Twenty-two hours ago, I posted what I believe to be my most-viewed contribution to the Internet of all time. Sadly, it was not a comic, or something I wrote, or any sort of artwork. It was a photograph I took of a 16-pound brisket The Man roasted. No joke, this image now has over TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND views, proving once again that the Internet sucks and can seriously go to hell. I create and upload original content 5 days a week for 2 years and I’m lucky if I get 1 or 2 thousand views on a comic that might have taken me 3 days to draw. But 28,000 people clicked to look at this piece of beef in less than a day.

Tasty brisket, though.

Like a lot of creatives, I struggle to grok the force that is social media. I hope it’s not too apparent that I don’t understand some of the platforms I’ve drawn into this comic. Some of them I’ve never even used. But I do my best to appear that I know what I’m talking about because, like everyone who understands that Google is master, I want to remain relevant.

This is, of course, one of those comics that took me 3 days to draw, and will probably get 1000 hits, which is better than some people are doing, but damn. Can I get half the love that a photo of roast beef gets? Special thanks to my sister in law, who gave me the fancy 50mm 1.4 lens, which really makes your subject POP. Maybe that’s why that brisket looked so good.

Kidding aside, I spent a lot of time thinking about social media platforms. In drawing this I realize that they’re pretty much all the same. The difference is mostly in who’s there and how they’re using it. But by and large, the digital community spends a lot of time shouting into the air. I also noticed that, even though computer screens are landscape orientation, most sites seem more optimized for mobile, and even if the display is wide, the important stuff on the screen tends to be long. That’s why the app names are all written differently: I had to shuffle them around after I figured out the shape of the content, because I just visualized everything as it looks on my laptop and didn’t realized until after I started that I would have been better off with long, skinny panels.

These templates can also be limited, too. It’s easier to use a template than to draw new panels every day, but the predetermined shape can get in the way.

And yeah, this probably isn’t that easy to read. Probably need to click the image to get in closer for the text. Or try this link for an even larger and higher resolution image: big version.

Not that I want to complain on WordPress. WordPress, as everyone knows, is for important applications, for corporate blogs and serious artists. And people who just aggregate other people’s content (i.e. steal photos) and repost them with nonsensical 5-sentence ramblings about life, and then somehow get 42,000 upvotes and, even more curiously, manage to monetize those blogs, sell them, and retire from blogging.