Comic Relief

Some decisions in life seem insignificant at first. Maybe you caught a train 10 minutes later than your usual time because you were running late. Maybe you decided to take the longer route home one evening just because. In the moment, these whimsical actions are negligible seconds that tick by, like grains of sand that graze past your ankles in the ocean waves. Given enough time, however, the grains can flow and flow until one day, you find your feet completely buried in the sand and unable to move.

My first grains came to me as webcomics during the last years of my childhood when the first years of adolescence were just peeking above the horizon. I stumbled upon my first webcomic almost serendipitously. As a child raised by the Internet, I had grown bored of my usual websites and was hunting the infinite web for something new. Back then, I had simply begun reading as a way to pass time, but my curiosity gripped the comic with a childish tenacity that eventually fueled an eager obsession with webcomics as a whole. Pretty soon, I was reading multiple comics, juggling the plotlines and characters based on an orderly schedule of chapter updates. “Todd Allison and the Petunia Violet” was a dark mystery riddled with government corruption and a beautifully diverse range of characters. “Cucumber Quest,” on the other hand, was a lighthearted adventure tale set in a food-themed universe. It was like the gospel for me. I loved them all.

Even better, my digital discovery occurred at a time when I still had the one-track dedication of a child. When I wasn’t reading webcomics, I was doodling the characters on the margins of notebooks and enthusiastically discussing them on online forums. My fascination with the individual artistic styles of each webcomic served as inspiration for my own artistic endeavours. Once I received my first drawing tablet on my eleventh birthday, it was like taking gum off of a shoe, for I would rarely leave whatever painting I was working on.

Looking back, I realize that my obsession with webcomics stemmed less from the comics themselves than from the creative awakening they sparked inside my young heart. One’s childhood marks the formative years of development, after all, and any interest that captures the curiosity of a child has the potential to radically shape the trajectory of his or her future. I devoured my webcomics as an active reader. Not only did I fall in love with the characters and storylines, but I also paid close attention to the formatting of the page, the nuanced differences in dialogue that molded each character to be his own, and the meticulous details that made each story so rich. What was subconscious then but is so glaringly obvious now is the question that pounded inside me as my eyes darted across each page: Can I create something like this, too?

Today, webcomics are a closed chapter of my life, but they stirred a passion for storytelling and art that will never quite leave me. I don’t think that I would have become who I am today had I discovered webcomics last week or even a year ago. As I have come to appreciate, art and childhood go together like the milk and cookies that we once left out for Santa Claus. With the creativity of art, children can express their hyperactive imagination in ways that coax out our best and inspire us to carve out our own paths in life. Even now, painting and crafting fictional worlds inside my head isn’t possible if I don’t tap into my inner child.

In retrospect, discovering that webcomic was no accident. Although I don’t know the exact moment when the impact of that decision began to weave its way into every aspect of my life, I do know that the waves had been licking at my ankles long before, the grains of sand pooling over my feet.

—Linda Lee '21 is a Crimson Blog Editor in Eliot House.