If history decides that Scott McCloud is the father of web comics, then it will also look back on 2001 as the year he was exposed as deadbeat dad. This year, McCloud took the worst beating of his career when his peers in both the print and web comics communities decided en masse to hit the guy with glasses. Gary Groth's two-fisted flogging "McCloud Cuckoo Land" tore Reinventing Comics' idealistic vision of web commerce to bits and reduced its aesthetic arguments to unstable atoms. Before McCloud was up on his feet again, Penny Arcade creator Tycho slugged him between the eyeballs with a spot-on parody of "I Can't Stop Thinking." The piece was accompanied by a scathing editorial questioning McCloud's position as the official web comics spokestoon and commerce guru. Tycho later wrote a retraction but the damage was already done. By July, McCloud's economic arguments, artistic ability and critical credibility were all called into question.

This kind of father killing makes for great copy, so it was unsurprising when the web press picked up on the conflict. Last summer, Wired and Salon devoted pieces to web comics highlighting the current crop of web cartoonists and the McCloud backlash. Both venues kept an open mind about the potential of the web as a storytelling platform, but underscored the fact that at this stage, and for the foreseeable fliture, web comics simply do not pay.

But after 50 years of diminishing returns and a rapid spiral down the sink in the late '90s, the comics economy has conditioned cartoonists not to expect fmancial rewards from their work. An increasing number of new artists are now going online to practice their craft and enjoy a greater degree of potential visibility and artistic flexibility than they would have trying to get a print gig. The results, of course, are varied, but 2001 produced enough reasonably good web comics to indicate that the creative tide is rising.

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The undergrounds were born from an inky orgy fueled by dangerous drugs. 30-some years later a few of the most pioneering web artists are growing up with the same anarchic spirit and psychedelic sensibility. The most outstanding new example from this digital underground is Demian 5's "When I Am King." The story follows an Egyptian king on a quest for his pants across a two-and-a-half dimensional desert. Along the way he is chased by a lovestruck camel, encounters a pack of wild brats, and eats a hallucinogenic cactus. The author's graphic sensibility recalls the work of Victor Moscoso. Like much of Moscoso, Demian 5's story is frivolous, but provides a platform for delightful eye candy. The Swiss artist shares Moscoso's ability to render charming iconic figures in a minimalist environment. He also treats the underground staples of sex, low humor, and drug experiences with wit and artistic virtuosity. Both artists reflect the psychedelic culture of their times: Moscoso was deeply affected by the acid rock scene of the late sixties and Demian 5's work seems to be influenced by the graphics of rave cards and the culture of techno music.

Demian 5 exceeds Moscoso's ability to sustain a narrative. "When I Am King" spans 63 installments that collectively represent 2001's best use of the web's comics storytelling capabilities. The story scrolls like an electronic codex, moving horizontally across a minimalist landscape for much of the narrative and is peppered with animation throughout. Demian 5 uses animation as a means of visual emphasis rather than a mechanism for controlling the story's pace. These points add an efficiency to many of the gags and increase the narrative's fluid qualities. The story's climax in Chapter 4 is an experimental tour de force that begins the falling action with a descending scroll and includes some outstanding 3-D rendering and animation. Throughout, Demian 5 retains the static temporal qualities of comics while creating a visually inventive and kinetic narrative flow.

Triston Farnon is still the enfant terrible of web comics. His site Leisure Town remains the most caustic and stunningly produced comic on the web. Farnon redesigned the site this year, making it much easier to navigate and providing a more fully immersive experience. Leisure Town is now structured like a webzine with frequently updated stories, functional archives and entertaining donation groveling.

Last year, Farnon moved towards telling shorter stories, which has made the site far more accessible to casual readers with slow connections. His finest story of the year may be "Down By The Freeway," which flays tagger culture and engagingly portrays a teenager's moral turning point. Moralizing is a deception in Farnon's stories, and here the moral is ruined in the last panel by a cynical and funny punch in the face. "There's A Girl I Like" is the story of a teenage biblethumper whose intention of asking a girl out goes violently wrong. The story is as gleefully devoid of morality as the most tasteless of Ivan Brunetti's strips. The gag strips in "The Functional Drug Addicts," also bear a resemblance to Brunetti.

