History of webcomics

The history of webcomics follows the advances of technology, art, and business of comics on the Internet. The first comics were shared through the Internet in the mid-1980s. Early webcomics were usually derivatives from strips in college newspapers, but when the World Wide Web became widely popular in the mid-1990s, more people started creating comics exclusively for this medium. By the year 2000, various webcomic creators were financially successful and webcomics became more artistically recognized.

In the second half of the 2000s, webcomics became less financially sustainable due to the rise of social media and consumers' disinterest in certain kinds of merchandise. However, crowdsourcing through Kickstarter and Patreon also became popular in this period, allowing readers to donate money to webcomic creators directly. The 2010s also saw the rise of webtoons in South Korea, where the form has become very prominent.

Predating the sharing of graphics on the Internet, an artist going by the name Eerie created a comic on the Internet using ANSI art, titled Inspector Dangerfuck. The earliest known graphical comic distributed solely through the Internet was Eric Millikin's Witches and Stitches, which he started uploading on CompuServe in 1985. By self-publishing on the Internet, Millikin was able to share his work without having to worry over censorship and demographics. In 1986, Joe Ekaitis first uploaded T.H.E. Fox on CompuServe, a furry webcomic drawn on his Commodore 64.

In the early 1990s, it was yet unclear which would dominate the market in coming years. Hans Bjohrdal's Where the Buffalo Roam was shared through Usenet in 1992. With this technology, Bjohrdal reached an audience at college campuses a few U.S. states across. Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web rose in popularity in 1993: usage of the World Wide Web grew by 341,634% in 1993, and competitor protocol 's growth of 997% paled in comparison. Web browser Mosaic, which saw its beta release in 1993, allowed the recent introductions of GIF and JPEG image formats to be shown directly on web pages. Before this point, images shared through the internet had to be downloaded to the user's hard drive directly in order to be viewed.

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