Topic Statement

Webcomics inhabit a unique position in the world of sequential art; while they may not always be born-digital (an artist, for example, may start on paper before uploading their completed piece to their blog, website, or social media platform of choice), webcomics categorically inhabit the Internet as their exhibition space. The medium emerged out of a desire to circumvent stringent publishing and newspaper syndication standards, including potential censorship, with the freedom of the world wide web and a do-it-yourself, artist-led community.

The digital form offered artists new creative allowances such as interactivity, animation, flexible upload schedules, collaboration between artists like character crossovers and guest-drawn pages, the choice of non-linear or sequential storytelling, and greater numbers of underrepresented stories and artists, notably in the queer space. Successful webcomics have gone on to be published in bibliographic form, but that erases the unique qualities of a web-based artifact. Even comments by readers, in themselves a snapshot of early online communication and media engagement, are no longer preserved when a webcomic is published physically.

In the context of digital cultural heritage, information professionals and audiences alike have much to gain from honoring webcomics as their own art form worthy of preservation. Webcomics require the same in-depth classification and cataloguing of a bibliographic record, with flexibility that captures their characteristics as digital and visual artifacts. By utilizing metadata, my goal is to better reflect the complexity of webcomics, and allow for increased searchability and discoverability for potential readers to find and support these trailblazing artists.

About Me

My name is Sabrina Chaney. After I spent ten years
building a career in animation and motion graphics,
I decided to pursue a Master’s of Library and Information
Science at Pratt Institute. My fascinations lie in the
intersection of digital technology, contemporary art, pop
culture, and online accessibility, of which webcomics
represent all of the above. Digital asset management is
my specific area of interest within the realm of information
science, and my goal is to support the retrieval and
preservation of online repositories in galleries, libraries,
archives, and museums.