In Hatfield’s “Transforming Spaces,” she discusses how transgender identities have been left out of academic spaces, libraries, and archives. To combat this lack of representation and information, transgender people have taken to webcomics to interact with their community and tell transgender stories.
I snooped around for community-content in other webcomics again, and this time I settled on xkcd. Although this webcomic isn’t representing marginalized audiences, Randall Munroe does have a large community following. This webcomic is the pride of geeks everywhere, and their main nesting grounds lay in Twitter and Reddit territory.
If fans are taken to something, spaces for fans to engage with one another grow organically on their own, especially with the versatility of the internet. This is shown by xkcd’s subreddit. Fans feel free to post, link to comics, and simultaneously react (the Opportunity rover currently has people feeling some feels).
Unlike the examples in Hatfield’s excerpt where creators are actively engaging with viewers and asking “what’s next?” for their webcomic, according to a Reddit thread, the creator of xkcd Randall Munroe has disengaged himself from Reddit due to high volumes of unproductivity. Redditors implore him to answer their inquiries, but their pleas fall on deaf ears…
That being said, Munroe engages with his audience in other ways that still align with the ideas of xkcd. As David mentioned in his presentation, Munroe keeps a side blog titled What If? where he answers absurd physics questions that are submitted by the audience from his webcomic. Munroe’s direct interaction with his audience here falls more in line with Hatfield’s examples of participatory culture in “Transforming Spaces.”
It turns out that the everyday geeky Jim isn’t the only person following along on Munroe’s science-y path. In an interview with The Atlantic, Munroe detailed that he started the blog for fun, but it ended up getting feedback beyond his expectations. For his first What If? post, MIT physicists contacted him about the hypothetical situation he addressed, told him they had simulated it in their machine, and gave him some corrections for his hypothesis.
Community doesn’t exist within just the webcomic content. People are drawn in from all over, and many fans interested in a creator’s work will follow them through various other projects that the creator picks up. Munroe’s community revels in the geek culture that he represents in his online platforms and his books, and every new addition to the collection is another morsel that people can relate to and admire.
As always, stay tuned for next time!
Astronomical Webcomic 