SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Readers of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC have begun sharing with me the unusual webcomics they encounter, and I am grateful for this tribute to my consciousness-raising efforts. They are starting to seek that mysterious quality that makes for an outstanding SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.

The Dada art movement of the early 20th century, inspired by genuine lunatics, strove to attain a type of conscious unconsciousness which disconnects the mind from normal thought patterns in such a way that it is possible to create things, events and ideas so novel as to be purely meaningless. In the middle and later 20th century the elevated level of both lunacy and access to creative media made it possible for people who were not "crazy" enough to be locked up and not "artistic" enough to be acclaimed, to release upon the world their own unique creations, the greatest of which partake of a quality which, in my religion, has been called Bulldada. This ineffable and ethereal quality can only be attained when the best efforts of a dedicated person, whose talents are unsuited to their field of endeavor, fail so cataclysmically as to constitute a new category of success. I seem to be the first person to apply bulldadanalysis to the field of webcomics.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC reader Cloe shared with me a horrible, horrible, horrible webcomic. It is badly drawn and not funny. The problem lies in the fact that the cartoonist knows it and says so in the title. The most basic principle of Bulldada is that it cannot be created by anyone who is aware of the concept of Bulldada. The application of that principle in this case is that knowing your webcomic is lousy does not make it great. It makes it lousier. Except when the lousiness is meant ironically, but fails. "a horrible, horrible, horrible webcomic" is a success at being bad, and thus falls beyond the purview of this exercise. Purview.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC reader Diana shared OF NOOBS AND MEN, a strip of notable qualities. It is very well drawn and its jokes are recognizable as such. Its transcendent quality comes from the fact that the content of those jokes is so obscure to the normal or average reader as to be incomprehensible. I can read dozens of them and see exactly why they are supposed to be funny, and if I knew what the in-jokes and references meant I know they would be very funny indeed. The local community radio station has a Dutch Hour program on Sunday mornings, and the host sometimes plays standup comedy - in Dutch. You can tell that stuff is funny as hell just by the pacing, the cadence, and the audience reaction - you just can't tell what the joke actually is. Another vital principle of Bulldada is that it is fully comprehensible to no-one, not even the one who created it. Somebody is reading OF NOOBS AND MEN right now and totally cracking up because that is their life it is talking about.

This leads us to today's SUNDAY WEBCOMIC, The Simple Life.