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It’s a funny site there

Saad akhtar’s Fly, You Fools is part of a growing breed of webcomics

A COMIC TRIP

It’s a silent revolution. Webcomics have been taking modern offices, universities and almost any online work place by storm with their wit, sarcasm and alternative insights. There are innumerable such comics online today and a few of them are e ven commercially viable. These include xkcd, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Questionable Content, PhD and many others.

XKCD’s creator Randall Munroe, a former NASA contractor, describes it as a comic of “romance, sarcasm, math and language.” The comic, which has a loyal geek following, has funny observations of daily life with references to theorems and space research.

There are others like PhD that are based on the idiosyncrasies of university life. PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, also appears in the Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and Caltech newspapers. It has been linked to The Washington Post and USA Today’s websites.

The creator of PhD, Jorge Cham, gives talks on the ‘power of procrastinating’, full time, in universities in the US. PhD has all the varsity stereotypes: the bookworm engineering student, the closet-geek college sweetheart, the lazy varsity bird who’s been there forever, the activist social scientist, the plagiarising professor and so on.

While most webcomics are stick art, many of them have distinct genres of art like fumetti, pixel art, and photo manipulation. Joey Comeau and Emily Horne’s A Softer World, for example, is made by photography overlaid with strips of typewriter-style text.

Comics like Married to the Sea and Monkey Fluids use Victorian illustrations. So popular have they become that Indian comic artist Saad Akhtar, who creates Fly, You Fools, wants to do comics with Mughal illustrations.

Fly, You Fools is a hit with its sarcastic take on daily life, newsmakers and popular culture. Saad uses photos, of random people, manipulated to look like a comic figures. The nameless characters recur in different settings, taking their trip on the hypocrisy of modern living.

Online for about one and a half years now, Fly, You Fools is in your face. There is profanity, but it isn’t cruel. Saad, who lives in Delhi, does his comics in the weekend and by Monday he’s a harmless design manager at naukri.com.

Eric Monster Millikin’s comics, like Fetus-X, have bright colours with swirling and spiralling brushwork. The haunting images and Milikin’s scathing attacks on catholicism and George W. Bush have earned him the wrath of censors and the tag of a sociopath. Unlike the sanitised comics in the mainstream, most webcomics are liberal with profanity, violence and are blunt, almost cruel, while handling sensitive issues.

Savita Bhabhi is India’s first pornographic cartoon. Based on the sexual escapades of a married woman, it was firewalled by government on June 3, 2009. The ban drew caustic responses online and in print, the most publicised one being by Pritish Nandy, in a national daily. Another popular controversial comic is Cyanide and Happiness. This stick art strip was started in December 2004 by 16 year old Kris Wilson. Cyanide is full of dark humour and cynicism and often deals brutally with themes like paedophilia and disability.

Webcomics have become such a hit because they have something for everyone. Penny Arcade, Ctrl+Alt+Del, PvP, and Looking for Group for gamers, xkcd for maths and science geeks, Megatokyo for anime fans, Girl Genius, Saturnalia for science fiction fans, Boy Meets Boy is gay themed, and so on.

And, they’re free. “The wonders of RSSing (Rich Site Summary) webcomics is a big plus compared to reading offline ones,” says Ranjana Ninan, a software consultant. RSS allows you to retrieve the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter.

Ranjana adds that “many artists find it convenient to distil their opinions about a topic in a webcomic. So, webcomics can be a sounding board for thoughts that can be expressed instantly, have a far reaching audience thanks to the internet.”

Besides, any one can create them. Censorship is almost non-existent and as Saad Akhtar puts it, “Censorship brings in huge amounts of publicity when it comes. Government bans never hurt any site like they’re supposed to.”

Most people hadn’t heard of Savita Bhabhi until she was banned.

Saad has a comic take on the moral police, as a comment on his site reads, “Sorry if they (the comics) offend your sensibilities. But please don’t fatwa me. I’m not even from Denmark.”

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