Sex, death and candy

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

The popularity of webcomics has been gaining momentum for a while now. While the medium remains firmly in the niche/cult zone, a few like Penny Arcadeand XKCD have managed to convert this into financial success in recent years. One of the more remarkable and long-running webcomics, A Softer World (ASW) is published by Canadian writer Joey Comeau and his compatriot, photographer Emily Horne. The mostly three-panel ASW, which began in February 2003, has over 800 strips now, with fresh editions appearing thrice a week.

ASW employs a deceptively simple juxtaposition of real world photographs (Emily Horne prefers to photograph unposed subjects) coupled with Comeau's intense, poetic and often macabre text. The themes on display revolve around sexuality, death and existential angst, with occasional strips delving into quirky, screwball humour. Talking about the tendency for webcomics to be typecast pretty quickly, Horne said, "There are those out there who pigeonhole our work as being aimed at mopey teens or the universally-derided catchall 'hipsters', but we've always covered topics we found interesting. Sometimes that means sex, death, and even candy."

Nobody who has read an ASW strip can deny that it is most certainly literature. It has, in the past, been compared to the haiku style of Japanese poetry – for its brevity and impact. But in the rarefied air of literary circles, all comics-including webcomics have found it difficult to gain acceptance. ASW writer Joey Comeau noted the hypocrisy of this judgmental tendency often displayed by writers. "Margaret Atwood said that she doesn't write science fiction because she writes literature. When I want to read a certain type of book, genre helps me to find it. Genre books can be more like literature, to be certain, but I think it's wrong to assume that makes them more valuable rather than simply different," he added.

About the prolific output of ASW, the duo explained that they have not strictly stuck to one method of working. Sometimes it's Comeau who sends a bunch of story ideas to Horne, who then looks for a good visual fit and designs the comics; while on occasion, Horne sends finished strip designs for Comeau to caption.

As Comeau puts it, "Both ways are fun, and lead to slightly different feeling comics I think."