The new format allows Farnon to expand his range of storytelling techniques and take direct aim at the internet. "Banana Peel Snarls Southbound Lanes" is one of Farnon's signature mass destruction strips told in the style of a vacuous online news article. "Nobody Came to My Winter Solstice Party" mocks messageboards, new-agers, and the generally pitiful lives stereotypically assigned to Internet addicts. "I'm Afraid I Must Now Kill Myself For Real" illustrates a fatally pathetic chat room experience. Farnon makes loud comics that rail as madly against contemporary corporate culture as the underground did against the sixties establishment. His comics are painstakingly crafted, sardonic and aggressively modern. He has no time for introspection in his stories, each one is a candy-colored and subversive assault. If the graphic novel is elevating comics to star pupil status in literary circles, in Farnon's hands they remain the discipline problem smoking a joint in the back of the hall.

Berkeley artist Patrick Farley continues to gain creative momentum on e-sheep, whose format is roughly the web equivalent of an author-driven anthology like Weasel. The stories on the site share the early underground's penchant for taboo busting humor, depictions of drug experiences, and the critical satire of politics, corporate culture, and religion.

In 2001 Farley debuted the first two chapters of Apocamon, a darkly comic interpretation of the Book of Revelation. The story is rendered in a cartoony, manga-influenced line style that is sometimes accompanied by 3-D and animated elements. Apocamon blinks rather than scrolls. Farley breaks the story into units of time that range from single panels with animation to four or six panel grids. Farley's animation tends emphasize an image or illustrate a moment of change.

Since September 11, Apocamon has assumed a different context. When the second chapter was posted late in the summer, the opening sequence depicting an angel blowing up the White House while Dubya addresses a TV audience was worth a laugh. After the attack, however, the image is more cutting, causing Farley to pull it offline for a short period. While the strip was down he crafted his response to the attacks, part one of the three-part story, "The Spiders." Set in the Afghanistan desert,the first installment depicts a conflict between two young Taliban soldiers and a group of women gathering airdropped food. The story's scenario and dialogue are unlikely, but their intent and delivery entertains and provokes thought. If nothing more, "The Spiders" is a welcome relief from the engine companies of crying firemen the mainstream pumped out following the attack. "The Spiders" first installment ends in what seems to be a socially just crowd pleaser, but its meaning could take a radically different turn in a later installment. The most well-defmed characteristic of Farley's stories is that he leads the reader on what seems to be a simple path that then grows increasing complex, creative, and surreal as the narrative progresses.

Mild mannered in comparison to the bad-boys of webcomics, Farnon and Farley, is Tatsuya Ishida's Sinfest. The strip may be the best of the web dailies, and is certainly the strongest feature on the gigantic strip portal Keenspot.com. Ishida's art is highly skilled and would make him a standout in newspaper comics, but the strip's content will keep it locked out. God and the Devil are characters in Sinfest, who antagonize each other and the no-good teenagers who star in the strip. Last year Sinfest fell into gag-a-day philosophizing, but still had the occasional laugh out loud blasphemy that put the strip on the map early on.

The defiant freedom these cartoonists enjoy illustrates that the web's potential for artistic innovation and independence is reviving the caustic against-the-grain thinking that defines underground comics.

Lives of Quiet Desperation

Online or in print, comics offer the ability to create powerfully visceral reading experiences. In both cases, though, the artistic merit of the artform is defined less by the explosive and fantastic than the quiet and personal moments that can be achieved by an artist. Last year a bumper crop of very effective personal stories were told online.

The strongest of these is Ethan Persoff's Teddy. Nearly 4 years ago Persoff's Top Notch knocked him to the bottom rung of many alternative comics reading lists. Readers rejected Persoff's work on Top Notch as a cheap imitation of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library, sending him back to the anthology circuit. If Persoff offended in print, he vindicates himself online. Teddy is a crushing account of a doomed relationship rendered in frank, economical prose abstractly juxtaposed with grotesque cartoon graphics. Persoff's storytelling eschews electronic bells and whistles, experimenting instead with the marriage of prose passages and silent or abstract comics sequences. This approach works well online where the elements of Teddy blend to create an unsettling and truthful narrative. What makes Teddy most jarring is the divergence of the story and the art. Persoff's narrative is set in the bars, parks, and apartments of 1995 Chicago, but the accompanying art is a flat cartoon landscape populated with ugly and rotund characters. The result is an engaging depiction of the narrator's bleak emotional state.

