"Ant Comic" by Michael Deforge, from kingtrash.com
If you ask anyone in my generation who is into comics what helped them maintain their interest in comics, often they will say that they've read webcomics their whole life. Growing up in the 90's as we did, the print comics industry was waning, and a lot of people were declaring comics to be 'dying'. What a lot of people didn't anticipate though, I think, was the emerging venue of the internet. A lot of people found that the internet was an easy, cheap way to showcase your artwork and have a lot of people be able to see it (at the catch of more risky copyright issues). As print comics were largely expensive and inaccessible to most people, a lot of people started putting up their comics on the internet. As print comics died down a bit, kids like me started to read comics on the internet-- the place where we spent most of our time.
This week I read Ant Colony/Ant Comic by Michael Deforge. Deforge is a small-press cartoonist who is one of my favorite comic artists working today. He tells his stories with a very serious tone which blends unusually well with the strange-yet-humorous visual style and subject matter. Deforge is an example of a comic artist who has a lot of comics on the internet, webcomic strips, and print comics from which he makes his living. Some of my favorites besides Ant Comic are Lose (an annual anthology which is now on it's sixth issue), Sticks Angelica (an online strip that is ongoing), Abbey Loafer, First Year Healthy, and Spotting Deer. I always recommend him to anyone looking to get into small-press or indie comics.
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