Another One Bites the Dust

The last time I felt this bowled over by webcomics news was the shutdown of Smackjeeves, and before that, MangaMagazine (Inkblazers). Here goes Tapas. Or Tapastic, as I knew it.

I have mixed feelings about this because on one hand, Tapas (alongside LINE Webtoons) is representative of the "telco conglomerate corporatisation of webcomics" which - hot take incoming - has prioritised efficiency, hustle and virality at the cost of webcomics' ambition and weirdness. Tapas didn't make webcomics worse than LINE did, but it was second place.

On the other, I was actually there at Tapas' infancy. When MangaMagazine got turned into Inkblazers, I jumped to Tapastic, and mirrored the early pages of TWIDI on there. The mirroring didn't last very long, since I preferred posting on my own site. (The problem with these vertical scroll platforms is that they require me to crop and cut and resize pages to their ultra-specific-specifications, and I am too lazy to do further post-production processing like that. If you don't let me upload the pages as they look in my PSD, goodbye). But it played a small part in helping TWIDI gain a little bit of attention, what with the Facebook-esque community. I also came to know someone who would eventually become its chief editor, and we always watched each other's journeys from an FB-friend-who-is-actually-an-acquaintance-sized distance.

As Tapas grew bigger, so did LINE, and together they brought forth the new era of webcomics. Despite being one of the people who was there at the ground floor I never got into the webtoons craze, due to my aforementioned laziness. And my stubborn loyalty to the previous era of webcomics, which inspired and kickstarted my interest in comics as an art form and a way of presence on the internet.

The increasing corporatisation and its associated wall-gardening further put me off. Don't get me wrong, I don't ascribe my aversion as a morality thing; I'm simply recognising that my comics-making is not at all compatible with how the platforms ran things. I was more used to the idea of platforms as secondary to the webcomic's website, and to have my content - visual style, presentation, storytelling - be as unpolished and unbothered by the owners of the platform.

The previous era of webcomics did have competition and exploitation, but the new era ramped that to astronomical levels. Being an early creation of Web 2.0, it had the best and worst qualities of Web 2.0. The monkey-dancing, hustling, numbers.... the desire to chase clout.

The thing about these platforms - and their copycat successors, if these folks' cold emails are to be believed - is that in the end they are tech companies. They claim to care for artists, and why wouldn't they? Webcomics are the valuable add and valueable ad for their services, since with comics (especially free->freeis->freemium ones) come their associated readers: the new generation... of customers who could be funnelled into the parent company's ecosystem. Tons of readers (users) will mean tons of value, which translates to tons of shareholder interest... or tons of soft cultural power. Alternatively, tons of webcomics means tons of potential IP to consider buying the rights of - primarily the media rights, to turn said webcomics into a more prestigiou$$$ medium: film and TV.

It's very cynical, this post lol. That's what happens when you are an old hat - you see the rise and fall of internet civilisations. Following the death of MangaMagazine and Smackjeeves and the downfall of my ex-dayjob, Tapas is yet another skull to add to that mountain. RIP.

These downfalls have only reaffirmed my more stubborn notion of keeping the web independent. Given the infestation of bots and techbro zombies, one can only hope. RSS forever. Anti-link-rot, pro-archive.

I would normally end the post here, but I must mention that I'm worried about the archive of webcomics stuck on Tapas' platform. It's not easy getting content out of a wall garden, though it is possible. It's such a monumental effort though; thousands of images and god-knows-paywall infrastructure. Even if some people can save a decent majority, there will be a lot lost - the webcomics posted in the early days, before their creators went on a forever-hiatus. A young artist's attempt at Webtoons. A slightly-older artist's make-and-ditch-and-burn attempts at creating the viral webcomic until they finally get it right. The experimental work that can only work within Tapas' codebase. If I mourn Tapas, I mourn the lost of vast swaths of internet history and artistry.