Justine Shaw's new Nowhere Girl is not nearly as punishing a read as. The story is a strong work of young adult fiction that will appeal most to readers whose tastes are in between Strangers in Paradise and Ghost World. A straightforward coming of age story, Nowhere Girl's narrator, Jamie, is trapped in a depressive funk and on the verge of an identity crisis. As the story unfolds, Jamie experiences lessons about friendship and comes to terms with her sexual orientation. Shaw is a competent storyteller who credibly depicts the delicate quirks and crises of early adulthood. Her art is clean and appealing to a ground-level comics sensibility. The work is not a literary comics achievement on the order of Teddy, but does succeed as realistic fiction.

Shaw is one of the vast majority of web artists whose work would function as well in print as it does online. Her 43-page story is told in standard page form sized to fit a browser window. The web enables her to work in color and to tell a story that would be a chancy sell in the comics marketplace. Shaw is a strong example of how the web benefits cartoonists by removing the pressures of the marketplace.

So is Derek Kirk, whose Small Stories is one of the most readable author anthologies online. Kirk captures the ups and downs of early adulthood with sensitivity and gentle wit. The serial "Same Difference" opens during a conversation between three friends at a Pho house in Oakland. Their daily banter turns to the recollection of an awkward high school experience of social confusion and the aftereffects of deceit. Another serial, "Half Empty," follows the disillusioned path of an illustration major after dropping out of art school. The high points in this story are found in chapters 2 and 3, which humorously depict the dynamic between parents and children in Asian culture. In this and the other stories on the site, Kirk captures the small but significant moments that define young adult personalities. His observations are not heavy handed and are delivered with a sense of humor and in a pleasing visual style.

Jason Turner's Strongman Press is an author anthology similar to Small Stories. It also consists of a variety of personal stories, though Turner's work explores the workaday and romantic lives of twenty-somethings. Created in collaboration with Manien Bothma, the romantic comedy "True Loves," is Turner's best feature. By day, True runs a second-hand clothing store and in the evening slogs her way through a boring relationship. This starts to change when a shaggy grocery store clerk pops in for ajacket. He spends hours trying on every coat in the store, making True late for what turns out to be a fairly uninteresting date. While her relationship grows increasingly stale, she starts to bump into the young clerk around town. "True Loves" is drawn in an attractive style reminiscent of Nick Bertozzi and Scott Morse. Updated weekly, "True Loves" is a light, enjoyable romance comic.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, these cartoonists use the web to tell accessible fiction to as broad an audience as they can find. While this work does not challenge our definitions of comics, it does demonstrate how the web is being used to pursue personal stories with general audience appeal.

Outer Limits

Of course, one of the key attractions of web comics is that reinventing the wheel is a viable creative option. Whether the web becomes the dominant future environment for comics or not is secondary to the fact that right now it is a mecca for artists interested in experimenting with the form. With varying degrees of success, these experiments provide insight into the workings of the comics medium and how new technology is being used to create narrative art in the 21st century.

McCloud looms large in this world, where artists are putting to use concepts such as the "infinite canvas." The most aggressive testing of this notion is being done by Jasen Lex in his monthly feature "The Aweful Science Fair." Lex conceived the feature as a showcase for ongoing experiments in the aesthetic and formal properties of digital comics. The quality of the experiment, in Lex's view, is more important than the story it tells. The result is a feature that sometimes delivers a strong story and other times produces an unreadable but interesting viewing experience.

Lex is creating the chanciest experiments on the infinite canvas. Each story starts the reader at the top left corner of the screen then leads him in a winding path across the tale. Lex is also employing a variety of visual techniques including photography, collage, and line art. The most successful of Lex's stories are of the slice of life variety. "8 Months Later" is an ambitious narrative collage recording a hometown visit the author made last year. Lex combines hundreds of elements including photographs, sketchbook drawings, newspaper clippings, maps, airline tickets and the text of his own travel journal to recreate the story of his week on the road. The "infinite canvas" proves to be ideal for this sort of story. Its meandering path conveys a sense of the author's motion across both landscape and headspace. It also works well for "E-mail From Andy," a character sketch constructed from photographs and the e-mail correspondence of one of Lex's friends. In the story Andy outlines a scheme for wooing a girl in his office building as a release from workaday boredom. The story is both an entertaining monologue and an interesting comment on the role of e-mail correspondence in contemporary relationships. Other strips don't work quite as well, but are worthy experiments in the form. Lex's work is mapping a new direction for comics and is worth considering both for how it succeeds and why it sometimes fails.

