memes

the-case-for-memes-as-a-new-form-of-comics

The case for memes as a new form of comics


Both comics and memes rely on the same interplay of visual and verbal elements for their humor.

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

It’s undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

“One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics,” Abate told Ars. “I’ve published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I’ve been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now.”

Her most recent book is 2024’s Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. “I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too,” Abate said. “It occurred to me one day that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I’m sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there’s more continuity than there is difference.”

So Abate decided to approach the question more systematically. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 popular science book, The Selfish Gene, well before the advent of the Internet age. For Dawkins, it described a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of information”: ideas, catchphrases, catchy tunes, fashions, even arch building.

distraught woman pointing a finger and yelling, facing an image of a confused cat in front of a salad

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

In a 21st century context, “meme” refers to a piece of online content that spikes in popularity and gets passed from user to user, i.e., going viral. These can be single images remixed with tailored text, such as “Distracted Boyfriend,” “This Is Fine,” or “Batman Slapping Robin.” Or they can feature multiple panels, like “American Chopper.” Furthermore, “Memes can also be a gesture, they can be an activity, they can be a video like the Wednesday dance or the ice bucket challenge,” said Abate. “It’s become such a part of our lexicon that it’s hard to imagine a world without memes at this point.”

For Abate, Internet memes are clearly related to sequential art like comics, representing a new stage of evolution in the genre. In both cases, the visual and verbal elements work in tandem to produce the humor.

Granted, comic artists usually create both the image and the text, whereas memes adapt preexisting visuals with new text. Some might consider this poaching, but Abate points out that cartoonists like Charles Schulz have long used stencil templates (a static prefabricated element) to replicate images, a practice that is also used effectively in, say, Dinosaur Comics. And meme humor depends on people connecting the image to its origin rather than obscuring it. She compares the practice to sampling in music; the end result is still an original piece of art.

In fact, The New Yorker’s hugely popular cartoon caption contest—in which the magazine prints a single-panel drawing with no speech balloons or dialogue boxes and asks readers to supply their own verbal jokes—is basically a meme generator. “It’s seen more as a highbrow thing, crowdsourcing everybody’s wit,” said Abate. “But [the magazine supplies] the template image and then everybody puts in their own text or captions. They’re making memes. If they only published the winner, folks would be disappointed because the fun is seeing all the clever, funny things that people come up with.”

Memes both mirror and modify the comic genre. For instance, the online nature of memes can affect formatting. If there are multiple panels, those panels are usually arranged vertically rather than horizontally since memes are typically read by scrolling down one’s phone—like the “American Chopper” meme:

American Chopper meme with each frame representing a stage in the debate

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

Per Abate, this has the added advantage of forcing the reader to pause briefly to consider the argument and counter-argument, emphasizing that it’s an actual debate rather than two men simply yelling at one another. “If the panels were arranged horizontally and the guys were side by side in each other’s face, installments of ‘American Chopper’ would come across very differently,” she said.

A pad with infinite sheets

Scott McCloud is widely considered the leading theorist when it comes to the art of comics, and his hugely influential 2000 book, Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form, explores the boundless potential for digital comics, freed from the constraints of a printed page. He calls this aspect the “infinite canvas,” because cartoonists can now create works of any size or shape, even as tall as a mountain. Memes have endless possibilities of a different kind, per Abate.

“[McCloud] thinks of it very expansively: a single panel could be the size of a city block,” said Abate. “You could never do that with a book because how could you print the book? How could you hold the book? How could you read the book? How could you download the book on your Kindle? But when you’ve got a digital world, it could be a city block and you can explore it with your mouse and your cursor and your track pad and, oh, all the possibilities for storytelling and for the medium that will open up with this infinite canvas. There have been many places and titles where this has played out with digital comics.

“Obviously with a meme, they’re not the size of a city block,” she continued. “So it occurred to me that they are infinite, but almost like you’re peeling sheets off a pad and the pad just has an endless number of sheets. You can just keep redoing it, redo, redo, redo. That’s memes. They get revised and repurposed and re-imagined and redone and recirculated over and over and over again. The template gets used inexhaustibly, which is what makes them fun, what makes them go viral.”

comic frame showing batman slapping robin

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

Just what makes a good meme image? Abate has some thoughts about that, too. “It has to be not just the image, but the ability for the image to be paired with a caption, a text,” she said. “It has to lend itself to some kind of verbal element as well. And it also has to have some elasticity of being specific enough that it’s recognizable, but also being malleable enough that it can be adapted to different forms.”

In other words, a really good meme must be generalizable if it is to last longer than a few weeks. The recent kiss-cam incident at a Coldplay concert is a case in point. When a married tech CEO was caught embracing his company’s “chief people officer,” they quickly realized they were on the Jumbotron, panicked, and hid their faces—which only made it worse. The moment went viral and spawned myriad memes. Even the Phillies mascots got into the spirit, re-enacting the moment at a recent baseball game. But that particular meme might not have long-term staying power.

“It became a meme very quickly and went viral very fast,” said Abate. “I may be proved wrong, but I don’t think the Coldplay moment will be a meme that will be around a year from now. It’s commenting on a particular incident in the culture, and then the clock will tick, and folks will move on. Whereas something like ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ or ‘This is Fine’ has more staying power because it’s not tied to a particular incident or a particular scandal but can be applied to all kinds of political topics, pop culture events, and cultural experiences.”

black man stroking his chin, mouth partly open in surprise

Credit: Sean Carroll via imgflp

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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4chan may be dead, but its toxic legacy lives on

My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying “I can has cheezburger” or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It’s strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for Internet culture and an anonymous way station for the Internet’s anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.

“The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world’s five or so richest people and the government of the United States,” the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.”

My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a “hate blog” for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger’s digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan.

They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game.

Many of the 4chan users that called me mid-Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voicemails have never left me in the 15 years I’ve spent covering 4chan as a journalist.

I had a front-row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the Internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan’s impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan’s users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself.

Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan’s rise in the 2010s from Internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for it?

4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy,” Collins says. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official.”

But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true Internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site’s political influence, but I’d argue they were equally, if not more, important.

4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole when he was 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole created a spinoff site for a message board there called “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse.” Poole was a fan of the Japanese message board 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site’s code and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful’s anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process.

4chan users were anonymous, threads weren’t permanent and would time out or “404” after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark end point of the techno-utopianism that built the Internet. On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.

“The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn’t saved, I think, is really, really fascinating,” Cates Holderness, Tumblr’s former head of editorial, tells WIRED.

Still, 4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan’s cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)

“When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers,” she says.

Holderness calls 4chan the Internet’s “Wild West” and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.

Our feeds deliver us content; we don’t have to hunt for it. We don’t have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we’re getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we’ll eventually find out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

“The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it’s all skewed,” Holderness says. “There is no record. There’s no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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