#BOB AND GEORGE REPLAY. COMIGN IN 2031

[homestuckreplay]

Webcomics at Day 100 #5: Bob and George

Pages read: 4/1/2000 – 4/5/2002; 718 pages (including author’s commentary)

Reason for selection: Bob and George was a pioneer of the ‘sprite-based’ comic genre, where video game sprites (or custom sprites) are used in place of original character art to reduce the artist’s workload. B&G is also famously meta, almost entirely disregarding the fourth wall.

Original run: 4/1/2000 – 7/28/2007; daily updates with 2658 total pages. Completed before Homestuck began.

Content warnings: homophobia and mild ableism (comic), cultural insensitivity, centrism, and severe ableism (author’s commentary)

Overall thoughts:

‘Now, there is something to say of the nature of creativity. How creating a fictional world makes you akin to a creator god. You could say that, sure - if you were fucking nuts. It's a fucking story. It's not real. I don't give a fucking dick's shit how many readers there are, how fucking huge it is - every fictional world is exactly that, fictional.’ – John S.

‘The jokes are bad, the art is plagiarism, and I firmly believe the only people that can appreciate this comic are 14 years old or younger.’ – Cesar R.

Some people on the internet like to spend large amounts of time talking about things they hate, and both of the above quotes come from Bob and George reviews on blogs dedicated to discussing webcomics the authors think are bad. I don’t personally have much respect for the Avowed Hater, but I cannot express how much I love these quotes.

However. I think this webcomic rules.

Here’s a brief overview. David Anez invents two characters – the titular Bob and George – in middle school. Aged 20, at the turn of the millennium, he decides to make a webcomic about these characters, despite having no idea how to draw. He plans to start on April 1, 2000, but can’t source a scanner by then, so begins making placeholder comics using 8-bit and 16-bit sprites from Megaman games, telling a potential audience that the comic isn’t ready yet – meaning that from day one, Megaman knows that 1. he’s in a comic created by an author, and 2. he’s not supposed to be the main character.

Months later, Anez sources a scanner and begins to draw Bob and George. They’re two college aged brothers who are also a superhero-supervillain duo. By this point the strip already has readers, and they don’t like this format as much. It’s also more difficult for Anez to make, so he returns to the Megaman sprite comics, but also edits some sprites into representations of both Bob and George, who become characters transported to the Megaman universe from another dimension. The story cycles through ‘retellings’ of the first six Megaman games interspersed with original storylines, dimension hopping, time travel, predestination paradoxes, alternate versions of characters, fan created characters, at least two characters who are explicitly the author, and other characters reading the comic they’re a character in. It goes from a simple story about George passing the days at his summer job before college, to a huge, whirling, spiraling mess of continuity and temporality.

In July 2007, after just over seven years, Anez brings the story to a conclusion, goes through the archives to add author’s commentary to each and every strip, and then… disappears. He focuses on his day job and his wife, and he never does another internet project again.

I genuinely love amateur art. I think Anez can be too self-deprecating in his author’s commentary – because he’s right, the jokes can be repetitive and don’t always land, the hand drawn art is ridiculous, the characterization is inconsistent and the ideas are unoriginal, but art can be all those things and still be meaningful. ‘I could have made this’ should be a compliment. It should mean: this makes me think I could create; you have achieved something and have inspired me by doing so, because this is within my grasp, too.

Unlike Cesar R. above, I don’t think sprite comics are plagiarism – these are firmly transformative works. Anez rearranges the Megaman sprites, gives them dialog and puts them in situations, and recaps and expands on the game storylines. He credits Capcom with the sprites’ creation, and wrote a homage to the games, not a substitute for them. However, due to the copyright issues, sprite comics are famously un-monetizable. Some original-art comics were occasionally able to turn webcomics into income, but even when Bob and George was at its peak of 25,000 daily site visitors, Anez wasn’t able to sell character merchandise or books and could only source small donations via PayPal. In this way, he sits among hundreds of big name fans who have created wildly popular fanfiction and fanart that’s almost entirely unpaid labor.

Anez’ author’s commentary is sometimes highly problematic but gives fascinating insights into his process. On October 19 2001, Anez included the Author - an established character - in the day's comic, wearing a helmet for the first time. In the author's commentary, he states that 'the Helmeted Author was never intended to be a new character' and that the helmet's inclusion was necessary due to artistic limitations with the sprites. However, the Helmeted Author stuck around and became a separate and important character. Similar instances recur in the commentary, where an accidental continuity error or an out-of-character moment ends up being folded into the overall story, becoming smooth and seamless in retrospect despite being entirely unplanned. It’s an open and honest look into how serial narratives work in practice.

An ice cream joke followed immediately by a self-deprecating joke is pretty standard issue for this drivel. Seriously, look at yourself. You're reading a sprite-based webcomic with Megaman characters, and they were just arguing about the merits of ice cream. I can't believe you read this stuff. Hell, I can't believe I wrote it. That being said, it's a fun way to waste your time, isn't it? – David Anez (author’s commentary for 10/23/2001)

Relevance to Homestuck: [ooc – vague spoilers for the entirety of Homestuck]

Bob and George feels like a rough draft for a LOT of things Homestuck would end up doing in (relatively) more artful, complex ways. It’s often painfully explicit about what it’s doing, hammering its own themes and experiments into the ground via the small amounts of dialog there’s space for instead of advancing a plot – but it’s the earliest webcomic I’ve personally looked at that’s actually testing what the medium is capable of. Anez begins with a simple four-panel strip, and primarily sticks to this style throughout, but from early on he thinks that some strips would look better animated and that the fourth-panel punchline format is a ‘severe restriction’, especially with battles.

As time goes on he begins to experiment with art size, style and aspect ratio, animate part or all of some strips, include interactive strips where readers can click through the panels at their own pace, and include panels in the wrong orientation or that aren’t physically connected as they should be – all elements that would become hallmarks of Homestuck. Characters even comment on the change in panels, and in art style (such as their own change from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit sprites). In commentary for July 2nd 2001, Anez says, ‘I suppose these comics are my non-animated contributions to the infinite canvas nature of webcomics, huh?’

B&G never reaches the extremes of Homestuck, but it’s still a multimedia story. It recaps its own storylines, celebrates its own anniversaries, and folds fan contributions into its main arcs. Prominent fan creators have custom sprites made of them which are included in panels, including the Second Party arc, where a character ‘interviews’ fancomic creators and references their work and their activity in the forums and chatrooms. As such, to have a complete understanding of B&G, it’s necessary to also read prominent fanworks, and to understand its surrounding community – much of which is no longer archived. ‘Subcomics’ are differentiated and elevated from officially-hosted ‘fancomics’ which are again differentiated from fancomics which didn’t make the cut, and a hierarchy based on official recognition is born in the community, not unlike the elevation of Homestuck fanartists to official contributors.

B&G is similar to Homestuck in themes as well as form. From early on it asks questions about the meaning of ‘reality’ and an ‘official’ or ‘canon’ timeline, and explores ideas of what it means to have free will (or not) when you’re a character in a story, you know what’s going to happen next, you’ve met the guy who wrote it, and that guy may or may not be dead. It’s about physically two-dimensional characters who are in both a video game and a comic, and continually blurs the boundaries between those mediums. In both comics, an author – born in 1979 – has grown up witnessing the birth of technology that is going to change everything about how the world operates and break down our interactions with physical space and time, and they’ve made weird, longform, and often technically ‘bad’ art exploring what that means. These comics are holding hands as two links in a chain of a broader artistic movement.

Continue reading? I cannot WAIT to read the rest of Bob & George.