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is another of web comics mad science majors. He is the most academic creator working in web comics and his site, e-merl.com, reads more like an art school portfolio than a coherent author anthology. Goodbrey's most interesting experiments are concerned with hyperfiction, a form he has not yet mastered, but diligently explores. The most high profile example of Goodbrey's hypercomics is "Sixgun," which resides on Comic Book Resources. Inspired by Vonnegut's notion of becoming "unstuck in time," Sixgun maps the paths of six converging stories over six increasingly experimental installments. These stories often amount to strange vignettes rendered in a stark chiaroscuro visual style. Goodbrey could benefit from collaboration with a writer. His work, particularly on Sixgun, is surreal to no good narrative end. In most cases his stories are present as a front for examining a formal point. Unfortunately Goodbrey's tendency towards counter-intuitive narrative motion annoys more often than it enlightens. However, his experiments are valuable because they introduce the application of simultaneous non-linear narrative to comics.

John Barber is accessible in comparison to Goodbrey, and like Goodbrey is more interesting for his use of the web than for the content of his stories. Barber tends to create poorly realized genre stories, such as the crime drama New York 2. His art is rough and his writing lnkewarm, but he is developing an interesting approach to web comics that invokes the disciplines of cinematography. Barber advances his story by animating the sequence of panels. At the end of a passage the reader clicks on the image, bringing up new panels and dissolving others. The technique is similar to that being employed in Marvel's dotComics, but here is being used to achieve narrative rather than commercial ends. As Barber develops or as other artists adapt his techniques into their points of view, his approach to controlling the reading experience could yield interesting results.

Closer to true cinematography is "The Dough" on xdude.com. Nowhere on the site is Mr. Dude's real name revealed, but it is made clear that he is a master of Flash and has done work on a variety of Hollywood projects. "The Dough" is about an experience he had attempting to cash a check from one of those projects at his Canadian bank. Over the course of the story, Mr. Dude is tossed from branch to branch in what turns out to be a futile and aggravating battle with bank bureaucracy. The story is an animated comic, relying on written dialogue, photography, and clipped illustration that is emphasized by a techno soundtrack and sound effects. "The Dough" is a highly professional presentation that blurs the line between comics and animation while retaining the fundamental relationship between words and pictures that defines sequential art.

At the opposite extreme of the animation spectrum is Ben Jones' series, "The Future Genies of Mush Island," which is found aboard USS Catastrophe.com. These surreal limited animations have their roots in the cartoon concerts of Vaughn Bode, and like Bode's concerts, are probably best appreciated with a head full of acid. Future Genies plays closer to theater than cinema. Jones generally sets the scene with an abstract and colorful drawing of two figures who exchange dialogue that flashes at the bottom of the screen. Typically a bizarre turning point in the story will involve a set change leading to a puzzling conclusion. Jones' web comics betray an underlying logic, though it's doubtful that anyone besides the author truly understands it. Like Bode before him, Jones seems to shelter a fully realized cartoon world in his head, which he shares in his comics, animation, and performances.

Each of these authors are reveling in the possibilities of the web and their experiments are sorting out the storytelling methods that may change the comics form in the 2lst Century.

No Money, No Rules

This selection represents a small, but competent sampling of the web cartoonists who made a mark in 2001. New cartoonists are emerging on what seems like a weekly basis with strips, long-form stories, and formal experiments. With the exception of the most successful daily strip cartoonists, none of them are making a living from it. These comics are created strictly to scratch a creative itch. The sensibility that spurs web cartoonists on seems to be best described on the front page of David Gaddis' website: "No Money, No Rules." Without the concerns of the marketplace determining what can and can't be made, online artists are free to explore any subject in any fashion they see fit. Right now the main cost is time, both for the author and the reader.

While the situation is not ideal for artists looking to make a living from their craft, the web at least benefits them by opening up a means to create personal work with a broad range of creative options. The fiscal challenge facing web cartoonists may change in the future, but if it changes, it will be because enough good content is finally being created to necessitate a system that allows it to be paid for. 2001's web comics are the content horse that will pull whatever economic cart eventually develops.