Fri, October 13, 2006

One of the most challenging things about storing all our knowledge on the Internet is that it creates an unimaginably vast amount of information which is impossible to sift through. You could look at one web page per second all day every day and it would take you twenty-eight lifetimes to see all of the Internet – and that's assuming no new pages were added, starting right now! I made that statistic up entirely, but it you get the idea. The web is way too big and unorganized to sample everything, the way we do with the Annual TiVo Gauntlet of New Fall Programming. The only way we can successfully interact with such an enormous trove of information is through filters, which is what blogs and "portal sites" (Yahoo!, e.g.) and search engines are. Each in their own way, they point us to things we're likely to find interesting or enjoyable, saving us lots and lots of browsing time.

I didn't start this idea; it's being discussed constantly (on the Internet, of course). But it's important background for my point here, which is: I'm often overwhelmed at the thought of how many awesome things I'm missing online. If you surf the web at all, you're constantly running into things that you've missed. If you can think of something, there's someone on the Internet who's already been doing it for at least a year. Do you go back and catch up? Do you jump in and try to keep your head above water? Or do you reinvent the wheel and forge your own path?

Once or twice a month, something will catch my eye and suddenly I'll be devouring all the knowledge I can find on some previously unexplored topic. Recently, one such expedition yielded this rare gem: Dinosaur Comics. On those few lucky occasions when one of these net-based vision quests leads me to something interesting, I ordinarily post a Buzzworthy link and call it a day. In this case, though, I was afraid you'd think I was crazy. This one might require a bit of a sales pitch.

There are thousands and thousands of webcomics online, many of which take forms similar to those of a newspaper comic strip. (As opposed to that of a comic book, which – to oversimplify the issue – normally includes more panels, ongoing narrative, and a more immersive visual style.) The world of webcomics is a great illustration of the Long Tail principle – that supercheap online distribution makes it possible to serve many, many teensy niches where previously the money was made serving a few options to a mass audience. Syndicate editors must force "Garfield" to be boring, homogenous tripe because it's going out in hundreds of papers, but web hosting is essentially free, so a webcomic can represent the unfettered viewpoint of its author. (As with most things online, this creative freedom can mean anything from brilliance to disaster.) I don't pretend to know a lot about webcomics, because I very rarely read them. Most of them are insular, intensely geeky, and not very funny. For one summer, a friend had me hooked on Sluggy Freelance, which has been around for over nine years (!) and now includes epic space battle adventures. Back in those days, it was about a web designer with a homicidal talking pet bunny, so we ate it up. (I never meant to imply that "intensely geeky" is a bad thing on its own.) Since then, I've only read a few episodes of Joy of Tech (Apple fanaticism, intensely geeky) or Penny Arcade (console gaming, intensely geeky, wildly popular).

Some time last week, a ridiculously esoteric episode of xkcd (relationships, higher math, intensely geeky) was making the rounds online, and after adoring a handful of strips from its archive, I tried Dinosaur Comics from the "Comics I Enjoy" list. A week later, I've only made it through 13 months of its three-year archives, but I've laughed to the point of physical pain at least once each day.

To start with, your average Dinosaur Comic doesn't look like much. The crude drawings are exactly the same each day – only the dialogue changes. But once you've read ten or so strips, that restriction no longer seems lazy and starts to look brilliant. Every day is pretty much the same for the main character, T-Rex, but as he goes about his routine, he's always pondering something new. Somehow the strip manages to cover everything from cosmology and philosophy to relationships and sex. T-Rex has a unique voice: sweet and sort of oblivious, but very curious. He doesn't really have an inner monologue, so everything that's on his mind is up for discussion. What fascinates me is that you'd never expect anything like this to be a venue for raising the kinds of issues it does – it's an interesting demonstration of how a seemingly simple character can have complex layers, and an effective use of those complexities can illuminate a variety of seemingly unrelated viewpoints. What I'm saying is, the comic is very, very silly – but it can still be serious without seeming out of character. It got me thinking about how powerful characters are: the way Stephen Colbert can make jokes Jon Stewart can't, that sort of thing. Once you define your characters and know them well enough, you can get them to reveal surprising things.

It's impossible to choose one representatively awesome episode (I spent more time narrowing down this selection than on the whole rest of this column), but here's a try: September 13th 2006. You really have to read a few to get a feel for how the characters work, but this is a good start. I can't say enough about the understated slacker genius of the strip. It just keeps surprising me. (Another one I love, but which is way too dopey to lead with, is July 24th 2006. Admittedly, this one is a guilty pleasure.)

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Still not convinced that you love Dinosaur Comics? Allow me to filter (!) the archives for you, and suggest a few further favorites:

Things Women Love
It Will All End In Heartbreak
Littering Comics

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Also endlessly entertaining – though by no means new news – is the power of Wikipedia for reveling in the most inconsequential minutiae. I wasn't too surprised to find its (very useful) comprehensive Arrested Development episode guide the other night, but I was a little startled to find its detailed entry on Dinosaur Comics. It just goes to show you what a waste of paper a regular encyclopedia is. Anybody can wax poetic about the principal exports of Peru. It takes awesomeness to a whole new level to devote over 1200 words to the history and characteristics of, say, Laserbeak.

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