characters from one another in a version of a comics crossover that positions them as readers of one another's work while also positioning them as authors. Each is authoring his own drawing, but the use of the other author's character situates each author as a reader, too. The relationship between these authors demonstrates how their cooperation helped them compete in an attention economy, and illuminates how the dominance of Google encouraged cooperative economic relationships in the internet space.

Reciprocal Guest Comics
If we consider the currency of links, the practice of reciprocal guest comics makes economic sense. The usual practice for guest strips is to label the guest strip with the guest author's name and then link to the guest author's webcomics site in the newspost that follows the comic. Often, the author who wrote the guest strip will reciprocate the favor for the person who ran the guest strip. Drawn in the style of Available at https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=856.
the guest author, the guest strip runs in the same web space as the normal author's strips (i.e. If I go to the normal website on the day of a guest strip, I will see the guest strip in the same place I would see a strip drawn by the regular author), and usually provides the guest author's interpretation of the characters in that webcomic. Think of guest comics as akin to fan fiction, but, rather than appearing in a fan only space, the fan fiction appears where the media it interprets would appear, foregrounding the guest cartoonist as both reader (because the strip is an interpretation, a reading) and author (because the strip is marked by the guest cartoonist's style and ideas).
Shortly after the announcement about the rivalry, Logan composed a guest comic for QC that Jacques claims ' distills every aspect of QC down into one single comic' (Jacques 2004c). Early in QC's run, the main drama of the strip stems from the tension between Faye and Marten, roommates who have a lot in common. Marten wants to be with Faye, but just when we think they're about to finally get together, something else comes up. The guest strip from Logan highlights these aspects of the narrative by having Faye start to tell Marten something only to be interrupted by a variety of distractions including Marten's robot Pintsize playing golf in the toilet; Steve, a character we haven't seen in a while, emerging gasping from the closet; and government agents searching for the space owl mentioned a few strips before (Figure 3).
In the last panel of the strip, we learn that Faye was not, in fact, trying to tell Marten that she loved him as her repeated 'Marten I lo-' would suggest. Instead, we find that she was merely trying to tell him that she lost one of his musical albums (Logan 2004b  Alexa goes to put out the fire, her clothes get burnt away, and she threatens Sam

Conclusion
The blurring of boundaries between reader and author encouraged by this system of cooperative competition demonstrates how cooperative economic relationships were advantageous on the Internet in the early 2000s, suggesting that, even when still part of a capitalist system, competition is not the only way to succeed. The fact that these authors remain attached to their own individual projects-this isn't collective authorship-suggests that the individual is still a key component in this system.
Yet the cooperation through community building that helps these individual authors promote themselves suggests that competition and cooperation are not quite as opposed as they may seem. We would not be able to see this reframed version of authorship in webcomics without paying attention to them within their digital historical contexts. Jacques's site has no ads, a fact that signals how authors can rely on such crowdfunding sites to fully support themselves.
Crowdfunding owes its success to another major digital shift since 2007: the rise of social media. Links on Jacques's homepage to his Tumblr and the Twitter pages of the characters and links on Logan's homepage to his Twitter and Tumblr pages provide evidence of how the rise of social media has changed webcomics. Authors are more accessible to their readers than before, and often provide access to works in progress or to process videos based on requests about how they create their comics.
While Twitter provides access, Tumblr provides a space to share work in progress, and the links connect the two spaces to one another and to the webcomic. The fact that Jacques's Twitter link is not for his author account, but for accounts he made for his characters shows how social media allows authors to publicly expand on their own story worlds. The world of social media plays a large role in the attention economy, where likes and other forms of engagement quantify reader attention. On platforms like Facebook and Twitter, much as readers contribute money to authors through crowdfunding, readers help authors gain attention through sharing links, which might be seen as an act of public reading, especially when the link is accompanied by a short critique or judgment. Buttons for Twitter and Facebook on  homepage provide easy access for readers to help his comic spread, suggesting that an author's success in the more complex attention economy of today's digital realm relies on a number of different factors, few of which the author can control. All of these changes have shaped the landscape in which the comics are created and, as a result, the comics themselves.
If this kind of historical approach to webcomics within their contexts demonstrates a reframed notion of digital authorship that is characterized by cooperative competition, consider how else webcomics might reflect how technology shapes digital media. We might, for example, track how a long running webcomic shifted over time during the popularization of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.
How did creators incorporate such new media into their site designs or into their modes of comics distribution? How did these decisions in turn shape the comics themselves? How has the development of mobile technology produced new innovative webcomics forms and changed old ones as they adapt to new platforms? Answers to these questions have the potential to tell us not only about webcomics, but about historical shifts in digital media more broadly. Webcomics, as serial texts published by the same author over time, allow us to track the development of digital media as new technology emerges. They, therefore, deserve our attention.