A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the development of the internet, they began to appear online as webcomics. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in South Korea alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.
User Friendly was a daily webcomic about the staff of a small fictional Internet service provider, Columbia Internet. The strip's humor tends to be centered on technology jokes and geek humour.
A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is often created for entertainment, political commentary, or advertising. Cartoonists may work in many formats, such as booklets, comic strips, comic books, editorial cartoons, graphic novels, manuals, gag cartoons, graphic design, illustrations, storyboards, posters, shirts, books, advertisements, greeting cards, magazines, newspapers, and video game packaging.
Dinosaur Comics is a constrained webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz", after the site's domain name, "qwantz.com". The first comic was posted on February 1, 2003, although there were earlier prototypes. Dinosaur Comics has also been printed in three collections and in a number of newspapers. The comic centers on three main characters, T-Rex, Utahraptor and Dromiceiomimus.
Ozy and Millie is a daily comic strip that ran from 1998 to 2008, created by D. C. Simpson and syndicated by North America Syndicate and Andrews McMeel Syndication. It follows the adventures of assorted anthropomorphized animals, centering on Ozy and Millie, two young foxes attending North Harbordale Elementary School in Seattle, contending with everyday elementary school issues such as tests and bullies, as well as more surreal situations.
Keenspot is a webcomics portal founded in March 2000 by cartoonist Chris Crosby, Crosby's mother Teri, cartoonist Darren Bleuel, and Nathan Stone.
United Media was a large editorial column and comic strip newspaper syndication service based in the United States, owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, that operated from 1978 to 2011. It syndicated 150 comics and editorial columns worldwide. Its core businesses were the United Feature Syndicate and the Newspaper Enterprise Association.
Brad Guigar is an American cartoonist who is best known for his daily webcomic Greystone Inn and its sequel Evil Inc.
Christopher Charles Crosby is the co-founder of Keenspot along with Darren Bleuel and Nathan Stone. He also founded the comic publisher Blatant Comics with Bobby Crosby in 1997. He draws and writes the webcomic Superosity and writes for Sore Thumbs, which Owen Gieni illustrates. He is the CTO for Red Giant Entertainment. He currently resides in Cresbard, SD.
Adventures Into Digital Comics (2006) is a documentary by Sébastien Dumesnil about the fall of the comic book industry in the 1990s and the emergence of webcomics since then. The film features interviews with various comic book and webcomic artists and authors.
Zachary Alexander Weinersmith is an American cartoonist, who is best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC). He is the author of two other webcomics, the completed Captain Stupendous with artist Chris Jones, and Snowflakes, co-written by James Ashby and also illustrated by Chris Jones. He also founded the sketch comedy group SMBC Theater with James Ashby and Marty Weiner in 2009.
Andrews McMeel Syndication is an American content syndicate which provides syndication in print, online and on mobile devices for a number of lifestyle and opinion columns, comic strips and cartoons and various other content. Some of its best-known products include Dear Abby, Doonesbury, Ziggy, Garfield, Ann Coulter, Richard Roeper and News of the Weird. A subsidiary of Andrews McMeel Universal, it is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. It was formed in 2009 and in January 2017 was renamed to its current name.
The history of webcomics follows the advances of technology, art, and business of comics on the Internet. The first comics were shared through the Internet in the mid-1980s. Some early webcomics were derivatives from print comics, but when the World Wide Web became widely popular in the mid-1990s, more people started creating comics exclusively for this medium. By the year 2000, various webcomic creators were financially successful and webcomics became more artistically recognized.
The business of webcomics involves webcomic creators earning a living professionally through various revenue channels. Webcomic artists may sell merchandise based on their work, such as T-shirts and toys, or they may sell print versions or compilations of their webcomic. Many webcomic creators make use of online advertisement on their websites, and some have undergone product placement deals with larger companies. Crowdfunding through Kickstarter and Patreon is also a source of income for webcartoonists.
Notable events of the late 1990s in webcomics.
