Bildungscomics: An Internet Coming of Age

Clicking "Random" again

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Like many of us who came of age in the 2000s I feel like I grew up with webcomics. I entered college the same year xkcd—still the 800-lb gorilla of nerdy comics culture to this day—went live. It was a heady time, when a select few could make a living off a website, some ads, and a merch store. It felt like the beginning of something. But oddly, for that iteration of the art with independent creators owning their own sites, the wave had already crested. Facebook became widely available the following year and social media began to swallow the web like a sandworm. Nevertheless, there was an efflorescence of webcomic creativity, and, perhaps because it accompanied the long becoming of my young adulthood, I was particularly drawn to comics that used the serial format to convey the texture of time as their characters mature. Bildungscomics if you will.

During my grad-school years I spent a stifling summer in an attic cubicle at the top of the University of Illinois’s Mumford Hall, procrastinating on my master’s thesis and reading Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie. Set in a magical-realist Brooklyn where baristas are secret agents and halloween parties have real ghosts, but work still sucks and rent is high, Octopus Pie featured protagonist Eve Ning – a spiky caricature of a New Yorker at the beginning, all hard edges, defined by her scramble to survive the city. But by the end of the comic’s run, Eve acquired surprising dimensions and a dense web of relationships around her. When the series went out with a full-color bang on the occasion of Eve’s birthday, each character who showed up for a cameo felt like an old friend or enemy. And, in two lovely codas, relationships blossom that were only hinted at in the main arc while Eve lives through pregnancy and then early parenthood. Gran makes video games now, and infuses their 8-bit graphics with a similar mix of whimsy and coming-of-age poignancy.